网络民主热的冷思考

网络民主热潮的背后,折射出了现实政治的诸多困境.它的“一枝独秀”很大程度上缘于现实参与渠道的不畅通、多元民主力量的缺失以及代议机构功能不足等,它的有效治理取决于现实政治的容纳和对接,有赖于多元民主力量的壮大,以及各种民主形式之间的优势互补.     

The Dynamics of Change: Class, Politics and Civil Society—From Marx to post-Marxism

This paper discusses how Marxist understandings of politics and civil society, particularly Marx's own work, can contribute to understanding the dynamics of political change in contemporary capitalist democracies. While briefly exploring the conceptual problems contained in the political-philosophical agenda set out in Marx's earliest works, the paper argues that his subsequent examinations of civil society and class relations are grounded in a political economy of capitalist development which retains considerable salience. The possibilities of a post-Marxist politics of civil society are assessed in this light, using the example of recent neo-liberal and neo-conservative assaults on the welfare state to indicate the ways in which membership of civil society is itself a critical focus of political contestation. A politics of civil society (for example, contemporary 'third way' strategies) lacks any substantive democratic potential, without the type of radical political economy developed by Marx.     

Neo-liberalism and the Decline of Democratic Governance in Australia: A Problem of Institutional Design?

This paper is a preliminary attempt to evaluate changing patterns of democratic governance, at least in Westminster-style parliamentary settings, and possibly more generally. It has two specific purposes: first, to propose a paradigm for evaluating the empirical evolution of democratic governance; and second, to illustrate the explanatory potential of this paradigm through a mini-case study of changing patterns of governance in one particular polity. The conceptual framework is drawn from March and Olsen's eponymous study (1995) from which polar ('thick' and 'thin') forms of democratic governance are derived. Four conjectures about its evolution are then explored. First, in its mass party phase, the pattern of democratic governance approximated the 'thick' pole. Second, the subsequent evolution of democratic politics has been in the direction of the 'thin' (minimalist or populist) pole. Third, the cause of this shift was a failure to adapt political institutions to changing citizen identities, which was masked by the ascendancy amongst political elites of the neo-liberal account of governance. Fourth, the paper considers the means by which democratic governance might be renewed. The approach is applied to explain changes in Australian politics over recent decades.     

孙中山五权宪制中的国民大会

国民大会是孙中山后期五权宪制架构中的一个重要权力结构。从这一结构所承载的功能来看，它首先是一种“民主”的制度安排；同时，作为中央政制中针对政府权力的“结构性制约因素”，它又具有“宪政”的意义。章力图分析这一机构所折射出的政治理念的基本取向及其自身存在的问题。     

坚持科学执政、民主执政、依法执政——兼论我国社会主义民主政治建设问题

坚持科学执政、民主执政、依法执政,是发展社会主义民主政治的必然要求和必要条件,也是推进国家治理体系和治理能力现代化的关键所在。为此,要把党的领导方式和执政方式嵌入到社会主义民主和法治的制度框架之中,把科学执政、民主执政、依法执政有机统一起来,把“为人民执政”和“靠人民执政”有机统一起来。其前提是澄清我国民主政治建设的一些重大理论和实践问题,在知行合一的前提下不失时机地推进社会主义民主政治建设。     

From ‘Judicial Mind’ to ‘Democratic Soul’: Law and Politics on the Bureaucratic Frontline

This article considers the relationship between law and democratic politics as manifest in the practice of ‘street‐level bureaucracy’. By glancing back to debates about citizenship and public administration between the two world wars, it sets contemporary concerns about the political constitution in broader context. In doing so, it discloses a fundamental division between conceptions of the state derived from Roman jurisprudence on the one hand, and ancient Athenian political practice on the other. It finds in the tragic dilemmas posed for street‐level bureaucrats—by the competing claims on their values—a test of individual moral agency and of democracy as the management of diversity. It concludes that what is at stake in our estimation of street‐level bureaucracy is not so much the purity of the ‘judicial mind’ as the complexity of the ‘democratic soul’ and the ‘connected society’.     

马克思主义视角下的当代西方民主理论评析

当代西方主要民主观念和理论体系极为庞杂,各种学说目不暇接,代表人物流派层出不穷。用马克思主义的视角观察与评价西方的民主观念和民主理论,是我们研究西方政治观念的基本出发点和方法。西方式民主是在西方社会这块独特的土壤上培育出来的,是一种特殊的、历史的政治现象,有其历史和社会局限性,并不具有普遍适用性。在当代中国政治发展过程中,不能照搬西方的民主体制和价值观念,应当树立科学、正确的民主观。从方法上讲,必须坚定阶级的立场、历史的观点、全面的观点和过程的观点。只有这样,才能真正有助于推动中国特色社会主义民主政治的发展。     

