Forging a new political culture: Plenary behaviour in the scottish parliament

Part of the appeal of creating a new Scottish Parliament lay in the ability of legislators to re-define the institutional culture of politics. For advocates of change, the Westminster system, with its emphasis on adversarial and male-dominated politics, turned citizens off politics. Devolution advocates argued that a Scottish Parliament, composed of a new type of politician and operating according to modernised rules, would better serve the public. The four principles of the Consultative Steering Group report included among them references to a more open and accessible political system. The 1999 elections introduced a number of new faces but among the 129 Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) are a number of sitting and former local councillors, Members of Parliament and party workers. This article examines these individuals and their behaviour in the first year of plenary debates to determine whether the social characteristics of these MSPs, their gender, their partisan ties or their previous political experiences affects the likelihood of a new model of political debate. It argues that initially the political experience of MSPs affected their levels of participation but that increasingly, position within the Parliament exerts a greater influence. Some social characteristics such as gender, however, continue to influence the extent and manner of participation.     

A systematic justification for the EU's pouvoir constituant mixte: Principles of constitutional politics in supranational polities

This article presents a rational reconstruction of the practice of constitutional politics in supranational polities. In doing so, it seeks to refocus the ongoing debate about constituent power in the EU on the question of who, under what conditions, is entitled to decide on the EU constitutional order. The analysis leads to a number of principles of democratic legitimacy, which include the political autonomy of the members of the state demoi as well as the political autonomy of the members of a cross‐border demos. In explicating these parallel entitlements to political autonomy, I provide a systematic justification for the notion of a pouvoir constituant mixte, according to which the citizens should take control of EU constitutional politics in two roles: as European citizens and as Member State citizens.     

Loyalty,Justice, and Rights: Royce and Police Ethics in Twenty-First-Century America

The killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and others have instigated widespread debate concerning the ethics and politics of police behavior toward young black men in America. In this article, I show how Josiah Royce’s philosophy of loyalty provides a useful theoretical framework for diagnosing and working to overcome strained relations between police and black citizens in the United States. I begin by establishing the relevance of Royce’s thought to the realm of police ethics. Then, I argue that Royce’s notion of loyalty to loyalty is a useful and powerful lens through which we can examine the practice of police discretion, particularly as it comes to bear on racial profiling and use of force. I conclude by offering what I regard as Roycean recommendations aimed at ameliorating the fractured relationship between police and blacks in America today.     

Multi‐Level Democracy

Modern democratic polities regularly operate at several political levels. In the case of the EU at the level of the member‐states and the EU itself, and in addition at federal, regional, and municipal levels. Is there any democratic rule to determine which level is more legitimate than the others? The article argues that from a majoritarian perspective there is none. Individual citizens may have quite different preferences with regard to the level that is of particular political importance for them. The article critically analyses different concepts, from sovereignty to demos, subsidiarity, and the judicial review of competences, and tries to show that none of them can provide a solution to the dilemma. Instead, democratic theory has to assume that in the co‐evolutionary process of institutions and societies at different political levels, the question of the final say has to be left open.     

The public rhetorics of policing in times of war and violence: countering apocalyptic visions

Public debate about post 9/11 policing presumes for the most part that the world changed fundamentally at that point and that policing powers and tactics have altered in response. For some people, largely defenders of the necessity of a strong security stance, the changes have been possibly not enough. For others, opponents of the security state, the changes represent a latest instalment in an always threatening rise of totalitarian policing. Seen in macro-perspective these views represent the politics of security, helping to shape, modulate, contain, expand, limit the powers available to police, and the possible uses of them. These opposing views, very often highly antagonistic in expression, are part of the politics, and do not stand outside them. They have also been heard before. In seeking to understand what policing means for stable societies under threat of political violence, this article examines some key transitions in the development of security policing over the last 100 years in Australia, highlighting some of the contextual features that have shaped them. In doing so it will suggest that apocalyptic rhetoric is part of the politics of policing, shared by both advocates and opponents of tougher policing, and in tension with the more sober realities of a policing that operates within a framework of enabling as well as limiting conditions.     

