Public Meetings and the Democratic Process

Public meetings are frequently attacked as useless democratic rituals that lack deliberative qualities and fail to give citizens a voice in the policy process. Do public meetings have a role to play in fostering citizen participation in policy making? While many of the criticisms leveled against public meetings have merit, I argue that they do. In this article, I explore the functions that city council and school board meetings serve. While they may not be very good at accomplishing their primary goal of giving citizens the opportunity to directly influence decisions made by governing bodies, they can be used to achieve other ends, such as sending information to officials and setting the agenda. As a complement to deliberative political structures, public meetings have a role to play by offering a venue in which citizens can achieve their political goals, thereby enhancing governmental accountability and responsiveness.     

利用微信公众平台提升高校党风廉洁教育质量

随着新媒体时代的到来,微信在高校党员干部和师生中的使用日益普及,这为利用微信公众平台开展党风廉洁教育提供了可能。高校党风廉洁教育微信公众平台具有拓展时空边界、降低经济成本、深化实质效果的三维价值优势,有助于高校廉洁意识入脑入心、入心入行。但是目前高校党风廉洁教育微信平台运行面临高校师生关注度欠缺、活跃度不够、参与互动率偏低三个问题。解决这些问题要采取精确定位选准教育切入点、精心谋划提升互动参与程度、精细协作协同联动形成合力、精心运营打造品牌效应等手段。     

Revenue Diversification in Public Higher Education: Comparing the University and Polytechnic Sectors

Financial stringency has been an increasing concern in the higher education sector, especially in the aftermath of the financial crisis. As a result, public higher education institutions have been under increasing pressure to diversify their funding sources through tuition fees and other nonpublic revenues. This article reflects on the institutional impact of those changes by analyzing a panel of 30 higher education institutions from the Portuguese public university and polytechnic sectors for the period between 2003 and 2009. The authors explore the relevance of institutional characteristics such as enrollments in undergraduate and postgraduate programs, the qualifications of academic staff, and the regional environment where institutions are located. Results suggest that certain institutional characteristics related to mission differentiation and the path of development of binary systems are important determinants of higher education institutions’ ability to earn income from tuition fees and other nonpublic sources.     

Democratic Legitimacy, Public Justification and Environmental Direct Action

This article addresses the question of whether environmental direct action against policies or institutions that are recognised as democratically legitimate can be justified. Arguments that seek to tie environmental outcomes to stipulated requirements of either the democratic process or distributive theories of justice are found wanting in this regard. However, one of the central justifications for the losers in a democratic settlement accepting defeat is policy reversibility. The non-reversible element in significant areas of environmental change entails that environmentalists are forced to play a 'one-shot' political strategy. This fact lends support to the justification of environmental direct action in such cases, although it may also apply beyond the sphere of environmental politics.     

公民公共精神与民主政治建设

在一个追求高度民主的国家,较强的公民公共精神对该国民主政治的发展有着积极的推动作用.目前,我国公民公共精神还较弱,如公民的主体意识缺乏、公共意识淡薄、公共责任缺失,这种状况对我国的民主政治建设极为不利.因此,应大力培育公民公共精神,如发展公共领域、培育公民社会、提高公民素质,以此来培植和增强公民的参与、合作、团结、责任等意识,从而不断累积民主发展所需的社会资本.     

Public Administration as Pragmatic, Democratic, and Objective

In the foregoing essay, Patricia M. Shields argues that public administration and administrators should support a much greater incorporation of classical pragmatism than has been the case to date. This paper supports that conclusion by focusing on classical pragmatism's central benefit to public administration: its ability to provide the field with a claim to objectivity that it badly needs, but which Shields barely mentions. It shows how objectivity is closely connected to a pragmatic conception of democracy, and how this conception of democracy is diametrically opposed to one built on a fact/value (or administration/politics) dichotomy.     

