Chinese and U.S. Schools: In Comparison

When comparing U.S. and Chinese schools, one finds a number of stark differences and unexpected similarities. Differences exist Let's begin with the most overwhelming difference. While the Chinese education system has many different objectives, its dominant feature is the gaokao system. Gaokao refers to the national exam that high school students take to determine admission to colleges and universities. The main part of the exam is taken by most students during their senior year, although some special subject exams can be completed the year before.     

The Value of Judicial Independence: Evidence from Eighteenth Century England

This article assesses the impact of changes in judicial independenceon equity markets. North and Weingast (1989) argue that judicialindependence and other institutional changes inaugurated bythe Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 improved public andprivate finance in England by putting restraints on the government.We calculate abnormal equity returns at critical points in thepassage of statutes giving judges greater security of tenureand higher salaries. Early-eighteenth-century legislation grantingtenure during good behavior is associated with large and statisticallysignificant positive abnormal returns. Other statutes had positivebut generally insignificant effects.     

Rethinking agency and structure in the study of regime change

The oscillation of the study of political regime change between voluntarist and structural approaches has increasingly led scholars to seek research strategies for synthesizing the two approaches. This article addresses the conceptual and practical difficulties of achieving such a synthesis by evaluating several strategies for integrating voluntarist and structural factors in the analysis of regime change. It examines competing ways of conceptualizing agency and structure and assesses the varied consequences that different conceptualizations have for explaining regime transformation. The article also analyzes three distinct strategies for integrating agency and structure: the funnel, path-dependent, and eclectic strategies. Each integrative strategy isanchored by a different conceptual base and has characteristic strengths and limitations. The conclusion explores future directions for developing integrative strategies. The authors are listed in alphabetical order and share equal responsibility for the content of this analysis. We appreciate helpful comments and suggestions from Christopher Ansell, Ruth Berins Collier, Michael Bratton, David Collier, Larry Diamond, Giuseppe di Palma, Peter Evans, John Foran, Jeff Goodwin, Tomasz Grabowski, Ernst Haas, Stephan Haggard, Jonathan Hartlyn, Terry Karl, Steven Levitsky Juan Linz, Gerardo Munck, Pierre Ostiguy, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Eric Selbin, Michael Sinatra, Jutta Weldes, Alexander Wendt, and Brendan Works. James Mahoney is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Brown University. He is currently finishing a book that analyzes liberalism and regime change in five Central American countries during the 19th and 20th centuries. Richard Snyder is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has published numerous articles on both regime change and the politics of economic reform. He is currently completing a forthcoming book entitledPolitics after Neoliberalism.     

Integrating Public Deliberation into Engineering Systems: Participatory Technology Assessment of NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission

We discuss an experiment employing participatory technology assessment (pTA), a public deliberation method for eliciting lay citizen input prior to making decisions about science and technology to inform upstream engineering decisions concerning technical aspects of NASA’s Asteroid Initiative. In partnership with NASA, the Expert and Citizen Assessment of Science and Technology network conducted a pTA forum on NASA’s Asteroid Initiative in 2014. The goal of the exercise was to assess citizens’ values and preferences about potential asteroid detection, asteroid mitigation, and exploration-based technologies associated with NASA’s Initiative. This article discusses the portion of the forum that focused on the Asteroid Redirect Mission, an effort to redirect an asteroid into lunar orbit that astronauts can study. The forum sought public input on two options for performing the mission that NASA included in technical assessments to make a down select decision: Option A to capture a 10-meter-diameter asteroid; or Option B to redirect a several-meters-diameter boulder from the surface of a larger asteroid. We describe the values and perceptions participants had about Option A and B, how these results were used by NASA managers, and the impact the results of the pTA had on the down select.