External dimensions of European environmental policy: An analysis of environmental treaty ratification by third states

The European Union has become an important leader in international environmental affairs – particularly through the negotiation of multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) with favourable terms. In this article, EU environmental leadership is studied from a new perspective, focusing on the ratification stage of environmental regime formation. Specifically, it investigates whether the EU is also capable of motivating third states to join its preferred MEAs. It is argued that third states join the EU's preferred MEAs to signal their compliance with EU environmental standards in an effort to become eligible for various rewards that the EU could potentially offer, including a credible membership perspective, access to its lucrative markets, and aid and assistance. The argument is tested by examining the ratification behaviour of 25 non‐EU Member States with regard to all 21 MEAs negotiated under the auspices of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE). The results provide robust support for the theory that EU rewards motivate third states to ratify these treaties. The results withstand a number of statistical tests, even when alternative explanatory factors such as trade intensities, transnational communication and geographic proximity are controlled for. The study is the first large‐scale demonstration of the EU's external influence at the ratification stage of environmental regime formation. By identifying three different channels of EU influence, the research permits a more refined understanding of the EU's role as a promoter of environmental protection standards.     

China's Strategic Censorship

While it is often assumed that authoritarian regimes inevitably fear and restrict media independence, permitting watchdog journalism can actually help such regimes maintain power by improving governance. Yet such a strategy risks facilitating a coordinated uprising if discontent is revealed to be widespread. A formal model shows that under some conditions, a regime optimally permits investigative reporting on lower‐level officialdom, adjusting how much reporting is allowed depending on the level of underlying social tensions. This strategy yields many of the benefits of free media without risking overthrow. An extension shows why an increase in uncontrollable information, such as from the Internet, may result in a reduction in media freedom. The model sheds light on important aspects of China's media policy and its evolution and on authoritarian media control more broadly.     

Strategic political commentary

I model the media’s role in transmitting information to voters in a strategic framework. Media outlets in which commentators speak primarily to voters of like type face strong incentives to reveal private information about political choices truthfully, while “mainstream” outlets observed by all types of voters face mixed incentives. Also, the number of preference-matched news outlets determines the informativeness of the mainstream media; a general increase in the number of news outlets does not necessarily improve the quality of information conveyed by the media. The model also rationalizes why commentators of a single political preference predominate in the mainstream media.     

论战略思维

战略思维是各级领导干部都必须具备的思维素质.然而,长期以来因关于战略思维的定义存在缺陷,使部分领导干部特别是一些基层领导干部把是否具有战略思维看成是无关紧要的;从培训轮训干部的主渠道即党校和行政学院的教学实践看,抓好战略思维的训练被认为就是抓好"国际国内若干重大现实和战略问题的研究和讨论",这在一定程度上削弱了党校和行政学院在培养领导干部战略思维能力方面的功能.实际上,研究和讨论重大现实和战略问题需要战略思维而不等于战略思维本身.针对上述情况,本文从分析战略思维的深刻内涵入手,阐述了各级领导干部提高战略思维能力的必要性、重要性和现实途径.     

Partisan politics and treaty ratification: The acceptance of International Labour Organisation conventions by industrialised democracies, 1960–1996

Abstract. This article looks at the political and economic determinants of the ratification of International Labour Organisation conventions by 17 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries since 1960. Two well-known models of intra-governmental decision making – the veto player model and the portfolio allocation model – provide alternative assumptions regarding the political process. Results from stratified Cox estimation of the ratification hazard suggest that the latter model is more appropriate than the former. They indicate that partisan preferences of government parties have a huge influence on ratification probabilities. Among economic determinants, the unemployment rate and the sectoral composition of employment exert a significant impact, but its size differs according to the government's policy position.     

基于战略地图的战略性绩效管理研究——以GW公司为例

通过战略地图来描述GW公司的战略,实现平衡计分卡四个层面(财务、客户、内部流程、学习成长)的整合,分解关系战略重点的绩效目标和指标,构建一个具有共同语言基础的可视化战略地图。     

Strategic Voting in Open Primaries

The purpose of an open primary is to incorporate more moderatevotes into the primary elections. This intention may backfirewhen nonparty members strategically participate in theprimary, and the result of an open primary might become even moreextreme than when nonparty members are not allowed to participate.Realizing this, the party members might also votestrategically to counter-react. If this occurs, then it mightactually coordinate the votes of the party's supporters. Theeffect of strategic voting behavior on the result of aprimary depends on the size of the party, turnout rate ofnonparty members, the positions of the candidates and theproportion of voters who vote strategically. Strategic votingbehavior can sometimes improve social welfare.     

夕阳产业与战略创新

企业发展战略是一个动态的系统,必然随着产业生命周期的变化而变化,如成长期的扩张战略和衰退期的撤退战略等等.     

