Beppe Grillo's First Defeat? The May 2013 Municipal Elections in Italy

The article analyses the results of the Italian municipal elections held in May 2013. It focuses on their three most striking features: the clear victory of the centre-left coalition, the marked drop in voter turnout and the shrinkage of the Five Stars Movement (M5S). The article analyses the causes of the M5S' loss of votes and interprets this new party with reference to European (disaffection towards political institutions and the ‘counter-democracy’ phenomenon as explained by Rosanvallon) and Italian (the crumbling of the party system) variables.     

北京市市政管理委员会网上审批应用

从需求、结构、功能、技术等方面对北京市市政管理委员会网上审批系统进行了介绍和分析     

Spatial voting in non-partisan cities: A case study

In spatial voting theory, voters choose the candidate whose policy preferences are most like their own. This requires that (a) voters and candidates have policy preferences that can be meaningfully summarized in terms of low-dimensional “ideal points” on a left-right scale; (b) voters are able to discern, either directly or through relevant cues, the ideal points of the candidates who are running for office; and (c) voters incorporate this information into the choices they make at the ballot box. Perhaps more than in any other elections, it is not clear that any of these requirements are met in non-partisan municipal elections: policy preferences may not be ideologically structured, information may be inadequate, and voters may choose candidates for reasons other than ideology. This makes non-partisan municipal elections an especially hard test for spatial voting theory. Using novel data from both municipal candidates and eligible voters in a major non-partisan municipal election in Canada, we show that municipal policy attitudes are ideologically structured and that these municipal policy ideal points are strongly related to mayoral and council vote choice. Thus, despite the institutional and informational obstacles, spatial voting can play an important role in non-partisan municipal elections.     

How do municipal amalgamations affect turnout in local elections? Insights from the 2015 municipal reform in the Austrian state of Styria

In this paper, we evaluate the effect of municipal amalgamations on election turnout in local elections. Following recent studies, we argue that municipal mergers can lead to less information about the election being made available to citizens and less influence for individual voters. That is, while citizens in the local context usually rely on their own direct contacts in local offices and among political candidates, the subsequent increase in population size due to a merger reduces opportunities for establishing such contacts and for having decisive influence on political decisions. Consequently, voters are less informed and less engaged, resulting in lower levels of electoral turnout in local elections. We test our argument empirically by using aggregate level data from the municipal level from the 2010 and 2015 local elections in Styria, Austria, which followed the amalgamation of some, but not all, municipalities in January 2015. The empirical results support our argument.     

城市生活垃圾填埋场每日覆盖替代材料及评估方法

比较了传统的城市生活垃圾填埋场压实粘土覆盖与每日覆盖替代材料(A lternative Daily Cover简称ADC),研究了它们对填埋场空间以及运行成本的影响,并讨论了对每日覆盖替代材料的评价方法。     

制约警务创新改革的瓶颈因素分析及应对举措——以苏州市公安局创意警务为例

江苏省苏州市公安局的创意警务举措为我国的警务创新工作提供了宝贵经验,应该将其理论成果加以研究,为我国公安工作做出应有贡献.通过苏州市公安局创意警务工作来探讨制约警务创新发展的瓶颈因素及应对举措,探讨警务创新的延续性发展的必要因素和复制性价值,只有警务创新从机制创新走向体制创新,警务创新才能更加健康、持续发展下去.     

Is small beautiful? Transitional and structural effects of municipal amalgamation on voter turnout in local and national elections

The effect of jurisdiction size on democracy is hotly debated. Allegedly, smallness promotes democracy, whereas effectiveness and efficiency increase with size. Neither claim has strong empirical underpinnings. We provide evidence for the former. We use municipal amalgamations as a source of exogenous variation in jurisdiction size and show that it reduced voter turnout in Dutch elections in the 1986–2018 period. This period is sufficiently long to separate potential temporary effects of the amalgamation process from a structural effect of size increase. Surprisingly, we find no evidence of the former. Municipal amalgamation reduces turnout in local elections by 2.2 percentage points and in national elections by 0.7 percentage points. Both effects are long-lasting, persisting at least five elections after amalgamation. More detailed analysis reveals that the most likely driving forces are a weakening of the social norm to vote, and, in municipal elections, increased distance between voters and politics.