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Neighbourhood Impacts on Wellbeing: The Role of Housing among Low-Income Tenants
Get PDFThe existing literature on neighbourhood effects suggests that a number of factors within local areas can have an impact on health, including environmental hazards, social networks and the socio-economic status of the area. However, there is minimal evidence regarding the role of housing organisations in shaping these effects. This article sets out the findings from a three-year longitudinal, mixed methods study of tenants of three housing organisations operating in the social and private rented sectors, examining different aspects of neighbourhood experience and their relationship to health and wellbeing outcomes. The findings demonstrate impacts of the immediate environment in terms of close neighbours, the wider neighbourhood environment, and social support networks, which are heavily influenced by tenant characteristics, previous experience and expectations. The services provided by housing organisations, themselves shaped by regulation and market factors, are also important. The findings will have relevance for tenants, housing providers, public health professionals and policy makers
Reflections on Deploying Community-Driven Visualisations for Public Engagement in Urban Planning
Get PDFPublicly available visualisations play an increasing role in enabling wider audiences to contribute to debates to shape place futures. In this article, we unpack such contributions to consider the conceptualisation, actualisation and deployment of these visualisations as separate entities that each require development and reflection. In doing so we draw on our experiences of using two public engagement tools that utilise visualisations of residents’ comments. Through this we explore the limitations of visualisations in public engagement designed to support differing levels of debate and their abilities to support abstract topics and geographic associations. We discuss how visualisations alone do not produce actions and how they need to be rooted in wider conversations about a place to lead to insights and action. The article calls for the linking of visualisations for place meaning and place action at different stages of much broader public engagement projects to unlock the potentials present in them in the mediatisation of built environment outcomes
Audience-Based Indicators for News Media Performance: A Conceptual Framework and Findings from Germany
Get PDFMany attempts to conceptualize and to assess the performance of media systems or single news media outlets focus on the “supply side” of public communication, operationalized as characteristics of the news content and the form of presentation. These characteristics indicate the potential performance of news media; they are a necessary but not a sufficient condition for media performance. In order to assess the actual performance of news media we need to know what kind of audiences they reach, how they fulfil their users’ news-related interests and needs, and how they contribute to their users’ perceptions of the news environment. In this article, we propose a conceptual framework for the definition of audience-based indicators for news media performance. We apply this framework to data gathered as part of the 2019 Reuters Institute Digital News Survey for Germany. We compare 42 news media, both online and offline, in regard to their reach in different parts of the population, and to their audiences’ interest in news and politics, their trust in media, and their perceptions of the overall performance of German news media. The findings underline that news media performance is a multidimensional concept and that there are different ways in which news media can perform. Furthermore, the particular type of media, technically or organizationally, still matters when it comes to audiences’ expectations and perceived functions
News Media Performance Evaluated by National Audiences: How Media Environments and User Preferences Matter
Get PDFMedia fragmentation and polarization have contributed to blurring the lines between professional and non-professional journalism. Internationally, more fragmented-polarized media environments are often associated with the emergence of non-professional news providers, the weakening of journalistic standards, and the segmentation of audiences along ideological leanings. Furthermore, these environments are home to partisan and alternative news media outlets, some of which try to actively undermine the credibility of traditional mainstream media in their reporting. By following an audience-centric approach, this study investigates the consequences of more fragmented-polarized media environments and consumption habits on users’ perceptions of news media performance. We use online-survey data from five countries that differ in the extent of fragmentation and polarization in the media environment (CH = 1,859, DK = 2,667, IT = 2,121, PL = 2,536, US = 3,493). We find that perceptions of high news media performance are more likely to be expressed by citizens from less fragmented-polarized media environments. Positive perceptions of news media performance are also stronger among users of traditional media, and those who inform themselves in a more attitude-congruent manner. By contrast, citizens from more fragmented-polarized media environments and users of alternative news media tend to express less satisfaction with news media performance. Based on these results, we argue that perceptions of news media performance among news users are shaped by their individual media choices as well as by the composition of the news media environments that surrounds them
Democratic Theory and the Potential of Value Frames in Assessing Media Performance
Get PDFMedia users need information and knowledge to act as free citizens. From this basic democratic assumption, news standards for media performance can be derived. Porto’s (2007) model of the ‘interpreting citizen’ assigns a central role to the diversity of interpretive frames. These frames enable citizens to make judgments about societal issues and related political positions. However, a theoretical foundation for classifying these frames in terms of their content is missing. We propose to derive such a basis from democratic theories of citizenship, which assume that values define a citizen’s position vis-à-vis the political sphere. Building on the cleavage approach from political science, we characterize which values organize political debates. The results of a large-scale content analysis of German news media demonstrate which empirical insights into media performance can be gained with a theoretically derived classification of value frames (most notably, measuring the substantive content of plurality). Based on this, we discuss additional avenues for future research
Boundary Crossers: The Transformation of Civil Society Elites in Indonesia’s Post-Authoritarian Era
