高校政工人员的诚信危机与对策

大学生诚信道德水平的下降,高校政工人员的诚信危机是其主要因素。本文就长久以来高校政治思想教育中讳莫如深的问题进行了深刻地揭示与批判,提出了从制度上解决诚信危机的方案。     

How Politicians Discount the Opinions of Constituents with Whom They Disagree

We argue that politicians systematically discount the opinions of constituents with whom they disagree and that this “disagreement discounting” is a contributing factor to ideological incongruence. A pair of survey experiments where state and local politicians are the subjects of interest show that public officials rationalize this behavior by assuming that constituents with opposing views are less informed about the issue. This finding applies both to well‐established issues that divide the parties as well as to nonpartisan ones. Further, it cannot be explained by politicians’ desires to favor the opinions of either copartisans or likely voters. A third survey experiment using a sample of voters shows that the bias is exacerbated by an activity central to representative governance—taking and explaining one's policy positions. This suggests that the job of being a representative exacerbates this bias.     

Framing and Deliberation: How Citizens' Conversations Limit Elite Influence

Public opinion research demonstrates that citizens' opinions depend on elite rhetoric and interpersonal conversations. Yet, we continue to have little idea about how these two forces interact with one another. In this article, we address this issue by experimentally examining how interpersonal conversations affect (prior) elite framing effects. We find that conversations that include only common perspectives have no effect on elite framing, but conversations that include conflicting perspectives eliminate elite framing effects. We also introduce a new individual level moderator of framing effects—called "need to evaluate"—and we show that framing effects, in general, tend to be short-lived phenomena. In the end, we clarify when elites can and cannot use framing to influence public opinion and how interpersonal conversations affect this process .     

Politicians: be killed or survive

In the course of history, a large number of politicians have been assassinated. To investigate this phenomenon, rational choice hypotheses are developed and tested using a large data set covering close to 100 countries over a period of 20 years. Several strategies, in addition to security measures, are shown to significantly reduce the probability of politicians being attacked or killed: extended institutional and governance quality, democracy, voice and accountability, a well-functioning system of law and order, decentralization via the division of power and federalism, larger cabinet size and a stronger civil society. There is also support for a contagion effect.     

后信息时代图书馆员信息超载与信息焦虑问题研究

后信息时代是一个信息超载的时代,由信息超载带来的信息焦虑是日渐严重的心理疾病,图书馆馆员作为职业的信息使用者,是其易感人群。本文就这一人群的信息超载的起因和信息焦虑的表现进行了分析和研究,并给出了解决方案。     

Politicians and protection: Tariffs and elections in Australia

An index of manufacturing industry tariff protection is calculated for each Australian federal electoral division and used to test for the presence of voting factors in the electoral incidence of tariff protection. There is a strong positive relationship between the level of tariffs and the Labor vote in an electorate, though this is more likely to be evidence for the effect of levels of manufacturing activity than for systematic electoral manipulation of tariffs. Smaller samples of electorates do suggest that governments shift the largest tariff increases into electorates which they won at the previous election.     

Surviving Maurras: Jacques Maritain's Jewish Question

ABSTRACT

Crane's essay begins to engage the complex, polyvalent nature of the so-called Jewish Question in the early twentieth century by following closely the evolving ideas of a French intellectual who eventually emerged from his association with figures such as Action Française leader Charles Maurras to offer a sustained and vehement rejection of antisemitism, a rejection itself almost unheard of in respectable circles. The philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) has been identified as an extraordinarily philosemitic member of the Catholic intelligentsia in interwar France. Having broken with the anti-democratic and antisemitic Maurras in 1927, by the late 1930s Maritain established an international reputation as an outspoken anti-fascist and opponent of antisemitism. In response to the intensification of anti-Jewish prejudice in interwar Europe, he strove to advance a metahistorical understanding of what might be called the Sacred Jew in an era in which the racially hygienic construct of the Dirty Jew threatened to prevail in contexts ranging from the gutter to the drawing room to the classroom. But Maritain's recasting of the timely Jewish Question as the timeless Mystery of Israel amounted to just as much of an expression of the political-cultural anxieties of the interwar period as its racist and ever more eliminationist counterpart, articulated as the so-called Jewish Problem. Both removed the Jewish object of the question from the perspective of visible mundane reality and uncovered—or recovered—hidden apocalyptic secrets. Maritain's vision of Jewish identity in the modern world, as it developed in the 1920s and 1930s, thus proved inseparable from his negotiation of the personal and public crises of his time.     

Rewarding the Top: Citizens' Opposition to Higher Pay for Politicians

The rewards of politicians are a key part of the implicit contract between politicians and citizens, and the effect of these rewards on democratic legitimacy and political recruitment is a central concern in public debate and democratic theory. Using a survey experiment, we show how citizens respond to hypothetical changes in politicians’ pay. The results indicate that citizens express lower levels of trust in the politicians when these politicians award themselves higher pecuniary rewards. However, our results also show that a devious strategy in which the rewards for politicians are less transparent ensures lower opposition from citizens than open and transparent strategies. Based on this, we outline a reinvigoration of the research agenda on “rewards at the top.”     

What Wins Votes: Why Some Politicians Opt Out of Clientelism

In a context where clientelism is widespread, why do some politicians choose not to condition the delivery of goods and services to citizens on individual political behavior? I argue that the answer to this question lies in the heretofore unexamined electoral costs of clientelism: clientelism decreases support from nonpoor constituents even while it generates votes from among the poor. Taking into account these costs and other factors that shape politician incentives, I posit that the interaction between political competition and poverty will explain variation in clientelism. I test this claim using an original measure of clientelism that assesses mayoral involvement in social policy implementation in Argentine municipalities. The results of statistical analysis suggest that high levels of political competition are compatible with clientelism when poverty is also high. Only when high competition is coupled with low rates of poverty does clientelism decline.     

Listening to the Government: How Information Shapes Responsibility Attributions

Assigning credit and blame in systems of multilevel government, such as federal states, requires information. This paper examines how voters respond to information about policy outcomes when attributing responsibility to multiple levels of government in a European context. Using an experimental design, we show that the responsibility attributions of British voters are affected by perceptual biases, notably their feelings about the government and the European Union (EU). But interestingly, we also find that voters, regardless of their predispositions, are only responsive to information they receive from their national government, whereas they ignore information provided by EU officials. These findings have implications not only for our understanding of attribution in systems of multiple levels of government, but also for how voters use information selectively depending on the credibility of the source.