The diploma thesis deals with the issue of forced administration in municipalities in Slovakia. The aim of the diploma thesis is to analyze the municipal policy of Slovak municipalities in forced administration. The theoretical part defines the terms related to the issue. The analysis and research in the practical part of the thesis aimes to point out the state of municipal policy of municipalities that were or are currently under compulsory administration, as well as the state of the institution of compulsory administration of municipalities in Slovakia and outline the necessary changes. In a comparative multi-case study, the features of municipalities at the time of economic collapse and the introduction of forced administration were identified and specified. It was found out how the forced administration in selected Slovak municipalities affected municipal elections, candidacy, turnout and local democracy. For the data collection, substantial interviews were conducted with representatives of municipalities whose municipality is currently under compulsory administration and with representatives of municipalities of former forced administration. Keywords: financing of municipalities, local politics, municipal elections, local democracy, forced administration, political impacts, Slovak...

Marges en déclin sociodémographique dans la deuxième moitié du XXe siècle, les quartiers d’inner city sesituent aujourd’hui au coeur de la stratégie de développement de Londres. Ils constituent désormais un espacesoupape où se négocient les conséquences sociales et spatiales de la globalisation dans la capitale britannique.Le modèle politique et urbain de la régénération qui préside à ce changement se stabilise à la fin de ladécennie 1980 dans un consensus entrepreneurial, compétitif et partenarial. Cependant, sa territorialisation dans les anciens quartiers d’inner city est discrète et inachevée et fait place à de nombreux reliquats de l'intervention de la puissance publique, loin de l’image d’un retrait univoque de l’État. L'agenda néotravailliste des années 2000 modifie ce modèle en y introduisant des normes de durabilité, de reconnaissance des minorités et un impératif participatif. À Londres, cette évolution se traduit par la mise en place d’une politique territoriale spécifique, les zones d’opportunité, dont le but est initialement d’arrimer le développement des inner cities à celui des marchés immobiliers péricentraux. Nous montrons qu’en l’absence de mécanisme de redistribution suffisamment contraignant, cette politique a conduit dans les faits à une accélération de la privatisation du parc de logements publics et à une généralisation des formes de gentrification clé-en-main (new-built gentrification). La coalition conservateurs / libéraux-démocrates au pouvoir depuis 2010 a partiellement maintenu les dispositifs participatifs dans les programmes de régénération. Cependant, nous montrons comment le contexte d’austérité a conduit dans certains cas à une forme de privatisation du fonctionnement même de la démocratie urbaine locale. Le modèle de la régénération, ses impasses et ses injustices, est désormais contesté dans plusieurs sphères politiques, mais les protestations sont fragmentées et peinent à se généraliser en raison même de la géographie spécifique de la régénération, par projet. / The inner city was at the margin and in decline for most of the second half of the 20th century. Today it is an essential part in London's development strategy. It works as a relief valve for the social and spatial pressure induced by globalisation in the capital city of the United Kingdom. Regeneration policies are the political and spatial model driving this transformation. From the late 1980s the regeneration consensus revolved around three principles: it had to be funded by property-led entrepreneurial investments, distributed by competitions between territories and governed by public-private partnerships, thus realising the neoliberalisation of space.However, the delivery of regeneration projects in old inner city areas is discontinuous and incomplete. Itmakes space for numerous state interventions which show that we are far from a complete withdrawal of thestate. In the 2000s, New Labour policies append new norms to the regeneration model: the notions ofdurability, acknowledgement of minority rights, and the imperative to become more participative. In Londonthis has led to the creation of the "opportunity areas" policy, which has attempted to propel the development of the inner city by the boom of the property markets on the edge of the city centre. In the absence of stronger coercing distributive mechanisms, we show that this policy has in fact led to the faster privatisation of public housing and extended the range of "new-built gentrification". The Conservative – Liberal Democrat Coalition have dismantled many of the regeneration participative regimes. In some cases, austerity policies have triggered the privatisation of core functions in local urban democracy. This model, with its shortcomings and injustice, is criticized in the public sphere but protests remain fragmented and are struggling to become established, because of the very geography of project-based regeneration.

