The Financial Crisis: A Retrospective

Government efforts to manage the financial crisis and to promote economic recovery have been extensive over the past three years. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been distributed—and much of it now repaid—from the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The Federal Reserve holds more than $2 trillion in mortgage‐backed securities, collateralized loans to financial institutions, and other assets and liabilities to maintain liquidity in the financial markets. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act injected more than $600 billion into the economy through tax breaks, loans, contracts, grants, and entitlements. Congress also passed the Dodd‐Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in 2010. Yet economic recovery remains flat. The author examines the reform effort to date, key points of its primary focus, and the politics of implementing the reform as a factor in eventual economic recovery. One component of the reform, the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, holds the greatest potential for changing the way consumers participate in the financial markets, but also has drawn the greatest debate and opposition. While regulatory reform alone will not revive the economy, a newly conceived and broadly participatory Consumer Financial Protection Bureau could simplify and streamline the complex linkages that contribute to the supply of credit.     

The Wild and the Sublime: Lyotard's Post-Modern Politics

This paper examines the thought of Jean-Francois Lyotard in relation to the problems of justice and the constitution of a post-modern politics. It argues that Lyotard is highly influenced by Kant's aesthetics and specifically by the idea of indeterminate judgement in the formulation of a conception of justice that, in an age of social variegation and fragmentation, underlies a politics which strives to promote different ways of looking at, and living in, the world. The text concludes that Lyotard's conception of justice and its resultant politics are founded upon a skewed reading of Kant's work such that claims of truth and morality are separated from those of judgement. The result is a politics marked by radical individualism which poses the threat of social atomization.     

Parties and Partisanship: A 40-Year Retrospective

The study of political parties and voter partisanship has come full circle in 4 decades. During the 1960s and 1970s numerous scholars advanced the thesis of party decline, contending that party organizations had disintegrated, party influence in government had plummeted, and voter partisanship had eroded. The 1980s and 1990s saw a turnaround in scholarly judgments, however, as first party organizations, then party in government, and finally voter partisanship appeared to strengthen. This article reviews the evidence for the downs and ups of parties, suggesting that the evidence of party resurgence is more equivocal than often realized. The parties subfield currently lacks the theory and theoretical sensitivity that enables us to interpret ambiguous empirical evidence. This contrasts with the congressional subfield where the issues now confronting the parties subfield were recognized a decade ago.     

The FBI,A Hundred‐Year Retrospective

No civilian government agency in the United States has received as much attention from authors as the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Much of the early writing consisted of laudatory pieces that parroted the output of the agency’s extensive public relations apparatus. This was followed by a reactive era of critical literature following the Watergate scandal and the death of J. Edgar Hoover. This article surveys the key literature on this controversial agency, including both perspectives and insider memoirs, Hoover biographies, and recent scholarly works.     

Democratic Accountability and Retrospective Voting: A Laboratory Experiment

Understanding the incentives of politicians requires understanding the nature of voting behavior. I conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate whether voters focus on the problem of electoral selection or if they instead focus on electoral sanctioning. If voters are forward‐looking but uncertain about politicians’ unobservable characteristics, then it is rational to focus on selection. But doing so undermines democratic accountability because selection renders sanctioning an empty threat. In contrast to rational choice predictions, the experimental results indicate a strong behavioral tendency to use a retrospective voting rule. Additional experiments support the interpretation that retrospective voting is a simple heuristic that voters use to cope with a cognitively difficult inference and decision problem and, in addition, suggest that voters have a preference for accountability. The results pose a challenge for theories of electoral selection and voter learning and suggest new interpretations of empirical studies of economic and retrospective voting.     

Retrospective Voting and Electoral Volatility: A Nordic Perspective

This article examines why people vote for the same party, switch parties or move from voting to non-voting at consecutive elections. By using post-election survey data from Iceland, Finland, Norway and Sweden in the beginning of the 2000s, the main aim is to model the impact of retrospective evaluations of party performance while controlling for theoretically relevant variables. The results of the multinomial regression analyses confirm that dissatisfaction with the performance of a party correlates strongly with party defection, and that the relationship is not weakened with the inclusion of variables for general dissatisfaction with the political system and its actors, standard background factors and political variables. This suggests that many voters are concerned with valence issues and value the overall competence of politicians and parties when they are making a decision whom to vote for.     

传统、现代、后现代:当代大学生政治意识的三重视野——基于部分高校调查数据的分析报告

由于中国现代化的特殊历史际遇.多种历时性形成的政治意识共时性地存在,构成了当代大学生政治意识的复杂图景:"潜规则"意识影响下的前现代的权力观是传统的遗风,它的涤清有赖于社会风气的净化;参与型的公民文化意识体现的是现代的精神,它的培育需要更多的制度支持;平面化的政治认知模式反映的是后现代的风格,学校教育对它的疏导负有主要责任.     

