美国和欧盟正在分道扬镳吗?--关于文化的概念及文化差异的思考

文化可以定义为一个成规系统,借助这一概念,可以将文化区分为不同的类别,从而清晰地描述和阐释两种或几种文化之间的同异。在伊拉克战争中的不同表现,凸显了美国与欧盟文化层面上的歧异,有学者将之归结为具有"现代"与"后现代"特征的战略文化之间的不同,这种观点值得进一步辨析。文化成规不是一成不变的,美国与欧盟的战略文化也必将随着全球语境的变化而变化。     

澳大利亚《信息技术证据管理指引》述评

在实行诉讼对抗制的国家，人们可以通过以下三种方法使信息技术证据成为保护企业利益的一种工具：(1)起诉，包括刑事诉讼；(2)法庭辩护；(3)为规则制定者和企业作出重要决策提供依据。然而，对于什么样的信息技术证据具有可采信性，人们仍有质疑。计算机法学正是研究如何确定、保存、分析及如何提交数字证据的一门新兴的学科。尽管传统上计算机法学被认为是一门滞后的学科，但是澳大利亚《信息技术证据管理指引》还是前瞻性地规定了能使电子证据效力最大化的系统生存周期的一些重要原则。     

Testing Explanations of Strategic Voting in Legislatures: A Reexamination of the Compromise of 1790

A difficult yet prevalent problem in legislative politics is how to assess explanations when observable actions may not represent true (and unobserved) legislator preferences. We present a method for analyzing the validity of theoretical/historical accounts that unifies theory, history, and measurement. We argue that approaches to testing accounts of legislative behavior which are theoretically and historically agnostic are not always best and present an approach which: (1) forms an explicit explanation of behavior (here a simple dynamic voting game) that yields estimable parameter constraints, and (2) tests these constraints using a customized empirical model that is as consistent as possible with the explanation. We demonstrate the method using legislative voting data from the first Congress (1789–1791). Using the idea of sophisticated equivalents from voting theory we subject the traditional account of the “Compromise of 1790” to a statistical test and find that there is reason to doubt the claim that legislators of the time believed the specified log roll was taking place. The results suggest that the capital location and assumption issues were resolved independently.     

A House Divided? Roll Calls,Polarization, and Policy Differences in the U.S. House, 1877–2011

The study of political conflict in legislatures is fundamental to understanding the nature of governance, but also difficult because of changes in membership and the issues addressed over time. Focusing on the enduring issue of civil rights in the United States since Reconstruction, we show that using current methods and measures to characterize elite ideological disagreements makes it hard to interpret or reconcile the conflicts with historical understandings because of their failure to adequately account for the policies being voted upon and the consequences of the iterative lawmaking process. Incorporating information about the policies being voted upon provides a starkly different portrait of elite conflict—not only are contemporary parties relatively less divided than is commonly thought, but the conflict occurs in a smaller, and more liberal, portion of the policy space. These findings have important implications for a broad range of work that uses elite actions to compare political conflict/polarization across time.