Strategic Voting in Scandinavian Parliaments

Increasingly a case is being made that voting systems are highly manipulable —whether by strategic voting, agenda setting, or vote trading. Yet there exists little hard evidence on the actual extent of manipulation in real world settings¹ To a large degree this lack of evidence is a result of voting methods that allow only partial recovery of individual preferences over multiple alternatives and of a natural desire of legislators not to publicize misrepresentation of preferences or strategic agenda setting. Yet if we are to understand the empirical relevance of recent advances in the theory of voting, attempts must be made to apply new theoretical work to real world voting situations. In this paper we attempt to do this for voting in Scandinavian legislatures.
Our major concern is with effects of the order of voting on legislative proposals and with strategic voting that takes advantage of existing voting orders. Two distinct approaches are used. First, we present a detailed analysis of three situations in the Swedish parliament in which strategic voting was relevant. From these we conclude that when manipulation occurs in the Swedish context, it is not by altering the order of voting or by the creation of new, confounding alternatives, but by using strategic voting to take advantage of existing voting circumstances. Second, we take a more sweeping but less detailed look at voting in the Scandinavian legislatures. It appears from this analysis that the major way in which strategic voting is avoided is by limiting the number of alternatives to two.     

Strategic Terror and Amateur Psychology

Terror is defined as deliberate acts of violence designed to create a psychological effect—terror—with the intention of causing a shift in the target's attitudes and behaviour. A distinction is drawn between tactical terrorism, when such acts are undertaken as part of a multifaceted campaign, and strategic terrorism, where they are undertaken as an independent means of achieving the desired political ends. This follows a familiar distinction in airpower theory. A set of historical examples from both airpower and terrorism, as well as the fictional works of H. G. Wells and Joseph Conrad, is used to demonstrate the reliance on amateur psychology, concerning the likely social responses to forms of attack. This helps explain why strategic terror is rarely successful, though tactical terror can be.     

Strategic Misspecification in Regression Models

Common regression models are often structurally inconsistent with strategic interaction. We demonstrate that this "strategic misspecification" is really an issue of structural (or functional form) misspecification. The misspecification can be equivalently written as a form of omitted variable bias, where the omitted variables are nonlinear terms arising from the players' expected utility calculations and often from data aggregation. We characterize the extent of the specification error in terms of model parameters and the data and show that typical regressions models can at times give exactly the opposite inferences versus the true strategic data-generating process. Researchers are recommended to pay closer attention to their theoretical models, the implications of those models concerning their statistical models, and vice versa.     

把握战略思维的几个特征

现代领导者具有战略思维是做好工作必备的素质和能力。战略思维具有全局性、预见性、系统性、创新性、多赢性等特征。     

A Strategic Theory of Bureaucratic Redundancy

Do redundant bureaucratic arrangements represent wasteful duplication or a hedge against political uncertainty? Previous attempts at addressing this question have treated agency actions as exogenous, thus avoiding strategic issues such as collective action problems or competition. I develop a game‐theoretic model of bureaucratic policy making in which a political principal chooses the number of agents to handle a given task. Importantly, agents have policy preferences that may be opposed to the principal's, and furthermore may choose their policy or effort levels. Among the results are that redundancy can help a principal achieve her policy goals when her preferences are not aligned with the agents'. But redundancy is less helpful if even a single agent has preferences relatively close to the principal's. In this environment collective action problems may cause multiple agents to be less effective than a single agent. Redundancy can also be unnecessary to the principal if the agent's jurisdiction can be terminated.     

Strategic adaptation to new electoral systems

How quickly, to what extent and under what conditions do voters and elites adapt to new electoral institutions in order to not waste their votes and effort on hopeless competitors? A latent‐curve model of strategic adaptation is developed and fitted to district‐level election data from Spain. The extent of strategic adaptation is generally found to vary with the strength of the electoral system. However, grave ethnic tensions are demonstrated to seriously retard adaptation even under favourable institutional conditions.     

Strategic Competition in Sequential Election Contests

This paper studies a sequential election contest, such as theAmerican presidential primary, in which several electionsoccur one at a time until a single winner emerges. Theconventional wisdom is such a system benefits a candidatefavored in the initial elections because of momentum. Thispaper uncovers a potentially opposing force if participationis costly and candidates exit when they have unfavorablefuture prospects. A candidate with friendly elections at theend of the contest will typically benefit from the resultinggame theoretic competition.Tension between this strategic effect and momentum helpsexplain several empirical regularities of presidentialprimaries.     

政府创新的博弈分析

政府创新本质上是打破原有利益格局,通过利益主体博弈,经过成本——收益核算后形成的新的契约格局。在制度变迁的理论框架下,运用博弈工具动态地分析在制度创新中三种参与力量中央政府、地方政府和微观主体相互作用的博弈过程与博弈策略,可以发现可能的博弈结果——地方政府的伪创新。规范地方政府创新的行为,要从改善博弈的策略环境和规范及改进地方政府自身入手。