Acts of Faith: Churches and Political Engagement

Many observers suggest that white evangelical Protestant churches serve to mobilize their members into politics, while others argue that they encourage withdrawal from political life. This paper reconciles these two claims. I hypothesize that the time members of evangelical Protestant denominations spend in service to their church comes at the expense of participation in the wider community, contrary to the way mainline Protestant and Catholic churches foster civic activity among their members. However, I further hypothesize that the tight social networks formed through this intensive church activity can at times facilitate rapid and intense political mobilization. Data from the Citizen Participation Study supports the first hypothesis, while applying King's method of ecological inference to two elections in Alabama supports the second.     

中国和平发展的俄罗斯视角

当前,中俄两国关系存在新的情况,面临新的问题,特别是作为中国的战略协作伙伴,俄罗斯如何看待中国的和平发展应该引起我们的高度关注。1989年5月,邓小平同志在会见来访的苏联领导人戈尔巴乔夫时表示,中苏两国应该“结束过去,开辟未来”。重温小平同志当年的讲话,正确认识和解决今天中俄两国关系中存在的问题,对于发展中俄战略合作,促进两国关系的发展,具有很强的现实意义。本文旨在介绍分析中俄关系发展的现存问题,并对进一步发展中俄战略伙伴关系提出一些建议。     

Corporate interests and public affairs: organised business–government relations in EU member states

The internationalisation of economic and political affairs changes the way in which business interests are brought to bear on public policy. This is a global phenomenon but can, in particular, be observed in Europe. The construction of the European Union, the development of the Single Market and the build‐up of the policy institutions to go with it, together change business–government relations profoundly. This paper answers the question of how organised business interests relate to government agencies and political institutions. By using the example of trade associations in the Netherlands and Germany, the paper shows that, despite the internationalisation of public affairs in Europe, the national political level remains strategically important for the representation of business interests. The paper thus argues that changes in European business–government relations are institutionally embedded at both the European and the national level. The implication for future research is that much of the dynamics of economic and political internationalisation materialises within the domestic arrangements of interest politics. Copyright © 2004 Henry Stewart Publications     

Mexicans react to electoral fraud and political corruption: an assessment of public opinion and voting behavior

Despite various electoral reforms enacted in Mexico between 1988 and 1994, large numbers of Mexicans doubted the honesty of elections and the general integrity of their country's policy making process. Such doubts did not automatically lead, however, to support for opposition parties that called for greater democratization. Rather, voter preferences were largely dependent on judgments about the opposition's viability and competence. Widespread suspicions about fraud and corruption in Mexico did affect electoral outcomes by making it less likely that potential opposition supporters turned out to vote. Data are drawn from seven national public opinion surveys conducted in Mexico in 1986, 1988, 1991, 1994 (3 polls), and 1995.     

中国妇女参政十年回顾与评估

该文对于1995年至2005年的中国妇女参政进行回顾评估,从四个方面展开:第一,将十年妇女参政置于解放后的历史背景下,描述加强制定性别保障政策的意义和实践。第二,发现女性民主参与对我国公共政策推进的价值。第三,与国际社会妇女参政进行比较,与我国民主党派进行比较,分析这十年妇女参政停滞不前的状况和原因。第四,分析参政女性在权力结构中的边缘地位,认为导致女性政治参与更多表现出的是非权力的外围参与,对公共政策的影响效果有限。     

The Making of a Corporatist State in Hong Kong: The Road to Sectoral Intervention

Extant Hong Kong studies have under-stated the corporatist nature of the Hong Kong state. From the 1980s, as part of its political strategy, the Chinese government had helped to build a corporatist state in Hong Kong that incorporated various sectoral elites, leading to a change in the role of the state after 1997. Through an empirical study of the behaviour of functional constituency legislators and policy outputs after 1997, this article shows that the functional constituencies as a corporatist structure introduced many sector-oriented demands. These sectoral representatives lobbied for favourable polices, increased representation for their sectors, and more state resources. This drove the post-1997 Hong Kong state to sectoral intervention, as resources were diverted to selected sectors, creating new legitimacy problems for the regime.     

Discovering the Dark Side of Power: The Principal’s Moral Hazard in Political-Bureaucratic Relations

Principal agent (PA) is among the most prominent concepts for analyzing the relationship between politics and bureaucracy. Nonethelesss, the inherent bias of PA scholars to attribute moral hazard almost exclusively to the agent, usually referred to as “bureaucratic drift”, requires re-examination. Building on the spare literature in which moral hazard of the principal is considered, this paper provides empirical evidence for a neglected aspect of the PA concept. Three cases of German regulatory agencies responsible for drug control, financial services and rail safety are analyzed in critical situations which were largely perceived as bureaucratic failures. The analysis reveals that a good deal of these failures, ranging from negligence to suppressing crucial information, has to be attributed to the political principal. This is called the dark side of power because the intention is to shift blame or to dodge political responsibility. Turning conventional PA reasoning upside down, the conclusion is that the principal’s moral hazard should be considered more routinely as a potential explanation for political-bureaucratic interactions.     

Voting Advice Applications and the Estimation of Party Positions – A Reliable Tool?

Data contained in Voting Advice Applications (VAA s) is not only a prerequisite for the vote recommendations they provide but can also be used for estimating party positions in low‐dimensional spaces. Given that VAA s can be designed differently in terms of their number of items and their measurement level, how much can one trust the party positions obtained from this source? We tackle this question by exploiting relevant variation in a real‐world setting: three VAA s offered at the 2017 Lower Saxony election. Despite substantial design differences, the policy spaces extracted through an inductive scaling approach are highly convergent. Simulated random item removal from the pooled dataset of all three VAA s furthermore suggests that about 40 items yield satisfactory reliability of the party positions. Finally, we find that a priori assigning VAA ‐items to ideological dimensions is potentially problematic as the interpretation of resulting party spaces may differ from the ones derived inductively.     

It Takes a Coalition: The Community Impacts of Collaboration

Members of Congress frequently collaborate on policy initiatives, reaching out to colleagues in both parties to find common ground on solutions for the problems faced by their constituents. Using a novel dataset of over 30,000 “Dear Colleague” letters sent by members of the 111th Congress, I use the collaborative relationships that exist in the earliest stages of the policy process to measure the social influence of legislators. I demonstrate that districts represented by members of Congress who are better connected to their colleagues receive a greater share of federal grant money. I argue that this is because collaborative legislators are well‐positioned to be influential allies to strategic bureaucrats who want to maintain a broad base of support for their programs in Congress. Thus, devoting resources to building relationships with their colleagues is one way members of Congress can more effectively support the communities they represent.     

State transformation and cross-border regionalism in Indonesia’s periphery: contesting the centre

Abstract

This article examines how the decentralisation and fragmentation of the Indonesian state and resultant central–local dynamics affect cross-border regionalism in Indonesia’s periphery. It argues that cross-border regionalism projects are best understood as sites for scalar contestation over regulatory control between central and local government. Moreover, scalar contestation around cross-border regional projects is characterised by the struggles to control relationships with transnational capital between elites operating at different tiers of the state. When elites at different scales have conflicting interests and strategies, this can cause policy incoherence, inhibiting the development of cross-border regionalism. Conversely, when they align, and intersect with the interests of transnational business, cross-border regionalism can succeed. To illustrate the argument, this article utilises the comparative case studies of the Batam free trade zone and West Kalimantan–Sarawak cross-border cooperation.