Remembering and Voting: Theory and Evidence from Amnesic Patients

One of the most prominent claims to emerge from the field of public opinion is that citizens can vote for candidates whose issue positions best reflect their own beliefs even when they cannot remember previously learned stances associated with the candidates. The current experiment provides a unique and powerful examination of this claim by determining whether individuals with profound amnesia, whose severe memory impairments prevent them from remembering specific issue information associated with any particular candidate, can vote for candidates whose issue positions come closest to their own political views. We report here that amnesic patients, despite not being able to remember any issue information, consistently voted for candidates with favored political positions. Thus, sound voting decisions do not require recall or recognition of previously learned associations between candidates and their issue positions. This result supports a multiple memory systems model of political decision making.     

创新体制从源头上预防和治理腐败

“一把手”腐败、用人腐败、司法腐败、公贿和行政腐败等政治领域腐败现象日益突出。制度反腐败的重点应当从经济领域转向政治领域,通过继续推动政治体制改革与创新从源头上预防和治理腐败。其中,党政领导体制改革、干部人事制度改革、司法体制改革、政府间管理体制改革和行政管理体制改革在遏止政治和行政腐败方面具有特别重要的意义。     

The Scandinavian Welfare Model in Crisis? Achievements and Problems of the Danish Welfare State in an Age of Unemployment and Low Growth

The "Scadinavian welfare model" is often considered vulnerable to mass unemployment. The Danish welfare state provides and opportunity to examine the capacities of the "Scandinavian model" to adapt to this situation. This article explores a number of alleged crisis problems of th welfare state, ground into budgetary pressures, incentive problems and legitimacy problems. It is conclude that most of these problems have been exasggerated and that the rrreal threats to the economic foundations of the welfare state should be found in political steering and incentive problems rather thant in the exogenous pressures from the social and economic system, or in pressure from th unintended side effects of welfare arrangement. It is furthermore argued that one of the main achievements of the Danish welfare state has been so prevent unemployment and labor market marginalization from developing into a broad-ranged social marginalizaton and a political po-larization which could undermine citizenship and solidarity in society.     

Reform Politics through the Creation of Inefficient Political Institutions: The Case of the 2007 Danish Administrative Reform

This article poses the question of whether reform politicians' pursuit of institutional goods may, under certain circumstances, lead to the creation of inefficient political institutions. The theory of weakening political actors through the creation of inefficient political institutions, as elaborated by Terry M. Moe, is applied in a comparative analysis of two main elements in the recent Danish administrative reform: the consolidation of 270 municipalities into 98 larger ones, and the creation of five new macro regions with special responsibilities. In contrast to the coherent institutional structure of the municipalities, the level of coherence in the regional reform elements is inappropriate and inefficient. The article shows that the different institutions in the municipalities and the regions can be interpreted as an attempt by the (national) reform parties to prevent other political actors from gaining access to future substantial, as well as institutional, goods.     

The political and practical obstacles to the reform of the judiciary and the establishment of a rule of law in China

Is China’s “socialist rule by law” (社会主义法制) qualified to be called “rule of law” (法治) or a “thin rule of law” proposed by Randall Peeremboon, without abolishing the political supremacy of the Chinese Communist Party and the establishment of an independent judiciary? Since the mid-1990s, the Chinese legal system and its judiciary have gone through reforms and on the whole modernized. However, the Chinese judiciary still faces many problems, and among them the lack of professional jurists, corruption and local protectionism appear as crucial ones. The current political and institutional arrangements and lack of freedom of the press and freedom of association clearly intensify these problems. “Rule of law” (法治) or “rule by law” (法制) in China is still more often interpreted in the light of the respective political, bureaucratic and economic powers of the parties involved than according to principles of law or equity. The modernization of the legal system will continue, but the political translation of the legal demands of society and the international community will take time to materialize. In the meantime, risks, setbacks and difficulties will continue to prevent China from establishing a truly independent judiciary and what is universally called a rule of law.     

Public Service Neutrality in Hong Kong: Problems and Prospects

Before 2002, Hong Kong's higher civil servants were required to play the dual role of quasi-ministers and civil servants. In such a context, can we make sense of the claim that Hong Kong's civil service has all along been politically neutral? What role has neutrality played in the governance of Hong Kong? Informed by Kernaghan's model of political neutrality and Oakeshott's idea of civil association, this article argues that the public service should not be regarded solely as an effective instrument of the government in power. In conclusion, this article proposes some institutional measures to strengthen the neutrality of the public service in Hong Kong and argues that properly understanding this will help prevent excessive or illegitimate partisan political power.     

