On what basis do people often make sense of the world reach decisions and organize their lives?

Cognitive Approaches to Political Decision Making

Political decision making is one of the most important research domains in political psychology, and rational choice theory is the most commonly used theoretical framework to explain decision-making processes. Basic assumptions of (normative) rational choice theory are that individuals have a coherent set of preferences, gather the necessary information to reach an informed decision, evaluate alternative actions, and choose actions that are optimally related to their beliefs and values. Such decisions are expected to further individuals' self-interest and are therefore deemed rational. However, the rational choice approach is confronted to a paradox, since research has amply shown that in practice political decision-making virtually never follows these principles. People lack consistency in their opinions, use information incorrectly, are overconfident in their own choices, fail to adapt existing evaluations in light of new information, draw unwarranted conclusions from insufficient data, and express prejudiced opinions. Moreover, political decision making, in particular voting, is only weakly related to actual self-interest.

Following the implausibility of a ‘full’ rational choice model, researchers have developed models of ‘bounded’ rationality that are based on similar assumptions as rational choice theories, but that recognize individual and contextual variation in decision-making processes and outcomes (Kahneman, 2011). To compensate limited information, cognitive biases and lack of motivation, bounded rationality models such as behavioral decision-making theory describe a number of cognitive strategies that help individuals to make ‘good enough’ decisions: simplifying the decision task, selectively filtering new information, interpreting information as a function of preexisting ideological predispositions, and making sense of political issues through evaluations of social groups involved in the decision (e.g., beneficiary groups of welfare programs). Individuals also refer to opinions of others to make up their mind, for example, by relying on expert judgments, by socially validating their opinion through comparisons of opinions with those of relevant others (informational influence), or by aligning their opinion with the perceived majority opinion in their community to avoid marginalization (normative influence). Finally, they may also defend the interest of their group (collective self-interest) rather than only their individual self-interest.

Nevertheless the amount of factual knowledge citizens possess does make a difference for the decision-making process (Delli Carpini and Keeter, 1996). High levels of knowledge are, for example, likely to increase the alignment of one's decision with one's beliefs and preferences. Yet, while many studies highlight low levels of political knowledge and lack of political sophistication of citizens, the actual implications of this general lack of knowledge remain debated.

A Definition of Democracy

Democracy is traditionally defined as a system of political decision making in which the people as a whole have the supreme power. However, this defines democracy as a general and vague ideal rather than as an actual institutional arrangement. More concretely, democracy could be defined as a political system in which all the adult members participate in decision making in equal terms, are free to express their views, to stand for office, and make proposals, and the most important decisions are based on some reasonable, egalitarian, and effective way to amalgamate their expressed opinions. Moreover, the resulting decisions bind all the members of the community, and the officials are bound to implement them. This more complex definition is procedural in the sense that it refers to a method of making decisions, rather than to their content. Nevertheless, it still defines an ideal type. The democratic nature of actual states and communities is inevitably a matter of degree.

According to the definition, democracy is a means to make binding decisions. The fundamental requirement is that the citizens are able to express their values in an authoritative way, in a referendum or in elections. Purely consultative mechanisms or information-gathering devices (like opinion polls) are not, as such, democratic. It is not enough that the citizens’ opinions are heard and somehow taken into account. Various consultative mechanisms may nevertheless be an important part of a working democracy because they provide arenas for discussion, help to form the agenda for binding decision making, and may guide the implementation of decisions.

Majority rule is not a part of our definition. Many democratic theorists have seen unanimity as the ultimate ideal, and in modern democracies majority rule is usually combined with various minority-protecting devices and consensual mechanisms. Nevertheless, it is plausible to claim that within the framework of the modern state, the equality of participation requires a frequent use of majority rule. In the modern state, decisions are made under the condition of disagreement. Disagreements result from moral and political pluralism, as well as from material scarcity. The continuous possibility of irresolvable disagreements makes the use of majority rule necessary.

