我国黑社会性质组织犯罪防控对策的反思与调整

我国自改革开放以来已经开展了三次全国性的专项斗争，但是一味地强调从重从快惩治黑社会犯罪分子，而没有其他的衔接性预防措施，从长远来看并非治理良策。因此，借鉴国内外的经验和教训，我们有必要重新认识黑社会犯罪的发展规律，在黑社会性质组织犯罪防治对策上应坚持“四个结合”的策略，并加强标本对策的研究。     

Development and Consequences of Referendum Campaigns in Switzerland, 1981-1999

Since the early 1990s, new forms of referendum campaigns have emerged in the Swiss political arena. In this paper, we examine how referendum campaigns have transformed in Switzerland, focusing on a number of features: their intensity, duration and inclusiveness (i.e., the variety of actors involved). These features are assumed to change in the long run in response to societal changes and in the short run as a function of variations in elite support. We further argue that public knowledge of ballot issues depends on the characteristics of campaigns. To formally test our hypotheses, we draw on advertisement campaigns in six major Swiss newspapers in the four weeks preceding each ballot from 1981 to 1999 and develop a structural equation model. We indeed find that the duration of referendum campaigns has increased over time, while their inclusiveness has decreased. Most importantly, we find that pub­lic knowledge is strongly related to the characteristics of campaigns.     

The electoral consequences of racial fluidity

Brazilian politicians have seemingly adopted new racial identities en masse in recent years. What are the electoral consequences of asserting membership in a new racial group? In the Brazilian case, politicians who change how they racially identify themselves and secure greater access to campaign resources may become more electorally competitive. If voters learn a politician has changed their self-declared race, however, the politician’s reputation is likely to be tarnished and their chances of victory are likely to decline. Building on evidence that voters acquire greater information about election front-runners in high-profile contests than other types of politicians, I expect incumbents running for executive offices who change how they publicly identify themselves to suffer an electoral penalty. Drawing on data from local elections in Brazil, I find limited evidence that voters penalize city council candidates who adopt new racial identities. I show that incumbent mayors seeking reelection, however, receive significantly fewer votes after they assert membership in new racial groups.     

Daring to Be Heard: Advertorials by Organized Interests on the Op-Ed Page of The New York Times , 1985-1998

Advertorials are a form of outside lobbying that organized interests use to influence policymakers and attentive publics. It is apparent from their popularity that organized interests consider them to be an effective form of political communication. This article analyzes 2,805 organized interest advertorials that appeared on the lower right quadrant of The New York Times op-ed page from 1985 to 1998. Advertorials take two broad forms: (a) image advertorials, which are paid messages by organized interests designed to create a favorable climate of opinion, and (b) advocacy advertorials, which are sponsored messages intended to win support for an interest's viewpoints on controversial issues. Typologies of advertorials (11 categories), organized interests (21 categories), corporate and noncorporate economic interests (29 categories), and policy content (28 categories) are used to document annually and over time who is sponsoring advertorials, what types of advertorials are being used, what interests avail themselves of advertorial campaigns, which issue areas are receiving attention, what images and policy messages are being communicated, which organizations sponsor the most advertorials, and the timing of such political advertising campaigns. We find over time an increasing number of advertorials, an increasing number and diversity of sponsoring interest organizations, an increasing trend toward advocacy advertorials, a continuing but declining sponsorship dominance by corporate interests, a shifting policy issue emphasis that corresponds to events in the political environment, and evidence that organized interests employ a variety of sponsorship strategies.     

Attention to Counter-Attitudinal Messages in a State Election Campaign

Research following the "selective exposure" model has focused on avoidance of political messages with which a person might disagree. But positive attention to such "counter-attitudinal" messages is worthy of study, in part because normative theories of democracy value exposure to information that might disturb citizens' political predispositions. Surveys of youth (N = 417) and parents (N = 430) examine attention to newspaper, television, and Web messages about candidates. While there is somewhat more attention to messages about and for a person's favored political candidate or party, forms of political involvement (knowledge, curiosity, and discussion) that predict this "attitude-consistent" attention also predict counter-attitudinal attention at least as strongly. Parents' education and students' exposure to civics lessons also predict both kinds of attention. These results suggest that attention to counterattitudinal political messages is worthy of further study as an important goal of political socialization and a criterion of citizen performance in democracy.     

