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The purpose of this study is to examine the changing political orientation of Air Tiris, Kampar, Riau community towards Islamic political parties in general elections; to analyze the factors that influenced the political orientation of Air Tiris community in general elections; and to realize the political rights of the society including Air Tiris community.

The subject in this study is the political orientation of the Air Tiris community in the 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2014 general elections with a period of research from 2009 to 2016. This qualitative research method consists of sources, data collection, informants, data collection techniques, data analysis and processing and writing systematics.

The results of the research indicate that there are three dominant factors affecting the change in the political orientation of the Air Tiris community towards Islamic political parties characterized by the deterioration of vote acquisition for Islamic political parties in Air Tiris village in 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2014 general elections. The weakening of the link between religious identity and voting behaviour, as well as the weakening of political movement. The identification or loyalty of the santri community towards Islamic parties has faded.

The originality of this research lies in the analysis of the political orientation of Air Tiris, Kampar, Riau community, in general, elections towards Islamic political parties. Traditionally, this community has more political orientation on religious/Islamic political parties but such orientation experiences developments and changes that lead to non-Islamic parties. This research contains new information about the analysis of the political orientation of Air Tiris, Kampar, Riau community in the general election of Islamic political parties.

In the Western thought tradition, the tourist has not been a subject worthy of intellectual musings and philosophical deliberations. Indeed, the tourist has been portrayed in primarily derisive ways. Nietzsche’s remark, “Tourists—they climb mountains like animals, stupid and perspiring, no one has told them that there are beautiful views on the way,” epitomizes the dominant attitude. Why does the figure of the tourist elicit such negative reactions? Do the sentiments perhaps imply something else, or is the tourist a doppelgänger, not anomalous or marginal but normative—a paradigmatic figure? If so, then what can be said of the poetics and politics of the tourist conceptualized as a paradigmatic subject?

We analyze the correlation between the political orientation of investors and their financial risk tolerance. Assessing financial risk tolerance is a very important aspect to developing an appropriate long‐term investing strategy. Our study is based on a sample of 129 undergraduates at Central Michigan University during one academic year. We employ a two‐axis political compass to determine the political orientation of our study participants. We determine their financial risk tolerance by analyzing their portfolios and trading behavior in a simulated investment game in a semester long course. We report two main findings: (1) financial risk tolerance is highest for those with more conservative economic political views and (2) financial risk tolerance is highest for those with more centrist social political views. We believe our results can help investment advisors and individual investors better assess individual financial risk tolerance through the use of the two‐axis political compass utilized in our study.

The former residences of historical figures are typical landscape elements of historic districts, which are characterised by the styles of these residences and spiritual historical figures cultures. The purpose of this paper is to determine how the former residences respond once the historical figures living there have passed.

The history of human culture and progression of urban construction – which are submerged in societal transformation – is recorded for old Beijing city. Narrative space theory is used and methods such as a content analysis, map overlay and the Geographic Information System are employed to analyse the selected 300 former residences of historical figures in old Beijing city.

The results are as follows: the political setting played a key role in the evolution process, three political narrative areas in the inner city and one cultural narrative area in the outer city form the narrative spatial structure of the former residences of historical figures, “government construction” and “resident construction” are the main reasons for the loss and destruction of narrative spaces and ordinary life is an important channel for showcasing the history of former residences. The narrative spaces of these residences carry double histories, namely, the development of human history and of city construction.

Different from former studies that focus on the preservation of the single historical building, this study explores the integral logic of historic buildings in the whole city through narrative space theory to get a combination of culture and space.

This paper aims to explore the significance of the 2011 uprisings in Tunisia for wider questions of democratization, interrogating in particular the question of the relationship between religion and politics in the aftermath of the revolutionary event. The political landscape emerging after the 14th of January Tunisian Revolution has witnessed the emergence of a new political class competing in the country’s first free democratic elections on October 23. The moderate Islamist Ennahda Party emerged victorious and obtained the majority of seats in the National Constituent Assembly. These developments in the revolutionary aftermath re-opened questions over the future of “secular Tunisia” and re-ignited the political struggle between modernist and traditionalist visions of society. As a result, religious actors have increasingly been taking to the streets alongside the general population via participation in public protests, creation of new unions and associations, presence in the media, militancy in new or pre-existent political parties, etc. In this context, this research focuses on the way in which the 2011 uprisings impacted on democratization by seeking to explain how and why religious leaders are re-emerging as influential figures in the political landscape of post-revolutionary Tunisia.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the political effects of microcredit. The author provides the theoretical connections between microfinance and political empowerment and tests them in the context of Central Asia and the Caucasus, a region that is significantly lagging in political development and yet has a growing microfinance potential.

The author conducted a total of 100 in-depth interviews with microcredit clients in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan in June 2010 and January 2011, respectively. The author chose my client samples randomly from two of the largest non-governmental microfinance institutions in these countries.

