Civil religious orientations and children's perceptions of political authority

Previous studies concerning the influence of religious variables in the political socialization process have been inadequate because they employed crude operational measures of religious beliefs. This study utilizes the presence of civil religious orientations as an alternative conceptualization of religious beliefs and finds that civil religious orientations among children are highly related to early perceptions of political authority. Moreover, the data suggest that the presence of these civil religious orientations are far more important than the nature of early perceptions of the president in the development of support for the political system.An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the 1980 Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association.     

封建政治文化及其对现实行政的影响

中国封建政治文化具有突出的君主政治、全能政治、官僚政治、家国政治、人情政治特征,且至今仍制约着行政职能、行政权力、行政执法和行政效率.为此,应从立法、执法、司法、监督、教育等方面加强工作,以逐步清除封建政治文化的影响,建设起"廉洁、勤政、务实、高效"的政府.     

中国传统政治文化对我国政治文明建设的影响

中国传统政治文化是在小农经济生产方式、宗法制的社会结构,以及以儒家文化为主体的政治意识形态基础上形成的,具有专制性、依附性、宗法性和人治性的特征。由于文化的传承性和发展相对滞后性,在我国正在进行的政治文明建设过程中,中国传统政治文化将对政治意识文明建设、政治制度文明建设和政治行为文明建设产生深远的影响。     

A generational model of political learning

We propose a mathematical framework for modeling opinion change using large-scale longitudinal data sets. Our framework encompasses two varieties of Bayesian learning theory as well as Mannheim's theory of generational responses to political events. The basic assumptions underlying the model are (1) that historical periods are characterized by shocks to existing political opinions, and (2) that individuals of different ages may attach different weights to those political shocks. Political generations emerge endogenously from these basic assumptions: the political views of identifiable birth cohorts differ, and evolve distinctively through time, due to the interaction of age-specific weights with period-specific shocks. We employ this model to examine generational changes in party identification using survey data from the 1952–2008 American National Election Studies.     

The politics of regulatory enforcement and compliance: Theorizing and operationalizing political influences

There is broad consensus in the literature on regulatory enforcement and compliance that politics matters. However, there is little scholarly convergence on what politics is or rigorous theorization and empirical testing of how politics matters. Many enforcement and compliance studies omit political variables altogether. Among those that address political influences on regulatory outcomes, politics has been defined in myriad ways and, too often, left undefined. Even when political constructs are explicitly operationalized, the mechanisms by which they influence regulatory outcomes are thinly hypothesized or simply ignored. If politics is truly as important to enforcement and compliance outcomes as everyone in the field seems to agree, regulatory scholarship must make a more sustained and systematic effort to understand their relationship, because overlooking this connection risks missing what is actually driving regulatory outcomes. This article examines how the construct of “politics” has been conceptualized in regulatory theory and analyzes how it has been operationalized in empirical studies of regulatory enforcement and compliance outcomes. It brings together scholarship across disciplines that rarely speak but have much to say to one another on this subject in order to constitute a field around the politics of regulation. The goal is to sharpen theoretical and empirical understandings of when and how regulation works by better accounting for the role politics plays in its enforcement.     

The environments of U.S. R&D laboratories: political and market influences

R&D laboratories in the United States have during the past decade undergone much structural and environmental change. Much of this change has been in response to public policy initiatives and changing markets. One result of the changing environments of R&D laboratories is that traditional sector-based (government, industry, university) classification of laboratories tells us little about their structure and behavior. This study based on survey data derived from 966 U.S. R&D laboratories, develops an environmental input taxonomy, based not on sector but on the mix of political and market influence on laboratories. This taxonomy is examined in connection with three central policy issues: amount of cooperative research, red tape and bureaucratization, and laboratory output. Traditonal sector classification accounts well for red tape, but the environmental input taxonomy provides additional insights into laboratories' scientific and technical output and cooperative research.     

Economic influences on presidential popularity among key political and socioeconomic groups: A review of the evidence and some new findings

This paper analyzes presidential popularity among important political and socioeconomic groups in the United States from 1965 to 1980, making use of the Gallup Poll indicators of support for the incumbent president among the main socioeconomic, regional, generational, sexual, and racial groups, and among Democratic, Republican, and independent voters. The analysis allows fully for both economic and noneconomic influences on incumbent popularity and includes in an integrated rational model underlying partisan orientations. The conclusions suggest the strong importance of partisanship, with the public's political response to the economy depending largely on the political affiliation of the incumbent president. Beyond this, we find economic predictors generally are more important than any of the systematic political or cyclical predictors tested here, with unemployment the single most important influence on presidential popularity. For all presidents, macroeconomic conditions have greater political significance than do the government's redistributive policies designed to influence economic well-being. And with minor exceptions, the economy's political importance is equally strong for all economic classes in American society.     

