政党权利与政党权力、政党义务之关系辨析

政党权利、政党权力及政党义务属于政党科学中的元问题.政党权利是政党权力的根本来源及合法性依据,它与政党权力的关系,既是决定与被决定、目的与手段的关系,还是以政党利益为纽带的辩证统一的关系.政党权利的正当性取决于政党对其义务的承诺和履行,它与政党义务是对立统一的关系,政党义务是从相反的方面对政党权利的认定,它的价值意义不仅在于揭示政党义务与政党权利的内在联系,还在于其蕴涵着对政党权利的价值判断和实践要求.政党权利与政党义务的表现形态和价值倾向不同,但都以政党利益为基础.     

Monitoring State Fulfillment of Economic and Social Rights Obligations in the United States

This article adapts the economic and social rights fulfillment index (SERF Index) developed by Fukuda-Parr, Lawson-Remer, and Randolph to assess the extent to which each of the 50 US states fulfills the economic and social rights obligations set forth in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. It then extends the index to incorporate discrimination and examines differences in economic and social rights fulfillment by race and sex within each of the states. The overall SERF Index score varies between states from below 70% to almost 85%, with wider variation on some of the six substantive rights that comprise the overall SERF Index score. The findings reveal limited sex discrimination but pronounced race discrimination.     

Contracting Revisited: Determinants and Consequences of Contracting Out for Public Education Services

The determinants and consequences of contracting are examined in more than 1,000 Texas school districts for 1997–2008. The results largely replicate prior research by O'Toole and Meier, showing that contracting is negatively related to spending on school districts’ core instructional functions and that the relationship between contracting and bureaucracy is reciprocal. The present findings, based on data from a longer period, indicate that contracting is positively related to school district performance. This article also finds support for an extended model of contracting determinants involving two environmental shocks: negative budget shocks and enrollment shocks.     

Complex Contracting: Management Challenges and Solutions

Governments at all levels buy mission‐critical goods and services whose attributes and performance requirements are hard to define and produce. Many governments—and the public managers who lead them—lack experience and knowledge about how to contract for complex products. The contract management counsel provided to public managers is thin. Missing is a conceptual managerial framework to guide purchasing the complex products that are often so critical to public organizations' core missions. Drawing on perspectives from across the social sciences, the framework presented in this article provides guidance on how managers can harness the upsides of complex contracting while avoiding its pitfalls. The framework helps identify conditions that increase the likelihood of positive outcomes for the purchasing government and the vendor—the win‐win. To illustrate the framework, the article provides examples of successful and failed acquisitions for complex products such as transportation projects, social service systems, and information technology systems.     

Contracting Out and Public Values: A Symposium

The three papers that constitute this symposium were first commissioned for a workshop entitled Citizenship and Contractualism held in October 2000. The theme of that workshop centred on the contractualisation of the relationship between service deliverers and their clients. 1 They have been published elsewhere in a special issue of Law in Context, March 2001, co‐edited by Terry Carney, Gaby Ramia and Anna Yeatman.
These three papers did not fit that theme. They are concerned more with the general use of contracting out as a tool of contemporary governance. I have used the title contracting out and public values because all three of these papers raise fundamental questions about the implications of contracting out for public values.     

Public Opinion and Collective Obligations

This article attempts to identify the general principles that underlie public reasoning about collective obligations and that help explain when political parties can create new obligations or defend existing ones. I use these principles to President Clinton’s unsuccessful attempt to create government health-care plan and attempts by President Bush to privatize Social Security. The success of a party in selling – or defeating – an obligation depends upon what people believe about the competence and capacity of government and the value of autonomy – choices made by each citizen; whether people perceive the obligation as providing floors or establishing ceilings by limiting choice or otherwise restricting opportunities for the better-off; and whether the program is more like insurance or more like welfare. A party’s ability to maintain credibility with voters also depends upon whether party leaders can suppress issues that threaten intra-party elite pacts. When attempts to suppress “taboo” issues like “stem cells” or “black crime” fail, the party loses credibility with its voters and attempts to defend or sell obligations fail.