2 History of Women's Suffrage

The first explicit arguments for women's participation in political decision-making were expressed at the outset of the French Revolution, initially by the Marquis de Condorcet in 1787 and 1790, and in a number of anonymous pamphlets that turned these arguments into demands to be admitted to exercise the droit de cité, denouncing masculine aristocracy and challenging men's right to make the rules for women. As revolutionary French assemblies proceeded to declare the Rights of Man, to draft constitutions and reshape old laws for a new society, individual women such as Olympe de Gouges and men such as Pierre Guyomar insisted on women's full inclusion in the decision-making process. After four years of resisting eloquent arguments for women's inclusion, revolutionary political leaders shut women out of political life on the grounds that women and government should not be mixed, an argument that had centuries-old roots. These demands were widely repeated in the 1830s and again, in early 1848, when leaders of the revolutionary Second Republic decreed universal (manhood) suffrage, and a group of Parisian women immediately organized to protest their exclusion. Deliberate choices of words from ‘male’ to the more subtle ‘en âge viril’ signaled the exclusion of women from political affairs, and campaigns ensued to change the wording of electoral laws, as from ‘male’ to ‘person’ or to stipulate ‘and women’ following ‘men,’ or to add the term ‘of both sexes’ to qualify the masculine ‘Français.’ Despite these early beginnings, however, French women only acquired the vote in 1944; the French campaign for woman suffrage began earlier than elsewhere and lasted far longer. Resistance to women in positions of authority was deeply embedded in France. There the ‘Rights of Man’ were constantly qualified on grounds of ‘public utility’ when it came to women's rights.

In the English-speaking world, governing elites began to re-examine their electoral laws in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries. Demands for women's suffrage were strongly expressed during the 1820s. The Reform Act of 1832 in England added the word ‘male’ to qualify electors, even as it broadened the franchise greatly, and in the next few decades a number of other European countries moved to do the same. The campaign for a Second Reform Act in the late 1860s mobilized women to seek inclusion. John Stuart Mill brought their demands to change ‘male’ to ‘person’ to the floor of Parliament during his brief tenure as representative of Westminster; although parliamentary suffrage was not forthcoming, qualified women did obtain a local vote in 1869. The campaigns in England would continue into the twentieth century, when they rose to a new peak, thanks to the combined efforts of the National Union of Woman Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) and the more militant activities of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). The spectacular and extensive campaigns of the WSPU from 1906 through 1913, featuring mass parades, public demonstrations, occasional incidents of violence against state property, and the imprisonment and force-feeding of suffrage militants by British authorities gained world media attention and set a benchmark by which all other campaigns were subsequently judged. The cause of woman suffrage became a decisive political issue for both England and Ireland, and Irish suffrage advocates did not soon forgive their parliamentary deputies, who in 1912 sacrificed the cause of British women's suffrage in order to obtain Irish home-rule. Ironically, Irish women did receive the vote along with English women who met certain property or educational qualifications in 1918; ‘universal’ suffrage including all women did not become a reality in the United Kingdom until 1928.

In the United States, democracy without women began to emerge in the 1820s, as various states slowly lifted property qualifications on white male voters. The demand for the vote was a key feature of the ‘Declaration of Sentiments’ issued by the first women's rights convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. Because US electoral laws were made at the state level, not at the federal level, suffrage advocates faced the challenge of organizing suffrage campaigns on a state-by-state basis, following their exclusion from the federal amendment that enfranchised black men after the Civil War. The territory of Wyoming enfranchised women in 1869, and Utah territory in 1870, but these proved exceptions until new western states granted votes to women in the 1890s. Resistance to woman suffrage remained strong in the eastern, central, and southern states. In the United States, racial and immigration issues complicated the problem still further and from the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, even black men's vote in southern states was often qualified by literacy requirements, poll taxes, or threats of physical violence. Finally, in the early twentieth century, suffrage leaders decided to attempt the federal amendment approach again; following a huge prosuffrage campaign, reminiscent of the British suffrage movement, Congress passed the nineteenth amendment, which was successfully ratified by a majority of states and became law in 1920. Democracy, even without women, was not an unproblematic development, even in the US; indeed, few nation-states had wholeheartedly embraced the principle of full democratic participation in government by the end of the nineteenth century, even for all men.

The first nation-states to enact full woman suffrage were New Zealand (1893) and two Australian states (1894, 1899). Originally British colonies, these South Pacific outposts of the British Empire—like the western states of the USA—proved more favorable to women's citizenship than the older, more settled, and more authoritarian societies of Europe and Asia.

