试论托尼的平等观

平等思想历来是中外思想家所关注和深入研究的大问题,英国近代思想家托尼是研究平等思想的著名学者,他从天赋、平等对待和平等推进等角度极赋见地地论述和阐发了平等思想,他的所有政治构想、经济研究和对社会、历史的探索都是围绕平等展开的。可以说平等是托尼全部政治思想的基础和核心。     

试论全球化与党的建设的现代化

全球化是当今世界最显著的一个时代特征,它不仅改变着世界经济、政治格局,而且也影响着中国现代化建设的历史进程.在当前,全球化对中国共产党自身建设的现代化也产生了深刻的影响,因此,党的现代化建设已成为新时期党的建设的一项十分迫切的任务.     

Understanding the Social Media Strategies of U.S. Primary Candidates

This paper examines the social media strategies of candidates seeking their party’s nomination for the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We use textual analysis to understand what candidates focused on. We assess eight themes covered in Twitter posts. For example, Clinton focused on GUN CONTROL, while Sanders focused on climate change. Using Facebook data, we introduce a topic modeling approach, latent Dirichlet allocation, to the political marketing literature. This allows us to uncover what topics the candidates focus on without researcher intervention and, using a dynamic model, show how this changes over time. We note that Clinton’s focus on Trump increases toward the end of the primary campaign.     

Commercial Mining of Celestial Resources: Case Study of U.S. Space Laws

ABSTRACT

The fact that there are abundant mineral resources in space is shown by remote sensing and observation through space probes and analysis of samples, in situ and otherwise. That these resources are useful to humanity and can augment depleting Earth resources is also established beyond a doubt. Further, the technology to excavate and process the same in situ is feasible. The end-product can be used for other activities on the mined planet or transported to Earth. The processed material can also be recycled for use and manufacturing on the celestial body itself, or to refuel space probes on deep space missions. Thus, the utility of celestial natural resources to mankind is obvious, but the algorithms of law and economics in regard to excavation, processing, transportation, and use in situ are not yet adequately clear for business viability and reasonable profits. This article discusses the prospects of space mining on celestial bodies in this context, focusing on the case of U.S. space laws.     

Reflections of a Member of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations

There is consensus on the need for a successor to the U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations in Washington, D.C., but no agreement on how this entity should be organized and funded and what it should do. There are now many players, both organizations and individuals, in the intergovernmental field, and they need to be sorted out. A key distinction is that American federalism is both an idea and an interest, and a new ACIR should focus on the former as a neutral, independent body with informational, convener, educational, and dissemination functions. We should encourage a discussion and debate on what the new ACIR should be and how it should be structured in order to bring federalism and intergovernmental relations back to the table in Washington.     

Retention and retirement: The case of the U.S. military

The military retirement system provides an immediate, lifetime, inflation-protected annuity to personnel who complete 20 or more years of service. The cost of this system has risen substantially in the past 15 years, and the system's actuarial costs now comprise almost one-third of total military manpower costs. Because of its importance in the total military compensation system, the military retirement system exerts a significant influence on the age structure of the force and on personnel turnover patterns. This article evaluates the relative efficiency of the current retirement system by comparing it with two recently proposed alternatives, one by a presidential commission and one by the Department of Defense. It estimates the impact of these proposed alternatives on the military personnel force structure and on manpower costs. It is concluded that these alternatives would provide a force as capable as today's force at significantly lower cost.Order of authorship determined alphabetically. This paper presents results of analysis conducted while Enns and Nelson were associated with the Department of Defense and Warner was on the staff at the Center for Naval Analyses. The views presented herein are those of the authors.     

Group Components of U.S. Presidential Voting Across the States

Examinations of the sociodemographic group foundations of presidential voting and electoral coalitions rely on national samples (e.g., the American National Election Studies). However, recent developments in the state party and electoral change literature suggest variation across the United States in the group bases of political coalitions and in the process of electoral adjustment. Moreover, the strategic implications of the electoral college suggest a focus on state electorates. We estimate multivariate, group-based logit models of presidential vote choice using 1988 CBS/ New York Times and 1992 Voter Research and Surveys exit poll data from each of the largest states. Our results reveal noteworthy variation in the nature of group influences on presidential voting, in the composition of presidential electoral coalitions, and in cleavage structures across the states. This mapping exercise suggests limitations in theoretical and empirical accounts of presidential voting, political cleavage, and electoral change that do not accommodate the geopolitical diversity of the United States.     