Contracting Out and Accountability

Governments are increasingly moving to contract out the provision of public services which have previously been delivered by public service departments. Contracting out typically implies provision by private sector contractors. However, it may also include in-house provision by public service departments or other public agencies where the right to provide is won through competitive tendering and is governed by contract. At the Commonwealth level, the trend has been given added impetus by the Coalition government elected in 1996 (Reith J 996; National Commission of Audit 1996).
The main rationale for contracting out is to improve efficiency in service provision by harnessing the virtues of competition, in particular the superior productivity engendered among competitive providers (Industry Commission (IC) 1996, B3.4; Appendix E). At the same time, there is a legitimate expectation that providers of public services paid for by public funds will be publicly accountable (IC 1996, BI). However, contracting out has the potential to reduce the extent of public accountability by transferring the provision of public services to members of the private sector who are generally not subject to the same accountability requirements as public officials. Indeed, reduction in such accountability requirements may be one of the reasons for the greater efficiency of the private sector.     

Corporatisation and Community Service Obligations: Are They Incompatible?

This article asks whether corporatisation is compatible with the notion of community service obligations (CSOs). Corporatisation provides only a minimal framework for the identification of social objectives as CSOs and their funding by government from budget. The community has certain expectations of utilities in relation to CSOs, which may be different from expectations held by governments. Models of corporatisation which have two shareholding ministers with competing objectives introduce a further potential source of conflict.
Historically, the characteristics of a CSO are ambiguous (IC 1991:81) and this presents difficulty in their costing and identification. Governments and corporatised entities have attempted to clarify the issues of definition, identification and costing. These and other issues such as transparency, budget funding, coverage, jurisdiction, public interest and community spirit are discussed in the context of corporatised government electricity utilities.     

Engendering Transitional Justice: a Transformative Approach to Building Peace and Attaining Human Rights for Women

In this article, we examine the continuity of harms and traumas experienced by women before, during and after war and other mass violence. We focus on women because of the particular challenges they face in accessing justice due to patriarchal structures and ongoing discrimination in the political, economic and social, as well as legal spheres, and because of the gendered nature of the crimes and harms they experience. We use the four key pillars of transitional justice identified by the United Nations as a framework to analyse how these harms are addressed in the context of criminal prosecutions, truth commissions, reparations and institutional reform. We conclude that a gender-transformative approach to transitional justice that focuses on transforming psychosocial, socioeconomic and political power relations in society is needed in order to attain human rights for women and build a sustainable peace.     

Reciprocity and resistance to comprehensive reform

Comprehensive reforms often fail, despite being beneficial to society. Politicians may block comprehensive reforms in an attempt to form vote trading coalitions in which they benefit from a piecemeal reform at the expense of others. Because formal commitment devices for vote trading are frequently missing, trust and reciprocity among legislators can play an important role for vote trading. We investigate in a laboratory experiment whether legislators will impede comprehensive reforms in an attempt to form vote trading coalitions even if formal commitment devices for vote trading after reform failure are missing. We find that open ballots allow for vote trading without commitment, based on trust and reciprocity. In turn, legislators frequently reject efficient comprehensive reforms in such institutions.     

Government-to-Government Contracting: Stewardship,Agency, and Substitution

ABSTRACT

This paper provides empirical evidence detailing the distinctive nature of service delivery provided through contracts with other governments. The results of a survey of Ohio city and county managers both confirm and stand in contrast to implications derived from stewardship theory. Consistent with stewardship, our data demonstrate that contracts with public sector service partners generate less intensive monitoring by contracting governments than do services contracted with private entities. In contrast to stewardship theory, we find that contracting governments do not use other governments for services requiring intensive monitoring. In an era of accountability and results-oriented management, reliance on trust may not satisfy constituents who seek evidence of effective service delivery. The inability of the contracting government to affect another government's service delivery reduces the attractiveness of that government as a contracting partner. If the tools of stewardship prove to be inadequate, the imposition of carrots and sticks appropriate for a principal-agent relationship could undermine the trust central to stewardship. Given these tensions, it is not surprising that governments are contracting less with other governments.     

Commitment to political tolerance: Situational and activity-based differences

Survey research on political tolerance has consistently found situational and activity-based differences in levels of support for the rights of political opposition. The present inquiry is based on three studies that explore these differences. These studies reveal two distinct factors related to situational and activity-based variation in tolerance. First, attitudinal tolerance tends to be less when the activity in question may affect a respondent's loved ones or home community, particularly in situations where there is relatively little consensus on whether an activity should be allowed. Second, attitudinal tolerance is less in situations where greater threat is associated with the consequences of the activity in question.     

