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The aim of this study is to analyse the level of environmental, economic, and social engagement disclosed by local governments, taking into account factors such as political ideology and media pressure.

The authors analysed 102 large Spanish municipalities, using data from 2011. An econometric model was used based on dependency techniques for cross-sectional data. The Tobit technique is suitable, since it enables the authors to address particular considerations of extreme scores on the dependent variable.

The results show that local governments report less strategic and socio-economic information when subjected to strong media pressure, because the press tends to focus on unusual, negative news, and ignores other issues such as the environment. However, in municipalities governed by left-wing parties, media pressure actually promotes disclosure of this type of information.

It would be interesting to create an information index which includes local governments' disclosure, spanning a period of several years.

Particularly in municipalities governed by a left-wing party, media pressure favours the disclosure of sustainability information, including information about the municipal corporation and strategic and social issues.

This study analyses the impact of the press on the disclosure of sustainability information by local governments and also tests the moderating effect of the ruling party's political ideology. The authors did not find any paper that had analysed this impact before.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of the political partisanship of government in charges of returns on the European stock markets. The authors found a large body of research investigating this issue for the case of US stock market but less evidence for the European stock markets.

The authors employ a panel data model with fixed-effects and an additional dynamic panel model using the bias-corrected LSDV estimator on a data set consisting of monthly and quarterly data. The data range from 2000 to 2010 and cover 20 European Union (EU) countries. The authors test several hypotheses, and run distinct regressions using political, financial, and economic variables. The authors also divide the data set into two sub-samples in order to reveal the distinctions between advanced and emerging economies in the EU.

The authors find that stock markets perform better under right-wing administrations. The result is consistent for the advanced EU economies, but the authors found no robust evidence in that sense for emerging countries. Additionally, the authors show that European stock market preferences for right/left-wing administrations is not necessarily related to the beliefs about the size of unemployment, inflation, deficit, and/or debt, which opens the field for further research in this area.

The study contributes to existing knowledge. It examines if Wall Street folklore, asserting for many decades that stock markets perform better under right-wing governments, also holds for European stock markets given the distinctions in the political and financial systems between USA and Europe. Moreover, the authors underline the introduction in the analysis of the Central and Eastern European countries.

This study examines how the effects of three predictors, namely left–right political orientation, generalized trust and political trust, on fossil fuel taxation attitudes vary between post-communist and other European countries.

By using European Social Survey (ESS) Round 8 data and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression, this paper studied the effects of the hypothesized predictors on fossil fuel taxation attitudes across post-communist and other European countries. The countries were analyzed both in group and individually.

The results showed that stronger left-wing orientation, higher generalized trust and higher political trust predict more support for fossil fuel taxation at the country group level in both post-communist and other Europe. However, the effects were generally speaking less consistent and significant in the countries of the post-communist Europe. By and large, the effect of political trust was the most significant and universal.

The findings contribute to the understanding how left–right political orientation and generalized trust have somewhat distinct effects on fossil fuel taxation attitudes in different European country contexts, while the effect of political trust is more universal across the continent.

The purpose of this paper is to build on the insights of mobilisation theory to examine the interplay of structure and agency dynamics in strike activity. It proposes to do so by investigating the 2007 36‐hour strike undertaken by 2,300 engineering and infrastructure workers employed by the private consortium Metronet on the London Underground, focusing attention on the relationship between workers’ militancy, trade union leadership and left‐wing politics within a highly distinctive and union favourable “opportunity structure” context.

Semi‐structured in‐depth interviews were conducted with 24 RMT union informants within Metronet and the London Underground (including union members, reps, branch and regional officers); analysis was made of documentary industrial relations and trade union material; and personal fieldwork observation.

Although favourable specific contextual and contingent factors served as both provocations and resources for strike action, notably in enhancing workers’ bargaining position and lending feasibility to a strike mobilisation approach, the role of trade union leadership and left‐wing politics at every level of the union in collectivising workers’ experiences and aspirations in forms which directly encouraged combativity was also crucial.

The specificity of the case study limits the degree of generalisation that can be made to other industries. Researchers are encouraged to test the proposed analytical approach further.

The paper provides case‐study empirical evidence into an important arena of employment in the UK, contributes to our understanding of the multi‐dimensional causes of strike activity; and adds an important political dimension to the analysis of collective mobilisation often neglected in both industrial relations and social movement literature.

Social left-wing political contestation and activism in Spain have undergone great changes over the past four years. First, there has been a shift from the 15-M movement that took over public plazas with its ambiguous claims basically related to radical democracy and rejection of institutional politics, to a new focus on social problems generated by the crisis, highlighting issues such as housing and cutbacks in social rights. Second, there has been a shift towards institutional politics in 2014. How should this recent whirlwind evolution in political contestation to status quo be understood? What is the relation between the changing material conditions of the population and the extremely shifting shape of left-wing militancy in Spain? The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The arguments put forward here are based on the authors’ involvement in social movements in the city of Seville between 2011 and the current time. They have been complemented with in-depth interviews of social activists who have taken part in the movements: 15-M assemblies, the housing movement, general strikes and, in more recent times, electoral initiatives (Podemos and Ganemos). The interviews were done between 2012 and 2014. The fieldwork has been complemented with an exploration of documentary sources: the manifests and writings of the various organisations that are being addressed.

