State Budgetary Processes and Reforms: The California Story

This paper analyzes state budgetary processes and reforms to inform California budgetary policy. We consider key institutional provisions, including budget periodicity, tax and expenditure limitations, balanced budget and reserve requirements, and supermajority vote requirements, and analyze the extent to which changes are likely to advance procedural norms. Our analysis suggests that empirically unproven assumptions and poorly articulated linkages between budgetary processes and outcomes have undermined the state's ability to understand the budgetary problem and identify effective reforms. We recommend a focus on procedural norms and related reforms that promote effective budgeting processes as a less partisan framework for reform.     

How to Operationalize Two-Partyness

Because of the prominence of Duverger's law, a great deal of work has focused on assessing whether or not given election outcomes can be regarded as exhibiting two-party competition. The most common metric for assessment is whether the effective number of parties is close to two. We introduce two statistics that better measure conformity to two-partyness, briefly survey their logical properties, and then demonstrate their utility with data on parliamentary elections in England.     

Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemonic Project: The Story So Far

This paper seeks to do two things: first, to map out in a broad way Laclau and Mouffe's intellectual development, since the publication of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy in 1985, and how they have created a following within academia; and second, to evaluate their 'hegemonic' endeavours so far. I argue that there is a place for a post-structuralist approach to the study of political ideologies and the 'political', but that the project as a whole is unlikely to achieve its intellectual and political ambitions.     

探索自觉增强党性的途径和基本规律 --读任弼时《关于增强党性问题的报告大纲》

任弼时的党建理论非常丰富。他的《关于增强党性问题的报告大纲》阐述了自觉增强党性的途径和基本规律。重 温任弼时的有关论述,对于我们自觉缯强党性具有重要现实意义。     

The Environment: How to Solve Problems That Don't Respect Borders

Many environmental problems do not respect political or jurisdictional borders. Not only does this frustrate the formulation of technical solutions, it also leads to duplication of effort, overlap and jealousies.
Australia has attempted to address such jurisdictional problems, as in the case of the Oceans Policy. At a global scale borders are fundamental stumbling-blocks. Disparities in wealth (the North-South divide) will need to be addressed if threats such as global warming are to be met.     

非法刑事证据的存在与杜绝

运用非法手段获取口供等非法刑事证据的现象大量存在于刑事诉讼之中.非法刑事证据产生既有立法上的原因,也有实践和认识方面的原因.杜绝非法刑事证据的出现要着眼于诉讼制度和诉讼体制的改革.     

Anglo-American Intelligence and the Soviet War Scare: The Untold Story

Abstract

During the Soviet war scare of the 1980s, British intelligence shared vital information from KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky with its American partners. The US intelligence community, however, was suspicious of the message and the messenger, dismissing Soviet ‘war talk’ as disinformation. Some officials even believed that the British had tweaked their reports to influence US policy. President Ronald Reagan, however, on the advice of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, listened to Gordievsky rather than his intelligence advisors. The war scare had a profound influence on Reagan's thinking about nuclear war, Kremlin fears, and Soviet–American relations that led him to seek a new détente with Moscow and the end of the Cold War through diplomacy rather than confrontation.?Subsequent events and post-Cold War revelations vindicated Gordievsky. Reagan sought his advice on the eve of his first summit meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev and later expressed his gratitude during a private meeting in the Oval Office.     

How to lose a majority: The competition in single-member districts

Few observers expected that the 1966 elections in Italy would yield a clear-cut outcome. Even fewer people expected that, after the disastrous results of the previous elections, the centre-left coalition would be able to gain a majority of seats in both branches of Parliament. Yet this is precisely what happened on 21 April 1996. This article tries to explain the comeback of the 1994 losers by focusing on three factors which have changed the electoral balance between the two major coalitions in the single-member districts. The first factor was the ability of the centre-left coalition (Ulivo-RC) to broaden its range while its major rival (the Polo) lost key allies. The result has been a more competitive stand of centre-left candidates, particularly in the North. The Polo lost the support of the Lega Nord and suffered the split of the Movimento Sociale on its right. These defections, along with others, led to the loss of a considerable number of seats. Finally, the Polo also suffered from the defection of a considerable number of its voters who voted for one of the parties of the centre-right coalition in the proportional arena, but refused to vote for the Polo candidate in the single-member districts. We conclude by suggesting a number of hypotheses that could explain this split-ticket phenomenon.