In some twentieth-century continental European countries, where the demographic balance had tilted and adult women began to outnumber men significantly, the prospect of convincing men in power to enfranchise women became even more complicated. This complication was compounded by concern among ruling elites over Marxist-socialist enthusiasm for enfranchising all women along with all men, irrespective of social class (endorsed by the Second International in the 1890s); the Socialist Women's International endorsed unrestricted suffrage for women in 1907. It was further compounded by longstanding concerns among otherwise liberal, even progressive men that women would vote as the priests dictated, to the detriment of progressive (often anticlerical) secularizing regimes (especially after the Roman Catholic Church muted its earlier opposition to woman suffrage following World War I). Meanwhile, Finnish women obtained the vote alongside their menfolk in 1906, when Finland obtained a degree of independence from the Russian Empire; by 1913 Norwegian women were also fully enfranchised, followed by Danish women in 1915. Suffrage campaign strategies would differ markedly, depending on whether men had already been enfranchised in a particular setting, and to what degree.

Kingdon's Model of Agenda-Setting

The next major study is Kingdon's seminal book, Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies, first published in 1984, which presents a theory or a framework for understanding how attention affects political decision making that is still central within the policy agenda-setting tradition. A useful starting point for presenting Kingdon's agenda-setting model is his distinction between what he labels the governmental agenda and the decision-making agenda (1995: pp. 3–4). The governmental agenda is basically the issues that government officials and the actors surrounding them (experts, lobbyist, politicians, and journalists) pay attention to, whereas the decision-making agenda is the issues on the governmental agenda that are actually up for decision. To put it simply, Kingdon's model of agenda-setting can be considered a model of how issues move from the governmental agenda to the decision agenda or what it takes to move issues from just being considered by political actors toward actually being decided on. This also implies that Kingdon when compared with for instance Cobb and Elder focuses on a subsequent aspect of the policy making process. The question of how the governmental agenda relates to the systemic agenda is not Kingdon's central focus. Questions relating to the systemic agenda are mainly considered when they are important for understanding the relationship between the governmental agenda and the decision-making agenda. Kingdon's model of agenda-setting also draws extensively on organizational and decision-making theory, especially the garbage can model (1995: pp. 84–86).

Key concepts in Kingdon's model are the three streams of problems, alternatives and politics. Problems (1995: pp. 90–115) are basically societal problems. Alternatives (1995: pp. 116–144), or ‘the policy primeval soup,’ consist of the different policy solutions that actors within the policy communities surrounding most issues are trying to promote. Finally, the politics stream consists of political factors like the public mood, election results, and changes of administration – or government outside the US context (1995: pp. 145–164). According to Kingdon, the streams are normally not connected. Thus the mere existence of problems and alternatives, i.e., solutions, does not move issues from the governmental to the decision-making agenda, nor does the existence of politics besides problems and alternatives. Further, there is no logical connection between the three streams. For instance, actors in the alternatives stream may be actively looking for problems with which to connect their preferred alternatives.

The streams are connected by policy windows (Kingdon, 1995: pp. 165–195), which may appear in the problem stream or the political stream. In the problem stream, focusing events – unpredictable events like earthquakes or terrorist attacks – may open policy windows, but policy windows that open in the problems stream are not necessarily unpredictable. Measuring societal conditions is an important aspect of defining them as political problems and the release of new measures, for instance unemployment statistics, constitutes an often predictable policy window. In the political stream, windows may open both predictably and unpredictably as well. A change of administration is predictable, but other aspects like the retreat of a minister and the appointment of a new one can be very unpredictable. Policy windows rarely open from the alternatives stream. New alternatives of course emerge, but that does not in itself open a policy window. Rather, new alternatives emerge in the policy primeval soup and then have to wait for a policy window to open where they might be connected with a problem. The coupling of the independent stream is not an automatic process even when a policy window has opened. The coupling of the three streams takes a ‘policy entrepreneur’ (pp. 172–183) who can use a political platform to couple the streams and thus move issues from the governmental to the decision-making agenda.