浅析中国市场经济发展过程中的政治民主化

市场经济的迅猛发展使我国的经济结构、社会生活、大众心态等发生了重大变化。经济的深刻转型客观上要求民主政治建设与市场经济发展同步。基于我国复杂的历史背景和发展现状,我国政治民主化在经历了长期、曲折的过程之后,必然会逐步探索出一种新型的、现代化的社会主义民主政治体制,从而完善我国社会主义民主政治。     

The Political Quarterly, 2009 Lecture: Doing Politics Differently

A discussion of how politics is done in Britain, and how it could be done differently. It explores the relationship between culture and structure in politics, and between strong government and effective accountability. The argument is that the concentration on structures can lead to a neglect of the importance of political culture. It suggests that there are three democratic levels, and that Britain does better on one than on the others; and identifies a range of democratic issues to be tackled. It concludes by suggesting that even without major instrumental changes there are cultural changes that would make a difference to how politics is done in Britain.     

制度体系视野下的民主政治

从制度体系看民主政治,是推进国家治理现代化、促进中国特色社会主义民主政治科学发展的一个重要视角,具有重要的方法论意义。民主是一套把各相关元素有机地组合在一起,体现“主权在民”或“人民当家作主”原则的制度体系。从制度体系的角度能够更加准确地把握中国民主政治建设的特殊性,也标示了进一步完善中国特色社会主义民主政治的根本方向。     

Policing Academics: The Arkhè of Transformation in Academic Ranking

This article attempts a properly critical and political analysis of the “police power” immanent to the form and logic of academic rankings, and which is reproduced in the extant academic literature generated around them. In contrast to the democratising claims made of rankings, this police power short-circuits the moment of democratic politics and establishes the basis for the oligarchic power of the State and its status quo. Central in this founding political moment is the notion of the Arkhè, a necessarily asymmetric “distribution of the sensible” that establishes the basis of the political order, in this case an oligarchic political order. Drawing on Foucault and Rancière, the article argues for a necessary “dissensus” with both the ranking practice and its attendant academic literature, as the first step towards a politics of ranking that is properly critical, and therefore genuinely political.     

政治稳定视阈下腐败官员和资产外逃的惩防追缴机制建设

腐败的本质是公权私用,是权力与权利关系的异化。腐败官员与腐败资产外逃严重影响民众对于廉洁政治建设的信心,对我国的政治稳定造成严重的负面影响,鉴于此,惩防腐败对国家的政治稳定至关重要。目前,腐败行为的结构性转型使得我国对腐败官员跨境外逃和资产转移的惩防难度增大,因此,要认真对待社会转型带来的制度风险和利益冲突,正视权力结构存在的问题,健全权力运行制约和监督体系,改革政治体制,依靠民主政治和公民有序政治参与的扩大,促成对政府官员责任的落实和监督。将惩防跨境腐败上升到法治的高度,进一步完善并落实我国政府官员家庭财产申报制度,完善户籍管理、护照管理和出入境管理等制度。要在国际法和国际条约框架内,加强国际司法合作。     

政治文化视角下儒家"宽容"精神对民主政治的消极影响

儒家思想中富含宽容精神。宽容是对异己价值和权利的尊重，这与西方现代民主价值是一致的，但儒家因宽容精神而形成“无对、不争、礼让”的政治文化，显然与“民主政治其实也是一种‘对立冲突’的文化”不符，不利于民主政治的建设。     

Accountability in World Politics1

World politics has never been a democratic realm. Now, with interdependence and globalization prompting demands for global governance, the lack of global democracy has become an important public issue. Yet the domestic analogy is unhelpful since the conditions for electoral democracy, much less participatory democracy, do not exist on a global level. Rather than abandoning democratic principles, we should rethink our ambitions. First, we should emphasize, in our normative as well as our positive work, the role played by information in facilitating international cooperation and democratic discourse. Second, we should define feasible objectives such as limiting potential abuses of power, rather than aspiring to participatory democracy and then despairing of its impossibility. Third, we should focus as much on the powerful entities that are the core of the problem, including multinational firms and states, as on multilateral organizations, which often are the focus of criticism. Finally, we need to think about how to design a pluralistic accountability system for world politics that relies on a variety of types of accountability: supervisory, fiscal, legal, market, peer and reputational. A challenge for contemporary political science is to design such a system, which could promote both democratic values and effective international cooperation.     

What the Age of Populism Means for Our Liberal Democracy

Populism has leapt from fringe protest to shaping, even dominating, mainstream politics in just a few years. Behind this political and social upheaval is an economic and political settlement that has failed to deliver good jobs, life chances and sustainable communities in many parts of the country, particularly outside urban centres. The failure of mainstream political parties to build a new settlement following the financial crash in 1998 has left a vacuum which now threatens the foundations of liberal, representative democracy. Progressive politicians need to build a new pluralist settlement based on a radical devolution of power that allows decision making to become less remote, more responsive and brings capital under greater democratic control.     

