Differential Turnout Decline in Norway and Sweden: A Generation of Apathy or Alienation?

Voter turnout has been in a trend of gradual decline in most established democracies in recent decades and the reasons for this are by no means fully understood. While most studies agree that the trend is largely driven by younger generations voting less than older cohorts, the individual‐level mechanisms of their declining propensity to vote are still disputed. A major distinction in the literature on democratic developments is that between theories of political apathy and political alienation: whether citizens are less interested in politics or still interested but instead estranged from their political systems. An interesting test for these different explanations can be found in Scandinavia: While Norway and Sweden have intimate historical, political and cultural similarities, Norway has been experiencing gradual turnout decline, while there has been no clear overall trend in Sweden. This study uses a combined dataset of over 50.000 respondents from 31 national election studies in these two countries from 1956–2013 to test the relative roles of apathy, alienation and generational dynamics in explaining these different trends in turnout. The results indicate that apathy has been declining while alienation has been rising in both countries. However, in Norway, those who are more apathetic today are much less likely to vote than apathetic citizens were in the past. The youngest generations are also significantly more apathetic and less likely to vote in Norway than in Sweden. These dynamics appear to account for the larger trend of turnout decline in Norway.     

Relationship between the retirement, disability, and unemployment insurance programs: the U.S. experience

This article was prepared initially for an international conference of social security program administrators and researchers. They examined the reasons for, and implications of, a recent trend in several European countries toward making it easier to qualify for retirement or disability benefits as a way of alleviating long-term unemployment. The article notes that the United States has not followed this trend. Instead, this country has continued to use temporary extensions of unemployment insurance benefits as a way to help the long-term unemployed during recessionary periods. Since the mid-1970's, the emphasis in retirement and disability insurance programs has been to strengthen the financial integrity of these programs rather than to expand eligibility. Described here are the progression of extended benefit provisions of unemployment insurance through the most recent recession, the historical development of early retirement features in the social security program, and the more recent attention that has been paid to the financing issues that have played a central role in legislation during the late 1970's and early 1980's. Unemployment experience and trends toward early retirement are examined, along with the role of public and private employee pension plans that supplement social security retirement benefits. Preliminary data from the Social Security Administration's New Beneficiary Survey show the prevalence of such pension coverage for recent retirees and the extent to which these pension benefits were claimed before normal retirement age.     

Multiparty politics in Argentina? Electoral rules and changing patterns

This article attempts to illuminate some institutional features of the past and the current electoral systems of Argentina and the problematic relationship between these characteristics and the trend of changes that the party system has been experiencing since the return of democracy in 1983. The focus is on the dangers of political stalemate that might have developed if the institutional arrangements implemented at the end of the military rule had not been reformed subsequently. The study has two objectives: (a) to demonstrate that there is a trend towards an increasing fractionalization of the Argentine party system; and (b) to show that the combination of an electoral college with a majority requirement, proportional representation to allocate presidential electors, malapportionment among districts, and this increasing process of pluralization in most provinces (where presidential elections were decided because of electoral college complexities) threatened the stability of democracy.     

The Pitfalls of South Africa's "Liberation"

In recent years, the figurative face of politics in America often quite literally has become the face of a celebrity. This trend finds citizens in democratic society willing to yield up their political consciousness to media-created celebrities. Drawing on the theories of Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard, this article argues that the investiture of authority in celebrities represents a continuation of the trend by which social bodies operate as the site where relations of power are played out, and by which the media serve as a means in which real democracy has been replaced by a simulated one. Alongside grassroots participation, and in some cases leading it, society is incorporating a new language that deploys celebrities as chief vehicles for the simulation of political consent, thereby overcoming public apathy, and buttressing the existing political order.     

论内保工作发展趋势——走社会保安服务之路

传统内保工作体制受到市场经济的挑战,改革这种体制是大势新趋.本文认为内保工作走社会保安服务之路是社会化分工的需要,是经济发展的趋势,是西方发达国家政府鼓励发展的方向,它比传统的内保工作具有明显的优势,走社会保安服务之路是今后内保工作发展的趋势.     

Boards of trustees,agency problems,and university output

The analysis and empirical evidence in this paper indicate that the structure of the boards of trustees of state universities influences the provision of higher education. The structure of the boards is important because it helps to define the constraints on the board members and on the internal agents of the universities. An implication of this study is that public universities can be made to function more like private ones by placing them under separate governing boards.These results are especially interesting when examining the trends regarding board structures. The trend over this century across the states has been toward increasing the number of universities under the jurisdiction of a single board. This analysis suggests that the trend is a response to political pressure from educators, not from taxpayers and consumers of higher education.     

