The medical licensing examination debate

National licensing examinations are typically large‐scale examinations taken early in a career or near the point of graduation, and, importantly, success is required to subsequently be able to practice. They are becoming increasingly popular as a method of quality assurance in the medical workforce, but debate about their contribution to patient safety and the improvement of healthcare outcomes continues. A systematic review of the national licensing examination literature demonstrates that there is disagreement between assessment experts about the strengths and challenges of licensing examinations. This is characterized by a trans‐Atlantic divide between the dominance of psychometric reliability assurance in North America and the wider interpretations of validity, to include consequences, in Europe. We conclude that the debate might benefit from refocusing to what a national licensing examination should assess: to achieve a balance between assessing a breadth of skills and the capacity for such skills in practice, and focusing less on reproducibility.     

The attack on community: The grooved debate

Before that, he served as Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. He was a White House advisor in the final year of the Carter Administration and is presently the president of the American Sociological Association. Among his best-known works are The Active Society; Public Policy in a New Key; Modern Organization; The Spirit of Community;and The Moral Dimension.     

国家——社会关系理论流变与理论论争

国家与社会关系的产生缘起于古希腊时期的广场政治,后来逐渐由一体走向分离。当代许多学者对国家与社会关系的研究重点着眼于对二者之间互动关系的梳理,以及该理论对于国家治理现代化的现实意义。殊不知,理论之争往往不仅仅在于两个理论之间的单纯对立关系,而是由其背后多个理论相互支撑的理论群进行博弈的结果。双方此消彼长,更能顺势者方能占据上风。自由主义自古至今贯穿于西方政治思想史中,而国家与社会关系的发展是与自由主义的发展及其他相关理论并驾齐驱的。     

The capitalism/socialism debate in East Asia

is producer and presenter of a weekly television summary of business in the Hong Kong legislature.     

The electoral consequences of two great crises

Who benefits from deep economic crises: the left, the right or neither? On the basis of evidence from elections in 1929–1933 and 2008–2013 in all states that were democracies in both periods, it is argued in this article that the electoral consequences of the Great Depression and the Great Recession were surprisingly similar: in both periods, right‐wing parties were at first more successful than left‐wing parties, although this effect only lasted for a few years. The manner in which a crisis develops over time should be taken into account when examining the effects of deep economic downturns on the electoral fortunes of the left and the right.     

Trade union power in Britain: The recent debate

It is frequently claimed in the media that the trade union movement is the dominant political force in Britain. Such conclusions are based upon impressionistic and subjective judgements rather than thorough academic analysis. Fortunately, there has been a resurgence of more serious study of the trade union relationship with, and influence over, government. The aim of this article is to review this literature and it is divided into four major parts: the strategies unions use in influencing government; the growing literature on the economic role of the unions; the effect of unions on government policy making; the power of the trade unions in relation to that of capital.     

The tax-spend debate: Time series evidence from state budgets

This paper examines the temporal relationship between revenues and expenditures for the forty-eight contiguous states over an annual period 1942 to 1992. Using an error-correction model, we find that the tax-spend hypothesis is supported for twenty-four states. The spend-tax hypothesis is valid for eight states while the fiscal synchronization hypothesis is supported for eleven states. The remaining five states failed the diagnostic tests for error-correction modeling.