Fracking Fortunes: Economic Well‐being and Oil and Gas Development along the Urban‐Rural Continuum

Oil and gas extraction, especially via unconventional means like hydraulic fracturing, is hailed as an economic boon by many commentators and political leaders. However, empirical evidence is limited. In this article, we consider the socioeconomic effects (particularly, related to poverty, employment, income, and wages) of unconventional oil and gas extraction using a national data set of U.S. counties. We use a novel between‐ and within‐county random effects modeling strategy to capture both resource curse and boomtown dynamics. Further, we allow the effect of oil and gas development to be conditioned by county rurality. Broadly, our findings suggest that oil and gas development has very complex effects at the county level. Within‐county growth in oil and gas production slightly improves most economic outcomes, but counties that specialize in oil and gas development tend to perform worse than other counties. We find that, in general, the effect of within‐county oil and gas production is not significantly moderated by county rurality.     

The Relationship between Marcellus Shale Gas Development in Pennsylvania and Local Perceptions of Risk and Opportunity

Recent advances in gas and oil drilling technology have led to dramatic boomtown development in many rural areas that have endured extended periods of economic decline. In Pennsylvania's Marcellus gas fields, the recent development of unconventional shale gas resources has not been without controversy. It has been variously framed as a major opportunity for economic revitalization at the local and regional levels and energy independence at the national level, but also as a significant environmental risk, with uncertain and uneven economic benefits. We use data from a survey conducted in 309 school districts located within Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale region to study the ways local stakeholders perceive both risk and opportunity associated with gas extraction from Marcellus Shale. Our analyses indicate that there is a strong positive association between perceptions of risk and opportunity associated with gas extraction. Further, the intensity of perception of both risk and opportunity is directly associated with the amount of local drilling, suggesting the complexity of local contexts within which local stakeholders evaluate rapid boomtown‐associated community change. In total, these findings complicate the framing of unconventional gas extraction in the Marcellus Shale region, and indeed boomtown growth overall, as fundamentally polarizing issues.     

Busted amidst the Boom: The Creation of New Insecurities and Inequalities within Pennsylvania's Shale Gas Boomtowns

In the middle of the first decade of this century new technological innovations enabled the extraction of natural gas through the use of hydraulic fracturing within gas‐bearing shale and other unconventional energy reserves. As a consequence, many places, often in economically lagging rural areas, saw dramatic change as they were socially and economically transformed through rapid natural resource development. Although scholarship on so‐called boomtown development has long explored social disruption associated with the sudden influx of workers and rapid economic development, this literature has tended to overlook the ways in which such development can create new poverty in the very midst of economic expansion. This article, through an examination of key informant interviews with low‐income residents and human service providers within Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale region, discusses the contradictory processes by which new insecurity and social exclusions may be created precisely as a consequence of economic expansion associated with rapid natural resource development.     

The Influence of Value Orientations,Personal Beliefs,and Knowledge about Resource Extraction on Local Leaders' Positions on Shale Development

Unconventional shale oil and gas production plays a prominent role in boosting economic growth and stimulating wealth creation in many communities. However, because of potential social and environmental drawbacks, including a lack of affordable housing and groundwater contamination from drilling, unconventional shale development is highly contentious in many areas and has resulted in many community conflicts. Hydraulic fracturing, which is a specific technology utilized in unconventional shale development, has proved especially contentious because of concerns about its long‐term environmental consequences. Given the fast pace of shale development, coupled with the controversy that surrounds it, we seek to understand what factors affect a local government official's stance on shale development and hydraulic fracturing. To do this we draw from value‐belief‐norms theory while additionally examining knowledge and community‐level factors that can influence an official's position. In this study, we survey 308 local government officials across six shale plays in the United States to examine local officials' positions on shale development and hydraulic fracturing. We find that the more positively officials perceive the consequences of shale development, the less likely they are to support banning hydraulic fracturing. Additionally, we find that networks to other shale communities are positively associated with favoring a ban. Further, leaders with a bachelor's degree or higher are more likely to favor a ban than those with lower than a bachelor's degree.     

The Polish family: Stability, change and conflict

This article analyzes and interprets empirical findings from studies carried out in Poland over the last years to identify changes in familial support networks for the elderly. In comparison with Western Countries, the Polish family is much closer to the traditional mode and plays a key role in the supportive networks of the elderly. This analysis points to considerable changes in the model of family help. Its shape has become more symmetrical: the help given by old parents to adult children has increased visibly whereas the children's help for parents has decreased. These changes have not seriously reduced the importance of the family as a primary support group. This fact is related to cultural factors and the economic and political situation in Poland. It is concluded that while various services need to be developed along Western lines, this development should be accompanied by a strengthening of various forms of family care.     