维护国家海洋权益 建设海洋强国

当今世界,各国围绕着海洋权益明争暗斗,中国海洋意识觉醒较晚,一些合法权益已被周边邻国侵占。随着对外开放政策的进一步深化、全球化的进一步深入,海洋经济已经成为中国国民经济的重要组成部分,中国进一步依赖海洋及其资源的趋势仍将继续发展。建立一支强大的海上力量,大力发展海洋经济,维护海洋权益,成为和平与发展时代背景下的重要主题。     

Rediscovering Implementation: Public Sector Contracting and Human Services

There is vast literature on how to implement public policies, with endless case studies emphasising a few key lessons. The drive to contracting in the public sector raises familiar threats to coherent program implementation, and adds those of control and incentives. Contracting fragments program responsibility among multiple contractors, and separates policy agencies from service delivery contractors. It raises questions about political control and accountability, and the prospect of gaps between intention and outcome. This paper 'rediscovers implementation' by reviewing the practical difficulties of constructing public-private relationships which can deliver quality human services. After considering broad arguments about the efficacy of contracting, the paper turns to the provision of human services by examining the contracting out of welfare services and the Job Network. Our argument is modest: that public sector contracting fails if the challenges of implementation are not addressed explicitly, since service delivery through the private sector can falter for exactly the same reasons as traditional public bureaucracies.     

In Defence of Associative Political Obligations: Part One

Part One of this article seeks to defend the idea of associative political obligations against a number of criticisms that have been advanced opposing it. The purpose of this defence is not to demonstrate that the associative account is therefore the best explanation of political obligations, but only that the principal reasons which have been given for rejecting it are much less compelling than its critics maintain. The argument focuses in particular on the various criticisms advanced by A. John Simmons. Two general lines of defence figure especially prominently. First, it is shown how many of the criticisms in one way or another ultimately rest on the assumption that political obligations must be voluntarily acquired, when it is just this assumption that is contested by an associative account. Secondly, it rebuts the charge that the idea of associative obligations faces a particular problem because it entails the view that members must have obligations to associations or groups that are evil. While it is not claimed that the idea of associative political obligations is entirely without difficulties, it is contended that stories of its demise are greatly exaggerated, and in this respect the ground is laid for Part Two of the article, which sketches a particular account of associative political obligations.     

The Politics of Interpersonal Trust and Reciprocity: An Experimental Approach

Trust and reciprocity are theoretically essential to strong democracies and efficient markets. Working from the theoretical frameworks of social identity and cognitive heuristics, this study draws on dual-process models of decision making to expect (1) the trustor to infer trustworthiness from partisan stereotypes and thus to discriminate trust in favor of co-partisans and against rival partisans, but (2) the trustee to base reciprocity decisions on real information about the trustor’s deservingness rather than a partisan stereotype. So whereas partisanship is likely to trigger trust biases, the trust decision itself provides enough information to override partisan biases in reciprocity. The analysis derives from a modified trust game experiment. Overall, the results suggest partisanship biases trust decisions among partisans, and the degree of partisan trust bias is consistent with expectations from both social identity theory and cognitive heuristics. When it comes to reciprocity, however, information about the other subject’s level of trust nullifies partisan bias.     

International Obligations and the Morality of War

Americans are not as religiously divided on foreign policy questions as they are over such hot-button, culture war domestic issues as abortion and gay marriage. Nevertheless, surveys suggest that Americans’ attitudes on several foreign policy fronts are consistent with a religious worldview. This analysis draws primarily on the findings of various PRC polls to examine the relationship between religion and three areas of foreign policy: the role of the USA in the world; the nature of international obligations; and the morality of war.

互补性与社会科学的方法论基础

本文运用互补性辩证思维模式分析了社会科学最基本的方法论问题.在社会科学的研究对象上,提出了因果性与随机性的互补;在社会科学的理论构造上,提出了客观判断(真理性知识)与价值判断(评价性知识)的互补;在社会科学的研究方式上,提出了实证主义方法与人文主义方法的互补.本文认为,上述三对基本范畴的互补,将为社会科学提供普适的方法论框架,有助于推进现代社会科学研究的发展.     

In Defence of Associative Political Obligations: Part Two

This article continues the defence of associative political obligations begun in Part One. It does so by sketching an argument that supports commonplace ideas about our having a special, ethical relationship with the polity of which we are members. The argument begins by showing how non-voluntary groups in general can have value, and then seeks to identify the generic good of a polity: that good is the provision of order and security. While this is a necessary condition of associative political obligations, it is not sufficient. It needs to be supplemented by an argument explaining why we have obligations to the particular polity of which we are members. This 'associative' argument has two sides to it. The first explains how membership of a polity is for most people something like an ascribed status; that is, an identity or role that a person is taken to occupy without having chosen it. The second suggests how, through a process of identification, we incorporate membership within our self-understanding. The article concludes with some brief remarks about anarchism and why political obligation matters.