A Wider Range of Friends: Multi‐speed Organising during the 2015 Labour Leadership Contest

The British Labour party's recent adoption of a partially open primary for the selection of its leader conforms to a trend seen across many European political parties of increasing rights and privileges in internal party decision‐making and expanding opportunities for more loosely affiliated supporters to participate in party activity. This dual trend can be seen as a response to changes in the membership environment, greater individualisation of political participation and growth in social movement politics and online activism. Yet as much as parties are responding to a changed membership environment, they are also driving that change, increasingly blurring the distinction between members and supporters. This article examines the recent impact of this change within the British Labour party and argues that, in line with Susan Scarrow's theory of ‘multi‐speed’ membership, the Labour party's experiment in expanding affiliation options has led directly to a tension in locating the source of authority within the party, creating a challenge for its new leader in accommodating his new supporters within his party's representative traditions.     

Research in Context: Measuring Value Change

Abramson and Inglehart find a significant trend toward postmaterialist values in Western Europe, which they argue is largely driven by the gradual processes of generational replacement. Clarke, Dutt, and Rapkin argue that this trend is a methodological artifact of the wording of Inglehart's four-item measure of materialist/ postmaterialist values. They claim that because this battery does not include a question about unemployment, in periods of high unemployment respondents tend to choose postmaterialist goals. The long-term trend toward postmaterialism in Western Europe, they argue, results from rising levels of unemployment during the past two decades. Abramson and Inglehart point out that increases in inflation have a short-term impact on decreasing postmaterialism, but maintain that the positive relationship between unemployment and postmaterialism is spurious. As this analysis shows, Clarke, Dutt, and Rapkin find a positive relationship between unemployment and postmaterialism by building a model that has little theoretical justification and that is not robust to changes in specification. As this analysis demonstrates, unemployment is actually linked with support for materialist goals, and the trend toward post-materialism is robust in the face of alternative time frames, models, and specifications. The weight of the evidence demonstrates that the long-term trend toward postmaterialism in Western Europe is driven by generational replacement.     

1993: a Europe without borders or differences?

The author reviews current demographic trends in the countries of the European Community in the light of the efforts to abolish frontiers and border controls among member countries. She shows that there has been a general trend toward commonality in many aspects of demographic behavior.     

我国法庭科学实验室认可现状和发展趋势

随着全球经济一体化趋势的发展和国际贸易便利化的推动,世界各国的实验室认可和国际互认也呈现了强劲的发展势头,实验室认可作为一种国际公认的检测、校准能力的评价手段,也在经济和社会的各个行业和领域中得到普遍的应用。本文主要就实验室认可的概念、目的和意义,法庭科学的现状、法律环境及发展趋势进行介绍。     

The distribution of annual and long-run U.S. earnings, 1981-2004

Numerous authors have presented evidence of increased dispersion in the distribution of annual earnings in the United States from the late 1970s through 2004 or later. However, the dispersion of long-run earnings measured over many years has received relatively little attention because of the limited availability of appropriate data. This article uses the Social Security Administration's Continuous Work History Sample, which documents the earnings histories of 3.3 million workers, to examine changes in both the annual and the long-run distributions of earnings during 1981-2004 for men and women. For men, the results indicate an increase in long-run earnings inequality of roughly the same magnitude as the trend seen in annual earnings dispersion, but there has been very little increase in the dispersion of long-run earnings among women. If calculations are restricted to a sample of women who work every year of the observation period, a trend of increased earnings dispersion emerges, but much less so than that observed for men.     

略论死刑复核中“发回”案件的重新审判

在重新审判“发回”重审死刑案件的司法实践中，对被告人容易产生有罪推定的倾向、依据补强证据再次适用死刑的倾向和漠视侦控行为合法性的倾向，为此重审法院应杜绝片面依据侦控机关提供的不利于被告人的存疑补强证据，对被告人再次适用死刑；对“事实不清、证据不足型”发回重审的死刑案件，如果经过重审认定的案件事实没有发生重大变化，一般也不宜对被告人再次适用死刑。     

Forecasting General Fund Revenue: An Analysis of Idaho FY 1998 to FY 2011

Forecasting state general fund revenue (GFR) though business cycles means possibly confusing a cycle with an underlying long‐run trend. Relative to the actual revenue, the mean squared error of the academic, legislative, governor's, the growth path (GP), and Holt‐Winters (HW) forecasts for Idaho GFR was not significantly different than the naïve forecast's; the Combined GP‐HW forecast has significantly smaller mean square error. The GP model (ARIMA 1, 2, 1) produced a short‐run elasticity of revenue with respect to income of 1.05 (±0.05). The best GFR forecasts combined a HW two‐step‐ahead level with a GP one‐step‐ahead trend that provided a forecast of GFR with the smallest root mean square error between FY 1998 and FY 2009. A budget stabilization fund needs to be 34–40 percent of GFR for GFR to sustain growth at the state's long‐run expansion rate during a contraction.     