As Mucciaroni (2012) has pointed out, Kingdon's model is widely cited, but rarely directly tested and used as foundation for systematic empirical research. This may be an indication of the model's weaknesses. A frequent critique of Kingdon is that the model portrays the policy process as basically unpredictable, which of course makes it difficult to use it as a basis for predicting policy decisions. Kingdon's model clearly stresses the unpredictability of the agenda-setting process. No actor controls the process. However, Kingdon also points to many predictable aspects of the process. Policy windows can often be predicted by actors and certain actors are much more likely to be successful policy entrepreneurs than others. For instance, the US president has a privileged position (1995: pp. 23–26). Kingdon has also been central in developing a literature on focusing events (cf Birkland and DeYoung, 2012). That being said, the strength of his model is that it describes when and how rather than why issues move from the government agenda to the decision-making agenda.

2.4 Conclusion: the importance of aesthetic values in contemporary urban development and planning

I shall conclude this brief resume of the aesthetic values that have informed contemporary architecture and urban planning by commenting more explicitly on the importance attributed to aesthetic considerations in the process of design and planning. I offer three general reflections.

First, although the Modern movement in architecture and planning was heavily infused with the rhetoric of “functionalism” and, connectedly, with the notion of “rational design”, as we have seen, its chief protagonists advanced some clear aesthetic values, namely, those that emphasised the “classical” virtues of pure geometry and proportion, combined with a utilitarian cleansing away of “unnecessary” ornamentation and decoration. Nonetheless, the rhetoric of functionalism and rationality did have an important impact in undermining the importance attributed to aesthetic considerations in the training of architects and planners, and — by extension — in the process of architectural design and decision-making in urban planning. Thus still today many university programmes in architecture and planning do not contain any separate courses on, or provide any systematic education in, aesthetics. In this respect, the process of design in contemporary architecture and urban planning remains what Hearn [2003, Ch. 4, p. 81] has termed an “inside-out” approach in which the design, and hence the exterior form of built structures is determined primarily by the prior demands of how best to accommodate the internal functions, rather than by some preconceived idea of what the exterior form should look like. In this respect, Le Corbusier's observation that “The plan is the generator” has indeed come to pass [Le Corbusier, 1927, pt. III, pp 44–45].

Second, this relegation of aesthetic values to (at best) a subsidiary role in the process of contemporary architectural design and planning mirrors the relatively minor importance attributed to environmental aesthetic considerations in political decision-making, and in contemporary developed societies more generally. Thus in considering proposals to build new power stations or shopping centres, roads or port facilities, the primary focus of debate in contemporary societies tends to be on current or projected demands for energy, consumer products, travel and transhipment, rather than on the aesthetic impact that the large-scale structures associated with these activities will necessarily have on the landscape. To be sure, since (roughly) the 1980s, the wider “environmental” impact of planned large-scale developments has become an ever increasingly important consideration. But these wider environmental considerations focus mostly on the degree to which new development is “environmentally sustainable”, and here the prime considerations are ecological, not aesthetic. But the marginalisation of aesthetic considerations in contemporary developed societies is also associated with more deeply ingrained attitudes, values, and philosophical assumptions. Thus, even when it is acknowledged that the aesthetic quality of our surroundings is important, the objection is frequently made that qualitative aesthetic judgements are a matter of “subjective” personal taste, from which it is typically inferred that there can be no generally accepted norms or principles to govern the aesthetic form or “style” of major new developments. Then again, and perhaps because of its association with “the arts”, the aesthetics of architecture and planning are widely assumed to be just a “luxury” in comparison with allegedly more fundamental “social and economic” matters, and even, because of this, only of importance to privileged elites or the “middle-class”.8

And yet, in spite of these prevailing attitudes and values, almost every day numerous cases surface where it is apparent that ordinary people do care enormously about the aesthetic quality of their surroundings and the large-scale objects that threaten to alter the character of places. Recent controversies over the siting of wind turbines in open landscapes (in spite of their otherwise beneficial environmental effects) are a vivid illustration of this concern, as are the numerous other campaigns that have been fought throughout the developed world, often with great passion, against new development proposals for roads, airports, etc, that bring about the destruction of cherished landscapes and townscapes. We touch here on a paradox concerning this subject. This is that, on the one hand, it often appears that aesthetic considerations in relation to the built environment are not highly valued. And yet, on the other hand, there is also plenty of evidence — for example, from people's choices about where to live and take their leisure — that suggests that the aesthetic quality of places is of central importance to the quality of people's lives. Certainly, the latter has been revealed in some studies. Thus, in a very thorough investigation into people's attitudes to green urban open spaces (urban parks) in London, Jacqueline Burgess and her fellow researchers showed that ordinary working class people, including ethnic minorities, valued very highly the sensory, aesthetic pleasures of having access to green urban spaces, so that this was very far from being an unimportant, or simply a “middle class”, issue (see [Burgess et al., 1988]). Whilst, then, aesthetic values rarely figure prominently in everyday public and political debate, and so might seem to be an unimportant political issue, in people's everyday lives, and in numerous local campaigns and forms of “community action”, the aesthetic quality of the built environment emerges as a most important, and often highly charged political matter.