公众参与的协商民主价值与发展趋势

公众参与是衡量现代社会民主程度和发展水平的一项重要指标。实践中我国公民参与的形式丰富多彩,其中蕴含了中国特色的协商民主价值。我国公众参与实践还存在一些问题,公众参与在公共决策中的应用应当实现效率与民主价值的恰当平衡。在执政党、政府与公民社会的推动下,公众参与在我国公共管理实践中将得到日益广泛的应用,成为社会主义民主政治的重要实现形式。     

Public Life as Tragedy

Some of the most perceptive observers of public life have emphasised its tragic dimensions, not so much out of sympathy for politicians, but because the lens of tragedy offers a unique insight into the realities of the world of politics. Here I attempt to synthesise this tragic perspective by employing the comments of those best positioned to identify the salient features of public life, its primary dramatis personae. Politics occasionally provides us with the kind of spectacular catastrophe that journalists like to construe as tragedy. But our purpose is to evoke a different, more personal, less visible kind of tragedy: the small but malignant tragedies of self‐betrayal, of inflation of the ego and deflation of conscience, of helpless witness to injustice and misfortune, of status unaccompanied by power or efficacy, of the shrinking of aspiration to the scale of the practicable, of disillusion and, on occasion, of despair.     

Complexity and Rationality in Public Life

Increasing complexity in the contemporary world calls into question prevailing notions of rationality in public policy and political life. Even in their most refined forms, instrumental-analytic strategies of decision are inherently limited when confronted with complexity. Communicative rationality, rooted in the intersubjective understanding of competent actors, could cope more effectively with complex social problems. By implication, political institutions grounded in instrumental rationality may be less effective than those providing for reasoned discourse among concerned actors.     

GIS, Public Service, and the Issue of Democratic Governance

Geographic information systems (GIS) provide unparalleled power to examine social, economic, and political circumstances. As this technology becomes more prominent in the public sector, it brings new challenges to democratic decision making. How we choose to apply this technology will determine the relationship between those who control technology and those who engage in governance. This article provides examples of how GIS is being used for policy implementation and then explores the democratic implications of GIS.     

公民参与:公共决策科学化民主化的必然选择

将公众参与和专家论证、政府决策结合起来 ,突出政府决策的公众参与性 ,是群众观点在决策领域的升华。扩大公民参与 ,是提高决策科学化、民主化的关键。目前 ,我国公民社会的参与程度还不高 ,在某种程度上还是在政府的动员下参与的。因此 ,我们应当从观念层面、技术层面、制度层面、公众利益表达等层面建立健全公民参与机制 ,切实维护公民参与的权利。     

网络舆论与我国民主政治的良性化发展

互联网技术的普及运用带来显著的民主政治效应,表现为打破了信息垄断和旧的话语权力格局,为民意提供了一个自由表达的场所。以互联网为公共载体的网络舆论成为信息时代我国最活跃的民主政治场域。但技术是把双刃剑,网络也不例外。网络舆论的特性决定了它可能造就"优质"民主,也可能带来"劣质"民主。要使网络舆论促进民主政治良性发展,政府需要健全网络舆情监测预警机制,加强网络舆论监督的道德建设与法治建设,提高对网络舆论的回应能力,正确引导网络议题,培养公民精神。     

The Professors on Public Life

Many academics misunderstand public life and the conditions under which policy is made. This article examines misconceptions in three major academic traditions—policy as science (e.g., ‘evidence‐based policy’), normative political theory, and the mini‐public school of deliberative democracy—and argues that the practical implications of each of these traditions are limited by their partial, shallow and etiolated vision of politics. Three constitutive features of public life, competition, publicity and uncertainty, compromise the potential of these traditions to affect in any fundamental way the practice of politics. Dissatisfaction with real existing democracy is not the consequence of some intellectual or moral failure uniquely characteristic of the persona publica, and attempts to reform it are misdirected to the extent that they imagine a better public life modeled on academic ideals.     

Steering at a Distance: A New Paradigm of Public Governance in Dutch Higher Education

In the 1980s a new concept of government steering was developed at the Dutch ministry of Education and Sciences, called “steering at a distance.” It is a departure from “classical” government steering by means of legislation, prohibitions and regulations and a move towards more autonomy and self-responsibility for institutions of higher education. This new paradigm of public governance in Dutch higher education represents a drastic change both in a practical sense — the new steering concept has actually been carried out and implemented resulting in major institutional, legal, financial and planning changes — and in the scientific sense. The new concept departs from hierarchical, direct top-down control. Government is only one of the influencing actors in a complex network of many interrelated, more or less autonomous actors. The new concept contributes to the scientific body of knowledge on steering in complex interorganizational networks.