Suchergebnisse

This article focuses on eight regional elections held in Italy in 2020, the year of the Coronavirus pandemic. It looks at both the January and September rounds. Even though these two sets of elections took place, respectively, at the end and at the beginning of two distinctive 'phases', separated by the Covid-19 outbreak, they share some important characteristics. The discussion starts from a short overview of the events leading to the polling days, looking in particular at pre-election coalition building, the electoral campaigns and the positioning of key leaders. It then moves onto the analysis of the election results. It considers changes in political participation, support for the major parties, the strengthening of local and non-partisan lists, volatility and shifts in political representation. The overall pattern is one of increasing territorial complexity and fragmentation: regional elections now clearly follow a logic of their own, dominated more by local leaders than by national parties.

Democratic regimes have always been confronted with political, social and economic factors in making decisions in their health development policies. Despite its importance, the health development plans made at sub-national levels are often neglected in most political discourse. In Yobe state, North Eastern region of Nigeria where health indices are poor and financial resource inadequate, the relevance of the health policy agenda setting remains an important starting point. This study influenced by Kingdon's stream theory provides the health development agenda (HDA) of Governor Gaidam regime from 2009-2015 through the perceptions of health stakeholders in Yobe state. The qualitative study involved 28 interviews with informants and review of policy documents that underscores what, why and how the regime's HDA was developed. The study highlighted the power play through the regime's responsibilities, mandates, strategic objectives and priority agenda setting in achieving health development in the state. Furthermore, through the political lenses of agenda setting in the state, the emphasis was laid on the process, content and context of the regime's HDA. Although the HDA were home-driven, the motivations comes from local health problems related to health goals advocated by international development partners aimed to reduce IMR, UMR, MMR and other diseases all by 2015. Although the SSHDP provided 8 priority areas of key interventions in documents, in practice only 5 priority areas were prominent. Finally, the targets identified will serve as the justification to assess the regime's accountability since its intentions and goals could be judged from the extent of its performance.

1. The dynamics of sub-national authoritarianism : Russia in comparative perspective / Vladimir Gel'man -- 2. The liberal and the authoritarian : how different are Russian regions? / Rostislav Turovsky -- 3. Regional democracy variations and the forgotten legacies of western engagement / Tomila Lankina -- 4. Regional changes and changing regional relations with the centre / William M. Reisinger and Bryon J. Moraski -- 5. The transition to managerial patronage in Russia's regions / Joan DeBardeleben and Mikhail Zherebtsov -- 6. NGOs and politics in Russian regions / Elena Belokurova -- 7. Pluralism, (un)civil society, and authoritarianism in Russia's regions / Christopher Marsh -- 8. Party politics in the Russian regions : competition of interest groups under the guise of parties / Alexander Kynev -- 9. Electoral practices at the sub-national level in contemporary Russia / Petr Panov -- 10. Sub-national elections and the development of semi-authoritarian regimes / Cameron Ross -- 11. Redistributing sovereignty and property under Putin : a view from resource-rich republics of the Russian Federation / Gulnaz Sharafutdinova -- 12. State-business relations in Russia's regions / Natalia Zubarevich.

International experts on Russian regional politics, including top scholars from Britain, Canada, Russia and the USA, provide critical evaluations of the multiple deficiencies to be found in Russia's sub-national authoritarianism, including: principal-agent problems in the relations between the layers of the 'power vertical', unresolved issues of regime legitimacy that have resulted from manipulative electoral practices and the inefficient performance of regional and local governments.

The Italian 2013 election ended the period of bipolarism that characterized the so-called 'Second Republic', and paved the way for new parties such as the Five Star Movement. We investigate that election, which took place after the technocratic government led by Mario Monti, through the analytical lenses of the retrospective theory of economic voting applied at the provincial level. Local unemployment rates shape the electoral performances of those parties that were more supportive and sympathetic to the caretaker executive, thus confirming a distinction between incumbent and non-incumbent even in that critical and politically undecided election. We further contribute to the literature on retrospective voting by relaxing the locally untenable assumption of independence among the units. Making use of spatial regression models, we demonstrate the relevance of both the internal and contiguous economies, and their relative impact due to the different size of the provinces.