Assessing the Television Campaign: The Impact of Party Election Broadcasting on Voters' Opinions in the 1997 British General Election

Although paid television and radio political advertising is banned in the United Kingdom, parties fielding sufficient candidates are entitled to free air time during election campaigns for a fixed number of party election broadcasts (PEBs). Over the years, parties have experimented with a variety of different PEB formats. But the impact of PEBs on voters is underresearched. This article therefore analyzes the influence of PEB viewing in the 1997 British General Election. Though a majority do not view PEBs, those who do are influenced by them, especially in terms of their evaluations of parties and their leaders: Other things being equal, viewers of a party's PEBs become more favorably disposed to the party and its leader than those who do not see the broadcast. Labour and Conservative PEBs have no impact on vote intentions, however. But viewers of Liberal Democrat broadcasts become more likely to support that party. We speculate that this reflects different background levels of media exposure for the major parties as compared to the third party.     

Referendums on Independence, 1860–2011

There have been more than 50 independence referendums since the middle of the 19th Century when Texas, Virginia and Tennessee—albeit unsuccessfully—voted to leave the USA. A handful of plebiscites were held in each decade after 1945, but most independence referendums were held after the break‐down of communism. Most have resulted in majorities for independence. However, such plebiscites have been rare in countries with established systems of democratic government and the results may not be a fair reflection of the views of the voters. When referendums have been held in democratic countries, they have often resulted in a no‐vote (though Montenegro is an exception to the rule). Referendums have on a few occasions resulted in the exacerbation of ethnic conflict, such as in Bosnia‐Herzegovina and in East Timor. But generally speaking referendums are not correlated with civil war; indeed, war resulted in only 13 percent of the cases.     

The first one wins: Distilling the primacy effect

Research has shown that in proportional, flexible list systems, ballot list position influences electoral success. In this paper we investigate to what extent this is due to the primacy effect, a psychological bias towards the first option in a list. We also examine alternative explanations such as the electoral beneficial traits these candidates share and extra media coverage they receive. Using data from the 2014 Belgian elections, we find that candidates with higher ballot list positions indeed score better because they have more political experience and receive more media attention. We also find strong evidence for the primacy effect which is caused by a confirmation bias as well as ballot list position being the easiest heuristic for voters.     

Coping with lengthy ballots

Given voters' limited cognitive abilities, the learning environments voters face may have implications for how voters learn and make decisions. One prominent feature of American elections is the variation in the length of the ballot across jurisdictions and elections. This paper explores the consequences of lengthy ballots on the ability of voters to learn about candidates. Using an experimental design and a dynamic information board (Lau and Redlawsk, 2006), subjects participate in a mock election where they are asked to gather information about a single election or multiple elections. The results indicate that while voters compare more information as ballot length increases, they spend significantly less time learning about individual pieces of candidate information.     

Transforming international communications strategies

The strategy used by governments to communicate with foreign populations has changed dramatically in the twentieth century. The need perceived by governments to use such a strategy in the first place derived from numerous social changes in the 150 years before World War I, most particularly the increased role played in politics by the masses organized in nation‐states. The shifting strategy of persuasive communication since then forms part of a broader transformation of international political communication which includes technological change, organizational developments, and absolute but not necessarily relative growth in international communications transactions.

The predominant strategy developed in World War I was propaganda. It used fairly straightforward appeals to rationality, sense of morality, and such important but readily accessible emotions as hatred. Its excesses, especially the wide dissemination of atrocity stories which did not bear up well under later dispassionate examination, at once made all propaganda suspect and alerted governments to the necessity of refining their communicative techniques for the eventuality of future international conflicts.

The years before and during World War II saw international communicators—especially Goebbels in Nazi Germany and the Anglo‐American psychological warriors—develop a new strategy which utilized new knowledge about the psychological roots of human behavior. In addition to straightforward appeals to the consciousness of individuals, they sought to manipulate their audiences by playing on their deep‐seated desires and fears. Of particular importance for Nazi Germany were the allegedly racial ties of the individual to a people and the need for figures of authority.

First major experiments were made in World War II to develop an even more basic strategy of international communication: structuring the situation in which people learn their predispositions, perspectives, and behaviors. Its basic idea is to create situations in which the communicator does not have to tell the targeted audience anything at all, but in which the audience, left to its own devices, can only come to the conclusions desired by the communicator. Thus strategic bombing sought to destroy the morale of the enemy's home front and, through that action, to weaken its war‐making capacity. The postwar occupation of Germany originally sought to create a new environment in which Germans could be reeducated to democracy. Subsequent emphasis has also been on communications aimed at generating certain predispositions, such as a desire for consumer goods or a particular political style, which then spawn appropriate perspectives and behaviors.

This new strategy of structural communication has its limits. The most important of these is the difficulty of controlling all aspects of a foreign population's communications environment (which includes traditions, face‐to‐face networks, and conflicting sources of information). The potential importance of the strategy nonetheless makes it likely that governments will continue to work toward its development and implementation for their own international political purposes.