Get PDFThis article discusses the strategies used by the leaders of civil society organisations (CSOs) to cross the boundary between the field of civil society and the field of the state. Moreover, it examines the implications of this boundary crossing for post-authoritarian politics in Indonesia. In doing so, it tries to answer two questions: First, what are the strategies used by CSO leaders in boundary crossing? Second, what are the political implications of this boundary crossing for Indonesia’s post-authoritarian politics? Using Bourdieu’s field theory as its conceptual framework and drawing on qualitative interviews with CSO leaders, this article scrutinises the mobility of CSO leaders in different sectors: agrarian, anti-corruption, law, and human rights. It identifies two main strategies used in boundary crossing: direct and indirect strategies. Such strategies tend to be individual rather than organisational. Neither strategy is exclusive; CSO leaders do not limit themselves to particular strategies but may combine them and use them simultaneously. Another finding is that, when crossing to the state field, CSO leaders may increase or reduce their capital, or even lose it. Furthermore, boundary crossing has several significant implications for post-authoritarian politics in Indonesia: it generates sectoral policies; it creates political linkages; and finally, it leads CSO leaders to exert political control within the state field
“They Sold Us Illusions”: Informality, Redevelopment, and the Politics of Limpieza in the Dominican Republic
Get PDFIn the capital city of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, climate change and environmental concerns are used to justify massive redevelopment projects in informal settlements located along the rivers Ozama and Isabela. Residents in such river communities negotiate the uncertainty of state planning under a new socio-environmentalism that prioritizes the environment over social concerns, while continuing to pursue bottom-up neighborhood planning despite the powerful rationality of limpieza (cleanliness), the pervasive techniques of responsibilization, and the celebratory spectacles of megaprojects. The uncertainty resulting from governance under socio-environmentalism produces ambivalence towards environmentcentered projects among residents. Drawing on oral histories and interviews with long-time community members, we suggest that residents engage in three ‘sensemaking strategies’ to process their ambivalence in the face of daily precarity, in particular the ongoing threat of evictions. Residents ‘keep up’ with the state and strategically utilize planning language to advocate for community priorities. They engage in practices of storytelling that reproduce a deep sense of community and provide a longer historical understanding of planning interventions. Finally, through verbal speculation and other ‘unsanctioned speech acts’ they analyze disruptions caused by socio-environmentalism, build solidarity with other communities, and think ahead despite uncertainty
Feeling Left Out: Underserved Audiences in Science Communication
Get PDFScience communication only reaches certain segments of society. Various underserved audiences are detached from it and feel left out, which is a challenge for democratic societies that build on informed participation in deliberative processes. While only recently researchers and practitioners have addressed the question on the detailed composition of the not reached groups, even less is known about the emotional impact on underserved audiences: feelings and emotions can play an important role in how science communication is received, and “feeling left out” can be an important aspect of exclusion. In this exploratory study, we provide insights from interviews and focus groups with three different underserved audiences in Germany. We found that on the one hand, material exclusion factors such as available infrastructure or financial means as well as specifically attributable factors such as language skills, are influencing the audience composition of science communication. On the other hand, emotional exclusion factors such as fear, habitual distance, and self- as well as outside-perception also play an important role. Therefore, simply addressing material aspects can only be part of establishing more inclusive science communication practices. Rather, being aware of emotions and feelings can serve as a point of leverage for science communication in reaching out to underserved audiences
The Trump Paradox: How Cues from a Disliked Source Foster Resistance to Persuasion
Get PDFWe usually reject information from sources we dislike. But what if those same sources explicitly disagree with that information? Are we more likely to be persuaded by information that is opposed by someone we dislike? We present results from an experimental study with a convenience sample of 199 Dutch students. Respondents were exposed to counter-attitudinal information on climate change in an attempt to generate persuasion, and in a second time exposed to a tweet from the current US president, Donald J. Trump, as a positive or negative endorsement of the counter-attitudinal. Results show that positive endorsements reduce the persuasive power of counter-attitudinal information, whereas negative endorsements (marginally) increase its persuasive power. These results have important implications in today’s politics, where “disliked” figures—most of the time referred to as “populists”—play an increasingly central role in framing the terms of the debate on the most salient issues
Candidate Selection and Parliamentary Activity in the EU’s Multi-Level System: Opening a Black-Box
Get PDFMembers of the European Parliament (MEPs) have a multitude of parliamentary duties and, accordingly, have to prioritize some parliamentary activities over others. So far, we know comparably little about this prioritization process. Based on principal–agent theory, we argue first, that MEPs’ parliamentary activities are systematically determined by the “visibility” and usefulness of parliamentary instruments for their key principal; second, we expect the exclusiveness of candidate selection procedures of an MEP’s national party—the nomination and the final list placement—to determine her/his key principal (i.e., elites or members of national parties). Combining multi-level mixed effects linear regression models and expert interviews, we show that MEPs who are nominated and whose final list placement is decided by an exclusive circle of national party elites prioritize speeches, whereas MEPs who are nominated or whose final list placement is decided by more inclusive procedures prioritize written questions and opinions or reports. In other words, speeches seem particularly useful to communicate with national party elites, while other activities are used to serve larger groups of party members. These findings open up the black-box of the “national party principal” and illustrate how a complex principal–agent relationship stimulates very specific parliamentary activity patterns in the EU’s multi-level system