The aim of this thesis is to explore the institutional design of Participatory Budgeting (PB) in Sweden and how the design may contribute to realize central democratic goods. The study records the different PB experiences in Sweden and focuses on one particular case, which is the only case that successfully qualifies as a genuine PB-process according to international standards and definitions. To examine this, the following questions are asked: which municipalities in Sweden have implemented Participatory Budgeting? How can the institutional design of Participatory Budgeting be described and to what extent does it enable the realization of central democratic goods? To what extent does the institutional design enable the realization of the democratic goods inclusion, popular control, considered judgment and transparency? To what extent does the institutional design enable the realization of the institutional goods of efficiency and transferability? The study is based on an institutional theory of democracy. The method used is a mixed method ideal type analysis that combines document analysis, surveys and interviews. The results of the study indicates that the PB-institutions has multiple flaws regarding the way it enables the realization of numerous of the democratic goods analyzed. The institutional design does not pay enough attention to inclusion of different social groups including marginalized groups, popular control is restricted to issues of low political salience and the PB process does not live up to the transparency level expected from a democratic institution. On the other hand, the institutional design of the PB process does take into account some aspects of inclusion among the youth inhabitants and the process has been effective in the sense that it has delivered physical results quickly.

This licentiate thesis studies the differences between analogue and digital council meetings in how they are organized and how speaking times are distributed between men and women, and hard and soft issues. The study is based on Swedish municipal council meetings, which share similar features with national parliamentary meetings and seek legitimacy through meetings and debate. Perspectives on meeting sites and components are combined with a time perspective on parliamentary activity, where women's representation and formal meeting procedures are set in focus. By studying video recordings of six council meetings in three municipalities, time is used to measure components of three analogue and three digital meetings. Measures of relative speaking time or speech duration are constructed and applied to meeting structure and how women and men spend their speaking time. Findings indicate that the roles of meeting secretaries and chairmen changed when faced with new digital challenges. The meeting formality decreased in the digital meetings, which is in line with previous research. Women generally accounted for a smaller proportion of speaking time in relation to their numerical representation. They spent more of their speaking time debating soft issues, such as social care, while men spent more of their speaking time debating hard issues, such as economy and infrastructure. The findings are in line with previous research on the policy areas with which women and men most engage. In the digital meetings, differences between men and women where still observed, but less noticeable. This could be interpreted as the digital format having potential benefits for women's representation in certain circumstances. The findings have implications for the understanding on how digital parliamentary meetings strive to create legitimacy. However, more research is needed to be able to generalize beyond the specific context of this study and to understand the mechanisms that can explain differences between men's and women's speaking time. The contribution of the thesis lies primarily in the development of a new method for measuring speaking time which, in relation to previous research, presents greater robustness from a reliability and validity perspective. / Den här uppsatsen studerar skillnader mellan analoga och digitala fullmäktigemöten avseende hur de organiseras och hur talartider fördelas mellan män och kvinnor och hårda och mjuka frågor. Studien tar avstamp i fullmäktige som ett parlamentariskt möte på lokal nivå som söker genomflödeslegitimitet genom att sammanträda och debattera. Teoretiska perspektiv på mötesplatser och möteskomponenter kombineras med ett tidsperspektiv på parlamentarisk aktivitet där kvinnors representation och mötesprocedurer fokuseras. Genom att studera videoinspelningar av sex fullmäktigemöten i tre kommuner mäts hur tiden används i tre analoga och tre digitala möten. Måttet talartid konstrueras för att studera hur mötestiden struktureras och hur kvinnor och män spenderar sin talartid. Resultatet pekar på att mötessekreterares och ordförandes roller förändras när de ställs inför nya utmaningar i digitala möten och att formalitetsnivån sjunker i de digitala mötena, vilket är i linje med tidigare forskning om digitala möten. Kvinnor stod generellt för en mindre andel av talartiden i relation till deras numerära representation. De spenderade mer av sin talartid att debattera mjuka frågor som exempelvis social omsorg, medan männen spenderade mer av sin talartid åt att debattera hårda frågor som exempelvis ekonomi och infrastruktur. Resultatet är i linje med tidigare forskning om vilka politikområden som kvinnor och män engageras i. Skillnaderna bestod i de digitala fullmäktigesammanträdena, men de var inte lika påtagliga. En tolkning är att det digitala formatet kan gynna kvinnors representation under vissa omständigheter. Resultatet har implikationer för förståelsen om hur digitala parlamentariska möten bidrar till legitimitet. Dock behövs mer forskning för att kunna generalisera dessa fall bortom den specifika kontexten samt att förstå vilka mekanismer som kan förklara skillnader mellan män och kvinnors talartid. Uppsatsens bidrag ligger främst i utvecklingen av en innovativ metod för att mäta talartid som i relation till tidigare försök står sig robust utifrån ett reliabilitets- och validitetsperspektiv.

