Governance Delegation Agreements: Shared Sovereignty as a Substitute for Limited Statehood

Governance delegation agreements—international treaties allowing external actors legal authority within host states for fixed terms—succeed in simple and, under certain conditions, complex state‐building tasks. These deals are well institutionalized and have input legitimacy because ratification requires sufficient domestic support from a ruling coalition. In order to obtain that input legitimacy, however, host states constrain external actors commensurate with their level of statehood: Stronger states delegate less legal authority. This article argues that these constraints, which produce joint rather than complete authority, require external actors to work within state structures rather than substituting for them, and thus make coordination of complex tasks more difficult. A quantitative overview of data on consent‐based peacekeeping missions complements a qualitative analysis focused on comparative case studies in Melanesia and Central America to test the theory. The results support the theory and suggest that these deals hold promise particularly for accomplishing complex tasks in especially weak states.     

German Federalism in Historical Perspective: Federalism as a Substitute for a National State

A German national state was founded comparatively late in themodern era. In 1871 the German princes formed the German Empire.Unde Prussian hegemony, the Empire remained dependent on itsmember states. The constitution of the Weimer Republic of 1919turned the relations between the federation and the states upsidedown. The Länder, as the constituent states close to beinga decentralized unitary state. The Nazi regime centralizd it.After World War II, the West Germans and the Western Alliesagreed on forming a federal type of government. There was, however,controversy about the kind of federalism to be established.The West German Basic Law retained the tradition of a secondfederal parliamentary chamber in which the Land governmentsare represented. Sovereignty is shared and exercised jointlyby the federation and the Länder in most domestic policyfields.     

A Method of Automated Nonparametric Content Analysis for Social Science

The increasing availability of digitized text presents enormous opportunities for social scientists. Yet hand coding many blogs, speeches, government records, newspapers, or other sources of unstructured text is infeasible. Although computer scientists have methods for automated content analysis, most are optimized to classify individual documents, whereas social scientists instead want generalizations about the population of documents, such as the proportion in a given category. Unfortunately, even a method with a high percent of individual documents correctly classified can be hugely biased when estimating category proportions. By directly optimizing for this social science goal, we develop a method that gives approximately unbiased estimates of category proportions even when the optimal classifier performs poorly. We illustrate with diverse data sets, including the daily expressed opinions of thousands of people about the U.S. presidency. We also make available software that implements our methods and large corpora of text for further analysis.     

The State of Enslavement: the East European Substitute for the State of Nature

Comparing the Soviet-type political system before the emergence of independent groups and movements with the state of nature in the contractarian tradition indicates that both these conditions havecommon features. The situation under the Soviet-type system is reminiscent of the state of nature since it has a pre-political, analytical, as well as a normative character. However, the Fact that the condition under the Soviet-type system is real and the state of nature is fictive poses a challenge to social contract orthodoxy which exclusively ascribes the pre-political and normative components to the state of nature. This interpretation renders invalid the main argument of the critics of contractarianism: that social contract theory is based upon the fictive state of nature and, therefore, upon the concept of an abstract human nature. Moreover, under special circumstances, it permits us to consider social contract theory not only as normative but also as empirical     

Applying a Two-Step Strategy to the Analysis of Cross-National Public Opinion Data

W. Phillips Shively Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, 1414 Social Sciences Bldg. 267 19th Ave. South, Minneapolis, MN 55455 email: kjlong{at}umich.edu (corresponding author) email: shively{at}polisci.umn.edu. In recent years, large sets of national surveys with sharedcontent have increasingly been used for cross-national opinionresearch. But scholars have not yet settled on the most flexibleand efficient models for utilizing such data. We present a two-stepstrategy for such analysis that takes advantage of the factthat in such datasets each "cluster" (i.e., country sample)is large enough to sustain separate analysis of its internalvariances and covariances. We illustrate the method by examininga puzzle of comparative electoral behavior—why does turnoutdecline rather than increase with the number of parties competingin an election (Blais and Dobryzynska 1998, for example)? Thisdiscussion demonstrates the ease with which a two-step strategyincorporates confounding variables operating at different levelsof analysis. Technical appendices demonstrate that the two-stepstrategy does not lose efficiency of estimation as comparedwith a pooling strategy.     

The Structure of Issue Attitudes Revisited: A Dimensional Analysis of Austrian Voters and Party Elites

In this article we analyze how issue attitudes of Austrian voters and political elites are ideologically structured. Our mass and elite data are based on the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES) and allow for direct comparisons of the demand side (voters) and the supply side (party elites). Testing four different models from the literature with Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), we find that politicians' attitudes correspond to two- as well as three-dimensional configurations with quite strongly correlated economic and cultural dimensions. Voters' attitudes, by contrast, are not explained by any of the four models. This result casts some doubt on the existence of any strong ideological structure of attitudes in the mass public and therefore also questions the use of abstract concepts such as left–right to study the attitudinal congruence of representatives and voters.     

Women as Political Leaders: a Bibliometric Analysis of the Literature

The research of female leaders in politics indicates the important changes in global politics, which started in 1970s and continues slowly. As more women are occupying positions of power, the academic interest in women’s style of leadership grows. Our study, based on bibliometric analysis, reflects the publications development on this issue from 1967 to 2017.     

