习近平领导干部政绩考核评价三原则

党的十九大报告提出要坚持正确选人用人导向,建设高素质专业化干部队伍。习近平总书记针对选拔任用干部的问题,提出了考核评价领导干部的三原则:一是既看显绩又看潜绩;二是要公道正派地评价敢于担当的干部;三是要全面、历史、辩证地看干部。体现了我党对干部考核和选拔认识的深化,是我党新时代全面、客观地评价和选拔高素质领导干部的重要遵循,是对党的干部路线、组织路线的最新阐释和创新发展。     

The ethos of sovereignty: A critical appraisal

Taking as its starting point the commonly held claim about the obscurity of the concept of sovereignty, the article first identifies a fundamental paradox between the classical Westphalian notion of state sovereignty and human rights. In the rhetoric of international politics, attempts to establish the responsibility of states to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms within their jurisdictions are often countered with claims referring to the “sovereign equality” of all states and the subsequent principle of non-intervention. The article suggests that in a more contemporary understanding of sovereignty the responsibility of a state to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms is seen as a constituent ingredient of the state itself. The chapter continues to elaborate how this change has come about. The classical notion of sovereignty is illustrated through a reading of Bodin’s Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576). In Bodin’s world, sovereignty is a constitutive element of the state, and the possibility of a multitude of sovereign entities in a global world logically denying the possibility of any “supra-national” normative framework is still a minor consideration. This possibility is only worked out with the emergence of international law. In both classics such as Emmerich de Vattel’s The Law of Nations (1758) and more contemporary treatises such as Lassa Oppenheim’s International Law (1905), state sovereignty has become conditional to recognition by other sovereign states and a subsequent membership in the “family of nations.” The conditional membership in the “family of nations” involves a contradiction: a sovereign state must act in a “dignified” manner, it must use its sovereignty with “restraint” by respecting the human rights and fundamental freedoms of its citizens, i.e., it must employ its sovereignty in a non-sovereign way. This restriction of sovereignty, addressed as “ethical sovereignty,” becomes a constitutive element in a post-Westphalian state and a central ingredient in the contemporary doctrine of humanitarian intervention. The article further criticizes the various uses (and abuses) of “ethical sovereignty” in the regulation of “failing” and “rogue” states and concludes by identifying its general political dangers. Finally, with reference to Jacques Derrida’s Rogues (2003), the article suggests a more radical reappraisal of the concept of sovereignty. It is a fact that sovereignty is a term used without any well-recognised meaning except that of supreme authority. Under these circumstances those who do not want to interfere in a mere scholastic controversy must cling to the facts of life and the practical, though abnormal and illogical, condition of affairs.¹ —Lassa Oppenheim But to invoke the concept of national sovereignty as in itself a decisional factor is to fall back on a word which has an emotive quality lacking meaningful specific content. It is to substitute pride for reason.² —Eli Lauterpacht     

The political hand: Policy implementation and youth employment programs

Outstanding studies in the past decade have illuminated the sources of ineffective implementation and thus have suggested what not to do. To learn more about what to do, we analyzed a broad range of cases of effective implementation of youth employment programs in eight cities. The goal was to build an impressionistic model of the conditions contributing to flective implementation. We found that executives in the successful programs often acted as “fixers,” repairing the implementation process and protecting and correcting their programs, especially through coalition building and constant intervention in administrative detail. Some executives created patterns of interest convergence among the relevant actors, using incentives to turn mild interests into active support. They thus provided the public sector's missing “political hand,” analogous to the market's “invisible hand.”     

The interpersonal voice: applying appraisal to the rap and sung voice

Following in the traditions of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and social semiotics, this paper applies the linguistic system of appraisal to the mode of sound. More specifically, it aims to describe and compare the interpersonal properties of the rap and sung performance voices. In doing so, this paper also aims to provide analysts with a systematic, principled method by which to identifying interpersonal meanings in sound. Drawing on various aspects of the appraisal framework, and the respective sound features of the rap and sung voice, this paper offers three approaches. The first approach employs the grammatical frames used to classify the attitude sub-systems of affect, judgment, and appreciation. The second approach is more general in scope and analogizes from the sound systems of melody, time, and voice quality to the appraisal systems of attitude, engagement, and graduation, respectively. The third approach applies the concept of binding to the distinctive sounds of the rap and sung voice. The paper concludes by considering some future directions for this research.     

