State and Local Fiscal Sustainability: The Challenges

At the state and local level, fiscal sustainability is the long‐run capability of a government to consistently meet its financial responsibilities. It reflects the adequacy of available revenues to ensure the continued provision of the service and capital levels that the public demands. After examining separate revenue and expenditure trends for state and local governments, this article identifies three specific sets of pressures that affect subnational fiscal sustainability—cyclical, structural, and intergovernmental. It then presents three specific examples of these pressures: Medicaid, pensions and retiree health benefits, and infrastructure. The author asserts that without changes in the fiscal system—in both revenues and expenditures—state and local fiscal sustainability will disappear. It concludes with some potential solutions but argues that the most difficult reform is to ensure that the public understands that there is no such thing as a free lunch.     

Writing Cartographies of Violence: Nation Building through State Failure

Literacy and literature were central to the birth of the modern nation state. Yet few studies explore the importance of literature in contemporary state construction. In this article, the ongoing importance of literacy and literature in (re)producing the Colombian nation state is studied. Since the colonial era, literacy has conferred the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, first to an elite few and now to the vast majority of people. The democratization of the ability to author the nation has allowed common people to contest and contribute to elite narratives. In this article the content of competing stories of the nation state is analyzed. It argues that these writings have had contradictory effects, successfully consolidating national identity as a nation swathed in violence while undermining the state by revealing its inability to provide security for the majority of its citizens.     

中国特色文化软实力与当代中华民族凝聚力

中华民族凝聚力内在地包含着四个层次:民族整体对民族成员的吸引力、民族成员对民族整体的向心力、民族成员之间的亲和力和民族整体在世界各民族中的影响力。党的十七大报告明确提出"提高国家文化软实力"的重大命题,为当代中华民族凝聚力的进一步增强找到了新的着力点。     

中国的发展与国家安全面临的挑战

今天的中国正在迅速发展,中国的政治、经济地位都在提高,在国际上的影响力也在提升。然而,随着中国的发展,它所受到的威胁和挑战也日趋多元化。这些挑战有来自周边环境的,有来自全球化的,还有来自“安全边疆”的延伸。     

Lessons from Leadership Theory and the Contemporary Challenges of Leaders

Leadership theories and the academic literature can sometimes seem difficult for practitioners to understand because of complex conceptualizations, obscure terms, and its enormousness. Yet taken as a whole, the literature makes a great deal of sense and has much to offer. Indeed, the truths are often quite simple, elegant, and straightforward. The purpose of this article is to review the major findings of the organizational leadership literature and to identify the important overarching insights, specifically those of particular importance to today's leaders in administrative positions in the public sector, where an evolving context constantly reconfigures age‐old challenges.     

大学生道德人格面临的文化冲击

当代中国,在文化现代化进程中,异质、开放、无政府的网络文化导致大学生的人格变异、交往封闭,并形成意识形态的入侵.在文化市场化进程中,大众文化的商业化、标准化、通俗化导致大学生的道德导向模糊、道德分层划一、道德深度扁平.在文化全球化进程中,物欲泛滥、个性张扬、追求世俗的消费文化导致大学生的道德理性危机,吞没了其真实自我,造成其意义式微.置身文化交锋的前沿,大学生道德人格教育,应采用一种更为有效的文化方式,增强他们的精神力量.     

Technological Distribution in Uganda: Information and Communications Technology and the State in an Eastern African Nation

Information and communications technologies (ICTs) include old technologies—such as the radio and the television—as well as newer technologies—such as the Internet and wireless telephony. This study considers the process that the government of Uganda has used to adopt and implement ICT policy. This study also considers the techniques which the government of Uganda has used to distribute ICTS in public locations such as government offices, schools, and hospitals. In particular, this study attempts to consider the political motivations for distribution. The Ugandan government's attempt to distribute this technology reflects strengths in the area of distribution of artefacts, particularly to rural areas. Information and communications technologies are an important part of the Ugandan economy. In addition, ICTs strengthen the ability of citizens to communicate with each other across regional and language borders through shared access points. Methodologically, this paper uses the case study method. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with politicians, policy makers, civil society activists, citizens, academics, medical personnel, regional government officials, and business people. This paper argues that politicians use ICTs as a component of a basket of goods and services that they can distribute to witnessing publics. This paper argues that ICT should be viewed as a type of infrastructure, and that as a public good, it can be used as a “club” good or “pork.” Although several authors discuss the potential of ICTs as democratizing, this paper documents that the Ugandan government has employed ICTs in oppressive ways, including for the surveillance of opposition leaders, and for social control.     

伟大的历史命题:胡锦涛中国当代国家发展模式理论

党的十六大以来,胡锦涛站在人类历史发展的潮头,提出科学发展观、建设和谐社会和创新型国家三位一体战略思想,形成了中国当代国家发展模式的基本理论框架;它揭示了当前中国社会发展的新方向,是指导中国社会主义现代化建设的强大思想武器。胡锦涛中国当代国家发展模式战略思想的创立,是一个伟大的历史命题,是中华民族和中国共产党发展史上第三个里程碑,展示了奔向共产主义伟大理想的新途径,是党的十七大的思想理论基础,具有划时代的意义。     

Imagining the Economic Nation: The Scottish Case

The impending Scottish referendum on independence raises the question: what is a nation? This article addresses this question in terms of ‘economic nationhood’. Tracing the development of the Scottish economy over the last century and a half, it shows how the extraordinarily ‘globalised’ economy of pre‐1913 Scotland slowly evolved into a much more self‐reliant entity. Today, Scotland has a de‐industrialised and substantially de‐globalised economy, with a very large public sector about which key decisions are made in Edinburgh. Scotland has become much more of an economic ‘community of fate’ than ever before in its modern history.     

Zionism, Translation and the Politics of Erasure

This paper examines the translation of classic political philosophy into Hebrew, arguing that a variety of ideological positions can be disclosed simply by examining the erasure process employed during translation. Exploring the connection between translation and nation-building, I claim that segments from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty , John Locke's Two Treaties of Government and Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan were excised in the service of a Zionist identity politics. Insofar as Zionism is a discursive formation, its production and maintenance involves the expulsion of components that may hinder the fabrication of a unified identity. Counter-narratives of the nation that disrupt its totalizing boundaries may disturb, in Homi Bhabha's words, 'those ideological maneuvers through which "imagined communities" are given essentialist identities'. By way of conclusion, I argue that the altered texts are in effect a sign that one ideology overpowered another and led, as it were, to the corruption of the spirit underlying the original project of translating classics into Hebrew, a project that was initiated by Leon Roth for different ideological reasons.     

Challenges Confronting Contemporary Public Budgeting: Retrospectives/Prospectives from Allen Schick

For nearly half a century, Allen Schick's works have explored and analyzed central issues in the role of budgets in modern government. In 2009, the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development published Evolutions in Budgetary Practice: Allen Schick and the OECD Senior Budget Officials, a selection of his work, together with new chapters. The book traces developments in budget practices and reforms since the 1980s, relating them to changes in the role of government, and discusses challenges to contemporary budgeting and how they might be met. This collection provides an invaluable insight into Schick's thinking about public budgeting: a perspective on the past, a practical resource for the present, and a guide to the future.