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Demographic Challenges and Mentalities: Modes of Reflexivity and Personnel Policy in German and Polish Municipalities

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Coping with Demographic Change: A Comparative View on Education and Local Government in Germany and Poland

Part of the book series: European Studies of Population ((ESPO,volume 19))

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Abstract

Chapter 10 analyses the relationships between local demographic change and its perception by local decision makers. It also aims to determine if there are any differences in demography-related interpretation patterns between German and Polish municipalities. We link our analysis of local mentalities with the concept of agency developed by Margaret Archer. Drawing on her Internal Conversation Indicator (ICONI), we formed a Local Authorities’ Conversation Index (LACONI) to measure the collective reflexivity of local authorities. Our empirical analysis draws on a representative survey of mayors in 49 East German, 143 West German and 127 Polish municipalities. This represents the first transnational comparative study of demography-related coping strategies at the local level. Since there are no previous results on this topic, we conduct a confirmatory latent profile analysis to assess the reliability of our LACONI. However, we find that only a low congruity exists between the theoretically derived LACONI and the inductively determined latent profiles. Therefore our results should be interpreted carefully. We also find different modes of collective reflexivity toward local demographic changes. This is proven not least by the inductive latent profile analysis. These reflexivity modes also vary between East German, West German and Polish local authorities, but they often do so in an unexpected or counterintuitive manner. However, although the LACONI has not proven fully convincing, the results are nonetheless promising. The reliability of quantitative operationalisation by using LACONI might be improved by modelling it more closely after Archer’s ICONI.

Authors: Christian Rademacher, Bernadette Jonda

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Types of local governance that are restricted to providing private goods (market or corporate hierarchy; see Lütz, 2006, p. 26) or that only occur in small populations (community; see Holtkamp, 2006, pp. 37–38. and Blömker, 2010, pp. 53–54 are deliberately excluded.

  2. 2.

    For the original German and Polish wording of the LACONI items, see the online appendix.

  3. 3.

    VR is defined in regard to each mode as the proportion of cases that do not show that specific mode, “with larger values indicating greater dispersion on the variable: variation ratio = 1 - (fmode/N), where fmode is the frequency of the modal category and N is the total number of cases” (Lewis-Beck et al. 2004, p. 1178).

  4. 4.

    For the definition and meaning of latent profile analysis, among other cases of latent variable modelling, see the online appendix.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Soziologie, Martin-Luther-Univ. Halle-Wittenberg, Halle (S.), Germany

    Christian Rademacher

  2. Zentrum für Soziologie, Halle (S.), Germany

    Bernadette Jonda

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  1. Christian Rademacher
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  2. Bernadette Jonda
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Correspondence to Christian Rademacher .

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Rademacher, C., Jonda, B. (2015). Demographic Challenges and Mentalities: Modes of Reflexivity and Personnel Policy in German and Polish Municipalities. In: Coping with Demographic Change: A Comparative View on Education and Local Government in Germany and Poland. European Studies of Population, vol 19. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10301-3_10

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