The impact of the U.S. war on terrorism upon U.S.-China relations

Using a framework of geopolitical analysis. Oliver Lee argues that the fundamental geopolitical relationships between the United States and China, namely the relationship between the world’s strongest naval and air power and the world’s strongest land power, would not be upset even after the American military presence in central Asia since September 11, 2001. The relationship would remain essentially unaltered because — American initiation of the use of nuclear weapons against China being ruled out for fear of Chinese retaliation — China would be able to withstand any U.S. military offensive conducted with conventional land, sea, and air forces, regardless of whether the U.S. possesses permanent air bases in Central Asia or not, and regardless of how many troops it may station on them. His teaching and research interests include domestic and foreign policies of China and power in America and U.S. foreign policy.     

A typology of U.S. suburban places

Abstract

Suburbs are becoming increasingly diverse as they continue to comprise larger portions of the metropolitan population and employment. Former perceptions of suburban uniformity are being eroded by the variance in form and function that now characterizes them. This article analyzes data collected on 3,567 non‐central‐city, incorporated, metropolitan places in the United States along the dimensions of population, place, economy, and government. Specifically, a hierarchical clustering procedure, combined with discriminant analysis, identifies 10 distinct types of suburbs in the data.

Level, composition, and combinations of wealth, employment, and race drive the distinctions among suburban clusters, many of which do not fit our traditional characterizations of suburbia. In fact, only about half of all the suburbs considered are strongly characterized by these traditional traits, and these suburbs contain less than one out of every three residents considered in the analysis.     

Collateral Damage: The Impact of Mortgage Debt on U.S. Savings

This article contributes to the literature on saving by empirically investigating the determinants of the saving rate in the United States, with a special focus on the role of mortgage debt. Using data from 1987 to 2013, we find that mortgage payments have a substantial negative impact on both personal and private saving rates in the United States. An increase of 10 percentage points in mortgage payments leads to a 9.1-percentage-point drop in the personal saving rate and a 12.4-percentage-point drop in the private saving rate. In addition, including mortgage debt as an explanatory variable leads to significant changes in the impact of other variables, which further reinforces our claim that mortgage debt is important for the analysis of the saving rate. Comparing mortgage payments with nonmortgage consumer debt payments, we find that mortgage payments have a larger impact on the private saving rate whereas nonmortgage consumer debt payments have a larger impact on the personal saving rate. We also find a partial but robust crowding-out effect of public saving rate on the two saving rates. Our results have implications for monetary policy and government policies that encourage mortgage borrowing.     

The Correlates of Life Quality in U.S. Metropolitan Areas

This study analyzes the correlates of life quality differencesin 243 U.S. metropolitan areas. Using an overall index of lifequality developed by Ben-Chieh Liu, it tests the empirical utilityof three competing explanations—racial dualism, economicdevelopment, and political culture. The results show that allthree exert substantial effects on the quality of life regardlessof metropolitan size. Overall the best predictor of life qualitydifferences is the percentage of adults who have received atleast a high school education. In addition, cultural differencesexert significant effects on the quality of metropolitan lifeindependent of racial and developmental differences. These culturaleffects are interpreted within two theoretically seminal theories:Elazar's theory of political culture and Gastil's theory ofcultural regions.     

Issue Accountability in U.S. House Elections

Political Behavior - This paper analyzes the positions Members of Congress take on important aspects of public policy, voters’ preferences on those issues, and individual-level voting...     

A Unified Theory of Value-Based Reasoning and U.S. Public Opinion

Public opinion research shows that American citizens utilize domain-specific political values to guide opinion formation in the key issue areas that comprise the American political agenda. One set of political values operates on economic welfare opinions, a different set of values applies to cultural issue positions, a third set shapes foreign policy preferences, and so on in other policy domains. Drawing on Shalom Schwartz’s theory of basic human values, this paper argues that two socially focused values—self-transcendence and conservation—guide opinion formation across all major policy domains. By contrast, the personally focused values of self-enhancement and openness-to-change should play a more limited role in preference formation. These hypotheses are tested using data from a novel 2011 national survey and the 2012 General Social Survey. The statistical results affirm expectations. We show that self-transcendence and conservation values predict scores on symbolic ideology, economic conservatism, racial conservatism, cultural conservatism, civil liberties, and foreign policy opinions. Self-enhancement and openness-to-change values play a modest role in shaping preferences.     

The clash of government structure and racial politics in the City of Richmond v. J. A. Croson

Drawing on a qualitative case study of the political actors who authorized Richmond, Virginia's minority contractor ordinance, this article analyzes the discontinuity between their efforts to redistribute political resources into the black community and the municipal government structure established by the progressive reform movement and reinforced by the Supreme Court ruling in the City of Richmond v. J. A. Croson. It argues that the specific points of contention are the progress reforms that eliminated political patronage and required parsimonious tax structures. Pervious research noted the benefits and/or constraints on the redistributive efforts of black politicians/ regimes arising from coalitions in governments structured by progressive reforms. This research, in contrast, argues that we must look to the political structure itself as a source of constraints also. Thus, as affirmative action policies like the one in the City of Richmond v. J. A. Croson are outlawed, racial minorities will find their efforts to achieve social, and especially economic, equality limited by the dictates of the political system itself.     

