Ideals Without Institutions: Understandings of Democracy and Democratic Participation Among Ecuadorian Youth

Many scholars of democratization have identified citizen support for democracy as an important determinant of democratic consolidation and deepening. Fewer have explored in depth what everyday citizens actually understand democracy to mean. If mass values shape democratic prospects, what specific notion of “democracy” are the masses inclined to support? This study addresses this question through focus groups conducted with 186 young people in Ecuador, a country that has epitomized challenges of democratic discontent and instability in Latin America. As compared to the dominant survey-based literature, interactive focus group conversations offer a more complex and complete picture of youth democratic perspectives, thus sharpening our analysis of the link between citizen attitudes and democratic performance. Findings have relevance for contemporary debates about “authoritarian drift” in the region, showing youth as strongly invested in democratic freedoms, though highly skeptical of the institutions that allegedly guarantee them. More broadly, the analysis provides a window into how youth conceive of and practice democracy in contexts of unstable democratization.     

试析中国的多边制度外交——以中国参与国际反贪腐制度为例

近十多年中国参与了诸多国际制度,中国参与多边制度外交是审视中国多边外交的视角之一。中国在参与国际反贪腐制度时采用了更加灵活多元的多边外交方式,体现了中国多边外交从形式到理念的新特点。     

非政府组织--一支异军突起的国际力量

冷战结束后,随着经济全球化、世界多极化与国际关系民主化的深入发展,国外的非政府组织异军突起,逐步渗透到许多国家内部生活的各个领域和国际事务的方方面面,对各国内外政策和整个国际关系的影响日益加强,成为继民族国家、政府间国际组织之后的又一重要的国际行为     

Institutionalizing Participation and Governance? New Participative Structures in Local Government in Ireland

Public service providers and elected levels of government around the world are continually being encouraged to involve citizens in decision-making. Various means of achieving this have been employed by local authorities in different countries. These include local referenda, customer surveys, online discussion forums and citizens' juries. This article draws on the example of new participative committee structures within Irish local government. These seek to involve identified stakeholders (including business, trade unions, the community/voluntary sector and environmental interests) in local government decision-making. These structures were inspired both by international trends towards participatory democracy and Ireland's experience of neo-corporatist 'social partnership' at the national level. This article considers the new committee structures and their composition and examines some of the problems encountered. It demonstrates that recent research into these new structures supports many of the concerns that have been raised in the literature on varying participative mechanisms practiced in other countries.     

Institutions and Economic Performance: The Use and Abuse of Culture in New Institutional Economics

Important research programs within New Institutional Economics advance culturalist arguments to explain failures of economic development. Focusing on the work of Douglass C. North and Avner Greif, this article argues that such arguments rely on an essentialist conception of culture that is both historically inaccurate and analytically misleading. Greif’s work in particular rests on a selective use of empirical data that ultimately distorts the deductive models that are at the core of his work. As a result, both scholars use culture to account for outcomes that are more adequately explained as the product of social conflict and political struggles—struggles in which culture plays a far more contingent and destabilizing role than the one they attribute to it. What is needed, I argue, is to link arguments about the persistence of inefficient institutions with a sociologically informed conception of culture as an ensemble of resources that enhance rather than constrain the scope of individual agency. To come to terms with the effects of culture on institutional formation and change it is necessary to replace the essentialism articulated by North and Greif with a strategic-instrumentalist view in which culture is compatible with a wide spectrum of economic behaviors, individual actions, and thus institutional trajectories.

抓住机遇，推动新形势下中日关系取得更大发展——中共代表团赴日参加“中国共产党与日本民主党交流机制”第三次会议纪行

应日本民主党邀请,中联部部长王家瑞率中共代表团于11月8—12日赴日参加“中国共产党与日本民主党交流机制”第三次会议并访问日本,团员包括中央政研室副主任方立、中央外办副主任裘援平、团中央书记处书记卢雍政及外交部、国家发改委、商务部、财政部、中国人民银行等部门有关负责同志。