Conclusion

The ‘new woman’ championed by Aleksandra Kollontai turned out to be more myth than reality throughout Soviet history. She did not earn equal pay, did not have the same opportunities for professional advancement, was absent from the important decision-making political bodies, and had almost all of the domestic work to deal with. She was not an independent being but a servant of the state, serving it both in terms of production and reproduction. However, she did have a life outside the home, relative economic security, and (according to sociological studies) a sense of her own worth. Indeed, some commentators have argued that men suffered more than women in the Soviet Union, since the latter were able to use their family responsibilities as an excuse to withdraw as far as possible from the public realm, where state control was at its greatest (Funk and Mueller, 1993, p. 87). As the ultimate nanny state, the Soviet Union was also said to have deprived men of traditional masculine attributes; this led to concern that they had lost their sense of self-value and become ‘feminized,’ indolent, and alcoholic (Attwood, 1990).

The mad dash to the market in post-Soviet Russia turned this situation on its head. There was a revival of essentialist ideas about gender roles, and a celebration of traditional masculine characteristics that were thought to be particularly appropriate in a market economy. In the domestic realm, the role of ‘breadwinner’ was, in theory, restored to men. In reality, however, the new economic environment did not provide the conditions in which the majority of men could actually fulfill this role. This has contributed to a range of problems including alcohol abuse, violence, and a huge drop in male life expectancy.

While women have not been treated as equally valuable workers in the new Russia, their greater flexibility has ensured that they have retained an important role in the workplace. The family is still considered a primarily female sphere, resulting in a greater workload for women; but on the positive side, it provides them with psychological protection if they experience instability and deterioration in their work conditions.

People can make personal choices about how they live now that would have been unimaginable in Soviet days. However, some of these choices have not been welcomed by the authorities, and are, indeed, under threat. The most notable of these is the choice to reject family life in its traditional sense. With the demographic crisis seen as one of the key problems confronting Russia today, not having children is tantamount to an act of rebellion. Putin has claimed to “respect personal freedom in all its forms, in all its manifestations” (Putin, 2007), but it is hard to see how this is consistent with state pressure on childless women to procreate – and on the gay community to disappear.

Introduction

This article discusses urban change in postsocialist cities. The term postsocialist refers to societies which had been prior the revolutions of 1989 known as ‘socialist’ and which have been since 1989 undergoing transformations toward capitalist societies with market-based economy and pluralistic democracy in political decision making. While the former socialist and so called ‘second’ world (Andrusz, 2001) included countries on most continents, this article mainly builds on the experience and situation in major capital cities of postsocialist Central and Eastern Europe, since these are the cities that have been studied the most. The generalization based on these cities may also be relevant for other postsocialist cities.

The city is understood as complex dynamically evolving sociospatial formation. It is internally differentiated and structured not only in terms of social, economic, or political differences between individuals and social groups, but especially in terms of local sociospatial formations such as residential neighborhood including ethnic enclaves of immigrants, gated communities of better off population, middle-class suburbs, or ghettos of socially excluded, as well as functional zones such as industrial areas, office districts, shopping, and entertainment nodes. The city is also integrated through interaction between people, firms, and organizations, between residents, entrepreneurs, and politicians, and, as these actors are spatially embedded, also between local sociospatial formations integrated into an urban region.

