亚洲政党合作的一次盛会

9月3日至5日,由中国共产党主办的第三届亚洲政党国际会议在北京召开.这是中国共产党历史上首次主办的国际性政党会议.有30多个国家的80多个政党派代表与会,这些代表中包括一些国家的领导人和政府、议会的领导人,他们也是政党的领袖.我们党和国家的领导人出席了会议.     

Developing a short scale to assess public leadership

Tummers and Knies (2016) have recently introduced a 21-item scale for the measurement of public leadership to the burgeoning field of leadership research in public administration. However, due to restrictions in survey length and response time, scholars often face practical difficulties when adopting measurement scales of such length. In many subfields of public administration, this results in a proliferation of ad hoc measures of unknown validity, which impedes scholarly progress. The goal of the present study is to develop a short form of the public leadership scale. We build on data from a two-wave study in the German public sector and follow a step-by-step scale reduction procedure. The result is a reliable and valid 11-item scale of public leadership for utilization in public administration research. Since a short scale allows researchers to include additional measures of other constructs, it facilitates the exploration of the nomological network of public leadership.     

Petty and grand corruption and the conflict dynamics in Northern Uganda

This study explores the relationship between corruption and conflict in northern Uganda, using the perspectives of local business owners as an inroad. The purpose is to highlight how various types of corruption can be related to conflict dynamics in different ways, depending on the context. The article argues that in post-war northern Uganda grand corruption can be seen as related to the conflict dynamics, while petty corruption is generally not seen that way. At the centre of the conflict in northern Uganda lies a deep mutual mistrust between the population in the north and the central government. Therefore corruption in the public sector that occurs at the central level, in particular with regard to funds aimed at the north, tends to be associated with the conflict, whereas the various types of petty corruption encountered by local businesspersons in Gulu, the largest town in northern Uganda, are seen by these actors as normal or as ‘the way things are’.     

Killing the Third World: civilisational security as US grand strategy

Abstract

This article disputes explanations of American expansionism that are based on the requirements of national security or more abstract theories such as the balance of power. In contradistinction to the imperatives of defence and survival, the article shows how civilisational factors weighed heavily on the emergence of US grand strategy at the turn of the nineteenth century. In particular assumptions about the peoples of the Third World being lesser played an important role in the conception and legitimation of imperial expansion. During this period, the US Navy went through a dramatic build-up. The article shows the ways in which the worldviews of many of the key players (such as Alfred Mahan and Theodore Roosevelt) contributed to the militarisation of global racism, a development that led to widespread killing in the Philippines and elsewhere.     

Practice,Pirates and Coast Guards: the grand narrative of Somali piracy

In this article I develop a practice–theoretical account to provide the first systematic investigation of the justification of Somali piracy. Arguing for an understanding of piracy as a ‘community of practice’, I show how this community is organised by a ‘grand narrative’ that projects piracy as a quasi-state practice of the protection of sovereignty against foreign intruders. Paying attention to narrative provides an explanation for the persistence of piracy and assists us in understanding the phenomenon. Relying on publicly available interviews with pirates, I deconstruct this grand narrative and detail the different functions of the narrative in the light of situations in which it is told. The article develops an alternative perspective on piracy based on the study of practice, narrative and situation that provides new avenues for the study of clandestine, illicit or violent practices.     

Understanding China’s ‘Belt and Road Initiative’: beyond ‘grand strategy’ to a state transformation analysis

Abstract

China’s massive ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI) – designed to build infrastructure and coordinate policymaking across Eurasia and eastern Africa – is widely seen as a clearly-defined, top-down ‘grand strategy’, reflecting Beijing’s growing ambition to reshape, or even dominate, regional and international order. This article argues that this view is mistaken. Foregrounding transformations in the Chinese party-state that shape China’s foreign policy-making, it shows that, rather than being a coherent, geopolitically-driven grand strategy, BRI is an extremely loose, indeterminate scheme, driven primarily by competing domestic interests, particularly state capitalist interests, whose struggle for power and resources are already shaping BRI’s design and implementation. This will generate outcomes that often diverge from top leaders’ intentions and may even undermine key foreign policy goals.     

The impact of scale on management structures and processes

This paper advances the conjecture that the shift to a direct election of mayors in Israel, a most significant step towards recognising local authorities as political entities in their own right, has prevented further progress in the same direction. Hirschman's ‘getting stuck syndrome’ is used here to explore this paradox. Since a highly centralised system is not compatible with a ‘strong mayor system’, there developed an ingenious scheme — ’de facto decentralisation’ — a peculiar blend of formal ‘agency’ relationship, informal ‘partnership’ and ‘grey‐area’ autonomy. This scheme persists apparently because it is well suited to a world of ambiguous and conflicting imperatives.     

