当代政府行政权力初探

在政府行政领域空前发展,政府行政功能全面统帅社会生活的今天,行政权力对整个社会发展的影响日益明显.因此,它一直成为近几年来学术界关注的热点.本文在分析论述政府行政权力的含义、表现、本质、特征及其作用的基础上,着重探讨了在当代社会中发挥我国政府行政权力作用应该创设的具体条件.     

Solomon Islands: blending traditional power and modern structures in the state

By mid‐2001, the Solomon Islands government was on the edge of bankruptcy after two years of unrest on Guadalcanal. Solomon Islanders' hopes that the national government can improve their living standards have been dashed, only 23 years after British colonial rule ended on these South‐West Pacific islands. The reasons for the state's limited capacity to facilitate development extend much further than the financial crisis, as a comparison between power relations typically institutionalized in Western liberal democratic states and those institutionalized in the Solomons state shows. The Solomons state is a syncretism of traditional political practices and modern structures. Many of these traditional practices are impeding development. Recent neo‐liberal reforms championed by the previous government, the Asian Development Bank and other aid agencies did little to address these practices and were terminated in the unrest in 2000. If the state is to improve the living standards of ordinary Solomon Islanders, changes in structure, such as the state governments being established following the Townsville Peace Agreement, are not the sole answer. There also need to be changes in the political practices of both officials and politicians at national and local level. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

May the weak force be with you: The power of the mass media in modern politics

Abstract.  The idea that the modern mass media have a strong and malign effect on many aspects of social and political life is widely and strongly held. Television is often said to undermine democratic government popular support for leaders and institutions. In spite of all that has been written about media malaise, however, both theory and evidence suggests that the media are a comparatively weak force whose effects can be deflected, diluted and diffused by stronger forces. These include bedrocks political values associated with class, religion, age, gender and education, as well as social networks and discussions, distrust of the mass media, and personal knowledge and experience. Equally, the variables that mediate the media may also magnify its effects so that what appears to be a large media effect is, in fact, the result of an interaction between the media and other forces. This article lays out the argument of the media malaise literature that covers government and politics, then outlines the social forces that mediate the media, and finally provides some evidence to illustrate the argument that the media are generally a weak force in society.     

Regulatory independence, public accountability and the Victorian prison system

One of the most frequently used arguments supporting the introduction of privatization into a prison system is that it will strengthen accountability. However, to meet this claim it is maintained that a number of preconditions are necessary—one being independence of the regulator. This article examines the claims made by the Victorian Minister for Corrections that the Seamless System model would provide more independent monitoring and review of Victoria's prisons. Changes to regulatory arrangements are probed to determine if there has been any loss of independence in Victoria's prison system since the introduction of the latest model. It is concluded that the latest restructuring in 2003 of Victoria's part-privatised prison poses a significant risk for public accountability and requires attention to ensure both the private and the public prisons are held to account.     

Projecting the impact of new sentencing laws on prison populations

Recent efforts at sentencing reform have led to the consideration or enactment of new sentencing structures, including mandatory-minimum sentences, flat-time sentences, and sentencing guidelines. There is a clear need for estimates of the impacts that new sentencing laws would have on sentencing practice and on corrections programs, both as an informational input during legislative debate and as a basis for planning once a particular law is enacted. This study develops a methodology for estimating the impacts of alternative sentencing policies on prison populations. The methodology is demonstrated with an estimation of the impacts on the Pennsylvania state prison system of a mandatory-minimum sentencing bill which was considered by the Pennsylvania legislature.This research was supported in part by SPC No. 568788 funded by the Pennsylvania Governor's Justice Commission. The assistance of the Governor's Justice Commission, the Pennsylvania Association of Probation, Parole, and Correction, the Pennsylvania Bureau of Correction, the Pennsylvania Department of Education, and the Subcommittee on Crime and Correction of the Pennsylvania House Judiciary Committee in providing data and information is gratefully acknowledged. Appreciation is also due to Alfred Blumstein and Patrick Larkey for providing helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.     