This article is focused on urban change, on processes through which the city and places within urban space are produced, reproduced, and transformed. It emphasizes relations between social processes and spatial structures via social practices. In established societies, the social practices are guided by a set of broadly accepted rules. The unfolding daily life framed within relatively stable institutions results in relatively stable spatial patterns. The correspondence between social institutions, social practices, and structures and spatial arrangements might gradually change in the course of ongoing evolutionary social processes, such as transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, industrial to postindustrial society, and social to neoliberal state or during second demographic transition.

However, the evolutionary relatively gradual processes of urban change may be interrupted by periods of radical urban restructuring influenced by turbulent revolutionary transformations in political and economic principles of societal organization. This is the case of postsocialist cities, where the institutional setup was radically changed in the 1990s. The capitalist political economy leads to distinctively different social practices and urban spatial organizations. Contradictions between the inherited socialist urban patterns and newly established capitalist rules created tensions resulting in the restructuring of existing urban areas and the formation of new postsocialist urban landscapes (Sýkora, 2009). Even though the principles that influence the production of urban environments were changed quickly, the pace of change in the built environment, land-use patterns, and residential differentiation is much slower. The urban transformation of postsocialist cities is an unfolding process that may take decades. Revolutionary transformations in urban spatial organization, such as dynamically developing sprawl and increasing residential segregation, pose significant challenges. They call for anticipation of future developments and critical engagement in debating urban change.

The postsocialist cities offer a chance to trace the impact of transformations in political and socioeconomic forces and changing social practices on the logic of urban space generation under the condition of revolutionary, radical, and rapid transformations framed by the transition from communist totalitarian to democratic political regimes and from command to market economies. We can not only compare how two distinctively different societies of socialism and capitalism produce their own urban spaces, but in an online perspective observe how capitalism appropriates and reconstructs the former patterns to its own needs.

There is a widespread recognition of the diversity of urban transformation in former socialist countries indicating that different postsocialist trajectories may be developing (Tosics, 2005). Differences have emerged between the countries that have managed to apply more comprehensively the Western concept of capitalism, and those whose development is more based on the locally specific recombinations of selected aspects of socialism, capitalism, and unique features that have emerged during postsocialism. However, the rejection of communism and the acceptance of capitalist features have placed the postsocialist societies, countries, and cities on a similar trajectory leading away from communism and toward various forms of capitalism. In this article, while acknowledging the contextual embeddedness of urban transformations and their consequent local specific features and trajectories, the general and common features developing under the imperative of globally spreading capitalism will be highlighted.

The article starts with the reflection of the trajectories, patterns, and underlying forces of urbanization under socialism. This is followed by a section that overviews the recent transformations toward capitalism, juxtaposing two different political and economic systems with their own logic of urban space generation. Specific attention is devoted to relations between socialist legacies and global capitalism in shaping postsocialist urbanization and to major challenges that postsocialist cities face on their transformation path.

5.4.2 Voting for or Preferring Right-Wing Over Left-Wing Candidates or Causes

Studies throughout the world have concluded that people’s sociopolitical attitudes can be fairly well characterized as existing along a right-wing/left-wing continuum (Eysenck 1951; Judd & Milburn 1980:643; Henningham 1996). In essence, right-wing attitudes emphasize freedom and self-reliance as the most important objectives for political decision-making. Left-wing attitudes, on the other hand, place paramount importance on compassion and responsibility for the welfare of everyone as the overriding goal when making political decisions (Ekehammar et al. 1987; Evans et al. 1996; Bartle 1998:516).

Sometimes these two objectives are not in conflict, but often they are or at least seem to be. Also worth noting is that most people are somewhere near the middle regarding these two extreme perspectives. For this reason, when political candidates seek to prevail in general elections, they usually take fairly moderate positions on most issues associated with the right/left-wing continuum.

Other terms, such as conservative and liberal, have also been used to describe sociopolitical attitudes. However, equating conservative with right-wing and liberal with left-wing can sometimes be misleading. For instance, the communist party in countries such as China and the former Soviet Union was usually considered “conservative” even though their leaders generally sought to suppress freedom and promote human equality.

In the United States, the left-wing is associated with the Democratic Party, and the right-wing with the Republican Party. Canada’s two main parties are the Liberals, which tend to be left-wing, and the Conservatives, which lean to the right. In England, the Labor Party is left-wing and the Conservative (Tory) Party is right-wing (Bartle 1998:516).

