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Abstract. In Russia, housing issue has been remaining one of the most important political concerns since the beginning of the 20th century. In the recent political discourse, it is associated mainly with the need to provide new housing area and the improvement of housing conditions regardless of the difference in the development of regions or cities. However, the fact that over 70% of Russia's cities shrink (Batunova and Gunko, 2018) requires developing specific approaches to housing policy's formulation within depopulating territories. The phenomenon of urban shrinkage is generally understood as population decline which results in physical urban infrastructure surplus & degradation. Dilapidated or abandoned houses become the most evident sign of a city's decline and one of the most important challenges for the local authorities. However, most examples known from the existing literature come from the countries of Western Europe and the US, where economic factors are the main drivers of urban depopulation. The real estate market reacts to the population decline by falling prices (Follain, 2010), which worsens the economic situation in the city and leads to a vicious circle of economic/population decline. Less is known about what happens with the housing stock of, in words of J. B. Hollander (2018), 'atypical shrinking cities', where demographic aspects are the primary causes of depopulation: the excess of mortality over fertility and ageing. Hollander applied the term 'atypical' to Japanese shrinking cities, but in Russia, urban shrinkage is also foremost a result of demographic change (Karachurina, 2013). International migration to Russia does not compensate natural population decline, while the national policies are oriented towards promoting growth in large metropolitan areas (Kinossian, 2013) which intensifies internal migration flows from cities which are not the foci of national development. Consequently, for many Russian cities, especially small peripheral ones, urban shrinkage is an inevitable process. Less is known about what happens with the housing stock of, in words of J. B. Hollander (2018), 'atypical shrinking cities', where demographic aspects are the primary causes of depopulation: the excess of mortality over fertility and ageing. Hollander applied the term 'atypical' to Japanese shrinking cities, but in Russia, urban shrinkage is also foremost a result of demographic change (Karachurina, 2013). International migration to Russia does not compensate natural population decline, while the national policies are oriented towards promoting growth in large metropolitan areas (Kinossian, 2013) which intensifies internal migration flows from cities which are not the foci of national development. Consequently, for many Russian cities, especially small peripheral ones, urban shrinkage is an inevitable process. Against this background our research questions are as follows: What happens to housing stock in shrinking Russian cities? What are the preconditions (tools, regulations) for managing housing stock in shrinking Russian cities: official discourse of urban shrinkage, reaction to the transformation of housing demand-supply, main approaches to manage housing excess? To answer the first question, we turned to cartographic methods of research. The study of housing in selected shrinking cities (Vorkuta, Komi Republic and Apatity, Murmansk region) was based on visualization of statistical information, crowdsourcing of spatial data and visual decoding of remote sensing data, based on the theory of decryption features for the recognition of objects. To interpret high-resolution images direct (geometry, brightness, and structural) and indirect signs were used. The utilized data includes images from WorldView 1/2/3, QuickBird, GeoEye, which are published on the web mapping services of Yandex.Maps, GoogleMaps, BingMaps (Microsoft), ArcGIS.Imagery (ESRI), Roscosmos Geoportal. Maps of scale 1:10000 and 1:100000 became cartographic data sources. For comparison of data on separate structures regional statistical data of BTI (Technical Inventory Bureau) were used, to identify and verify abandoned houses and apartments field observations were also conducted. The main stage of work was the logical organization of data and the development of the geodatabase structure for the future geoinformation analytical system. All presented information is divided into two types: spatial datasets of different geometry (layers) and tabular data with thematic attribute information. This integrated approach to the state of the urban environment has been implemented for the first time in Russia and, supplemented by the capabilities of automatic spatial analysis in GIS, will identify the most 'acute' issues for territorial planning and housing management in shrinking cities. In addition, a series of maps were created visualizing housing features and condition which were presented to the local administrations of the case study cities. To answer the second question, we conducted an analysis of the local strategic, planning and policy document as well as interviews with the local stakeholders. The results vary in two cities. While local planning and policy in the realm of housing in Vorkuta are adequate to the identifies housing issues, in Apatity local development plans still serve land provision for the future 'dreamt' housing construction, needs of which are calculated based on over-optimistic demographic projections that do not consider the real factors influencing population development.

Issue salience is a fundamental component of party competition, yet we know little about when, where, or why parties' issue emphases converge or diverge. I propose an original operationalization of issue salience divergence, the extent to which parties' issue emphases differ from each other in an election, that generates values at the party-election and country-election levels. I leverage data from party manifestos to calculate scores for 2,308 party-election combinations of 381 unique parties in 426 elections across thirty European countries, the most comprehensive dataset to date. I find that issue salience divergence is generally low and has starkly decreased over time, but countries and parties differ substantially. As an initial step in understanding these differences, I propose and test initial expectations of how party and democracy age, electoral systems, and party type alter the incentives for divergent issue salience.

This study explores the feasibility and usefulness of five generic frames (conflict, responsibility, economic consequences, human interest and morality) in analysing framing practices in a multifaceted journalistic field over time. We show that supplementing generic frames through the tonality expressed in news stories enhances analytical quality. Mapping Swiss media outlets by how they frame a highly polarizing policy, we identify different framing practices in covering the issue. Using multiple correspondence analyses, the results first show that, while cultural background and media partisanship lead to heterogeneity in how the issue is initially framed, the state's involvement homogenizes framing practices over time. Second, unlike previous research, our study provides empirical evidence that both conflict frame and attribution of responsibility frame can measure the same underlying construct. Third, we find evidence that these two frames are strongly associated with a negative tone. Limitations and implications for future research are discussed.