Area-based partnerships in rural Poland: The post-accession experience

The paper examines the characteristics of area-based partnerships in rural Poland. It is based on the study of partnerships created after the accession to the European Union in 2004. Partnership structures have been rapidly adopted in rural Poland due to opportunities provided by the LEADER+ Pilot Programme. However, the research showed that partnerships are frequently subject to elite domination by local authorities and hence fail to fully engage a range of community and private sector actors. Funding rules for LEADER, most notably the condition that money will only be paid on the completion of projects, has been particularly significant in perpetuating the domination of partnerships by organisations with existing access to financial and human capital. Hence funding arrangements can undermine the ability of Polish partnerships to operate in ways which harness the endogenous capacities of local communities. To date power differentials between notional ‘partners’ have been experienced to a greater extent than in advanced liberal democracies. The research found that overt domination of partnership structures by state agencies limited the possibilities for community led development initiative in rural Poland.     

The Polish Social Enterprise Sector Vis-à-Vis the Welfare Regime: Following on the Solidarity Movement?

This paper presents the development of the enterprise sector and the welfare regime in Poland, dominated by two opposing trends originating from the country’s recent history: remnants of the “Communist welfare state” and liberal tendencies that came after the political and economic transformation in 1989. The growing civil society that supplements a deficient welfare system finds its roots in the peaceful underground Solidarity movement of the 1980s which played a great role in liberating Poland. After the political turnover, the Solidarity’s mission-driven approach not only survived, but also helped shape Poland’s contemporary civil society. The outlined mechanisms seem to be significant for understanding the transformation of social economy and the welfare state concept in post-communist Europe. In our paper, we identify six mechanisms underlying the Solidarity movement, which, when subsequently implemented by social entrepreneurs, has guaranteed the success of their organizations. We will also characterize the current welfare state in Poland, as well as the role of social enterprises in filling the gaps and addressing the shortcomings of the welfare state. Several case studies will illustrate the latter.     

How important are political interest and internal political efficacy in the prediction of political participation? Longitudinal evidence from Germany / La importancia del interés en la polític y dae la eficacia política interna en la predicción de la participación política. Datos longitudinales originados en Alemania

This study aims to disentangle the effects of interest in politics and internal political efficacy in the prediction of different political activities. The analysis examines the hypothesis that political interest is a more important precursor of electoral and unconventional political participation, and that both political interest and efficacy are required to promote participation in political parties. Using the German Longitudinal Election Study, multiple regression analyses yield that political efficacy is a strong and positive predictor of intentions to participate in party politics and unconventional political behaviour. Political interest has differential effects on voting conditional on whether respondents are surveyed before or after elections, and differential moderated effects appear for conventional and unconventional political action. The findings are discussed with respect to the importance of political interest and efficacy for citizen participation.     

Are they fellow countrymen or not? The migration of ethnic Poles from Kazakhstan to Poland

"This article presents the process of migration of Kazakhs of Polish ancestry from Kazakhstan to Poland which has been taking place since the early 1990s. Poles deported in the past to Kazakhstan were mostly inhabitants of territories which did not belong to Poland; neither were they citizens of Poland. Therefore, the process of adaptation and integration was rather painful. The article points to factors that may simplify and those that may impede integration. The other problem...concerns the piecemeal policy towards Kazakhstan Poles, adopted by the Polish government, which seems risky if not dangerous. The author explains why it may cause a huge wave of illegal immigration to Poland."     

Rooted Cosmopolitans: Israelis with a European Passport – History,Property, Identity

Over the past decade, a new and intriguing phenomenon developed in Israel: close to 60,000 Israelis applied for citizenship in the Central and Eastern European countries from which their families immigrated. Typically, these new dual citizens have no plans to “return” to Germany or Poland, nor do they feel any identification with their countries of origin. Instead, they are mainly interested in obtaining a “European Union passport” and in gaining potential access to the European common market. The paper presents statistics on this unconventional case of dual citizenship, surveys the historical and legal circumstances that produced it and uses material from interviews to explore the meanings and uses that European‐Israeli dual citizens attribute to their European passports. Dual citizenship, the findings show, is used by Israelis in various and sometimes unexpected ways: as enhancer of economic opportunities, “insurance policy,” intergenerational gift, and even as an elitist status symbol. This modality of state belonging can be termed “passport citizenship”: Non‐resident citizenship here is stripped of its national meaning and treated as an individual piece of property, which is embodied by the passport and obtained for pragmatic reasons.     