改革完善选举制度,扩大公民有序政治参与

公民政治参与是现代社会民主制度赖以存在的基础,也是民主政治的特征之一。选举是公民政治参与的重要形式,改革完善人大选举制度和村民委员会选举制度,对于发展社会主义民主政治,保证人民当家作主具有重要意义。     

Criminal Justice in a Democracy: Towards a Relational Conception of Criminal Law and Punishment

This article starts from the observation that in classical Athens the discovery of democracy as a normative model of politics has been from the beginning not only a political and a legal but at the same time a philosophical enterprise. Reflections on the concept of criminal law and on the meaning of punishment can greatly benefit from reflections on Athenian democracy as a germ for our contemporary debate on criminal justice in a democracy. Three main characteristics of the Athenian model will be analysed: the self-instituting capacity of a democracy based on participatory and reflective citizenship, political power as the capacity of citizens for co-operating and co-acting with others, and the crime of hubris as one of the key issues in Athenian criminal law. These analyses will lead to the conclusion that one of the key issues of a democratic legal order lies in its capacity of recognizing the fragility of the human condition and of developing workable and effective standards of justice in that context. A relational conception of criminal law and punishment, based on proportionality, reflexivity, mutual respect and responsibility fits best with a democracy under the rule of law.

积极推进政治参与努力构建和谐社会

公民合法有序地参与政治,建设社会主义政治文明,提高自身政治才能是时代的要求和培养理性政治素质的需要,也是构建社会主义和谐社会的基本条件。改革开放以来,民众政治参与的自主性有所增强,但是,由于主客观条件的限制,使他们的政治参与呈现出层次的不均衡。因此,探讨民众政治参与对现实中国社会发展的现实意义是十分必要的。     

Politics and Culture: From the Twentieth Century to the New Millenniumb

In a period in Italy in which the fascist “Ethical State” gave way to a lesser god, the ethical party, culture was transformed into a sort of political pedagogy. Bobbio insisted on the fact that the “first task of intellectuals ought to be to prevent the monopoly of force from becoming the monopoly of truth.” Today the ethical parties have disappeared, along with political pedagogy. Bobbio was aware of the reasons that make participatory democracy difficult: In complex societies citizens are poorly informed judges regarding their own interests; hidden powers condition the visible choices; pluralism borders on corporatism and even on a modern version of feudalism; and, lastly, where mass individualism prevails, perception of the general interest appears increasingly distant and difficult. Consequently, we need a different relationship between culture and politics.     

Polls as Public–Politic Linkage: A Comparative Analysis of Poll Use and Roles of MPs in Parliamentary Debate

Opinion polls as a linkage mechanism between the public and politics have rarely been examined in a parliamentary context. In our comparative study (Germany, New Zealand, Switzerland and the United Kingdom) we analyse if and how polls are invoked by MPs with different roles in parliamentary debates. Focusing on three theoretical aspects (responsiveness, populism and deliberation), we find that polls are indeed invoked to bring the views of the public into parliamentary debate to some degree, but they are also often used merely to support policies already developed in the political realm. Fears of the populist effect of polls are exaggerated; polls, in fact, have a positive influence on the discursive quality of parliament. Looking at parliamentary roles, we find very different patterns of poll use: while MPs oriented towards their constituencies use polls in the most direct and participatory vein, others mediate public opinion as displayed by polls through different institutions (the party, the parliament) or through expertise.     