mStories: exploring semiotics and praxis of user-generated mobile stories

Innovations in information and communication technologies have allowed people to actively author multimodal content and engage in new meaning-making practices. New Literacies research has gone some way to understanding new meaning-making behaviours. However, this research often derives its understandings from studies undertaken with students enrolled in formal educational settings. Mobile technologies are increasingly situated outside such domains; the informal use of these devices by adults remains on the periphery of scholarly focus. mStories is a creative participatory digital mobile storytelling project. Taking a multidimensional perspective, this article presents the in-depth case analysis of one participant and their mStory. A semiotic analysis found that the user-generated content demonstrated complex and sophisticated multimodal sense relations. However, control over the textual or compositional meta-function of the text was determined largely by the computer interface, with users habituated to relinquishing authorial control over this element. Within this study, mobile literacy praxis was characteristically ad hoc and contextually embedded, and though mobile technology invites such practices, users were neither determined nor limited by this, and happily turned to other devices where necessary.     

Rapid rural appraisal: Rationale and repertoire

Decision makers need the right information at the right time but in rural development much information generated is too costly and inappropriate. Rapid rural appraisal forms part of the attempt to learn about rural conditions in a cost effective way. Such appraisal involves avoiding the traps of quick and dirty or long and dirty methods and using instead methods that are more cost effective. To do this means ignoring inappropriate professional standards and instead applying a new rigour based on the two principles of optimal ignorance—knowing what it is not worth knowing—and proportionate accuracy—recognising the degree of accuracy required. The article reviews a range of approaches and techniques for rapid rural appraisal that are less rigid and exhaustive than many traditional methods and yet more rigorous in relation to cost and use. Time is emphasized as a critical factor in effective appraisal and rapid rural appraisal methods increase the chance of reducing the bias against the poorer rural people in the promotion of rural development.     

Programme Evaluation and Effectiveness Auditing in Sweden: The Changing Swedish Policy Style*

Modern governments must increase their capacity for analysing and evaluating public programmes. Evaluations, however, take place in a political context and many policies have unstated political goals. Sweden appears to have a highly developed evaluation and effectiveness auditing system and the Swedish case is instructive, not only because of its experience in the evaluation field, but also because it illustrates the changing policy style. Two main agencies are involved in the evaluation process and they both experience some difficulties in their evaluation studies. These difficulties stem in part from the political environment in which they both operate but also relate to their own organisational styles. The resource squeeze could bring broad environmental charges which could be conducive to a greater influence for the two agencies.     

Gordon Tullock’s The Organization of Inquiry: A critical appraisal

The major themes of Gordon Tullock’s 1996 book The Organization of Inquiry are identified. Tullock’s treatment of the philosophy of science is criticized, as is his explanation for the backwardness of the social sciences relative to the natural sciences. The paper closes with a listing of some of Tullock’s proposals for the reform of science.     

The bird in hand: A feasible strategy for gun control

Policy analysis has failed to guide gun control policy away from its current impasse because analysts have avoided facing several crucially important features of the current reality: the existence of some widely held values in the United States public that favor the possession of guns; the limitations on the ability of public agencies in the United States to enforce restraints on the possession of handguns; and the implications of the fact that so many guns are already in the hands of the public. These factors greatly reduce the possibility that effective measures will be introduced to reduce the existing supply of guns. Some effective measures of gun control may be possible nonetheless, mainly through the mobilization of large metropolitan police forces.     

State Power and Ideology in Britain: Mrs Thatcher's Privatization Programme

State-centred theory, a leading exemplar of the new institutionalism, assumes the separation of state from society and objectivity from subjectivity. This epistemological stance supports a structural analysis which holds that the state is an actor in its own right, that the state has distinctive interests, and that state capacity depends on strong institutions and weak societal opposition. Yet the case of the Thatcher governments'ideologically motivated privatization programme challenges the statists'hypotheses and epistemology. Rather, the making of British privatization policy supports the view that the way political actors form and use ideas is important in explaining state power and in defending the liberal democratic vision of mankind as the maker of history.     