Policing the Chinese household: a comparison of modern and ancient forms

Chinese systems of household registration have long been regarded as marginal areas of interest in Chinese studies. Using recent theoretical work on community, family, policing, and power as the conceptual basis, this study, however, questions such marginalization. We have attempted to plot the role of the household register in the classical and contemporary periods. In the classical period, we suggest, it functioned as a mechanism to police and make visible the order of the family. It did this by renegotiating family relations away from anti-State alliances and by constructing a hierarchy of mutual control which valorized the privileged status of the family. The contemporary system has however moved away from the moral concerns of earlier systems, and centers instead upon questions of population and organization. It forms the basic statistical material of both the welfare system and state planning. It is no longer regarded as a defence of the moral order, rather it constructs itself not unlike domains that once claimed to be Proletarian Sciences.     

Myanmar: the challenges of power

Despite the National League for Democracy's resounding victory in Myanmar's November 2015 general election, the country's political future is far from clear. There remain major obstacles to a peaceful transfer of power from the military-supported government to one led by Aung San Suu Kyi.     

Guilt and the origins of modern law

Abstract

Tracing the history of legal concepts from the decline of European feudalism to the Reformation, this paper examines ways in which the concept of guilt shaped the first evolution of modern law, and it claims that the early revolutionary junctures in the construction of the law were centred around specific and distinctive conceptions of guilt. It argues that, through the history of medieval and early-modern European society, the law learned positively to abstract and account for itself through internally formative exchanges over the subject of guilt, and changes in law's observation of guilt reflected a growing refinement in law's societal sensibility, in its inclusivity, in its patterns of imputation and in its positive powers of self-legitimation. Guilt formed the term around which the law enacted the necessary stages of its social adaptation and produced constructs to underwrite the requirement for general, abstracted and positively inclusive law that constitutes modern society. The ultimate result of guilt's evolution as a legal figure became visible in the fact that the law progressively intensified its positivity and inclusivity, and it amplified the legal and normative resources that it permitted modern societies to store, utilize and reproduce.     

Democracy and modern political community: limits and possibilities

There are various limits to what is politically possible. The exigencies of economic production and exchange represent one crucial limit to possible political structures. Inherited Marxist and liberal conceptions of the relation between economic systems and political structures are incoherent; these relations need to be reconceived, yet recent socialist political thinking has preferred to focus mainly on the political domain, pursuing a theory of self-governing community. Can there today be a coherent account of such a theory? One way of showing there cannot is by pressing the question of the contours an dsubstance of modern political community. Optimistic theorists of self-governing community rely on a self-enclosed, determinate conception of community that has its imaginative roots in a vision of ancient liberty: the demos exercising legitimate and effective agency over a particular territory. But modern political community cannot be conceived of in this way: because of the presence of global processes of economic causality, there is today no fit between the territorial identity of a political community and its effective powers of agency. Modern liberty (unlike its ancient counterpart) has no specific or determinate location: its availability depends upon an elaborate division of economic and political labour. In these circumstances, it no longer makes sense to heighten the stakes of membership in a political community, as optimistic theorists of democracy do when they call for a more active and participatory civil society. The for appraising what forms of the division of political labour may be legitimate.     

Brand power and state power: Rise of the new media networks in East Asia

During the past decade, digital technology and global deregulatory forces have facilitated the restructuring of East Asia's mediascape - resulting in complex, internationalized relationships within the regional political economy. Transnational media corporations - such as AOL Time Warner and News Corporation - are negotiating strategically important positions in regional distribution and branded content markets, in the pursuit of 'consumer segments' that form the basis of multi-platform, mass-media customer relationships. In the early phase of the internationalization process, there were expectations that one result would be a more liberalized media discourse environment - eroding authoritarian governments' capacity to control information flows. Evidence to support this contention is unconvincing. Information-sensitive states, notably China, have developed strategies to mediate the distribution of mass information - often in partnership with compliant local entrepreneurs and the international media corporations who may also benefit from uncontroversial customer relationships. Prospects for a broader, richer media canvas might be enhanced by the parallel development of constructive, permissive media policies - underpinned by regulatory principles of modern public service communications and managed competition.