The findings of the survey reveal that microloans have only led to modest improvements in the socioeconomic status of the clients and had almost no effect on their political empowerment. Disaggregating the data further in terms of gender, type of loan and location of credit does not change the overall trends but reveals that to the extent that any political empowerment took place, group clients (mostly women) in urban settings were more aware and involved in political issues than individual clients in the villages.

Even with a carefully thought-out design, it is not clear how much the responses reflect the true and complicated impact of microfinance on the clients’ lives, a challenge that may be overcome in future research with focus group analysis or an ethnographic analysis of microcredit clients over a long period of time.

Notwithstanding these shortcomings, these observations can help inform microfinance institutions, donor organizations and governments about the true potential of microfinance. A realization of the limits of this unique development tool may prove useful in reorienting the goals of foreign aid and designing a more effective approach to development.

Despite the extensive literature on the economic and social effects of microcredit, very little attention has been given to how economic empowerment generated by microcredit can translate into political empowerment at the individual level. This paper lays out the theoretical reasons for why such a relationship might exist and tests these hypotheses systematically in two countries, taking into account gender, type of loan instrument and location of the loan.

This paper aims to analyse the level of informative transparency among Spanish political parties and political foundations, according to general and descriptive information (e.g. contact, ideas and values, electoral programmes, members, etc.) and economic, governance and financial information.

The situation of the parties in each year is represented by a biplot, which is a graphical representation of a multivariate sample. The data for this analysis were obtained from the reports published by Fundación Compromiso y Transparencia (Foundation for Integrity and Transparency) for 2011 and 2012.

This paper evidences the existence of serious problems of opacity, especially in relation to financial information (balance sheet, income statement, annual accounts and audit report) and information on the fulfilment of goals and programmes (management report and compliance report).

This is the first attempt to analyse statistically the level of transparency of political parties and foundations, showing the need for a robust control system and for mechanisms to penalise conduct that limits citizens’ access to public information.

The viable systems theory of autonomous social communities is a cybernetic theory in which politics is seen as a facilitator for social coherence. A recent paper by Yolles explored this dimension, considering, how power and its process affects structure, manipulates information, and influences the way that people behave. A core conceptualization of that paper about political temperament is corrected and further developed.

Interest in this paper lies in the social cybernetics of autonomous social communities that have a culture, normative behaviour, and where the behaviour is ultimately determined from that culture. Autonomous social communities that have a culture have a history and dynamic that can be argued to have a potential for behavioural coherence through policy formation and processes of action research. It is through this proposition that politics is engaged in the theory.

This paper offers a correction and development of Yolle's conceptual representation of the notion of political temperament as discussed by Duverger. Political temperament is a part of political culture, and is ultimately connected to the way that power is created, assigned and used. Yolles was concerned with the relationship between political temperament, political management, and processes of power distribution. However, this model was misconceived, and we shall redefine it by expressing political temperament as the relationship between political mindedness, political management, and political centripetality (or process of power distribution).

In this paper it is argued that political temperament comes from a set of attitudes that underpin the political nature of a governing body that becomes responsible for the political management of a social community. It is seen to contribute to the formation of the political culture of autonomous social communities.

Smart governance ultimately relates to the ability of political administrations to elicit trust and public confidence. Political administrations normally generate rational policies that arise from their context-sensitive goals. The capability of an administration to develop and implement policies is measured as efficacy, which can influence the value and stability of an administration. However, policy development and implementation is not only an attribute of a political administration but also of its bureaucracy. The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of bureaucracies, representing them as complex and dynamic.

A traditional blueprint model of a bureaucracy comes from Weber, seen to be a servicing body for the implementation of political policy decisions resulting from a process of governance. An alternative model arises from the fictional works of Kafka, which is underpinned by a firm conceptual basis of a bureaucracy that confronts that of Weber. Agency theory will be used to model bureaucracies, and comparisons will be made between the Weber and Kafka conceptualisation.

There are broad models of a bureaucracy that arise from different propositions such as a Weber and a Kafka model, the latter being more representative of administrations. Any attempts to measure comparative efficacy across political systems or administrations may well lead to failure due to the distinctions in the nature of the bureaucracies that they maintain. The paper argues that the Weber model is an unattainable boundary representation of a bureaucracy. In contrast, Kafka’s more pragmatic conceptualisation can be modelled as a pathological autonomous system that is both complex and adaptive. Such pathologies can be harmful to the implementation of socially improving policies.

The paper shows that even where a political administration has policy initiatives that can improve society, these can be corrupted and misdirected by its bureaucracy, mistakenly believed (by the administration) to be dedicated to the service of the administration, rather than the bureaucracy’s own self-interests.

No other approach has been able to graphically represent the relative natures of different bureaucracies, or their pathologies.