Rätten till politisk delaktighet skapar möjligheter för medborgare att göra anspråk på sina mänskliga rättigheter, och därmed möjliggör för medborgare att påverka sina levnadsförhållanden. Frånvaron av möjligheter till att delta och att kunna påverka beslut är därmed ett betydande rättighetsproblem. Uppsatsen har sin start i den politiska ojämlikheten som har påvisats i Sverige, där den allmänna rösträtten inte verkar räcka till för att garantera politisk jämlikhet. I utredningar föreslås medborgardialog som en lösning. Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka om medborgardialoger, initierade av Hallstahammars kommun och Västerås stad, kan förstås som ett uttryck av deliberativ demokrati. För att studera detta avgränsades deliberativ demokrati till fem normativa deliberativa ideal; argumentation, inkludering, jämlikhet, transparens och beslutspåverkan. Dessa ideal ses som rimliga villkor för deliberativ demokrati och har mätts mot kommunernas medborgardialoger med hjälp av en kvalitativ fallstudie med textanalys.   Uppsatsens resultat visar på att medborgardialog kan förstås som ett uttryck för deliberativ demokrati när det gäller en del normativa villkor, men i det stora hela så brister medborgardialogerna i de utvalda deliberativa idealen. Hallstahammars kommun är ett uttryck deliberativ demokrati i större utsträckning än Västerås stad. Kommunernas fortsatta arbete med att utveckla medborgardialoger är därför av största vikt och i synnerhet genom att utveckla riktlinjer och strategier explicit för att främja den politiska jämlikheten för samtliga kommunmedborgare. Uppsatsen har resulterat i en sammanfattande guide för att genomföra medborgardialoger med deliberativa kvalitéer. / The right to political participation creates opportunities for citizens to claim their human rights, thereby enabling citizens to influence their living conditions. The absence of opportunities to participate and to be able to influence decisions is therefore a significant human rights problem. The paper starts with the political inequality that has been demonstrated in Sweden, where voting rights does not seem to be enough to guarantee political equality. In studies, citizen dialogues are proposed as a solution.  The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether citizen dialogues, initiated by Hallstahammar municipality and Västerås municipality, can be understood as an expression of deliberative democracy. To study this, deliberative democracy was limited to five normative deliberative ideals: argumentation, inclusion, equality, transparency and decision-making influence. These ideals are reasonable conditions for deliberative democracy and have been measured against municipal citizen dialogues in a qualitative case study using text analysis as a tool.   The result of the study shows that citizen dialogues can be understood as an expression of deliberative democracy when it comes to some normative conditions, but overall, the citizen dialogues lack in the chosen ideals. Hallstahammar municipality is an expression of deliberative democracy to a greater extent than Västerås municipality. The continued work of municipalities in developing citizen dialogues is therefore of the utmost importance and by developing guidelines and strategies explicitly to promote political equality for all municipal citizens. The study has resulted in a guide to conduct citizen dialogues with deliberative qualities.