政策扩散视角下的省直管县财政改革——基于20个省份数据的探索性分析

省直管县改革是优化地方政府组织结构、理顺政府间财政关系的重要改革举措.以公共政策创新扩散为视角,建立理论框架实证分析省直管县财政改革2003年至2012年间从政策试点到全面推广的改革进程及其影响因素.基于20个省份的数据,研究发现省域资源禀赋、管理幅度、邻居效应和省长的县级主官经历等因素在不同程度和方向上影响省直管县改革的政策采纳概率和扩散程度.     

Introducing a New Data Set: Budget Support Suspensions as a Sanctioning Device: An Overview from 1999 to 2014

This article presents a new, publicly available data set covering all budget support (BS) suspensions in the period 1999–2014. The data set covers 239 BS suspensions, involving 18 donors and 40 recipient countries. This article shows an aggregate picture of these suspensions, including the reasons why donors suspended, which donors have been active in suspending their BS, and which countries have been undergoing these aid sanctions. From this aggregate picture some patterns drawn out, substantiate a couple of things that have surfaced in the literature already. With 42% of BS suspensions in the Democracy and Human Rights category, it is clear that democratic governance has been a pertinent reason to legitimize BS suspensions. The large number of suspensions in some countries also indicates the unpredictability of budget support. The data set and the user guide can be downloaded at www.uantwerp.be/budget-support-suspensions .     

Big Data for Policy Analysis: The Good,The Bad,and The Ugly

Big data holds tremendous potential for public policy analysis. At the same time, its use prompts a number of issues related to statistical bias, privacy, equity, and governance, among others. Accordingly, there is a need to formulate, evaluate, and implement policies that not only mitigate the risks, but also maximize the benefits of using big data for policy analysis. This poses a number of challenges, which are highlighted in this essay.     

严复“自由为体,民主为用”命题之困境剖析

严复提出的自由为体,民主为用内含三个困境:终极目标上的全盘西化论、批判逻辑上的文明不可借鉴论和实现路径上的教育救国论。该命题不仅与统新故而视其通,苞中外而计其全相矛盾,而且没能真正切中中体西用的要害,其原因在于严复的体用观有着其内在的缺陷。     

Globalization as a Challenge for Public Choice Theory

Public choice theory in many ways provides a fruitful economicinstrumentarium to be applied to the phenomena of internalizationand globalization. International political economics offers muchpotential for the analysis of real and relevant aspects ininternational relationships. This paper sketches out a few selectedaspects of the globalization question for which public choicetheory could offer a useful explanatory contribution. However, itis made clear as well, that the concept of globalization presentsa substantial challenge for public choice in that only a limitedpart of the institutional change that has accompanied globalizationhas been explained endogenously.     

Understanding Democracy as a Prerequisite for Spreading Democracy

The cultural underpinnings of American democracy are discussed with emphasis on ideas made famous in Max Weber’s, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In particular there is emphasis on the way America built upon the British cultural tradition so that the American working class would not be dependent upon bread and circuses offered by a political elite, a tradition in Europe dating back to the Roman Empire. Instead cultural emphasis on moral integrity and the self-respect of the American working class, the underpinnings of moralistic individualism as a key component of democratic culture in America but not necessarily in many other parts of the world, is emphasized. These ideas are elaborated with discussion of a certain decay of these values in present-day America, and the problems the American government has had in conveying the importance of these values to other nations seeking to democratize partly under our influence.

网络极化现象研究——基于四个中文BBS论坛的内容分析

本文试图把"极化"这一概念引入网络政治传播的考察中,主要针对四个中文BBS论坛(强国深水、猫眼看人、天涯杂谈和新浪杂谈)政治讨论中的极端化态度分布状态进行描述与比较。结果显示,态度极化现象与论坛群体和特定的议题类别紧密相关。其中激进派聚集的论坛更容易出现极化;涉及"政府"的议题更容易在激进的论坛中出现极化,而在温和派占据主流的论坛则呈现非极化状态。同时,发帖积极性越高的ID越容易出现态度极化的现象;而且,网民的意见同质化程度越高,则群体极化的程度也就越高。     

政策网络治理视域下我国政府养老服务政策内容分析及优化

随着我国老龄化程度的加深,政府不断调整顶层制度设计,以期解决日趋复杂的养老问题。在制度设计中,养老服务政策成为一个重要议题。目前,我国养老服务政策领域呈现出"政策主体(治理主体)由一元走向多元,治理工具由单一走向复杂,治理结构由科层走向网络,治理机制由命令、管制走向信任与协商"的特征。然而,我国养老服务政策制定与实施仍存在"多元主体资源配置极度不平衡;利益诉求各自为政,缺乏信任机制;治理网络结构处于初建期,主体关系方向单一"等诸多不足。因此,政府在网络治理中,应承担起管理者角色;各利益相关方通过结盟,重新构建网络结构;建立开放的网络空间、形成深度参与机制,引入市场机制,提高政策执行效率。