Representation,agendas and institutions

Dynamic agenda representation can be understood through the transmission of the priorities of the public onto the policy priorities of government. The pattern of representation in policy agendas is mediated through institutions due to friction (i.e., organisational and cognitive costs imposed on change) in decision making and variation in the scarcity of policy makers' attention. This article builds on extant studies of the correspondence between public priorities and the policy activities of government, undertaking time‐series analyses using data for the United States and the United Kingdom, from 1951 to 2003, relating to executive speeches, laws and budgets in combination with data on public opinion about the ‘most important problem’. The results show that the responsiveness of policy agendas to public priorities is greater when institutions are subject to less friction (i.e., executive speeches subject to few formal rules and involving a limited number of actors) and declines as friction against policy change increases (i.e., laws and budgets subject to a greater number of veto points and political interests/coalitions).     

论劳动者的团结权与工会体制改革

由于历史和现实的原因,造成了我国工会组织的行政化、工作内容的娱乐化、工会立场的中间性、代表权利来源和责任机制的虚无化等一系列问题,导致工会的维权作用受到很大削弱。我国工会的发展道路,应是在坚持党的政治领导和社会主义方向的前提下朝着社会化的方向发展。要通过深化改革强化工会的代表性和相对独立性,通过完善法律将维护会员的合法权益作为工会的首要职能,从而加强工会的责任意识。只有这样,才能适应我国当前经济转型、体制转轨时期劳动纠纷多发、群体性事件增多,必须创新社会管理、建立稳定和谐的劳动关系的迫切需要。     

One for me and one for you? The spillover effect of heads of lists on the presence and success of candidates of immigrant origin

As gatekeepers to elected office, party selectors are often held responsible for the political under-representation of social groups, including immigrant-origin citizens. This article investigates how the socio-demographic characteristics (immigrant background and gender) of heads of list affect the presence and success of immigrant-origin candidates. Heads of lists constitute a unique group, as they simultaneously act as selectors and role models for aspirants and voters. We rely on an original dataset based on the 2018 local elections in Flanders (Belgium) (N = 31,173 candidates on 1309 lists). To our knowledge, it is the first time such a big endeavour is undertaken. The results show that whereas having an immigrant-origin head of list has a positive effect on both the presence and success of other immigrant-origin candidates, having a female head of list does not. We find a spillover effect within one under-represented group, but not between under-represented groups.     

Coalition incentives and party bias in Chile

This article revisits the debate over Chile's binomial electoral rules and its consequences and examines how the new electoral system conceived by a democratic congress altered political competition. It utilizes a seat-vote model of multiparty competition to analyze party bias under the binomial rule. This approach differs substantively from prior studies of the Chilean case that focused primarily on the disproportionality of aggregate results. In contrast to earlier analyses, the findings reveal that the allocation of the seats under the binominal resulted in significant party bias benefiting the main parties of the right. This bias, however, was eliminated after the electoral reform. The new rule continues to provide majoritarian benefits to parties receiving larger shares of votes, but this effect is less pronounced than before. It is now easier for small parties to gain seats, which has increased party fragmentation. However, we show that coalition incentives, which were heralded as one of the main advantages of the binomial rule, are also significant under the new rule in use since 2017.     

Nomination and list placement of ethnic minorities under open-list proportional rules: The centrality of ethnopolitical context

Do parties respond to ethnopolitical context when nominating and placing ethnic minority candidates in open-list proportional representation (PR) systems? Open-list PR is by nature candidate centered. Candidates need to attract preference votes to succeed. Political leaders, we argue, anticipate candidates' ability to generate support and the extent of anti-minority sentiment in districts when nominating and placing candidates. To test our arguments, we analyze data on 8945 candidates competing across 124 localities in Latvia's 2017 local elections. Few studies have explored open-list systems in countries like Latvia where preference voting routinely alters list order. Other studies stress the role that context plays in ethnic minority representation, but often lack data on crucial indicators. Our results show that parties nominated more minority candidates in localities with more ethnic minority voters and fewer in those with larger noncitizen populations. We did not, however, find that ethnopolitical context affected list placement.     

Degrees of influence: Educational inequality in policy representation

Education plays an important role in the political, social and economic divisions that have recently characterised Western Europe. Despite the many analyses of education and its political consequences, however, previous research has not investigated whether government policy caters more to the preferences of the higher educated than to the preferences of the lower educated. We address this question using an original dataset of public opinion and government policy in the Netherlands. This data reveals that policy representation is starkly unequal. The association between support for policy change and actual change is much stronger for highly educated citizens than for low and middle educated citizens, and only the highly educated appear to have any independent influence on policy. This inequality extends to the economic and cultural dimensions of political competition. Our findings have major implications for the educational divide in Western Europe, as they reflect both a consequence and cause of this divide.     

Developing a Spatial-Temporal Method for the Geographic Investigation of Shoeprint Evidence

Abstract:  This article examines the potential of a spatial-temporal method for analysis of forensic shoeprint data. The large volume of shoeprint evidence recovered at crime scenes results in varied success in matching a print to a known shoe type and subsequently linking sets of matched prints to suspected offenders. Unlike DNA and fingerprint data, a major challenge is to reduce the uncertainty in linking sets of matched shoeprints to a suspected serial offender. Shoeprint data for 2004 were imported from the Greater London Metropolitan Area Bigfoot database into a geographic information system, and a spatial-temporal algorithm developed for this project. The results show that by using distance and time constraints interactively, the number of candidate shoeprints that can implicate one or few suspects can be substantially reduced. It concludes that the use of space-time and other ancillary information within a geographic information system can be quite helpful for forensic investigation.     

探究式案例再现教学模式研究

探究式案例再现教学模式是在案例教学实践基础上探索总结出来的,其实质是一种模拟侦查的教学活动,它贯穿于本课程理论教学和实践教学的全过程,其核心是将专业知识和技能的教学始终处于侦查的情景中,通过生生之间、师生之间平等互动的方式,增进学生对真实情境中侦查活动及其规律的认识,启发学生对自已的侦查行为进行积极主动地反思,在反思中提高侦查行为能力。