Stammwähler und die opportunistische Wahl parteipolitischer Programme

This article explains political radicalism by the number of voters who are biased towards a party. With little voters biased in favor of a party, this party has to rely more heavily on its programmatic distance to other parties. Because large parties – i.e.: parties with a high number of biased voters – gain votes when they move to the center of the political spectrum, parties with a lower number of voters that are biased in their favor are forced to the edges of the policy space. We draw on a computational model of political competition between four parties in a two‐dimensional policy space to investigate this relationship. We use panel corrected OLS estimates to analyze the data generated by the computer simulation. Our results substantiate the hypothesis of a negative relationship between the number of biased voters and the inclination of a party to adopt a more extreme policy stance.     

美国和欧盟正在分道扬镳吗?--关于文化的概念及文化差异的思考

文化可以定义为一个成规系统,借助这一概念,可以将文化区分为不同的类别,从而清晰地描述和阐释两种或几种文化之间的同异。在伊拉克战争中的不同表现,凸显了美国与欧盟文化层面上的歧异,有学者将之归结为具有"现代"与"后现代"特征的战略文化之间的不同,这种观点值得进一步辨析。文化成规不是一成不变的,美国与欧盟的战略文化也必将随着全球语境的变化而变化。     

Institutional Change in Swiss Cantons: A Contribution to Describing and Explaining Institutional Reforms

Most accounts of Swiss federal institutions are unable to explain institutional change. In this contribution the authors trace change in Cantonal reforms and then use multivariate explanation models to account for institutional reforms such as New Public Management reforms. The multivariate analyses used rely on an “event count model” to explain the frequency of institutional reforms and a “binary response model” to explain why Cantons adopt New Public Management reforms. This research demonstrates that policy research as well as innovation and diffusion theories can contribute to explaining institutional reform.     

Corruption, Reform, and Virtue Ethics

Books reviewed in this article:
Gerald E. Caiden, O.P. Dwivedi, and Joseph Jabbra (eds.), Where Corruption Lies
Susan Rose-Ackerman, Corruption and Government: Causes, Consequences, and Reform
Peter Kobrak, Cozy Politics: Political Parties, Campaign Finance, and Compromised Governance
Raymond J. Devettere, Introduction to Virtue Ethics: Insights of the Ancient Greeks     

Who's Responsible for the Economy? The Formation and Consequences of Responsibility Attributions

The concept of responsibility lies at the heart of theories of democratic accountability. This article represents the first attempt to explicitly model attributions of presidential versus congressional responsibility for the economy. The article investigates the extent to which contextual and individual-level factors influence citizens' attributions of responsibility for the economy and how, in turn, such judgments shape their political evaluations. Employing a multinomial probit model of attributional choice, I find that responsibility judgments are shaped to varying degrees by economic ideology, perceptions of institutional context, and partisanship, although the effects of partisanship are not uniform across political parties. The results demonstrate that responsibility attributions are politically consequential and moderate the effects of economic perceptions on presidential and congressional approval. Finally, the results suggest that the effects of responsibility attributions in the sanctioning process are not invariant across the target of institutional evaluation .     

Devolution and outsourcing of municipal services in Kampala city,Uganda: an early assessment

The late 1980s saw the beginning of wide‐ranging economic and political reforms in Africa, prompted by both external and internal pressures. Demands for political reform pushed for democratisation, including decentralisation of power and resources to lower levels of government. Alongside pressures for democratisation were those for economic liberalisation, including the rolling back of the state characterised by, among other things, reducing its role in service provision. This article looks at aspects of political and economic liberalisation in Uganda, involving devolution and outsourcing of service provision in Kampala city. It focuses on the city's experience with devolution and outsourcing of solid waste management. It shows that, pockets of resistance notwithstanding, the reforms enjoyed widespread popularity and led to many positive changes. In addition, it shows that they begot problems and encountered others that rendered the process of change more problematic than its advocates had anticipated. Its major conclusion is that while devolution and outsourcing are useful tools for improving service delivery, they cannot ensure long‐term success in the absence of financial, technical and managerial capacity on the part of contractors and contracting authorities. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

澳大利亚《信息技术证据管理指引》述评

在实行诉讼对抗制的国家，人们可以通过以下三种方法使信息技术证据成为保护企业利益的一种工具：(1)起诉，包括刑事诉讼；(2)法庭辩护；(3)为规则制定者和企业作出重要决策提供依据。然而，对于什么样的信息技术证据具有可采信性，人们仍有质疑。计算机法学正是研究如何确定、保存、分析及如何提交数字证据的一门新兴的学科。尽管传统上计算机法学被认为是一门滞后的学科，但是澳大利亚《信息技术证据管理指引》还是前瞻性地规定了能使电子证据效力最大化的系统生存周期的一些重要原则。