The authors of this issue-mapping article explore the rationale behind, and issues bearing on, the governance of community-based initiatives. They examine three issues relevant to the formation of local governance structures: the relationship between neighborhood-based governance structures and local government; issues of representation, legitimacy, and connection; and long-term viability. They suggest an agenda for further exploration that includes examining the relative benefits of different governance structures, exploring the issue of capacity in community-building, and investigating the perspective of local governments that have jurisdiction over the areas in which these efforts are being implemented.

The issue of migration had become highly politicized in Poland already before the 2015 elections. The neoconservative Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS) party made it one of the key topics in the electoral campaign both for the parliamentary and for the presidential elections, both of which the party won. Poland has switched from a country with the highest acceptance rate of refugees in the EU to the one with the lowest rate within about a year. The narrative about masses of refugees in Poland and at its borders threatening Polish culture, civilization and identity started to gather momentum and has provoked numerous intended and unintended consequences, political and social. On the one hand such statements and politics have sparked an increase in hate speech and incidents, and violent actions. On the other, as a reaction, there is an observable awakening of the civil society in Poland through more intensified actions of various groups and organizations. Both are outcomes of the situation in which the government and the ruling party take a strong and negative stance on the issue of migrants and refugees. At the same time, anti-racist activism has been instrumentalized as a tool for anti-government struggles, involving new actors into the struggle. The new alliances forged after 2015 are more than interesting and will be described below, based on the empirical research conducted for a comparative research project on anti-racist contention in the Baltic Sea region. I will show particularly the nature of cooperation between grassroots groups (often radical) and the more moderate NGOs, activists (of both stripes) and civil servants as well as politicians; and here point to the specific role of municipalities and the city-level.

Determining what constitutes a causal relationship between two or more concepts, and how to infer causation, are fundamental concepts in statistics and all the sciences. Causation becomes especially difficult in the social sciences where there is a myriad of different factors that are not always easily observed or measured that directly or indirectly influence the dynamic relationships between independent variables and dependent variables. This paper proposes a procedure for helping researchers explicitly understand what their underlying assumptions are, what kind of data and methodology are needed to understand a given relationship, and how to develop explicit assumptions with clear alternatives, such that researchers can then apply a process of probabilistic elimination. The procedure borrows from Pearl&rsquo ; s concept of &ldquo ; causal diagrams&rdquo ; and concept mapping to create a repeatable, step-by-step process for systematically researching complex relationships and, more generally, complex systems. The significance of this methodology is that it can help researchers determine what is more probably accurate and what is less probably accurate in a comprehensive fashion for complex phenomena. This can help resolve many of our current and future political and policy debates by eliminating that which has no evidence in support of it, and that which has evidence against it, from the pool of what can be permitted in research and debates. By defining and streamlining a process for inferring truth in a way that is graspable by human cognition, we can begin to have more productive and effective discussions around political and policy questions.

Public-Private Partnerships for One Health Panel ; The Center for Applied Research and Environmental Systems (CARES) at the University of Missouri-Columbia has a long history of integrating Internet accessibility with emerging technologies to assist underserved, under-resourced, and special needs communities, organizations and populations, and decision makers and researchers. Our center's decision support framework requires ongoing monitoring and updating of existing datasets and scanning for additional datasets. These datasets, which include socio-economic, demographic, health, jurisdictional, political, environmental, and infrastructure data, serve as a distinctive foundation for addressing a myriad of public policy issues.

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Oppositional pre-electoral coalition formation has, in a number of recent studies, been proven to have an important effect on the prospects for liberalizing electoral outcomes in authoritarian elections. Despite this recent recognition of oppositional coalitions as a trigger for democratization, almost nothing is known about when these coalitions are formed. An important explanation for the lack of cross-national large-N studies on this issue is the lack of sufficient data on party policy positions, among parties operating within these authoritarian systems. Policy differences between oppositional parties have been hypothesized to have a negative effect on the prospects for coalitions in the more studied Western democratic systems. In order to perform an exhaustive investigation of the prospects for oppositional coalitions in authoritarian elections, sufficient data on party policy differences would therefore be necessary. In this paper different strategies for party policy mapping is presented and assessed as methods for approximating policy distance between parties in authoritarian regimes. It is argued that a voter-based policy mapping (VPM) approach is the best strategy for this task, when considering both feasibility and validity aspects. In the later part of this paper an empirical comparison is performes between approximations made by VPM and the widely used Manifesto Research Group (MRG), using data for parties that contested post-communist authoritarian elections in the period 1990-2004. The comparison shows a significant correlation between the data produced with these two different strategies. Moreover, more qualitative comparisons of widely divergent cases in the VPM and MRG data, and a comparison with expert-survey data suggest that the VPM data is at least as reliable as the MRG data, in this particular context.

Table of Contents for Special Double Issue on Cultural Mapping in Planning and Development ContextsRésumé: Table des matières du numéro spécial portant sur la cartographie culturelle dans le contexte du développement et de la planification.