Mayors in Vertical Power Relations
From a constitutional point of view, cities are local governments. Some of them may proudly look back on a past as autonomous states. During the construction of the nation states in the 18th and 19th century, European cities were squeezed into the corset of national intergovernmental frameworks. No matter how glorious their past forgone, European cities henceforth occupy a subordinate position within national state polities. Their autonomy is limited by upper levels of government, such as regions, federate states, and the central state. Of course, the nature and the extent of these limitations differ across space and time, resulting in a great variation of patterns of constraints to which city governments have to comply, as well as of structures of opportunities through which they can expand their freedom to act.
New Public Management Reforms and Democratic Legitimacy: Notions of Democratic Legitimacy among West European Local Councillors
Abstract The article extends the question about the notion of democracy to the concept of democratic legitimacy and distinguishes between input and output-based legitimacy. We explore local councillors' view on the two alternative notions of legitimacy. The first question is descriptive and concerns the support for alternative notions of democratic legitimacy among councillors across twelve West European countries. What notion of legitimacy receives the stronger support: input-based legitimacy, associated with representative democracy and participation, or output-based legitimacy, emphasising the performance of democratic institutions – as promoted by New Public Management reforms? The second question is explanatory and concerns whether the view held by the councillors depends on the multi-level government system in a specific country. We assume that the more responsibility for the production of welfare services held by local government, the more support output-oriented legitimacy measures is likely to receive. We find that our measures of input-based legitimacy receive more widespread support than the measures of output-based legitimacy. As regards the impact of local government systems and responsibilities held by local governments our main hypothesis does gain some support, but the results are not significant. A reasonable interpretation of the fairly weak findings at this point is that local government in all European countries has a strong political foundation. Despite system differences and NPM reforms, European councillors appear to be strongly attached to their traditional representative role.
The Internet and the Changing Beijing-Taipei Relations: Toward Unification or Fragmentation?
Information and its technologies facilitate the exercise of what has been called “soft power,” a concept that differentiates information from the conventional dimensions of “hard power,” which is mainly associated with military force and economic influence. Soft power, according to Nye, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense of the United States, means that “A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries want to follow it, admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness. In this sense it is just as important to set the agenda in world politics and attract others as it is to force them to change through the threat or use of military or economic weapons.”1