台灣地區的民主化過程一直是中外學者注視的焦點。在長期實行民選地方政府或地方自治的台灣，真正是一個民主的社會嗎？在解嚴、動戡時期終止前，很容易回答，由於沒有組黨自由，中央民代選舉只是部分的增額改選，台灣的全國政治並不能達到民主社會的基本標準。但是，地方選舉則是長期地、完整地在舉行，要回答台灣地方是否民主，仍很難輕易地給予答案。地方民主是如此複雜、多樣化的面貌，如何才算達成地方民主？本論文基本上是以Leach和Percy-Smith所提出的地方民主的四個面向為標準，此即：1、課責性；2、回應性；3、參與性；4、代表性；進而探討。 筆者研究後發現：第一，從台北市的民主經驗來看，代表性應該不是問題的癥結；所謂的代表性是否意味著該和R. A. Dahl所言的，和社會人口或職業的結構相符合？在地方民主上來看，由於社會的多元化，以及要求民意代表的專業及高學歷背景，代表社會結構的多元民主（polyarchy）是否值得再強調？可以深思。第二，從台北市的民主經驗來看，參與性應該是地方民主很重要的一項指標。如何讓民眾更直接的參與到民主政治中，除了選舉之外，應該有更多的、直接的交換意見的平台或管道，例如公民投票、公民論壇、協調會等等。第三，地方民主的參與和地方政府的回應性夾雜在一塊，民眾參與到政策討論的領域中，政府也加入予以回應。所以，地方民主中，回應性與參與性似乎呈現某種程度的關聯性。第四，不論是參與性、回應性等民主的程度，都與政府能力有關，似乎地方政府解決問題的能力越高，民眾就越會表現出對於地方政府做為的參與，以及政策的回應。

Cette recherche porte sur l'évolution de l'administration locale en Roumanie et en France depuis ledébut des années 1990. L'étude de la situation de départ différente dans les deux pays a étépoursuivie par l'analyse des grandes étapes du développement du cadre juridique relatif auxcollectivités territoriales : l'avènement (en Roumanie) ou le renforcement (en France) du statutconstitutionnel des collectivités et l'évolution du cadre législatif opérant les transferts decompétences et de moyens en faveur des collectivités. Cette analyse a mis en évidence uneconception des réformes qui présente bien des similitudes, mais aussi une mise en oeuvre parfoisdifférente. Une évaluation du niveau de décentralisation atteint dans les deux pays a été entrepriseau regard des critères de la Charte européenne de l'autonomie locale. Elle a permis de relever lesavancées enregistrées par chaque pays et d'identifier les marges de progrès possibles. Au final, on apu constater qu'au-delà d'un contexte initial différent et des particularités de la carte administrative,au-delà d'une application différente des réformes, la Roumanie et la France montrent aujourd'hui undegré de décentralisation très comparable, globalement en cohérence avec les prescriptions de laCharte. / This research focuses on the evolution of the local government in Romania and France since thebeginning of the 1990s. The study of different initial conditions in both countries has been followedby the analysis of the major developmental stages of the legal framework concerning localauthorities : the relatively recent accession to (for Romania) or reinforcement of (in France) theconstitutional status of the communities and the evolution of the law corpus operating the transferof competencies and resources for local communities. This analysis revealed a conception ofreforms that has many similarities, but also some different implementation. An evaluation of thelevel of decentralization achieved in the two countries has been undertaken in the light of thecriteria of the European Charter of Local Self-Government. It identified the progress made by eachcountry, but also the opportunities for improvement. In the end, it was found that beyond an initialcontext and particularities of the administrative map, beyond the different application of reforms,Romania and France show today a very similar degree of decentralization, broadly consistent withthe requirements of the Charter.