Creating a sustainable U.S. electricity sector: the question of scale

The U.S. electricity market, like electricity markets in most countries, is heavily dependent on fossil-fuel generation from centralized power applications. This paper reviews the factors that led to the sector??s reliance on fossil fuels and presents a future vision of the U.S. electricity sector based on a varied spectrum of sustainable energy resources ranging in scale from large, centralized facilities to small, localized energy systems. This spectrum includes low-emissions energy and energy efficiency, as well as macro-generation, micro-grids, distributed generation, micro-generation and end-user conservation. We discuss the evidence that each element of this spectrum is a viable and proven technology, the balanced integration of which could shape an electricity sector that adheres to sustainability principles. This paper concludes with a discussion of the institutional barriers that need to be addressed to successfully achieve a transition toward a more future sustainable electricity sector based on the variations in scale.     

U.S.-China Space Cooperation: Balancing Act between the U.S. Congress and President

There are a growing number of U.S. space scientists and managers calling for reinitiating cooperation with China in space. It is well-known that investigations of the U.S. Congress into various allegations involving China have resulted in a series of laws curtailing space cooperation between these two countries. By surveying the concurrent political developments within the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, this article attempts to reveal the domestic compulsions that propelled changes in the U.S. space policy towards China. The fundamental impetus is the power struggle and differences between the U.S. president and Congress in their perception of U.S. economic interests and national security in the context of space technology that strained these relations. Recent U.S. presidents who inherited this situation added to the discourse based on their own perceptions about outer space and China. These perceptions either found congruence with the policy of the U.S. Congress or led to finding ways to circumvent its legal restrictions. Based on these developments, it is concluded that the view of the U.S. president has alternated between necessary, desirable, and objectionable on the issue of U.S.-China space cooperation, and the U.S. Congress has thus shifted from supporting to restricting and then legally banning cooperation.     

论美国政府绩效评估中的公众意志表达--以三项调查为基础

本文以王小虎1996年进行的有关地方官员对绩效指标的认识倾向性的调查、美国会计标准委员会2000～2001年进行的有关公民对州与地方政府绩效报告的看法的调查和2002年进行的有关州和地方政府绩效评估实践的调查为基础,考察了美国政府绩效评估中的公众意志表达问题,认为在实践中,公众意志不过是赋予政府行为合法性的一种点缀,或者说是行政机构采取的一种政治应对策略.     

The International Economic Interests of U.S. States

During the 1970s, global interdependence penetrated deeply intothe U.S. economy, drawing state governments into novel internationaltrade and investment activities. State promotional programssought to capture revenue and job creation benefits from exportexpansion and foreign investment inflows, while other stateactions attempted to minimize costly local disruptions associatedwith import competition and foreign control of resources. Asforeign and domestic economic factors intertwined, nationaljurisdiction in matters of foreign affairs increasingly overlappedtraditional state government prerogatives concerning economicdevelopment and citizen welfare. State governments began directlobbying on international issues, leading to both complementaryand conflictual national-state positions. As the United Statesadjusts to an interdependent global economy, a new internationaldimension will be added to federal relationships. National andstate officials must fashion creative new instruments to accommodatediverse domestic political and economic needs while still exertingpositive leadership in international economic forums.     

Exploring Institutional Hiring Trends of Women in the U.S. STEM Professoriate

The presence of women in the United States science and technology professoriate depends on various factors, including the availability of a pool of qualified women with relevant doctorates and the elimination of policy constraints and institutional barriers to professional access. Recognizing that initial hiring in related science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields is a crucial step affecting gender composition and representation at all levels in the academic hierarchy, we focus on hiring profiles in institutions of higher learning to examine related trends and practices. In addition to the significant and inversely proportional influence of initial hiring on future trends, differences were noted relative to public or private control of the university and other institutional characteristics, providing a basis for further analyses of institutional dynamics restricting or enhancing favorable hiring policies and practices for STEM women faculty.     

Time series evidence on shirking in the U.S. House of Representatives

This paper presents time series evidence on the voting behavior of members of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1975 to 1990. The empirical results indicate that voting behavior of individual congressmen is remarkably stable over time. We find no evidence of economically significant last term effects on voting behavior, nor are there important effects of legislative tenure on voting patterns. The most significant deviations in voting behavior occur for congressmen who failed to win their reelection bid, suggesting that sizable deviations from previous policy positions may result in swift retribution by constituents in the district.