Political polarization, congressional redistricting, and trade liberalization

During the last 50 years, political polarization in the US House of Representatives has intensified. One explanation for this trend emphasizes the importance of congressional redistricting. This paper analyzes the relationship between political polarization and redistricting in the context of two trade liberalization bills. The results of the paper indicate that redistricting has not contributed significantly to party polarization over trade policy although it has produced a partisan shift in favor of trade liberalization. Redistricting does not appear to impact political polarization largely because district-level characteristics currently are dominated by broader, national factors such as party affiliation. The results of the paper clearly demonstrate this point by showing that changes in party affiliation have a much greater impact on voting behavior than changes in district characteristics. The paper also finds, however, that institutional control of the redistricting process at the state level has influenced political polarization with respect to trade policy.     

Economic determinants of presidential elections: The fair model

Ray Fair has constructed a model explaining the incumbent share of the two-party presidential popular vote for the elections of 1916-1984. The economic measures of the growth rate of real per capita GNP and the absolute value of the rate of inflation are singled out as important. In addition, a time trend favoring Democrats and whether an incumbent is seeking reelection are included.I argue that the Fair model is misspecified. Including the rate of growth in the Dow Jones Industrial Averages significantly improves the fit of the model, eliminates the trend as significant, reduces the income parameter, and strengthens the inflation parameter. In addition, the model remains stable when including the 1908 and 1912 elections, and up-dating to include the 1988 election strengthens the results.The explanatory power of the model is impressive with only one missed election outcome (1976) between 1908 and 1988, and this miss is easily explained by the impact of Watergate on the Republican candidate, President Ford.     

中国转型期政治腐败的类型、程度和发展演变趋势

中国转型期的政治腐败在类型、程度和发展演变趋势方面都有着自身的特点，对此需要进行深入的研究。本从多种不同的角度对腐败的类型进行了初步的划分并介绍了不同类型划分的用途，章还评介了两种不同的测量政治腐败程度的方法。最后分析了中国转型期政治腐败发展演变的规律和特征，并预测了它的发展趋势。     

论大学生恋爱中的不良倾向及其教育引导

大学生谈恋爱已经成为当今大学校园里非常普遍的一种现象,甚至已经发展成为了一种潮流。手拉着手、肩并着肩、你侬我侬的大学生情侣构成了大学校园里一道靓丽的风景线。但是,由于受多种不良因素的影响,大学生在谈恋爱过程中还明显存在着一些不良倾向,如不及时加以纠正和引导,势必会对大学生的身心健康成长产生重大的影响。     

Political Communication in the UK: A Study of Pressure Group Behaviour

The main political parties' adoption of 'soundbites' and 'spin-doctors' has led UK political communication to become dominated by a 'promotional culture'. This article describes the historical development of this trend and the academic debate it has stimulated over the 'quality' of contemporary political communication. The article then argues that by exploring how pressure groups have adopted similar promotional techniques a valuable new dimension can be added to this debate, which focuses on the ability to gain access to media coverage. Finally, this point is illustrated with a case study of Liberty, a civil liberties pressure group.     

教育国际化与"教育贸易服务"

中国"入世",将面临全面冲击和挑战,教育也不例外,根据WTO服务贸易总协定第13条规定,除了各国政府彻底资助的教学活动以外,凡收取学费、带有商业性质的教学活动均属教育贸易服务范畴.国际教育趋势和现状促进了国际教育贸易服务的发展,教育理念的泛化将为国际教育贸易服务提供新契机,教育形式的多元化也将为国际教育贸易服务开辟新途径.     

Policy of decentralization and changing governance of higher education in post‐Mao China

Unlike the Mao era when educational development was entirely directed by the central government, there has been a strong trend to diversification and decentralization of education in the post‐Mao period. This article, being set in this context, examines how the policy of decentralization has affected the governance modes of higher education in Mainland China. More specifically, the article focuses on three major aspects of education governance, namely, financing, provision and regulation in education, with special attention given to examining the changing relations between the state, local governments and other agents in education delivery. One very significant consequence of the change is that the public‐good functions of education, of which the state has taken the primary role of a reliable guarantor, have diminished. Nonetheless, the state's role as a regulator and overall service coordinator has been strengthened rather than weakened under the policy of decentralization. These recent developments in China's higher education also reflect the global trend of decentralization in educational governance. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.