疫情信息公开的法治反思

新冠肺炎疫情信息公开存在的不足,引发对中央与地方关系、科学与政治关系、公民与政府关系的法治反思。应对疫情信息公开制度的僵化与冲突,须充分发挥中央与地方“两个积极性”,完善中央直管和属地管理相结合的疫情信息公开机制。针对疫情信息公开中科学与政治关系之争议,应合理定位科学家与政治家的角色,促进科学系统与政治系统的相互协同。面对疫情信息公开中公民话语权的保障,应从权力导向转向权利导向,防止政府对公民话语权的不当克减。     

The ethics of maxima and minima combined with social justice as a form of public corruption prevention

In recent decades, corruption has become one of the main problems perceived by Spanish society. As a result, the country’s citizens are experiencing a high level of disenchantment with politics and a general loss of confidence in the way public institutions function. Although in the last few years more stringent laws have been brought in to speed up procedures and help pursue crimes of corruption, the fact of the matter is that they have done little to reduce these cases and so they are not enough to put an end to the problem. There is a strong likelihood that, if a positive morality and a strong mutual union between ethics and politics were in place, legal loopholes would not be used for individual profitmaking operations that make a mockery of justice and the common good. Because of this, and taking public ethics as a basis, this article will review and discuss Adela Cortina’s hermeneutic definitions “of maxima and minima” and Agustín Domingo Moratalla’s concept of “social justice” in order to suggest tools that can be applied in preventing and fighting against political corruption.

     

Priming Partisan Evaluations of Congress

Congress has been the scene of increasingly partisan and ideologically polarized conflict in recent years. I examine the extent to which the national political climate mutes or amplifies the effect of partisanship on evaluations of Congress. Using data from the National Election Studies and a content analysis of national media coverage, I find that public evaluations of Congress divide most sharply along party lines when elite‐level discourse is most partisan (as during an election season or a highly charged partisan debate in Congress). This finding is consistent with an opinion leadership or priming hypothesis of public opinion. In addition, the most knowledgeable citizens are most likely to be primed by the partisan political climate in Washington. In contrast, less attentive citizens tend to rely on nonpartisan cues when evaluating Congress. I discuss the implications of these findings for public opinion and improving the public standing of Congress in an increasingly partisan climate.     

法律与政治:共生中的超越和博弈

法律与政治具有共生性,共同服务于社会目标与价值。虽然在形式上法律表现为政治的产物,依凭政治权力和政治组织而存在,但法律与政治是基于社会结构内在需要的不同而存在,具有基于社会结构的差异性和独立性。由于形式上的结合,人们往往把法律混同于政治,导引出法律的非结构性作用,变异为外在的政治工具;也正因为存在基于社会结构的实质性差异,法律才可以与政治适度分离并超越政治。但其过程充满以社会事件形式表现出来的冲突和博弈,通过这些冲突性社会事件,法律日渐进化为国家和社会之间的平衡互动性制度机制,在实现国家治理的同时能够成为公民维护自身利益的制度依靠。     

"Jurisdictional Politics" in the Occupied West Bank: Territory, Community, and Economic Dependency in the Formation of Legal Subjects

This article examines the distribution of legal rights in the Israeli occupied West Bank. It argues that legal rights are distributed through a "jurisdictional politics" that tries to stabilize the contingent relationship between political community, territory, and legal subjects. In particular, this jurisdictional politics seeks to delimit the contradictory boundaries of the Israeli state by creating distinct categories of person out of the populations that live and work in the region. These issues are addressed by examining a dispute concerning the jurisdiction of Israeli law over Palestinian workers in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The article ends by arguing that in the context of multiple movements of people, capital, and military force, attention must be paid to the often contradictory ways in which jurisdictional regimes seek to produce particular types of citizens and subjects.     

Punishment, Socially Deprived Offenders, and Democratic Community

The idea that victims of social injustice who commit crimes ought not to be subject to punishment has attracted serious attention in recent legal and political philosophy. R. A. Duff has argued, for example, a states that perpetrates social injustice lacks the standing to punish victims of such injustice who commit crimes. A crucial premiss in his argument concerns the fact that when courts in liberal society mete out legitimate criminal punishments, they are conceived as acting in the name of all citizens—on behalf of the whole political community. Resisting this premiss, Peter Chau has suggested that courts ought to be conceived as acting only in the name of “just citizens”: citizens who cannot be plausibly seen as having contributed to distributive injustice. When conceived in this way, Chau argues, courts can no longer plausibly be regarded as lacking standing to punish. This article uses the debate between Duff and Chau to explain why the question of whether to punish socially deprived offenders can only be answered adequately when connected to broader concerns of democratic theory. Specifically, it argues that Chau’s proposal is not available within the context of the kind of political community upon which (Duff rightly believes) a system of liberal criminal law depends for its justification and maintenance: a community in which citizens see the law as embodying shared norms whose specific demands they disagree about. State officials are morally permitted to see themselves as acting on behalf of a subset of the citizenry, I argue, only in circumstances of democratic crisis: circumstances in which a moral community can no longer be plausibly said to exist.     