Reflections on the Via Baltica Campaign in Poland

Years of NGO campaigning resulted in the withdrawal of consent for the Via Baltica road to be routed through Bialystok, north-east Poland. In light of the current revision of the Trans-European Transport Network and ongoing environmental campaigns against infrastructure development in Central and Eastern Europe, this profile piece reflects on the Via Baltica campaign in Poland. It identifies three factors crucial to its success: multi-level collaboration, framing of the campaign and the use of both ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ tactics. It argues that in combining these elements, NGOs were not only able to ensure success in the case of the Via Baltica but also set a precedent for future environmental campaigns in the region.     

Socioeconomic System of the Oil Boom and Rural Community Development in Western North Dakota

An oil boom is a complex social and economic phenomenon. The socioeconomic system presented in this article represents a novel effort to explicate boom impacts and changes, within a systems framework, at the community level to enhance community planning and development efforts. Most boomtown studies focus on longitudinal changes of a boom‐bust‐recovery cycle or social‐disruption‐based approaches. This article is an effort to demonstrate that longitudinal changes or social disruptions of a boom manifest through the interactions and interrelationships between social entities and stakeholders acting within the boom conditions and surrounding conditions. The socioeconomic system approach in this article analyzes the boom as a system, which provides a useful lens for many other rural communities currently experiencing unconventional oil and gas development in the United States. The socioeconomic system highlights five main challenges or factors that need to be addressed through community development strategies: develop affordable housing, invest in community infrastructure, expand public services, attract new businesses to the area, and develop better community integration strategies to build trust and unity within the community. This article is qualitative and exploratory in nature. As a result, it explicates the functions, structure, and relationships between system entities to provide a broader understanding of coherence, conflicts, and synergies within a system.     

The Determinants of Student Migration to Poland Based on the Opolskie Voivodeship Study

Until recently Poland has been considered a country to emigrate from. However, the situation is now beginning to change, and Poland is becoming an immigration country. This also refers to student migration. Polish universities are becoming increasingly attractive to foreign students, who are mainly of Ukrainian origin. They only began to promote their services abroad in 2005 and their foreign student population growth dynamic is one of the highest in the world. The study was conducted in the Opolskie Voivodeship, the first region in Poland where systematic action was taken to address depopulation, and the steps to counteract population decline were included in its strategic policies. One of the objectives of such policies was to stimulate immigration. For this reason, it was decided that the Opolskie Voivodeship might serve as a lab to study migration processes, including the inflow of foreign students.     

Migration Movements from and into Poland in the Light of East‐West European Migration

This article investigates migratory movements from and into Poland before and after the collapse of communism. The character and scale of these movements are of considerable significance, not only for politicians and societies in the CEE region, but also for European integration. The Polish eastern border is likely to remain one of the few places in Europe where it will be possible to control mobility on the East‐West axis. One cannot discuss East‐West mobility without discussing the emigration of Poles. Because recent immigration into Poland from the East should also be assessed from the perspective of both Poland and the West, the article examines emigration trends from Poland and immigration into Poland as well as the demographic characteristics of migrants. Only official statistical data are considered. Migration pressure from the East induced by the collapse of the system, combined with the restricted migration policy of Western Europe towards former USSR countries, were conducive to the formation of the Central European buffer zone. Poland is probably the best example of a buffer zone country. From the Western perspective it is also the most important country because the future of East‐West migration depends on the extension of the visa regime by Poland. Irrespective of the introduction of new hurdles, there will be other ways of channelling the movement from the East via Poland to the West. Globalization of migration will inevitably increase flows from the East. It is argued that the key to future European migration lies also in the West, more specifically in the employment needs of western labour markets.     

“Peaceful coexistence?” Jewish and Muslim neighbors on the eve of the Holocaust

Before the Holocaust, Jews and Muslims lived in close proximity in the kresy (borderlands) of northeastern Poland. While an abundance of literature exists on Jewish-Christian relations in Poland, no scholarly comparison of the history of coexistence specifically between Jews and Muslims in this territory has previously been done. This article is the first to document the living situation of these two Abrahamic faith minorities in interwar Poland. In a handful of small villages and even larger towns, they traded together on the market square, Muslims bought their meat from the local Jewish shochet, the Jews received fresh vegetables from their Muslim neighbors, and they even celebrated certain religious holidays together. These stories complicate previous arguments of self-imposed minority separateness which argue that social interactions between Jews and non-Jews were uniformly minimal and superficial.     

