Educating for active compliance: discursive constructions in citizenship education

This article examines the discursive construction of ‘active citizenship’ within recent civics curriculum documents across three provinces in Canada. New secondary school civics curricula have emerged across liberal democratic states since the year 2000, presumably in response to the perception of youth as disengaged from political involvement. Many of the new curricula subsequently emphasize ‘active’ engagement within the polity. The central task of this paper is to better understand what such ‘active citizenship’ actually means, via the methodological tool of discourse analysis. Engaging a theoretical frame that incorporates Foucauldian governmentality theory and cultural theories of the role of the state in creating subjectivities, the paper ultimately argues that the ‘active citizen’ of contemporary civics curricula is, in fact, a deeply neoliberal subject. The article then draws on feminist theories of citizenship in order to assess the forms of exclusion that the curriculum documents inadvertently create, arguing that they ultimately participate in a long tradition of devaluing such elements of citizenship as relationality and emotional ties. We conclude that one of the fundamental goals of citizenship education – to expand access to citizenship participation for all – has failed.     

Educating the Least Informed: Group Endorsements in a Grassroots Campaign

Theories of low-information rationality claim that uninformed voters can compensate for their lack of political knowledge by employing heuristics, such as interest group endorsements, to make voting decisions as if they were fully informed. Critics of low-information rationality contend that politically unaware voters are unlikely to use group endorsements effectively as a heuristic since they are unlikely to know the political relevance of interest groups. We address this debate by entertaining the possibility that contextual information coupled with a source cue may enhance the effectiveness of group endorsements as a heuristic. We test competing expectations with a field experiment conducted during the 2006 election in two highly competitive Pennsylvania statehouse races where a well-known liberal interest group endorsed Democratic candidates and canvassed both core supporters and Republicans believed to be likeminded. Our results reveal that Republicans used the endorsement as a negative voting cue and that the group's endorsement helped some Republicans compensate for their lack of awareness about politics.     

Roads to safety

He has written and lectured widely on problems of road construction and safety. He is co-editor (with H. V. Hurdle) of Transportation and Traffic Theory: Eighth International Symposium.     

方法论课程在本科教学中的重要性——以经济类专业为例的讨论

从高中进入大学,对于学生的学习来说,最根本也是最重要的改变是课程学习中方法论的改变。对于具体科学方法论的基本内容,必须在大学一年级就进行相关的培训。涉及方法论的课程都会比较枯燥和难懂,这就要求教师能够深入浅出,将比较艰涩难懂的内容通过同学们能够了解的语言和形式表达出来。如何能够带领学生尽快了解和掌握其所学专业的方法论,是每个大学教师所必需重视的工作。文章以经济类专业为例,对方法论课程在本科教育中的重要性做一次尝试性的讨论,希望能够为同仁提供一些启发性的思考。     

Behavioral response to safety regulation

The effectiveness of safety regulation can be enhanced or offset by various forms of behavioral feedback. This study provides estimates of the effectiveness of motorcycle helmet laws in reducing fatalities based on pooled time-series and cross-sectional data for the United States during the years 1975 to 1984. Estimates from the model suggest that the presence of a helmet-wearing law induces a 12 to 22 percent decline in the motorcycle mortality problem. The results are consistent with the view that helmet laws are an effective public health policy, at least in the short run. However, there is also some evidence of gradual risk-compensation behavior: The immediate rise in fatalities following repeal of helmet laws appears to dissipate gradually at a rate of roughly 2.5 percent per year. This result suggests that future studies of safety regulation should consider longrun as well shortrun behavioral responses.     

Tracing and periodizing China's food safety regulation: A study on China's food safety regime change

How has China's food safety administrative system changed since it was founded in 1949? How can we periodize the process of this historical transformation in terms of regulators, regulatees, and regulatory tools? This review article offers an analytical framework that distinguishes three regimes in the history of China's food safety governance: an old regime of command and control (1949–1977), an intermediate regime of mixed instruments (1978–1992), and a new regime of regulatory governance (1993–ongoing). In the article the regimes' features, advantages, disadvantages, and development tracks are discussed, and the groundwork is laid for an analysis of China's emerging regulatory state. Finally, a new notion of “transitional regulatory state” is used to define the current Chinese regulatory state based on its food safety regulation.     

Evaluating the effects of automobile safety regulation

Automobile safety standards adopted because of federal legislation have, according to many researchers, failed to save lives; safer cars, they infer, induce more dangerous driving. Results from the major study suggesting this conclusion are shown, however, to be quite sensitive to reasonable changes in the empirical model. An alternative statistical analysis of death rates supports a very different conclusion: Safety standards have saved tens of thousands of lives during the 1970s. More broadly, the article illustrates some general pitfalls in using statistical results in policy analysis, and how they can be avoided.     

论食品安全的法律保障

食品安全的法律保障应当强调执法重于立法、突出抓好日常监管与预警、以防范有毒有害食品为重点、加大处罚力度。