现代政治认同机制及其建构路径

社会利益结构、价值观念的多元化及现代政治体系的开放性,决定了现代政治有着完全不同于传统政治的认同机制,决定了相对均衡的利益结构、公平竞争的社会规则、核心价值体系是现代社会最重要的政治认同机制。而培育这种认同机制必须健全利益表达机制,拓宽政治参与渠道,使多元政治主体在广泛的政治互动博弈过程中达成基本政治共识。     

Private thoughts of public representatives: assisted death, voluntary euthanasia and politicians

Assisted death and voluntary euthanasia have received significant and sustained media attention in recent years. High-profile cases of people seeking assistance to end their lives have raised, at least in the popular press, debate about whether individuals should be able to seek such assistance at a time when they consider their suffering to be unbearable or their quality of life unsatisfactory. Other recent developments include a number of attempts to legislate on the issue by the minor parties in Australia and the successful enactment of legislation in a few overseas jurisdictions. However, despite all of the recent attention that has focused on assisted death and voluntary euthanasia, a discussion of the adequacy of existing laws has not made it onto the political agenda of any of the Australian State or Territory governments. This is in spite of the fact that the private views of the majority of our elected Members of Parliament may be supportive of reform. This article explores the role of politicians' views and, as a case study, considers the opinions expressed by a number of Queensland Members of Parliament. In light of the views of these politicians and those of members of the public, as well as considerations arising from current medical practice, the article argues that there is a need for open political debate on assisted death and voluntary euthanasia. The article also suggests ways that such a debate may be achieved while minimising any political impact on governments that are prepared at least to consider this issue.     

All Citizens are Created Equal,but Some are More Equal Than Others

Nationality is the legal bond between a person and a state that connotes full and equal membership of the political community. Yet, in the practice of states, not everyone who is admitted as a national enjoys the full package of rights attached, nor the same security of status. The phenomenon of inequality among citizens is particularly apparent when examining the question of how protected the legal bond itself is: citizenship by birth is more secure than citizenship acquired otherwise—such as by naturalisation—and mono citizens are less prone to withdrawal of nationality than persons with dual or multiple nationality. As nationality revocation gains new attention from states as a tool to counter terrorism, prompting much political, public and academic debate, the reality that this measure often applies only to particular sub-groups of citizens demands closer scrutiny. This article explores how law and practice on citizenship deprivation is to be evaluated against contemporary standards of international law. While states justify unequal application of citizenship deprivation measures by invoking the duty to avoid statelessness, this article shows that the application of other international standards such as non-discrimination and the prohibition of arbitrary deprivation of nationality calls into question the legitimacy of citizenship stripping as a security instrument. Finally, the article reflects on the broader implications of the current trend towards greater inequality of citizenship status as a reaction to the perceived threat that terrorism poses to the integrity of the state, discussing how the creation of different classes of citizen is in fact likely to have a deeper and more lasting impact on the foundations of liberal democracies.

     

表达渠道权与民主政治

表达渠道权是公民或社会组织为公开发表和传递信息而使用各种传播媒介、手段与方式的一项法律权利 ,也是民主进程中私人所有的一项基本权利。其能够丰富公众讨论 ,便利个人成长和民主进程的运转 ,进而保证民众对政治的广泛参与 ,使国家与公民之间建立良好的关系。然而 ,不可避免的是政府在创造和分配表达渠道权时会产生不适当地操控言论市场的情形。因特网的出现在一定程度上解决了这一民主进程的两难选择 ,实现了对言论自由的较少侵害和对公众讨论的丰富。