In the transition from 15-M assemblies to the recent shift in electoral initiatives, social protest have turned from direct democracy demands and the rejection of institutionalised politics to a progressively pragmatic and short-term position where institutions are targeted. This paper argues that the generalised impoverishment of the population, increased numbers of evictions and consistently high unemployment rates have broadened the social framework for the action of social movements. The political and ideological crisis, rooted in the majority of the population’s crumbling expectations of social progress has enabled the array of possibilities to be opened up to emancipatory politics.

It is argued that massive deprivation provoked by the economic crisis has been a fundamental factor in the movements’ new orientation, what as a consequence, and until certain extent, throws the New Social Movements discourses into crisis itself, at least with regard to its post-materialistic nature and its opposition to institutions of the State.

Reliability and political bias of mass media has been a controversial topic in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to propose and implement a methodology for fully automatic evaluation of the political tendency of the written media on the web, which does not rely on subjective human judgments.

The underlying idea is to base the evaluation on fully automatic comparison of the texts of articles on different news websites to the overtly political texts with known political orientation. The authors also apply an alternative approach for evaluation of political tendency based on wisdom of the crowds.

The authors found that the learnt classifier can accurately distinguish between self-declared left and right news sites. Furthermore, news sites’ political tendencies can be identified by automatic classifier learnt from manifestly political texts without recourse to any manually tagged data. The authors also show a high correlation between readers’ perception (as a “wisdom of crowds” evaluation) of the bias and the classifier results for different news sites.

The results are quite promising and can put an end to the never ending dispute on the reliability and bias of the press.

This paper proposes and implements a new approach for fully automatic (independent of human opinion/assessment) identification of political bias of news sites by their texts.

The present paper provides an educational status related to instructional days at elementary level in the districts identified as focus districts of left-wing extremism (LWE). The focus districts are those which have high intensity and presence of LWE. Educational development is not only influenced by the LWE, but many others, such as socio-economic, political and cultural, etc. Accordingly no direct correlations can be drawn between low educational development or otherwise with the influence of LWE. However, instructional days in school is an important physical indicator on school functioning.

The research is based on the secondary analysis of District Information System for Education (DISE) data, which provides comprehensive information of school-based indicators, facility indicators, enrollment based indicators and teacher-related indicators for every year. The DISE data relating to number of instructional days for the years 2005-2006 to 2009-2010 is studied among the districts identified as LWE districts. For the purpose of analysis, the number of days is classified into seven categories, and the schools functioning at district level is analyzed.

Education is critical in the LWE districts, which are areas with low literacy, large percentage of rural and backward sections of population. It was found that though there is an apparent improvement in the schools functioning, still number of schools fell under the category low/non-functional schools. In two out of five years, other districts had significantly lower average instructional days than focus districts. Hence, in terms of instructional days the situation is not all that bad.

The study is based on the secondary analysis of the DISE data. A large data related to number of students goes unaccounted and unregistered. The data is analyzed on mean instructional days at district level. Further down at sub-district and village level could provide a much more realistic picture.

The research paper analyzes the number of instructional days, which is an indicator that provides the basic empirical information related to schools functioning. Before policy makers can think of quality, it is pertinent to know whether the schools are working for the number of days that they are expected to. As of now hardly any study has taken place to provide information on the LWE districts in relation to elementary education.

This series is built around several independent propositions. One of these is that if managers (and personnel specialists in particular) are to be more effective then they will have to become more politically aware and seek to influence national decisions on work, employment and the economy. The assumption is that there is little point in slogging away at plant level trying to increase motivation, involvement and commitment and generally seeking to improve performance if the national climate is destructive of all these things. This is to pour water into a barrel with a huge hole in the bottom; it is more reasonable to try to repair the hole even if this means trying to influence events taking place outside the plant and therefore less under the manager's direct control. This is a new situation for the manager to face. Another aspect of my analysis is that in this socio‐political environment in which the organisation operates there are two influences in particular which have revolutionised our approach to the work and employment situation over the past century and, although these twin influences have had an enormous influence on industry and business, they have had virtually no effect on the way politicians behave or how they organise their own business. One of these influences is what we have learned about how to conduct human relationships and the other is the formal body of knowledge about management which has been built up over this period. Thus politicians, particularly the henchmen of the left‐wing political estate, are out of step with that large part of the national business and industrial community which has up‐dated itself on these two aspects of authority relationships and formal management procedures.

In light of the phenomenon of blogging in the 2004 US presidential campaign, this article aims to examine blogging during the 2005 British general election campaign. The article seeks to establish how widespread blogging was, the extent of bloggers' partisanship, what issues blogs were concerned with, what the purpose of the messages posted by the bloggers were, and what if any impact blogs had beyond the immediate community of users.

These questions were addressed through a content analysis of over 300 blogs and 1,300 posted messages, by additional searches of the Lexis‐Nexis newspaper archive, and via the use of internet poll data on blogging.

The research showed that blogging in the UK is in its infancy. There were few bloggers posting messages about the campaign and few people accessed blogs regularly. Most of the comments posted focused on campaign issues and were observational. While some of the bloggers exhibited an overt partisan identity, most did not. There was also some evidence of partisan networks, with blogs of a particular partisan/ideological position hyperlinking to others with a similar outlook. However, unlike the 2004 US presidential election campaign, blogs had no impact on the campaign news agenda.

Despite extensive research it is difficult to ascertain whether the sample of blogs examined in the research represented the entirety of the election campaign blogosphere. Nevertheless, the findings provide important insights into the evolving online election communication environment in the UK.

The study is the first to examine systematically the blogging about the general election campaigns in the UK.