Suchergebnisse

This study investigates whether citizen participation in public budgeting resulted in increased redistributive outcomes when compared with bureaucratic decision‐making. We focused on a specific budget item (i.e., the installation of surveillance cameras for crime prevention) and examined whether participatory budgeting yielded larger budget allocations to low‐income neighbourhoods. Results indicate that such participatory budgeting results in larger budget allocations for low‐income neighbourhoods when compared with allocations produced by bureaucratic budgeting practices. The results also indicate that budgets allocated through citizen participation may be no more or even less effective for advancing public goals. These findings suggest a potential trade‐off between equity and public service effectiveness. Citizen participation improves budget equity, but may be less effective for achieving public goals than bureaucratic decision‐making. To explain this, we offer the 'social pressure hypothesis', which posits that social pressure during public‐forum discussions can influence participating citizens to make redistributive decisions.

Based on a review of citizenship and citizen participation in politics and policy studies, this article reveals diverse concepts of citizens and citizenship and their changing roles within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. It argues that the pandemic will result in bringing citizens back into the policy process, given that active participation of citizens in solving wicked social problems has been emphasised. Our results suggest that the pandemic will result in a return of public citizens as their voluntary, active participation and coproduction practices are expected to increase.

The electronic structure of SrPd2Ge2 single crystals is studied by angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES), scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS), and band structure calculations within the local-density approximation (LDA). The STS measurements show a single s-wave superconducting energy gap (0) = 0.5 meV. The photon-energy dependence of the observed Fermi surface reveals a strongly three-dimensional character of the corresponding electronic bands. By comparing the experimentally measured and calculated Fermi velocities a renormalization factor of 0.95 is obtained, which is much smaller than typical values reported in Fe-based superconductors. We ascribe such an unusually low band renormalization to the different orbital character of the conduction electrons and, using ARPES and STS data, argue that SrPd2Ge2 is likely to be a conventional superconductor, which makes it clearly distinct from isostructural iron pnictide superconductors of the "122" family ; This work was supported by the DFG priority program SPP1458, Grants No. KN393/4, BO1912/2-1, and No. BO3537/1-1 (D.S.I. and J.T.P.); by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under Contract No. VVCE-0058-07, Slovak VEGA Grants No. 0148/10 and No. 1/0138/10, and the 7th FP MNT-ERA.Net II. ESO (T.S., P.S., J.G.R, and P.S.); by the Spanish MEC under projects Consolider Ingenio Molecular Nanoscience CSD2007-00010 and FIS2008-00454 (J.G.R.); and by the Korean government (MEST) Grants No. R15-2008-006-01002-0 and 2011-0028736 (N.H.S., B.K.C.)