The Holocaust: Commemorated but not remembered? Post-colonial and post-traumatic perspectives on the reception of the Holocaust memory discourse in Poland

The argument focuses on the reception of the globalized narrative of the Holocaust in the regional memories of East-Central Europe, in particular Poland. It is argued that this narrative has not been successfully integrated into the regional memory, partly because of the narrative's own deficiencies and partly due to the specific nature of the way in which regional memories have been produced. Instead, it has contributed to the split of collective and social memories in the region as well as to further fragmentation of each of these two kinds of memory. In result we may say that in post-communist Poland the Holocaust has been commemorated on the level of official institutions, rituals of memory, and elitist discourses, but not necessarily remembered on the level of social memory. It is claimed that to understand this phenomenon we should put the remembrance and commemoration of the Holocaust in the context of the post-communist transformation, in which the memory of the Holocaust has been constructed rather than retrieved in the process of re-composition of identities that faced existential insecurity. The non-Jewish Poles, who in the 1990s experienced the structural trauma of transformation, turned to the past not to learn the truth but to strengthen the group's sense of continuity in time. In this process many of them perceived the cosmopolitan Holocaust narrative as an instrument of the economic/cultural colonization of Eastern Europe in which the historical suffering of the non-Jewish East Europeans is not properly recognized. Thus the elitist efforts to reconnect with the European discourse and to critically examine one's own identity has clashed with the mainstream's politics of mnemonic security as part of the strategy of collective immortalization that contributed to the development of antagonistic memories and deepened social cleavage.     

‘Unfinished work and damaged materials’: historians and the Scots in the Commonwealth of Poland–Lithuania (1569–1795)

The burgeoning of a historiography of the Scots in Poland–Lithuania has been hindered by either the unavailability to scholars of, or their unwillingness to tackle, secondary sources in the relevant foreign languages. Despite this ethnic group having comprised, at one time, the largest representation of the Scottish diaspora in a foreign state, this article demonstrates that, since Poland–Lithuania’s partition, historiographical coverage has been compartmentalised along linguistic and national lines. The article is tripartite, outlining work in the German, Polish and English languages, albeit highlighting the detrimental effects caused, until recently, by the frequent isolation of these, and other linguistic traditions of historiographical significance, from one another.     

Public policy towards immigrants in poland’s shrinking cities – The case study of the city of Lomza

Some regions and cities in Poland face challenges due to an accelerating depopulation. Simultaneously, Poland is host to more than 2 million immigrants who mitigate the negative consequences of the population outflow and ageing. While bigger Polish cities adopted particular local strategies and measures addressed to migrants, the situation of smaller cities and towns, especially the shrinking ones, has not yet been explored. Therefore, we took a closer look at Lomza, a downscaled middle-sized city in the east of Poland where two phenomena occur: the accelerating depopulation caused mainly by the outflow of its residents and an inflow of foreign migrants, both asylum seekers predominantly coming from Russia (Chechnya) and economic migrants mainly from Ukraine. We explored the state of the public policy towards immigrants in Lomza in order to see what a shrinking city can offer its newcomers when it cannot count on national strategy in this regard.     

Women on strike: mobilizing against reproductive injustice in Poland

The paper employs a lens of reproductive justice (RJ) to discuss the events of the 2016 mobilization against a total abortion ban proposal in Poland. By presenting the context of women’s rights in Poland, especially the abortion debates, we argue that the 2016 Women’s Strike showed that taking a stand for reproductive justice was countered by governmental actions. By using a case study approach, the paper analyzes the Strike as a tumultuous act of women’s solidarity while simultaneously assessing its implications for RJ issues. We discuss the aftermath and the socio-political reticence to acknowledge the complexities of women’s lives and reproductive choices. Further, we provide arguments for applying the RJ framework into discerning the notion of ideal citizens and gendered social control in Poland. This localized analysis has a global relevance by reflecting the impact of worldwide trends in women’s rights activism and RJ in the context of resurfacing nationalisms and populism.     

DIFFERENTIAL DEPOSIT GUARANTEES AND THE EFFECT OF MONETARY POLICY ON BANK LENDING

This paper utilizes differences in de jure deposit insurance coverage across banks and changes in coverage over time to identify a bank‐lending channel in Poland. Banks with partial guarantees have a stronger loan response to monetary policy than banks with full guarantees. Furthermore, the weak response of the fully guaranteed banks is attributed to their ability to raise low‐reserve, uninsured time deposits relative to the partially covered banks. When differential coverage is eliminated, there is no disparity in the loan response between the two groups. This lending channel has implications for credit control and financial system development in emerging markets. (JEL E52, G21, G28)