三重自我:当代中国人自我建构新常态

由于多元文化的深入影响,中国人传统的依存自我观逐渐受到质疑。以契约性、流动性和个体化为特点的社会转型过程滋养着自我转变的温床,致使出现自我与他人关系的三重建构,即以能力等特质为特征的独立自我、以具体化他人为内涵的关系自我以及以概化他人为标志的集体自我,成为新时代中国人的自我新常态。     

Social Identity and Social Capital: The Collective Self at Work

Organizational scholars and institutional theorists have shown a great deal of interest in the concept of social capital. To a large extent, this interest has been fueled by accumulating evidence that social capital plays a vital role in the development of more cooperative, productive, and stable relationships within organizations and institutions. Recognizing these benefits, a major focus of recent theoretical efforts has been explicating the antecedents of social capital. Drawing on concepts from social identity theory and related theories of the self, this paper develops a framework for conceptualizing how individuals' psychological identification with a collective enhances their willingness to engage in behaviors that contribute to the creation and maintenance of social capital. The paper reviews empirical evidence in favor of the framework and draws out some of its theoretical and applied implications.     

Retrospective voting: An experimental study

This essay reports on some experiments designed to study two candidate electoral competition when voters are ‘retrospective’ voters. The experiments consist of a sequence of elections in which subjects play the part of both voters and candidates. In each election the incumbent adopts a policy position in a one-dimensional policy space, and voters are paid (on the basis of single peaked utility function over that space) for the position adopted by the incumbent. Neither voters nor candidates are informed of the voter utility functions, and the only information received by the voter is the payoff he has received from the present and previous incumbent administrations. Despite the severely limited information of candidates and voters, we find that, generally, candidates converge toward the median voter ideal point.     

自我防卫机制研究的回顾与展望

本文概述了三种典型的自我防卫机制（认知失调、社会比较和自我肯定）及它们的可替代性，自我防卫机制研究方法的变迁、原因及解决方法，自我防卫机制与相关变量的研究成果，以及我对这个领域今后研究的几点思考。     

A Retrospective of Northern Green Political Thought and Practice

Timothy Silver: A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500–1800. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 1990.

William Cronon: Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. Hill and Wang, New York, 1983.     

齐克果论回归自我

在齐克果时代,黑格尔倡导的公共理性支配着西方世界的价值取向。齐克果认为,在这种价值取向中,人迷失了自我。为了找回自我,齐克果在伦理恐惧中走向亚伯拉罕。作为找回自我的代价,人成为孤独的个体。     

A Boom with Review: How Retrospective Oversight Increases the Foreign Policy Ability of Democracies

In the ongoing debate concerning whether democracies can carry out effective national security policy, the role of transparency costs has received little attention. I argue for a more nuanced understanding of how some democracies that possess specific investigative institutions, such as national security–relevant freedom of information laws, legislative oversight powers, and press freedoms, are able to avoid the problems of which democracy skeptics warn. Using a new dataset on national security accountability institutions in democracies within a Bradley‐Terry framework, I find that national security oversight mechanisms raise the probability that a democracy wins international disputes as well as increasing the expected number of enemy casualties, as compared to democracies that lack effective oversight. Contra previous theories of foreign policy efficacy, I find that the chances for democratic foreign policy success are maximized when competitive elections are linked to institutions that increase the retrospective revelation of previously classified information.     

Citizenship: Care of the Self,Character and Personality

Recent attempts to reinvigorate citizenship have been rooted in a romantic impulse. The current nostalgia over citizenship strives to recuperate the participatory involvement of the small community with face-to-face interaction. This article advances a conception of citizenship that attends more closely to the agonistic ways that citizens have been historically constructed in order to challenge the romanticism of civic republicanism. We draw on those aspects of the Foucauldian governmentality literature concerned with the care of the self. Citizenship is a technology of government that constitutes membership in a political community that requires both self-mastery and attention to relations with others. Importance is attached to truth-telling since this is what makes one a subject of government. We argue that an historical shift occurred between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from a subjectivity rooted in ‘character’ to one based on ‘personality’ that corresponded to changes in the prevailing form of citizenship and the practices of the self. The preoccupation with ‘building character’ involved a caring for the self that was based on striving for conformity with a set of public virtues. The emphasis on personality involved a care of the self organized around the quest for a unique self. This phase in the care of the self marks a shift in the ethical requirements of effective citizenship and as a result, represents a new form of truth-telling. We argue that these two forms of caring for the self mark a decisive mutation in the characteristics that were considered desirable for citizens to exhibit.