Political careers emerge when individuals develop patterns of mobility between offices in the political realm. These patterns provide useful clues about the expected activity of an individual leader. Patterns of political tenure can be revealing because individuals who aspire to long-term service seem more committed to the autonomy of their institutions, as well as more active and effective within them. The mayoral career is created in a continuous process of mayoral position implementation where a unique combination of ambition and opportunity intertwine. A political career is therefore necessarily associated with time and defined by two key points: the starting point and the termination point of mayoral function. Between them, the mayoral career takes place. The article focuses on the career development and mayoral incumbency in post-communist countries such as Lithuania and Slovenia. Authors particularly focus on the direct mayoral elections conducted in Lithuania for the first time in 2015 and introduced in Slovenia already in 1994. Career of local leaders was analysed in terms of pre-mayoral career, where authors discovered that the largest share of mayors were municipal council members. Both countries had a relatively high proportion of political newcomers. In Lithuania, the first direct elections finally also enabled the elections of non-partisan candidates, a trend seen in Slovenia since 1994.

Key words:

pre-mayoral political career, incumbency, direct elections, non-partisans, Post-communist countries

This article undertakes the issue of the sources from which we obtain our knowledge and shape our opinions on the topic of the secular state. Based on a questionnaire survey on a representative group of Poles, I point to the constitutive role of the media in this process. However, I specify that the preferred sources of information are first of all television and then the Internet. Next, I translate the results of the quantitative analysis onto Neuberger’s (1999) approach to the Church-state relationship. As a result, I point out that the opinions of the respondents are located in the endorsed Church space. At the same time, I argue that in this type of approach to Church-state relations, respondents more often perceive the pressure of the Catholic Church in relation to state authority than vice versa.

Key words:

media, secular state, Church-state relationship, Poland, media reception

The article is an attempt to answer the question what role in political communication of the Catholic Church in Poland play the most important Polish Catholic opinion weekly magazines (Gość Niedzielny, Niedziela, Tygodnik Powszechny). Span of the analysis covers last 15 years. The research included the presidential campaign period in 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2015. The analysis was conducted with regard to the articles published during the period of one month prior to the presidential elections. The author assesses to what extent the analyzed press titles were convergent with the official announcements of the Polish Bishops' Conference regarding the political involvement of the Catholic Church. It is important to find an answer to the question of how the Catholic press supported one of the candidates for the office of President of the Republic. Another important question that needs clarification is whether and to what extent journalists discussed electoral programs of individual candidates. According to the author, the results of research regarding political engagement of Catholic press in the four presidential campaigns are a representative sample to determine the role of the analysed Catholic press in political communication of the Catholic Church in Poland.

Key words:

political communication, Catholic Church, presidential election, catholic press

The objective of this paper is to determine the scale of influence of the media (both traditional and social) on party preferences. The complicated contemporary media ecosystem, in which the boundaries between traditional and internet media are blurred (internet versions of newspapers), news coverage is increasingly de-professionalized (emergence of civic journalism), verification of information becomes increasingly problematic (fake news) leads to a number of theoretical and methodological challenges. Theoretically, the paper uses the model in which mass media act as a factor triggering the emergence of latent views. Empirically, the effort is undertaken to cover the whole universe of information sources, including both print and electronic media, both traditional and internet sources. The analysis determines citizens’ sources of information, tracks consistencies in selecting particular categories of sources (thus outlining ‘information bubbles’), correlates sources with party preferences and measures generalized attitudes to media categories. The study is undertaken on a sample representative  for adult Polish population, fielded with CAWI methodology.

Key words:

mass media, political attitudes, news, public opinion

Focusing on the joint analysis of security trends and the organization of the private security market in France, this article addresses the new relationships between different security players and modern citizenship and society within the framework of metropolization. Despite the construction of an extended sovereign power, especially after the Second World War, the governments started to cooperate in the 1990s with other partners and to vary the levels of decision making in terms of security policies. Experts from private security companies or local councillors are new operators in the so-called “security co-production”. An analysis at the metropolis scale seems important in order to understand the issues related to security for two reasons: firstly, because of the particular pressure connected to the recent terrorist attacks than can affect the “identity” of the city; secondly, because “incivility” – constructed as a major political problem since the 1990s – is linked to social structures of local territories within a wider one, with differentiated means for the people who live in the metropolitan center of social framework. The social representations of order and social control are still based on the relationships between private property, transports and public (access) spaces. The new security identity of cities depends on the relationships between local policies and the socio-economic reality of citizens, including private security guards, whose life conditions are an expression of the paradoxes of modern life.

Key words:

private security, professionalization, metropolis, social control

At the heart of the concept of value marketing is the evolution of its use. Starting with a mere information about the presence of a product on the market, through subsequently satisfying the needs of the buyer of the product or service, to finally reaching a full dialogue between the bidder (offerer) and the customer. This relationship is based, inter alia, on the common definition of the characteristics of the desired goods and their adjustment to the values indicated by the customers. Also, important values for the buyer of a political product should be similarly shaped in the marketing sense. Creating bonds, the partnership relations between the exchange parties on the political market is a mechanism that makes this process very effective. The article points to the “value” present in the political product and explains how it is created. It also analyses two key contexts of what “value” is, describes marketing and its core tools on the economic and political market. The author of the paper makes a hypothesis that “value” as the core of the political offer generated by the politician-voter relationship is of fundamental importance in political transactions   and is at the same time a determinant of electoral decision.

Key words:

value, value marketing, provision of value, voter, politician, political offer, political market