人民主权原则在越南宪法中的体现

宪法是国家的根本法,是对国家制度的原则性规范,原则性是宪法规范的特点。人民主权原则,就是在人民与国家的关系问题上,国家是人民的共同体,国家的权力来源于人民,人民是国家的最高主权者。人民主权原则在越南宪法中的体现及实践还存在一些问题,主要表现为：在思想认识和现实中,人民主权原则的体现在越南宪法中只是宣言;宪法中没有具体规定人民实现监督的权力;国会还没成为最高权力机关;立宪权还未真正属于人民。     

Greening Industry Without Enforcement? An Assessment of the World Bank's Pollution Regulation Model for Developing Countries

The best comparative and overview source now available for knowledge about pollution regulation in developing countries is the 2000 World Bank policy research report called Greening Industry . The World Bank finds that there is a new model for pollution regulation in lower- and middle-level income countries that is an alternative to "traditional" command and control regulation. The new model stresses flexible norms and nonstate pressures on regulated enterprises coming from communities and markets. This article presents an investigation into this new model. It finds that the prevalence of weak law enforcement may undermine the new model's potential to control pollution in developing countries. It also contends that social and market pressures only occur under certain circumstances often not found in lower- and middle-level income countries. Therefore, the article concludes that developing countries require smart mixes of various regulatory instruments appropriate in the given state and nonstate regulatory capacities, instead of contrasting state and nonstate regulation.     

The Effects of Satellite Technology on Newsgathering from Remote Locations

Over the course of the last decade, the equipment used by news organizations to transmit text, voice, and images from locations without fixed or operational communications links has changed radically. Whereas remote real-time transmissions once required tons of satellite uplink equipment, generators, and a stable of technicians, approximately the same can be accomplished today with a laptop sized device and handheld digital camera. This sort of technological prowess was seen most recently in the 2003 war in Iraq. We hypothesize that, as a result of these technological developments, the likelihood of newsgathering from remote locations has increased. By “remote location,” we mean any place without the standard technical infrastructure (fixed satellite uplinks or high-speed terrestrial lines). Most often, remoteness of this sort is a feature of nonurban, less developed regions of the world. This hypothesis is a critical but untested presumption underlying recent debates concerning the CNN effect, event-driven news, and other aspects of the changing nature of the relationships between news media and policy. In our analysis, we find evidence of a decrease in the effects of remoteness on levels of U.S. media coverage of distant events.     

Degrees of influence: Educational inequality in policy representation

Education plays an important role in the political, social and economic divisions that have recently characterised Western Europe. Despite the many analyses of education and its political consequences, however, previous research has not investigated whether government policy caters more to the preferences of the higher educated than to the preferences of the lower educated. We address this question using an original dataset of public opinion and government policy in the Netherlands. This data reveals that policy representation is starkly unequal. The association between support for policy change and actual change is much stronger for highly educated citizens than for low and middle educated citizens, and only the highly educated appear to have any independent influence on policy. This inequality extends to the economic and cultural dimensions of political competition. Our findings have major implications for the educational divide in Western Europe, as they reflect both a consequence and cause of this divide.     

Social Justice and Individual Ethics*

Abstract. If one is committed to a “Rawlsian” conception of justice, is one not also necessarily committed to a “Christian” personal ethics? MOE explicitly, if one believes that social justice requires the maximinning of material conditions, should one not use one's time and resources as well as one can in order to assist the poorest? The paper offers a very partial answer to these questions by arguing for the following two claims: (1) Contrary to what is implied by some egalitarian critics of Rawls, the idea of a well-ordered society does not require maximin-guided choices at the individual level, and hence leaves room for legitimate incentive payments. (2) Despite Rawls's own neglect of this fact, a limited form of patriotism does constitute an individual “natural duty” following from a commitment to maximin social justice.     

THE CONTENT AND CONTEXT OF ORGANIZATIONAL ETHICS

The aim of this paper is to provide an empirical contextual picture of what is truly valued most in different public and private sector organizations. Through a series of qualitative in‐depth interviews (n = 38), that were a follow‐up to an earlier survey study among public and private sector managers (n = 382), a number of crucial organizational values were presented to and discussed with a selection of top managers from a variety of Dutch public and private sector organizations. The decision‐making context from the interviews provides insight into why, when, how and to what extent specific values are important. A number of unexpected differences and similarities between organizations with a different sectoral status emerge from the data, which shed new light on existing predispositions on value preferences in government and business conduct.     

THE ORDER OF QUESTIONS IN A SURVEY ON CITIZEN SATISFACTION WITH PUBLIC SERVICES: LESSONS FROM A SPLIT‐BALLOT EXPERIMENT

Surveys of citizen satisfaction with local public services have become widespread, with the results increasingly used to reorganize services, to allocate budgets, and to hold managers accountable. But evidence from a split‐ballot experiment that we conducted suggests that the order of questions in a citizen survey has important effects on reported satisfaction with specific public services as well as overall citizen satisfaction. Moreover, the correlations of specific service ratings with overall satisfaction, and thus the identification of key drivers of overall satisfaction, also turn out to be highly sensitive to question order. These findings are in line with research on priming and question order effects in the survey methodology literature, but these effects have not been carefully examined before in the context of citizen surveys and public administration research. Policy and management implications of these finding are discussed.     

THE STATE AND THE THREAT OF CASCADING FAILURE ACROSS CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURES: THE IMPLICATIONS OF EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM MEDIA INCIDENT REPORTS

The threat of cascading failures across critical infrastructures has been identified as a key challenge for governments. Cascading failure is seen as potentially catastrophic, extremely difficult to predict and increasingly likely to happen. Infrastructures are largely privately operated and private actors are thought to under‐invest in mitigating this threat. Consequently, experts have demanded a more dominant role for government, including the use of regulation. Empirical evidence on cascading failure is, however, extremely scarce. This paper analyses new data drawn from news reports on incidents. We find that, contrary to current thinking, cascades are not rare. Neither do they indicate a wide array of unknown dependencies across infrastructures. Rather, we find a small number of focused, unidirectional pathways around two infrastructures: energy and telecommunications. We also found that most cascades were stopped quickly, in contrast to the oft‐cited ‘domino effect'. These findings undermine the case for more intrusive public oversight of critical infrastructures.