日本公务员制度改革述评

随着桥本内阁在世纪之交进行的行政组织改革目标的实现,日本公务员制度改革被提上了政府改革的议事日程。经过多种改革制度的探索,2001年12月,日本内阁会议通过《公务员制度改革大纲》明确了改革的方向;随后经过各方的探讨和论证,2008年7月日本国会通过《公务员制度改革基本法案》。至此,日本公务员改革的政策最终确立。本文在分析日本公务员制度改革的背景和具体内容的基础上,进一步对这一改革做出了分析和评价。     

Integrating citizen deliberation into climate governance: Lessons on robust design from six climate assemblies

Recent years have seen a “wave” of national climate assemblies, which bring together randomly-selected citizens to deliberate and make recommendations on aspects of the climate crisis. Assessments of the legitimacy of these interventions and their capacity to improve climate governance have focused on their internal design characteristics, but the fundamental question of how they are integrated into complex constellations of political and policy institutions is underexplored. This article constructs a framework for understanding their integrative design characteristics, drawing on recent work on “robust governance.” The framework is used to explore the connection of six national-level climate assemblies with political institutions, public debate, and civil society. Our findings highlight significant variety in the integrative design of these climate assemblies. This variety challenges the view of assemblies as a standardized object with predictable effects on legitimacy and governance capacity, while also refining deliberative systems theory's highly abstracted conceptions of integration and impact.     

“Fair and Balanced?” Justice Issues on Political Talk Shows

Like their news program predecessors, many political talk shows focus a considerable amount of their coverage on justice issues. Although numerous past studies have examined justice issue presentation in news programs, infotainment, and crime drama, to date only one forthcoming study has examined crime and justice coverage on political talk shows. Political talk shows often present issues in a debate format, as well as emphasize the balanced nature of the content in advertising, with one program even using the slogan “fair and balanced.” Building upon the format of previous media studies, we analyzed a composite month of videotaped footage of three popular political talk shows appearing on cable networks: CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight, MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Mathews, and The O’Reilly Factor from the Fox News Channel. Using content analysis techniques, this study examines balance in the form and content of these programs in terms of presentation of justice issues, political party identification of hosts and guests and realistic presentations of race and gender in the context of crime and justice. Results indicate that these programs tend to adopt an advocacy tone rather than an objectivist one. Furthermore, we demonstrate that racial and gender portrayals of crime and justice on these shows are significantly distorted from reality, with a priority afforded to white female victims of violent crime and minority male offenders.     

The Real Story Behind the Nation's First Shield Law: Maryland, 1894–1897

Blame it on H.L. Mencken. His unsupported account of how Maryland adopted the nation's first shield law in 1896 has been repeated in books and articles for seventy-five years, but it was a fabrication based on shoddy reporting. This article will show the law was not prompted, as Mencken claimed, by the jailing of Baltimore Sun reporter John T. Morris but by the criminal indictments of reporters John S. Shriver and Elisha J. Edwards in 1894. Passage of the law was not connected to local events but was sparked by a scandal unfolding in Washington. The drive for a shield law was not isolated to Maryland but was part of a national lobbying campaign that included talk of a federal shield law. Finally, that campaign did not emanate from The Baltimore Sun but from The Baltimore American.     

Why it Never Really was About Authenticity

Critics of the concept fail to note that staged authenticity is not authenticity but its opposite or negation. This error is illustrated referencing Ed Bruner’s reading of The Tourist in his recent book Culture on Tour.

Reinventing Pluralism: Consensus,Hegemony, and the Politics of Affirmation

As inequalities in the United States have intensified in recent decades, Washington, DC’s advocacy system has thrived. Why has this proliferation of interest groups failed to deliver more substantive equality? The dominant response to this question typically cites the advocacy realm’s “upper-class accent,” portraying interest group representation as imbalanced and unresponsive to a broad range of voices. Yet this prevailing account—which I term “post- pluralist”—does not sufficiently explore the inegalitarian ways that neoliberalism shapes contemporary political advocacy. To this end, this article builds upon post-pluralist and post-Marxist insights to outline the advocacy system’s “politics of affirmation.” Using recent antigay legislation to explore this concept, I argue that today’s political advocacy circumscribes, rather than enlivens, prevailing standards of democratic participation by mobilizing hegemonic, neoliberal expressions of democratic citizenship. The article concludes by outlining how groups might pursue a transformative politics in order to destabilize neoliberalism’s hegemony.