行政信访影响公共政策的作用机制分析

随着社会建设的深化和行政信访的发展,信访制度形成了从信息收集到政策问题察觉,从沟通协调到决策方案评估,从政策宣传到促进政策调整的一系列作用机制,因此对公共政策发挥着重要影响和作用。与此同时,从社会管理有效实施、社会矛盾有效解决和社会纠纷有效定止来看,行政信访对于公共政策的影响和作用机制尚需进一步优化健全,其作用力度和深度尚需进一步强化完善。社会管理和社会发展是一项长期的系统工程,行政信访的政策功效实现及其发挥,根本上在于信访制度本身的完善以及相关机制的配套和优化。     

Personality and criminality a summary and implications of the literature

Recent studies purporting to correlate criminality and personality are reviewed to update the earlier works of Schuessler and Cressey, and Waldo and Dinitz. It was found that fifty-two different tests were used in the recent literature compared with the twenty-nine different tests found both in the Schuessler-Cressey and Waldo-Dinitz works. It was also found that more recent tests are no better at differentiating between the criminal and noncriminal than the older tests were, although the majority of the current tests find more differences within the groups.     

Parole: How it is working

This paper presents some relevant information on parole and on several determinate sentencing proposals. Guidelines formulated by the United States Parole Commission demonstrate that release decisions can be structured to (1) enhance equity, (2) facilitate the explanation for decision variance, and (3) expose decision policy to public evaluation and debate. Empirically, parolees have a higher success rate or lower proportion of new convictions than those released in other ways. In contrast, the determinate sentencing proposals merely displace discretion to other areas of the criminal justice system where it is less visible and, hence, less subject to control.     

Whatever Happened to Thatcherism?

Throughout the 1980s and the early 1990s the pages of journals such as this were filled with debate – invariably heated – on the nature, extent, significance and reversibility of Thatcherism. Today the echoes of a once deafening clamour have largely subsided. Thatcherism has all but disappeared from the lexicon of British political analysis. My aim in what follows is to reflect on this passing and what it indicates about the state of our understanding of this once most contentious of phenomena. I do so by considering the two most significant recent additions to the vast literature on the subject, Peter Kerr's Postwar British Politics: From Conflict to Consensus (2001) and Richard Heffernan's New Labour and Thatcherism: Political Change in Britain (2000). ¹