Institutionalizing from the Middle: the Impacts of Provincial Legislation on Rural Grassroots Democracy in China

Nominal democratic institutions under non-democratic regimes vary across countries. This study intends to advance our understanding of such institutions by exploring the relevance of one aspect of the authoritarian regimes, government hierarchy. Focusing on village-level democratization in China, we investigate the intermediary role of the provincial level governments in shaping the variant outcomes of grassroots democracy across the country. Through an analysis of a national sample, we find that divergent provincial legislative interpretation of central policies is a key determinant of public access to power and democratic governance of village-level governments. Our finding suggests that authoritarian states can employ various institutions to gather information, accommodate local variations, and thus contain potential intra-government disagreement.     

Daily identity practices: Belarus and potato eaters

Food cultivation, preparation and consumption are important references for shaping national identity. Food is a crystallization of the history of a national or ethnic group, of its traditions, mentality, and religious adherence and of very pragmatic material elements reflecting the way of life of the group, for instance, climatic conditions and socio-economic levels. All elements of the history of a group are transmitted and experienced in daily rituals relating to food. Food has strong symbolic, quasi-sacred associations in many cultures: for Slavic peoples bread is a very important symbol, and in Belarus potatoes are known as "the second bread".The role played by banal everyday identity rituals is very important in complex political contexts, where identity building processes aimed at the transformation of a community into a nation-state with common identification denominators are not endorsed by political elite. Belarus is an extremely difficult case from the point of view of identity building: a country without a history (Zaprudnik, 1993), without a nation (Marples, 1999), without an identity (Bekus, 2010). In the Belarusian context, food - especially food which is cheap, rustic and simple to cultivate, such as potatoes - is an important identity marker.     

思维实验:罗尔斯正义原则的论证逻辑——兼谈《正义论》与政治哲学的复兴

20世纪中期的政治哲学受到了来自行为主义的强烈批判,后者认为真正的政治学应当是价值中立的政治科学,这直接导致了政治哲学的衰落。以罗尔斯的《正义论》为代表,政治哲学走上了复兴的道路。罗尔斯对于正义原则的论证逻辑,超越了古典契约论和功利主义的论证逻辑,其"思维实验"的方法具有非自明性、可反复性、结论唯一性等特点,这是其对传统政治哲学的超越。尽管赞成与反对的声音不一,但是大部分学者都承认其论证逻辑有着较强的说服力。     

Online Participation Chaos: A Case Study of Chinese Government-Initiated E-Polity Square

The research examines a government-initiated online engagement program in China, mainly including its history, mechanism, and how netizens participated in it. To clearly address the participation scenario, a framework is proposed to further explore the quality of participation. The result shows that participation chaos is prevalent with poor-quality proposals. A government censorship exists all the time and changes with the popularity of the forum. It also implies that the purpose of a Chinese government-initiated online engagement forum may be varied, one for engagement and the other for maintaining stability, which partly attributes to the online participation chaos.     

Formalization and consistency heighten organizational rule following: Experimental and survey evidence

This study examines the attributes of organizational rules that influence rule following. Rule following fosters organizational effectiveness by aligning individual behaviours with organizational preference. While a range of theoretical explanations have been offered for rule following, the characteristics of rule design and implementation have received less empirical attention. Borrowing from the green tape theory of effective rules, this study examines the influence of two particular characteristics—rule formalization and rule consistency—on rule following. Three studies, which include two vignette experiments and a survey of two local government organizations, provide the data for the research. The results suggest that rule formalization and rule consistency independently increase rule following, with mixed evidence of interaction effects. The broad implication is that public managers must attend to both rule design and implementation to foster organizational rule following.     

Policy roles: an analysis of policy formulators and policy implementors

This paper presents an empirical analysis of individuals in policy formulating and policy implementing roles. Data for the comparison are from interviews with a random sample of 119 New Zealand middle-level public administrators from 27 government departments.The individuals in the policy formulating roles were slightly younger; however, those in the formulating and implementing roles varied little from each other in terms of social background, educational attainment and career patterns. Few differences were evident in regard to job satisfaction, decisional authority, and hierarchical relations. Significant differences between policy formulators and policy implementors were discovered in terms of work load, career aspirations, and awareness of political influences in governmental policymaking.From the evidence of this study, the New Zealand administrative system does not allocate policy formulating roles to individuals different from those who implement policies. Differences between formulators and implementors in the New Zealand system appear to stem from the nature of the work of the two policy roles.     

Turning against the Union? The impact of the crisis on the Eurosceptic vote in the 2014 European Parliament elections

The 2014 European Parliament elections were held against the backdrop of the worst economic crisis in post-war Europe. The elections saw an unprecedented surge in support for Eurosceptic parties. This raises the question of whether the crisis, and the EU’s response to it, can explain the rise of Eurosceptic parties. Our analysis of the 2014 European Election Study demonstrates that the degree to which individuals were adversely affected by the crisis and their discontent with the EU’s handling of the crisis are major factors in explaining defection from mainstream pro-European to Eurosceptic parties in these elections. This suggests that far from being second-order national elections concerned only with domestic politics, European issues had a significant impact on vote choices.     

Organized interests and administrative rulemaking: the state of Wisconsin's lobbyists and coalitions

This study examines interest groups undertaking lobbying activity focused on administrative rulemaking. The analysis utilizes a dataset composed of observations made during the 2009–2010 Wisconsin Legislative Session, including the entire population of groups lobbying during this time period. This research examines the participants, efforts, and coalitions utilized when groups engaged in lobbying activity related to rulemaking. Although scholars have examined interest group activity focused on rulemaking at the federal level, little work has focused on this behavior in the states. This study aims to further the understanding of this activity. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Responding to the New Europe and the Crisis: The Adaptation of Sub-national Governments' Strategies and its Effects on Inter-governmental Relations in Spain

This article analyses the evolution of the institutional setting that the Spanish multi-level system provides for regional European Union (EU) adaptation, and the effects that recent developments of the EU (the Eastern enlargement, the Treaty reform process and the Euro-zone crisis) have had on the more or less pro-European positions and adaptive strategies of Spanish regions and on inter-governmental arrangements. It thus describes the increasing institutionalization of regional participation and EU policy coordination, both at the domestic and supra-national level, and the evolution of regional strategies, looking at its effects both on the degree of vertical and horizontal coordination, and the actual relative power and discretion of both levels of government. It argues that regional strategies have increasingly become more defensive and less pro-European and that increasing participation in European matters seemed to have favoured multi-lateralism and increased coordination without having produced further centralization until the recent crisis and associated budget consolidation targets induced new coordination requirements and a centralization of power towards the central government and EU authorities. This has, as a side-effect, reinforced some centrifugal tendencies of the system and therefore may affect the operation of IGR.