Deregulation despite transitional gains

Acemoglu and Robinson (in The American Economic Review 90(2):126–130, 2000) argue that historically economic rents have been less of a barrier to regulatory reform and innovation than political rents. Contrary to this conclusion, I argue that the important margin of distinction for factors preventing deregulation is not whether rents are economic or political, but rather what alternative profit opportunities are available and how innovation has changed the entrepreneurial opportunity set. Using the example of medieval Cologne, I show that the transitional gains trap framework, as developed by Tullock (in The Bell Journal of Economics 6(2):671–678, 1975), applies in a static environment and can successfully prevent reform over long periods of time, but that neither political nor economic entrepreneurs will ignore an opportunity for increased profitability in the long run. In addition, the organization of the political unit to which the regulation applies can determine the persistence of said regulation.     

探析党内关系异化的圈子文化之源

圈子文化作为一种亚文化形态，为人类社会结构的变迁演化提供了一种解释框架。在中国，圈子文化具有独特的历史传统与社会心理基础，其价值理念与运行规则从社会领域向政治生活场域的渗透，具有明显的负面效应。圈子文化所衍生的隐性的社会结构力量对党内关系的解构与异化、权力腐败的诱致与扩散，使政治生态面临劣质化风险，应从观念改造、清除特权、消解主要领导干部“被围猎”困局、完善防止利益冲突制度、落实主体责任、提升政治纪律和政治规矩执行力等方面构建防治党内关系中圈子文化蔓延的整体思路。     

关于加强信仰建设与反腐倡廉建设的思考

少数党员干部信仰缺失是党内滋生腐败现象的总根源。只有将信仰建设作为反腐倡廉建设的前提和基础，才能从根本上遏制腐败现象的滋生和蔓延。加强信仰建设必须强化马克思主义信仰教育，认真解决执政党自身建设中存在的问题，警惕和防止市场经济消极因素和负面影响，增强党员干部的政治敏锐性和鉴别力，培养党员的信仰意识。     

Multi-party competition: A computational model with abstention and memory

This paper analyses the properties of a computational model of multi-party competition in two policy dimensions. We find that, firstly, centrifugal incentives prevent rational parties from moving to the mean of voters' preference distributions. Secondly, the number of parties competing for votes and the inclination to abstain from voting are positively related to parties' optimum distance to the political centre. Thirdly, the number of parties in the political arena also increases both the distance between parties' location in the policy space and the volatility of their platforms. Finally, the more voters rely on past observations of partisan positioning behaviour in order to assess the credibility of parties, the more the distance between partisan platforms increases. At the same time, platform volatility declines.     

In the Aftermath of Earth,Wind, and Fire: Natural Disasters and Respect for Women’s Rights

Though much research has been devoted to a range of socioeconomic and political consequences of natural disasters, little is known about the possible gendered effects of disasters beyond the well-documented immediate effects on women’s physical well-being. This paper explores the extent to which natural disasters affect women’s economic and political rights in disaster-hit countries. We postulate that natural disasters are likely to contribute to the rise of systematic gendered discrimination by impairing state capacity for rights protection as well as instigating economic and political instability conducive to women’s rights violations. To substantiate the theoretical claims, we combine data on women’s economic and political rights with data on nine different natural disaster events—droughts, earthquakes, epidemics, extreme temperatures, floods, slides, volcanic eruptions, windstorms, and wildfires. Results from the data analysis for the years 1990–2011 suggest that natural disasters have a detrimental effect on the level of respect for both women’s economic and political rights. One major policy implication of our findings is that disasters could be detrimental to women’s status beyond the immediate effects on their personal livelihoods, and thus, policymakers, relief organizations, and donors should develop strategies to prevent gendered discrimination in the economy and political sphere in the affected countries.     

Economic grievances and political protest

How do economic grievances affect citizens’ inclination to protest? Given rising levels of inequality and widespread economic hardship in the aftermath of the Great Recession, this question is crucial for political science: if adverse economic conditions depress citizens’ engagement, as many contributions have argued, then the economic crisis may well feed into a crisis of democracy. However, the existing research on the link between economic grievances and political participation remains empirically inconclusive. It is argued in this article that this is due to two distinct shortcomings, which are effectively addressed by combining the strengths of political economy and social movement theories. Based on ESS and EU-SILC data from 2006–2012, as well as newly collected data on political protest in 28 European countries, a novel, more fine-grained conceptualisation of objective economic grievances considerably improves our understanding of the direct link between economic grievances and protest behaviour. While structural economic disadvantage (i.e., the level of grievances) unambiguously de-mobilises individuals, the deterioration of economic prospects (i.e., a change in grievances) instead increases political activity. Revealing these two countervailing effects provides an important clarification that helps reconcile many seemingly conflicting findings in the existing literature. Second, the article shows that the level of political mobilisation substantially moderates this direct link between individual hardship and political activity. In a strongly mobilised environment, even structural economic disadvantage is no longer an impediment to political participation. There is a strong political message in this interacting factor: if the presence of organised and visible political action is a decisive signal for citizens that conditions the micro-level link between economic grievances and protest, then democracy itself – that is, organised collective action – can help sustain political equality and prevent the vicious circle of democratic erosion.     

