1,721,098 research outputs found
Political participation and commons. The case study of the “Water Common Good” referendum
No full textPurpose – The crisis of confidence in political institutions has become a phenomenon with uniform trends across Europe. Nevertheless, citizens still express interest in politics and are engaged in political and social activities. What are the issues that still motivate them to go to the polls and/or engage in non-institutional forms of political participation? The case study of the Italian referendum in favour of the “Water Common Good” (June 2011) is particularly appropriate to explore these issues and motivations. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – The paper proposes a multidisciplinary common good’s framework focusing on its social and political challenges. As the referendum succeeded also thanks to the rhetorical effectiveness of the “common good” epithet, a survey on 120 Roman citizens who voted in favour of the “Water Common Good” was conducted. The hypothesis was that the referendum success could be associated with social needs to defend strategic resources (“commons”) by actively participating in the deliberations on them. A quantitative non-probabilistic research was carried out face-to-face, through a standardized and semi-structured questionnaire. Findings – The main findings refer to the leading role that distrust in political institutions, civil society activism and common good rhetorical effectiveness played. Originality/value – The most original contribution of this paper is the explanatory and stipulative definition of common good, which reduces the semantic uncertainty of the concept including common sense meanings. This novel conceptualization has practical implications in policy terms, as it explicates the social need to change the way of conceiving the relationship with strategic resources and decision-making processes concerning them
'The communal' in school and indigenous radio. Evidence from the North of Argentina
No full textThe Argentinian Law 26.522 on Audiovisual Communication Services (currently under reform) aimed at democratizing the media arena by recognizing multiple actors such as community broadcasters, school and indigenous media, among others. According to the legal classification, community broadcasters were regulated as private non-profit media, despite having specific objectives, programming, organizational logic and economic conditions. Conversely, school and indigenous media merged into the public sector, even if they may act as community media. The article compares results arising from two research projects carried out in Northern Argentina through in-depth interviews with key informants from two indigenous radio stations and two school radio stations. The theoretical framework mainly draws on literature about community, alternative and popular communication. Results show that communities participate in such media foundation or management and that media content deals with cultural and political issues related to their interests or needs. Indeed, emerging features allow considering such broadcasters as community media
The effect of local taxes on firm performance: Evidence from geo-referenced data
No full textThis paper investigates the effect of local property tax for businesses on firm performance by using a panel of Italian manufacturing firms. To identify this effect, we implement a pairwise spatial-differenced estimator and exploit the exogenous variation in local property tax rates caused by the political alignment of local and central governments. We find that business property taxation has a sizeable negative impact on equipment, the more volatile part of tangible assets, employment, and value-added. We interpret these results as evidence of a distortionary mechanism. When heavy equipment are included in the business property tax base, as was the case in Italy during our estimation period, business property taxation depresses investment and induces firms to also reduce output and downsize
Community Media as Exercise of Communicative Citizenship: Experiences from Argentina and Ecuador = Medios comunitarios como ejercicio de ciudadanía comunicativa: experiencias desde Argentina y Ecuador
Full text linkRecent Latin American reforms in the field of communication reshape and strengthen the role and challenges of the popular, alternative and community media. This paper analyzes different experiences arising from the results of two pieces of research, one in Argentina and another one in Ecuador, both carried out through a qualitative methodology, namely in-depth interviews. The theoretical framework mainly draws upon the grounded tradition of Latin American studies on popular and alternative communication for social change, and it also includes recent contributions from European studies. The objective of both research projects was to account for the communities-media relationship, by unveiling the existence of mutual bonds between social organization and content generation.’ Analysis of results shows that communities’ direct participation in the foundation, management and sustainability of such media reverberates in the production of organic content related to their own interests and needs –usually neglected both by public and commercial media– and also in a greater media pluralism and media supply diversity. Moreover, results allow considering popular, alternative and community media as key environments both for democratizing communication and shaping communicative citizenship. Both studies highlight a common challenge, that is, the need to consolidate trans-local and trans-national networks in order to establish a common action at the level of the media global order, thus enabling to measure their influence on the public agenda
PDB39 Assessing the IMPACT of New ANTI Diabetics Drugs: A Dynamic Microsimulation Approach
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