Reflective political reasoning: Political disagreement and empathy

As political polarization increases across many of the world's established democracies, many citizens are unwilling to appreciate and consider the viewpoints of those who disagree with them. Previous research shows that this lack of reflection can undermine democratic accountability. The purpose of this paper is to study whether empathy for the other can motivate people to reason reflectively about politics. Extant studies have largely studied trait-level differences in the ability and inclination of individuals to engage in reflection. Most of these studies focus on observational moderators, which makes it difficult to make strong claims about the effects of being in a reflective state on political decision making. We extend this research by using a survey experiment with a large and heterogeneous sample of UK citizens (N = 2014) to investigate whether a simple empathy intervention can induce people to consider opposing viewpoints and incorporate those views in their opinion about a pressing political issue. We find that actively imagining the feelings and thoughts of someone one disagrees with prompts more reflection in the way that people reason about political issues as well as elicits empathic feelings of concern towards those with opposing viewpoints. We further examine whether empathy facilitates openness to attitude change in the counter-attitudinal direction and find that exposure to an opposing perspective (without its empathy component) per se is enough to prompt attitude change. Our study paints a more nuanced picture of the relationship between empathy, reflection and policy attitudes.     

老旧小区加装电梯的冲突分析及解决:基于协商式角色模拟的研究

随着我国老龄化社会的来临,老旧小区加装电梯成为备受关注的社会问题,各地政府也陆续推出相关支持政策,然而加装电梯之路并不平坦。对于这一典型的公共冲突,协商式角色模拟方法为分析和协调不同相关方之间的利益冲突、寻求冲突解决之道提供了新的思路。老旧小区加装电梯中的冲突化解,不仅要探索具体的解决策略,还应从以下三个方面完善相关政策:适当放宽业主同意原则;确定相关技术规程及利益补偿依据;地方政府加快制定加装电梯行动指南。     

论法律意义上的仲裁地点及其确定

结合国际商事仲裁立法与实践 ,阐述了法律意义上的仲裁地点的含义 ,仲裁地点、开庭地点与仲裁庭合议地点之间的联系与区别 ,以及仲裁地点的确定方法。结合我国有关确定仲裁地点的立法与实践 ,提出了准确地确定仲裁地点对于不断地完善我国现行国际仲裁和国内仲裁立法 ,具有重要的理论与实践的意义。     

超越主客观解释论:刑法解释标准研究

合理解释刑法是正确适用刑法的前提,因而探寻解释合理与否的标准构成刑法解释理论的核心。传统刑法解释理论的解释标准,无论是主观解释论的立法原意标准还是客观解释论的客观意思标准,都存在诸多缺陷,因此,必须根据以人为本的理念,从理解人本身的视角确立刑法解释的标准。在以人为本的理念下,刑法解释主体是具有多元价值观的解释者构成的解释共同体,刑法解释的标准是多元互动解释共同体通过对话协商获得的共识。制度化的对话协商可以通过求同存异的办法防止实质性价值冲突的激化,成为刑法解释及适用的合法性保障。     

多元化、分歧与公众参与立法的难题

对于公众参与立法问题,既有的讨论大体上遵循了一种看待公众的单一模式,由此则忽视了公众作为一个复杂群体的内在特质;对于上述问题,一种基于多元化与分歧的分析进路可以弥补其不足,并有助于揭示、分析与消解诸多新的难题：人数的忧虑、协商的困境与草案所引发的烦扰。     

Women in contemporary Soviet society

What enables democracies to succeed has much in common with what enables other forms of modern rule to succeed: notably the capacity for effective military selfdefence and the reasonably efficient functioning of a domestic economy. When the factors favouring the success of any form of modern regime are broken down, most of them may readily be secured for a time under autocratic rule, and none is strucurally ensured by democratic rule. At present there is good reason to believe that the special advantages of democratic rule - above all the heuristic merits of open and competitive political deliberation - at least offset the inherent disadvantages long ago identified by its enemies. The distinctive preconditions for the success of democratic regimes are furnished, if at all, only by the workings of democracy itself. They are both instances and products of success in learning how to live freely as, and within, a large collectivity. That outcome can be menaced or precluded by the causal properties of ill-conceived institutions. But it can only be brought about by free and practically intelligent political action. This is a task for citizens and career politicians, not a potential gift from the social sciences.     

How Much Disagreement is Good for Democratic Deliberation?

The ideal of deliberation requires that citizens engage in reasonable discussion despite disagreements. In practice, if their experience is to match this normative ideal, participants in an actual deliberation should prefer moderate disagreement to conflict-free discussion within homogeneous groups, and to conflict-driven discussion where differences are intractable. This article proposes a research design and methods for assessing the quality of a deliberative event based on the perceptions of the participants themselves. In a structured deliberative event, over 2,000 individuals were assigned to small groups composed of about 10 persons of varying levels of ideological difference to discuss health care reform in California. We find that participants experience higher satisfaction with deliberation under moderate ideological difference than when they are in homogeneous or in highly disparate groups. That moderate disagreement induces optimal deliberation is consistent with normative expectations and empirically demonstrates the deliberative quality of this event.     

Sustainable citizenship for a technological world: negotiating deliberative dialectics

Incorporating the notion of sustainability is the biggest challenge for citizenship in a technological era. Existing conceptions of citizenship have not been able to grapple with compounded ecological, economic, cultural, and moral threats facing modern technology-infused societies. Nor has increased public participation, engagement, and dialogue resolved polarized positions on issues such as what constitutes quality of life or what is meant by the integrity of nature. This paper draws on the scholarship of both sustainability and citizenship to propose a framework of sustainable citizenship that seeks to emphasize shared values through a deliberated clash of ideas. Such a framework involves a negotiation of the dialectics of rights and responsibilities, state and non-state, public and private, human and non-human nature, universal and particular, and democracy and capitalism. The paper illustrates how sustainable citizenship can be applied to deal with contentious political and policy issues of new and emerging technologies.     

Exclusion through citizenship: civic deliberation and its limits in the Peruvian blogosphere

Research on the exclusionary nature of citizenship has concentrated on the state as the agent who defines the limits of citizenship, framing it as a legal status. Exclusionary discourses and practices resulting from everyday notions of ‘good citizenship’ have received less attention. A stronger focus on these can contribute to our understanding of the relationship between citizenship and exclusion by highlighting exclusion through citizenship. In other words, it emphasises the ways in which practices and discourses of ‘good citizenship’ simultaneously produce its limits, consisting of practices and discourses which are considered ‘not civic’. In this sense, exclusion happens because of, rather than in spite of, citizenship. The article examines notions of civic deliberation among Peruvian bloggers, arguing that these included clear limits, which, if violated, allowed for exclusion.     

论刑法的修改及其原则

刑法需要根据社会的发展变化或者刑事政策予以修改,以保持与社会的同一性。但刑法的修改不能随意,必须科学合理,遵循一定的原则。刑法修改除了要遵循刑法的创制原则外,还应遵循慎重性、合法性与协调性等基本原则。