具有重要意义的亚洲政党盛会--第三届亚洲政党国际会议述评

金秋的北京,气候宜人,在明媚清爽的美好环境中,迎来了第三届亚洲政党国际会议的隆重召开.应会议东道主中国共产党的邀请,来自于34国80个政党的300多名代表从地域广阔的亚洲等地区汇集中国北京.9月3日,第三届亚洲政党国际会议拉开帷幕,中共中央政治局委员、书记处书记、会议组委会主任刘云山主持开幕式,中共中央政治局常委、国家副主席、会议组委会名誉主任曾庆红发表题为"扩大亚洲政党交流促进地区共同发展"的发言.当晚,中共中央总书记、国家主席胡锦涛在人民大会堂会见各国政党代表团,并在欢迎宴会上致词.会议期间,各国政党代表围绕着"交流、合作、发展"的主题各抒己见.     

Development and testing of a comprehensive ageing problem scale for community-living older adults in South Korea

This study was undertaken to develop and validate an instrument for gerontological policymakers, practitioners, and researchers to comprehensively assess the nature and severity of problems experienced by older adults. The Comprehensive Ageing Problem Scale (CAPS) for older adults living in the community was created as a reliable and valid instrument that is easy to use. A cross-sectional strategy was utilized, in which a total sample of 1060 older South Korean adults was selected (through a proportionate random-stratified sampling method) from four regions nationwide. The psychometric properties of the instrument were verified using item analysis, exploratory factor analysis (EFA), and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). To achieve cross-validity, the total sample was randomly divided into two groups. The first group (for the EFA) was employed to identify the factor structure of the initial scale. The second group (for the CFA) was used to confirm the factor structure of the revised scale with the first group. The final version of the 19-item CAPS with four factors showed good internal consistency and a CFA confirmed the acceptability of the model fit.     

Comparative grand corruption and protection pacts among elites: the cases of Ao Man Long in Macao and Hui Si-Yan in Hong Kong

Although Transparency International has consistently ranked the governments of both the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) and Macao Special Administrative Region (MSAR), both under the sovereignty of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), much higher on the clean governance scale than the PRC itself, the reality is that the two special administrative regions witnessed two prominent cases of political corruption comparable to the mainland corruption. These were the Ao Man Long case in Macao and the Rafael Hui Si-yan scandal in Hong Kong. This paper examines the two cases of political corruption in both Macao and Hong Kong and makes comparisons and contrasts between them. It argues that individual greed contributed to the two cases of high-level bureaucratic (grand) corruption in Macao and Hong Kong, implying that institutional safeguards against corruption, such as the establishment of anti-corruption commissions, and the scrutiny of the mass media, are by no means adequate. In other words, institutional mechanisms against corruption in the HKSAR and MSAR do have loopholes that need to be plugged. Moreover, protection pacts between a minority of government officials and the business elites can be formed because of their close personal connections, strengthening the possibility of grand corruption.     

Economies of scale in Danish municipalities: Expenditure effects versus quality effects

A change in the cost structure in the Danish municipalities seems to have occurred bringing in a larger fixed element in the cost function and making unit costs higher in small municipalities than in large. The paper examines the hypothesis that small municipalities in their reaction to their higher unit costs for management make a trade-off between raising expenditures and the tax level, on the one hand, and reducing the quality of the production, on the other. Using accounting data for 1980, 1990 and 2000 it is shown that the expenditure structure has shifted since 1980 so that small municipalities now exhibit higher unit expenditures than larger municipalities. However, there also seems to be a quality substituting effect in the small municipalities as a reaction to the higher unit costs. From data based on a questionnaire to the chief executives in all municipalities indications of weak political and administrative leadership in the small municipalities are demonstrated. We find that population size and administrative capacity explain significant differences in municipal understanding of the consequences of the central government regulation defining the conditions for the local production of services.     

Economies of scale and Brazilian local government expenditure: evidence from the State of Paraná

ABSTRACT

Controversy surrounds local government reform, particularly efforts directed at reducing the number of local authorities to secure economies of scale. We examine whether economies of scale exist in local government outlays by analysing the expenditure of 398 municipalities for the Brazilian state of Paraná using a 16-year panel dataset covering the period 2002–2017. We find evidence that municipal expenditure is characterised by substantial scale economies. However, given the strong correlation between population size and population density, it is important to ascertain whether the influence of population size on municipal expenditure is due to variations in population density or not. When local government areas are divided into sub-groups based on population density, evidence of scale economies remains with the majority of councils operating below optimal size. Municipal consolidations may thus lead to lower per capita expenditure.