Reinventing Pluralism: Consensus,Hegemony, and the Politics of Affirmation

As inequalities in the United States have intensified in recent decades, Washington, DC’s advocacy system has thrived. Why has this proliferation of interest groups failed to deliver more substantive equality? The dominant response to this question typically cites the advocacy realm’s “upper-class accent,” portraying interest group representation as imbalanced and unresponsive to a broad range of voices. Yet this prevailing account—which I term “post- pluralist”—does not sufficiently explore the inegalitarian ways that neoliberalism shapes contemporary political advocacy. To this end, this article builds upon post-pluralist and post-Marxist insights to outline the advocacy system’s “politics of affirmation.” Using recent antigay legislation to explore this concept, I argue that today’s political advocacy circumscribes, rather than enlivens, prevailing standards of democratic participation by mobilizing hegemonic, neoliberal expressions of democratic citizenship. The article concludes by outlining how groups might pursue a transformative politics in order to destabilize neoliberalism’s hegemony.     

Lokale Politik und die Sozialisation demokratischer Einstellungen in Europa

The legitimacy of European democracies is challenged by a fading away of their citizens’ support (see Putnam et al. 2000). This phenomenon of declining support might even become more severe when formerly national political competencies are moved away to supranational institutions like the European Union. In this situation the local level gains importance. Can local government be a “training-ground” for positive democratic attitudes that strengthens political support also at higher levels of government? And is local autonomy a tool to foster this support function of local politics? Using comparative survey data on local and national political attitudes in Europe as well as macro data on local autonomy these questions will be investigated. The results show a remarkable socialization function of local politics, which is especially strong concerning feelings of local political competence. However, positive effects from local autonomy that support this democratic support function of local politics are hardly to be found.     

Recasting German federalism? The politics of fiscal decentralization in post-unification Germany

Why did the ideas of fiscal decentralization gain such political currency in Germany in the late 1990s but meet such a relatively dismal political fate by the Summer of 2001? In answering this question, I propose a framework centered around the interaction of ideas and state institutions to study the politics of fiscal decentralization in advanced democratic nation-states. First, I show that the new set of politically-charged ideas of fiscal decentralization which gained political weight in Germany in the late 1990s were driven by economic problems associated with German unification, the increasing popularity of “fiscal federalism” in German policy circles, and a centerperiphery conflict within German political parties. Second, my analysis explains the political failure of these ideas despite their apparent popularity among political and policy elites. Here, I focus on the role of the upper house of the German parliament in order to explain why these ideas have had such little policy success. After demonstrating that the long-standing tradition of “cooperative” federalism has largely survived German unification, the paper concludes by discussing the potential impact of the European Union’s 1997 Growth and Stability Pact on German federalism.     

Neither Seen Nor Heard: Children's Citizenship in Contemporary Democracies*

This article addresses the subject of children's citizenship in liberal democracies. While children may lack full capability to act in the capacity of citizens, the political status to which they have been relegated leaves much to be desired. Paternalist policies dictate that children be represented politically by their parents, leaving them as or more vulnerable and excluded from private life as women were under coverture. Lacking independent representation or a voice in politics, children and their interests often fail to be understood because the adults who do represent them conflate, or substitute, their own views for those of children. Compounding this damage is the tendency for democratic societies to view children not as an ever-present segment of the populace, but rather as future adults. This encourages disregard for children's interests. Until democratic societies establish a better-defined and comprehensive citizenship for children, along with methods for representation that are sensitive to the special political circumstances faced by children, young people will remain ill-governed and neglected by democratic politics.     

Political Skills or Lying and Manipulation? The Choreography of the Northern Ireland Peace Process

The 'real war' and 'propaganda war' fought over Northern Ireland for thirty years polarised party and public opinion. The key dilemma faced by politicians during the recent peace process has been how to wind down the 'war' and win sufficient party and public support for an accommodation between unionists and nationalists which falls so far short of previous expectations. Scripts telling contrasting stories have been prepared to convince rival republican and unionist audiences to support the peace process. In addition, the pro-Agreement parties have attempted to shift opinion towards accommodation through a range of political skills and choreography. Key competing parties and governments have sometimes co-operated back stage while front stage they have on occasion 'play acted' conflict between each other. The political skills, or lying and manipulation, by which the peace process has been driven forward have been uncovered creating public distrust in the political process. Realists see such political deception as an inevitable part of politics and permissible on the grounds that the ends justify the means. Absolutists attack the 'spin, lying and manipulation' of the peace process as an assault on democracy. A third democratic realist position argues that sometimes moral leadership requires doing wrong to do right but the gap between 'truth' and 'spin' should be narrowed. A more open and honest politics would not only be more accountable and democratic but also effective in advancing the peace process.