提高高职院校教职工政治理论学习的实效性

为了更好地适应经济社会发展新形势下对高职院校教职工政治理论学习提出的新要求,针对目前普遍存在的政治理论学习无用思想,以及学习形式陈旧、学习内容枯燥等问题,可从三个方面加以改进以切实提高高职院校教职工政治理论学习的实效性。一要充分认识教职工政治理论学习的必要性与重要性;二要创新理论学习内容与形式;三要建立健全考核机制。     

Analysing political ideas and political action

Abstract

This paper examines the relevance of Boltanski and Thévenot's newly translated book, On justification, to the analysis of political ideas and political action. While situating the work of the authors within its initial intellectual context, namely the ‘economics of conventions’, it shows that one of the key contributions of the ‘sociology of justification’ lies in the answers it brings to two fundamental, as yet unresolved, questions in political science and political sociology: first, how is it possible to identify those ideas which are politically relevant? Second, how is it possible to capture the dynamics of public ideas? After outlining the sources of the quandaries faced within political science and political sociology as regards these two questions, the conceptual framework of Boltanski and Thévenot is presented and explained, and research perspectives suggested. This article argues that On justification provides a highly engaging, stimulating and empirically useful contribution to current debates in social and political theory around the dynamics of political arguments and ideas.     

Examining rival theories of demographic influences on political support: The power of regional, ethnic, and linguistic divisions in Ukraine

Abstract. What effects do regional, linguistic, and ethnic divisions have on support for the government and political system? What is the effect of each when the others are controlled for? Are apparent differences in support across regions simply compositional effects of ethno-linguistic patterns in those regions? This article provides answers to these questions, through the analysis of late 1998 mass survey data from Ukraine. The results indicate that region of residence strongly shapes support for the government and regime. Ethnicity and language, on the other hand, have weaker effects than scholars would expect, once region is controlled for. Thus, regional differences are not simply reflecting ethno-linguistic patterns in Ukraine, as scholars have often implied. These findings shed light on rival theoretical approaches to understanding regional, ethnic and linguistic sources of identity. They also highlight the necessity for scholars who have emphasized ethnic and linguistic cleavages in other countries to consider controlling for region of residence before jumping to conclusions about effects on political attitudes. Finally, the findings have narrower, but important, implications for the study of Ukraine and for its stability.     

当代中国农民政治参与的政治文化因素分析

政治参与是现代社会民主制度赖以存在的基础,也是民主政治的重要内容.当今中国正处于从传统社会向现代社会的转型时期,占人口大多数的农民的政治参与水平也是衡量中国政治发展的重要指标之一.因此,应建立社会主义新型政治文化,从而提高农民政治参与的水平,促进中国民主政治建设有序、健康的向前发展.     

建设马克思主义学习型政党必须增强“五个力”

党的第十七届四中全会决定指出:"必须按照科学理论武装、具有世界眼光、善于把握规律、富有创新精神的要求,把建设马克思主义学习型政党作为重大而紧迫的战略任务抓紧抓好。"并指出,建设学习型政党,是在世界变化、形势发展、中国特色社会主义实践不断深入的新形势下,党始终走在时代前列引领中国发展的决定性因素。把建设马克思主义学习型政党作为重大而紧迫的战略任务提出来,并摆在新形势下加强和改进党的建设的首要位置,这是一个成员超过七千万人的巨型政治组织面对日新月异的世事变幻作出的重大决策,这是一个伟大而成熟的政党积80多年经验教训、为承担新的神圣使命而进行的必然选择,具有重大而深远的意义。加强马克思主义学习型政党建设,是党的建设的长期任务,需要增强五个方面力量,多策并举,不懈努力去实现。     

中小企业融资中的信誉问题研究

随着经济的发展,民营中小企业融资难以成为制约我国民营企业经济发展的一个突出问题。导致中小企业融资困难的一个首要因素是信誉度不高。因此,要解决我国民营中小企业融资难的问题,一个非常关键的因素是提高中小企业的信誉度。     

A note on seniority and political competition

Seniority conveys political power to legislators despite the fact that all legislators have equally valuable voting power. What prevents a coalition of junior members from exercising their political power to form a coalition and claim an equal share of the power by eliminating the benefits of seniority? Several models explain how valuable services are supplied by senior members, so the returns to seniority may be looked at as compensation for their services. This still does not explain why the providers of those services should be chosen based on seniority rather than on some other criterion.Seniority is used because it provides benefits to every member of the legislature. Legislators want to be reelected, and regardless of the seniority level of an individual in the legislature, the incumbent will always have more seniority when running for reelection than the challenger. Since voters benefit from being represented by more senior representatives, the seniority system enhances the reelection chances of even the most junior representative.     

Political business cycles and macroeconomic credibility: a survey

There is clear evidence that government popularity and election performance is affected, in part, by economic performance, suggesting that governments may manipulate the economy to political advantage. Simple models incorporating adaptive expectations which allowed the government to exploit this relationship were developed in the 1970s, but fell out of fashion with the advent of new-classical economics. However, modern theories of the political business cycle, which are closely related to the macroeconomic policy game literature, assume rational expectations, and lead to forms of political business cycle, driven by the existence of uncertainty of one type or another. The international evidence suggests that some aspects of the theories apply, although definitive conclusions are – as we might expect – hard to come by.     

Incentives and political contributions

Two implications from this research are noted. First, from a researcher's viewpoint, our research suggests the importance of age, wealth, tax rates, and marital status as determinants of political contributions by top U.S. wealth-holders. Therefore, these factors should be included in aggregated models that attempt to analyze the relations between such variables as voting, campaign expenditures and the outcomes of elections. Second, from politicians' viewpoints, this research suggests that individual economic variables such as marginal tax rates and wealth are major determinants of individual decisions to contribute to politicians. Assuming that such contributions reflect votes, this research suggests the relative importance of focusing campaign promises on economic variables — a strategy that low tax politicians like Ronald Reagan and George Bush may keenly be aware of.The views presented are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the Treasury Department.