Bad History

If history is a sort of radar for the ship of state, then the machine has broken down, just at the point where Gordon Brown, trained as a historian, takes over control. Caught up in the best-seller business, popularised on TV, it has come to reflect metropolitan commercial drives, the obsessions of The Hitler Channel or the 'publish or be damned' ethos of the Research Assessment Exercise. Fashionable discourses about identity and postmodern consumerism, and the palsied traditions of Fogeydomboth remote from the basic business of getting, spending and governing-may offer a niche-marketing future, but are more likely to speed the vessel towards the rocks.     

Breaking Bad News: Penal Populism,Tabloid Adversarialism and Brexit

This article analyses the role that British conservative tabloid newspapers play in promoting penal populism and delegitimising liberal prison reform initiatives. Principally, we consider how different sections of the British press reacted to the then Prime Minister David Cameron's prison reform speech of 8 February 2016. The analysis illustrates how different newspapers cohered around two diametrically opposing interpretations of the scandalous state of the prison system, reflecting distinctive penal philosophies and moral positions. In the context of penal populism and the populist furies unleashed by the Brexit campaign, the central research finding is that the comparatively passive and equivocal support offered by the broadsheets was no match for the vitriolic attack mounted by the conservative tabloids on the ‘soft justice’ parts of Cameron's prison reform agenda. We conclude by arguing that the stark lesson to be learned is that the scandal‐ridden prison is a particularly toxic issue marked by serial policy failure. Consequently, in a febrile, intermediatised penal populist context, why would any political leader take on the manifest risks associated with embarking on liberal prison reform?     

大学不良教师文化的现状与重塑

随着中国高等教育的快速发展,大学教师文化出现了价值取向的功利化、教书育人精神颓化、个人主义文化盛行、缺乏进取观念等不良化现象。这是由于经济社会发展的冲击、大学教师绩效评价不科学、教师队伍素质良莠不齐、教师工作的"无边界性"等原因综合而形成的。应该通过建立科学的大学教师绩效评价体系、构建合理的大学教师薪酬分配体系、倡导开放合作的教师文化、优化教师群体素质和崇尚大师精神来重塑大学教师文化。     

不良政策为何持续:新政治经济学的解释

公共政策有好坏之分,不良的政策为何会持续？在主流解释路径的基础上,新政治经济学从政治过程、官僚、利益集团、个体选民等方面,深入分析了不良政策持续的原因.新政治经济学认为,从客观上看,政策过程是一个政治过程,受到机会主义和信息不对称导致的交易成本的约束.从主体上看,政策制定者的能力影响着政策的好坏及其变迁,而其对自身利益的追逐会掉入“暂时性收益陷阱”.利益集团为维护和增加政策收益,会倾向于构建“良好”的政企关系,通过寻租导致政策俘获,而政治市场中的个体选民,由于参与政策过程的成本太高,会倾向于选择对某种信仰或观念的偏好,形成“理性胡闹”.新政治经济学对不良政策持续的解释表明,推动不良政策变迁需要进行规则重塑,提高政策制定者的能力,提供激励机制防范政策俘获,推进政策过程的公开性和透明度,实现政策制定和执行现代化.     

Rewarding Bad Behavior: How Governments Respond to Terrorism in Civil War

Although violent organizations often use terrorism as a means to achieve political aims, recent studies suggest the tactic is ineffective because it fails to help groups gain concessions. While focused exclusively on concessions, these studies overlook other important markers of success, specifically whether groups are invited to participate in negotiations as a result of their use of terrorism. Extant studies also conduct statistical analyses on overly aggregated data, masking any effect terrorism has on important bargaining outcomes. Using new monthly data on the incidence of negotiations and the number of concessions offered to groups involved in African civil wars, this paper demonstrates that rebel groups are both more likely to be granted the opportunity to participate in negotiations and offered more concessions when they execute a greater number of terror attacks during civil wars.     

Charismatic Urban Leaders and Economic Development: Good Mayors and Bad Mayors in Europe

The paper argues that decisions by strong mayors or council leaders can have a significant impact on their cities' economic fortunes. Good decisions include urban marketing exercises, the attraction of hallmark events and good land-use and infrastructural planning: bad decisions include engaging in political conflict with central government and engaging in illegal activity. Data from 16 European cities approximately arranged in matched national pairs to standardise for the degree of power decentralised to city government, and further standardised to take into account economic structure, suggest that good mayoral decisions have a marginally positive effect on economic growth but poor decisions have a significantly negative effect.     

国债市场的发展急需恢复国债期货交易

1992— 1995年我国国债期货交易试点的失败是因为当时的市场经济体制不健全。在广大投资者风险意识有了很大提高 ,市场急需套期保值工具 ,国内外投资者苦于我国金融市场投资工具不足的今天 ,国家应尽快恢复国债期货交易 ,以搞活金融流通领域 ,发展金融期货市场。     

Good Cuts,Bad Cuts: The Need for Expenditure Analysis in Decremental Budgeting*

Quantitative targets are widely used in decremental budgeting. On the macro-level, governments set global limits for the growth of public expenditures, government deficits, or the ratio of government spending to GNP. On the micro-level, reduction targets are frequently assigned to spending ministries or agencies on a selective basis or across-the-board. While this kind of targetry appears to be indispensable to achieve cutbacks, it is also very deficient in that it treats public expenditures as a fungible commodity, consisting of interchangeable units of account. As austerity policies are coming of age, the inherent weaknesses in the targets approach attract increasing attention, and there is growing concern about the quality of austerity measures. To make sound decisions on such measures, governments must develop a better understanding of the characteristics and properties of various public expenditures. This paper outlines four varieties of expenditure analysis that may contribute to ‘the leap from quantity to quality’ in decremental budgeting.