Resilience and robustness in policy design: a critical appraisal

Resilience and robustness are exciting concepts for policy researchers. Their broad use in other disciplines has motivated social scientists and policy researchers to adopt them in analyses. In the present paper, we review definitions of these concepts and the primary theoretical and empirical challenges presented by resilience and robustness as lenses for improving the understanding of policy process and policy design. The results reveal that the two concepts differ in their potential value for public policy analysis. Despite its diffusion and ‘charme’, resilience does not appear to be useful and may be misleading, whereas robustness exhibits great potential with respect to both analysis and design.     

Hannah Arendt's analysis of antisemitism in The Origins of Totalitarianism: a critical appraisal

ABSTRACT

Hannah Arendt's seminal work The Origins of Totalitarianism begins with an extended study of the history of antisemitism. Many of Arendt's arguments in this groundbreaking text have been challenged by other scholars. Examining the chief contours of Arendt's account of the rise of modern antisemitism, Staudenmaier offers detailed reasons for approaching her conclusions sceptically while appreciating the book's other virtues. Arendt's repeated reliance on antisemitic sources, her inconsistent analysis of assimilation, her overstated distinction between social and political dimensions of anti-Jewish sentiment, and her emphasis on partial Jewish responsibility for antisemitism indicate fundamental problems with her interpretation of the historical record. A thorough critical appraisal of Arendt's argument offers an opportunity for both her admirers and her detractors to come to terms concretely with the contradictory aspects of her historical legacy.     

Making sense of multilevel governance and governance coordination in Brazil: The case of the Bolsa Verde Programme

Brazil is an example of a challenging governance context par excellence: continental size, multi-levelled governance structures and diverse administrative cultures meet with ambitious, large-scale policy needs and objectives. The multilevel governance approach is applied here to analyse implementation and governance coordination of the Bolsa Verde Programme (BVP). Through a close reading of the narratives told by three programme officials – and zooming in on jointly exercised governance functions known from the metagovernance approach – we analysed how BVP’s programmatic governance coordination was made sense of. The analysis showed that our interviewees were well aware of the shortcomings of the governance coordination in BVP, understood as rather hierarchical, centrally driven and often tackling challenges of vertical multi-actor coordination in a reactive ad-hoc manner. However, since the implementers have been able to creatively and skilfully solve governance coordination challenges, possibilities for developing more systematic and inclusive (meta)governance approaches seem feasible.     

Space for stories: legislative narratives and the establishment of the US Space Force

Policy Sciences - In June 2018, President Trump directed the development of a sixth branch of the US Armed Forces—the Space Force—whose primary mission is to enhance the space...     

The temporal dimension of knowledge and the limits of policy appraisal: biofuels policy in the UK

What depth of learning can policy appraisal stimulate? How we can account for the survival policies that are known to pose significant countervailing risks? While heralded as a panacea to the inherent ambiguity of the political world, the proposition pursued is that policy appraisal processes intended to help decision-makers learn may actually be counterproductive. Rather than simulating policy-oriented learning, appraisals may reduce policy actors’ capacity to think clearly about the policy at hand. By encouraging a variety of epistemic inputs from a plurality of sources and shoehorning knowledge development into a specified timeframe, policy appraisal may leave decision-makers overloaded with conflicting information and evidence which dates rapidly. In such circumstances, they to fall back on institutionalised ways of thinking even when confronted with evidence of significant mismatches between policy objectives and the consequences of the planned course of action. Here learning is ‘single-loop’ rather than ‘double-loop’—focussed on adjustments in policy strategy rather than re-thinking the underlying policy goals. Using insights into new institutional economics, the paper explores how the results of policy appraisals in technically complex issues are mediated by institutionalised ‘rules of the game’ which feed back positively around initial policy frames and early interpretations of what constitutes policy success. Empirical evidence from UK biofuels policy appraisal confirms the usefulness of accounts that attend to the temporal tensions that exist between policy and knowledge development. Adopting an institutional approach that emphasises path dependence does not however preclude the possibility that the depth of decision-makers’ learning might change. Rather, the biofuels case suggests that moves towards deeper learning may be affected by reviews of appraisal evidence led by actors beyond immediate organizational context with Chief Scientific Advisers within government emerging as potentially powerful catalysts in this acquisition of learning capabilities.