Local governments dispose of powerful tools like development funds that can be distributed among its different constituents to compensate economic disequilibrium originated by a complex array of factors. But it is always one of the hardest decisions to assign handouts to people who could think its own expectations are not being taken properly into account. Each stakeholder has different criteria to evaluate his needs, and to demand a particular investment effort. Since resources are very limited in local levels, city hall governments are pulled apart by those conflicting demands. The challenge of addressing them at the same time can be modelled as a multi‐criteria decision‐making. The aim of this paper is to show that the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) could work out the most acceptable distribution of the funds among the different city districts and neighbourhoods. The application of the model in Madrid shows that AHP: (a) allows to incorporate opposing demands; (b) increases the transparency of the decision‐making process; (c) eases the decentralization of governmental decisions; (d) enhances the legitimation of the final outcome; and (e) it is a scientific approach with great potential to be applied in similar domains where hard political decisions are needed.
La comunicación política española arranca en los años de la Transición Política. Un retorno a la democracia que se traduce en la actualización del sistema político, reincorporando antiguos actores e incorporando a otros nuevos, en las nuevas formas de comunicación. Un corto período de tiempo, el que separa el arranque de la democracia hasta el momento actual, en el que la comunicación política española ha evolucionado, de manera temprana, en sus formas, adaptándose a las prácticas mayoritarias de las sociedades europeas y estadounidense. La profesionalización de los partidos políticos, el empleo de las técnicas y herramientas del marketing comercial, la personalización, son características de la nueva comunicación política española que resultan coincidentes con el modelo estadounidense.
Disintermediation allows citizens to directly access political communication. The greater diversity of interactions between political actors results in increased flow of information. This causes decreased effectiveness for gatekeepers and agenda-setters (old media), and makes way for the creation of a deregulated, non-hierarchical, and borderless space, resulting in the empowerment of citizens and the democratization of political communication. This is a modernizing time that affects the development of political process and the role of different political actors. However, this transformation is shaped by bias and structural factors that limit its universalization and, a priori, encourage the emergence of a citizen elite that is capable of managing and benefiting from change.
Several studies have shown that exposure to colors affects cognitive and affective processes. In this paper, we tried to find if colors affect the perception of political messages and activate partisan biases. We focus our study on the Spanish cultural environment. In a prestudy ( n = 991), participants identified red as progressive, blue as conservative, and gray as neutral. In two subsequent experiments ( n = 840; n = 938), we analyzed how these three colors influenced the interpretation of political messages and confronted them with issues ownership. The results show that the colors can activate partisan biases but do not have the same strength as issues ownership.
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