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Im Verlauf des Transformationsprozesses verändert sich die Siedlungsstruktur besonders augenscheinlich im Umland von Groß- und Mittelstädten durch Siedlungswachstum in den Außenbereichen. Dieses Siedlungswachstum führt in untergeordneter Form zur Zersiedlung der Landschaft. Es erhöht das Verkehrsaufkommen und belastet die Luft insbesondere durch steigenden Individualverkehr. Gleichzeitig kann diese Stadtrandwanderung ausgewählter Bevölkerungsgruppen zur Verödung der Kernstädte und Gefährdung etablierter Versorgungssysteme beitragen. Diese brisante und aktuelle Problematik der Suburbanisierung wurde von der ARL als Thema ihres dritten transnationalen Planerforums im Rahmen des CADSES INTERREG II C-Projektes aufgegriffen, um den gegenseitigen Wissenstransfer zwischen Wissenschaftlern und Praktikern in den Ländern Mittel-, Ost- und Südosteuropas zu grundlegenden und aktuellen Fragen der Regionalentwicklung fortzusetzen. Seine Ergebnisse sollen mit dieser zweisprachigen Veröffentlichung Nutzerkreisen in Tschechien, der Slowakei und Deutschland vorgestellt werden.

As a motivational factor of action, political efficacy is an important predictor of political behaviour. The term was invented to capture the extent to which people feel that they can effectively participate in politics and shape political processes. Today, we have a comprehensive knowledge of the individual-level factors (socio-demographic variables, political preferences etc.) that shape the level of internal and external dimensions of political efficacy. However, while it is widely demonstrated that media consumption influences the level of political efficacy, the country-level media context factors affecting it have rarely been studied. This paper reports the findings of extensive research on how two crucial features of the media context, the political significance of the media and the level of political parallelism in the media system, shape the level of external and internal political efficacy. The investigation draws upon the dataset of the seventh round (2014 – 2015) of the European Social Survey (ESS) and includes more than twenty-two thousand respondents from nineteen European democracies. The research hypothesizes that in countries where the media play a more important role, people have lower levels of external and higher levels of internal political efficacy. Political parallelism, which shows the extent to which media outlets are driven by distinct political orientations and interests within a particular media system, is expected to directly increase both external and internal political efficacy. Its indirect effect is also hypothesized, arguing that partisan media amplifies the winner-loser gap in political efficacy as a kind of "echo chamber". The findings show that in countries where the media play a major role in shaping political discourse, people have lower levels of external political efficacy, while the political parallelism of the media system indirectly affects the external dimensions of political efficacy. Internal political efficacy is, however, not related to these context-level factors.