Table 5.4.2 summarizes findings on how social status correlates with tendencies to support right-wing as opposed to left-wing political candidates. With a few exceptions, the table shows that the upper social strata are more likely than the lower strata to favor right-wing political candidates.

Table 5.4.2. Relationship Between Social Status and Voting for or Favoring Right-Wing Over Left-Wing Candidates or Causes

4.1.2 What Is the Information Need?

“[T]he question being asked determines the appropriate research architecture, strategy, and tactics to be used – not tradition, authority, experts, paradigms, or schools of thought.”

(Sackett and Wennberg 1997)

There is a clear correlation between the actual information need and the method applicable. Examples of this relationship are described by Anderson and Aydin (1997) and Fernandez et al. (1997). They may be incomplete, but they are perfect to bring an understanding, as well as inspiration, for the further progress of planning. Therefore, the next step is to identify and delimit the strategic objective of the investigation, discussing what it is you really want to know. It is essential to get a complete match between the purpose, the approach, and the actual use of the result.

If you don't know the purpose of evaluating, don't evaluate!

The next question is whether the outcome of the investigation is intended to:

Establish the foundation for:

Ongoing work on the development project?

Administrative or political decision making?

Healthcare professional or IT professional decision making?

Establish arguments for a sales promotion of the IT system? A good assessment study can always be used in a marketing context, provided that the system is good (enough) and one dares to be objective

Establish the basis for a scientific publication? Those who have got as far as considering this do not need to read the rest of this Introduction part, apart from familiarizing themselves with the terminology used and then reading Part III carefully

To find out about something? That is, exploration of the IT-based solution with the aim of investigating what changes are taking place, have taken place, or are likely to take place within the organization. Very often this scope has a research purpose

Is the purpose of the study to make a prognosis for the future or to measure reality?

The first two scopes listed do not normally require the same accuracy and stringency as required for scientific research. Be careful when starting with one of the other scopes and subsequently trying to write a scientific article based on the outcome of the investigation. The risk of aiming in parallel at more than one of the above scopes is either that one falls between two stools or that one cracks a nut with a sledgehammer. However, with caution, it may be feasible.

Write down what the information need is and the purpose of the assessment as the starting point of the subsequent planning. It should be published in a way that allows everyone access and makes it possible to refer to the information. An assessment study often requires extra effort from staff, and it is important, therefore, that they understand the task and are committed to it. One gets the best results if there is transparency, and everyone is motivated to work toward the same goal as the one delegating and authorizing the task. Vigorous discussions may arise in connection with such clarification, as the issue is about the reasoning behind carrying out the investigation and hence for taking on the extra burden – that is, the motivation.

It is also important that one realizes whether one's object of study is the IT-based wholeness within the organization or any part thereof, such as the IT-based solution (the organization and the work procedures around the IT system, including the IT system) or the IT-based system itself (the technical construction). In this case, it is often important to reduce the objective to something realistic (financially, in terms of resources, time, and practicality) while being clear about what is cut.

While discussing the purpose, it is also important to realize who the stakeholders are and, thus, who will subsequently be involved in the project from the time of planning. In this connection it is important to analyze the administrative aspects of the project. (See, for instance, how it can go terribly wrong in Part III.)

Abstract

This article offers some broad strokes for articulating a general conception of how political studies define and explore violence, peace, and conflict. Political studies are the arts, humanities, and sciences comprising a unified discipline for the study of politics. The discipline distinguishes itself from others that examine the behaviors and decision-making of individuals and groups. Political decision-making is unique, but it is ultimately a reflection of values and beliefs, which comprise significant parts of the study in the discipline. This general examination focuses on the wide range of practical value and challenges that emerge in political studies; at times, politics can be the cause and opportunity for addressing conflicts and building peace, and, at others, politics are the cause of conflict and cycles of violence sometimes escalating to war and crimes against humanity including genocide. This overview lays out the methodologies for understanding how governance and policy at local, state, national, and international levels provide rich insights into peace, conflict, and violence. These levels of analysis can present significantly different descriptions of the same contexts or sets of events. We also examine the role of institutions, practices, and the relationships of public opinion with strategic thinking on peace, conflict, and violence. The conclusion includes remarks on current research, ongoing debates, and ideas about where the field is moving in relationship to questions of peace, conflict, and violence.