International political system, supreme values and terrorism

Terrorism is becoming a weapon of ever increasing importance to reach certain ends, given the potential of mass destruction available to leading international powers and the rise of one superpower dominating the international system. In most cases terrorism is driven by an ideology comprising a world view with supreme values. Since these values are absolutely true to believers, they have to be preferred to everything, so that terrorists are required to sacrifice not only the lives of others but also their own. It is therefore difficult to prevent this kind of terrorism. But the threatening damages can be mitigated by economic, technological and political decentralization. In the long run, it is even more important to win the spiritual fight. This can be done by starting from the fact that believers in ideologies whose supreme values are conflicting, can only live together peacefully, if they accept that each individual has the right to choose his or her own belief. A corresponding education has to prevent fundamentalist instruction and to inculcate the basic rules of a free society.     

高校学生工作中突发事件应急管理的思考

高校学生事务应急管理作为和谐校园建设的重要组成部分已经成为大学生思想政治教育工作的重要内容。文章从大学生思想政治教育的角度,分析了大学生的时代特征以及高校应急管理所处的社会经济发展环境背景,总结了学生突发事件的两种类型。同时,以学生工作实践为基础探讨了高校学生工作中基层学院学生突发事件应急管理预案的构建方案,提出了高校学生工作中预防和处理突发事件的一些应对措施。     

政治地位中的性别差距

全球范围内存在着程度不同的政治地位性别差距问题。造成政治性别差距的显性因素已经随着历史发展过程的推进而逐渐破除，但是形成政治地位上性别差距的隐性因素如文化、制度和人自身仍然在实践中大量存在，需要进一步关注和研究。去除我国女性政治发展边缘化隐性因素的关键在于：通过多种方式尤其是在媒体传播中增强社会性别意识，创造有利的文化舆论环境；公共政策尤其是党政干部的培养选拔要防止产生无意识损害女性群体政治权利的问题；女性领导者自身增强职业发展规划意识，实现从优秀到卓越的跨越。     

UNEMPLOYMENT POLICY: A CASE STUDY IN AGENDA MANAGEMENT

Abstract: Agenda management is a process in which governments attempt to prevent policy issues from emerging, to influence the public perception of issues and to shape or delete issues on the current agenda of policy making. Numerous techniques are available and governments may often resort to them for political purposes. Unemployment policy from 1976–82 provides a case study for assessing the significance of agenda management in the policy process. The many initiatives and announcements of the government and their presentation in the media are described. It is concluded that the government often appeared to employ agenda management techniques such as tokenism, symbolic reassurance, postponement and the selective presentation of social indicators. It is noted that the government's handling of the issue followed an annual cycle, superimposed on which was an electoral cycle. Its attempts to influence public perceptions of the issue had direct links with the nature of policy outputs.     

Institutional Mismatch and the Inevitably Failed Operation of Section 46 of the Trade Practices Act

Following a series of narrow interpretations by the High Court of Australia, s 46 of the Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth), has been rendered inoperable. The legislative provision seeks to prevent corporations from ‘misusing their market power,’ and is concerned with one of the long standing questions in political economy: the role of the government in the market. This article establishes that s 46 has inevitably failed as a consequence of institutional mismatch between the interpretive expectations that parliament has of the courts, and the limits of discretion in judicial interpretation.     

The interaction problem in policy analysis

A problem little noted in the literature on policy analysis is that analysis can interact with problems to make them different and more difficult to solve than they would be without analysis. Four varieties of interaction can be distinguished. All are rooted in the methods and assumptions of economics, the discipline that now dominates federal analysis, and particularly in its limited capacity to set policy goals. To prevent interaction, analysts would have to be able to set goals with greater independence so that aims were not swayed by the analytic process. They would need either their own theory of ends or closer political guidance.     

Book reviews

This essay challenges the conventional wisdom that political pacts intended to consolidate the transition to democracy have the paradoxical consequence of compromising or freezing democracy. It suggests, instead, that political pacts have a neutral impact and that whether they are good or bad for democracy depends upon the inclusiveness and political diversity of the bargaining cartel and its ties to societal organisations. These arguments are derived from an analysis of the case of Spain, where political pacts led to a widely praised process of democratisation, with contrasting perspectives from Venezuela, Colombia and Brazil, cases that loom large over the debate about how pacts freeze democracy.     

Why is there no Radical Right Party in Ireland?

The rise of the radical or extreme right parties in Europe – parties usually noted for strong, sometimes racist anti-immigrant ideologies – has attracted a great deal of attention in political science. Ireland, despite having some conditions favourable to the growth of such a party has no radical right party. This paper argues that that this is because the ‘space’ usually occupied by such parties – for young, poor people disaffected by economic change – is taken up by Sinn Féin, which though it has similarities to radical right parties, differs markedly in its attitudes to immigrants. It goes on to explain the special circumstances that prevent nationalist parties in Ireland from presenting overtly anti-immigrant platforms. The focus on anti-immigration and liberal economic policies for such parties may mean that other parties with strong resemblances are excluded from studies they might usefully be included.