DECK THE GREAT WALL WITH BOUGHS OF HOLLY

THE Great Dragon has been courting foreign business and cultural aspects for more than two decades now, and what is perhaps the West's biggest commercial festi- val is becoming more popular here in China with every passing year. There's a new plump and jolly man in town that loves the color red, but he wears a long white beard and drives a sleigh. The newcomer carries with him a traditionthat the other may or may not admire: in December his picture is posted up on countless walls, but in fla…     

It's Only Made Things Worse: A Critique of Electoral Reform in Britain

Since it came to power, New Labour has introduced a range of new electoral system into the British political system, implicitly accepting the argument that Britain's traditional electoral system - first-past-the-post (FPTP) - has been a cause of voter disenchantment with Britain's representative democracy. In this article, it is asserted that Labour's reforms have merely compounded this problem, while demonstrating that all electoral systems have significant flaws. Indeed, it is argued that the flaws of the new systems are more serious than those of FPTP and threaten an even greater disconnection between UK politicians and the people they represent."     

Fair Treatment in a Divided Society: A Bottom‐up Assessment of Bureaucratic Encounters in Latvia

In real‐world bureaucratic encounters the Weberian goal of perfect impersonal administration is not completely attained and unfairness sometimes results. Theories of bias attribute unfairness to social characteristics such as income, education, ethnicity, and gender. A random theory characterizes unfairness as the result of idiosyncratic conditions that give everyone an equal probability of being treated unfairly regardless of their social characteristics. In Latvia, bias would be expected on grounds of ethnicity as well as social characteristics, since its population is divided politically by citizenship, language, and ethnicity as well as socioeconomic characteristics. Survey data from the New Baltic Barometer shows that a majority of both Latvians and Russians expect fair treatment in bureaucratic encounters and multivariate statistical analysis confirms the random hypothesis. Insofar as unfair treatment occurs it tends to be distributed according to idiosyncratic circumstances rather than being the systematic fate of members of a particular social group. The evidence indicates that the professional norms and training of service deliverers are more important in bureaucratic encounters than individual attributes of claimants, even in a clearly divided society.     

TAKING THE ‘HIGH ROAD’: DOES PUBLIC SERVICE MOTIVATION ALTER ETHICAL DECISION MAKING PROCESSES?

Although public administration scholars have long been interested in promoting administrative ethics, recent lapses in judgment by government employees make the study of ethics even more pressing. Yet, we know relatively little about how public values and publicly oriented motives influence the ethical obligations employees reference when confronting organizational problems. We employ Perry's (2000) process model of public service motivation to connect public values, public service motivation, and employees' understanding of their ethical obligations. Using data collected from over 1,400 managers in United States municipal governments, we present findings that suggest that public service motivation appears to be positively correlated with ethical obligations rooted in virtue and integrity, or high road ethics, for less professionalized employees. Further, broader constellations of public values encourage increased application of high road ethics for the same employees, but only to the extent that they foster public service motivation.     

China's VAT System

China's value-added taxes (VAT) contribute a large percentage to China's annual tax revenue and account for a significant     

How Do We Judge Policies?

Political science has paid scant attention to the way that citizens judge public policy, assuming that citizens do so, or should do so, in ways familiar to academics themselves, depending upon which of the various schools of thought they endorse. This paper argues that approaching citizens’ judgement realistically requires attention to political psychology. Indeed, our conception of citizen judgement can be enriched by attention to research and theory in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. That work emphasises that much judgement occurs spontaneously and very rapidly, that it is involuntary and non‐semantic and that it depends upon the emotional impact of experience rather than conscious weighing of situations against explicit standards of assessment such as science, self‐interest or moral theory. A moral psychology for public life is sketched out, with implications for judgment by politicians.