民事法律监督视野中的“先法后检”模式

"先法后检"模式及相关立法造成两次再审,在国家利益和社会公共利益的保护、对恶意诉讼的打击等方面未予以例外规定,拉远了检察院与当事人间的"距离"。为此,检察院应树立科学的执法理念,严格执法,积极与法院合作,确保该模式得以贯彻落实,并取得良好的成效。     

Is referendum voting distinctive? Evidence from three UK cases

The study of referendum voting follows much the same format as for general election voting. Influences on vote, however, are likely to differ significantly. Referendums decide issues, while general elections determine which party or parties will form the government. Parties are often divided on referendum issues and these issues tend to be of low salience. General elections, however, are contested by long-established parties on highly salient issues. Using panel data from the British Election Study and the 2011 Alternative Vote Referendum Study, we find that voters place different weights on party identification, issue positions, government and leader evaluations when voting in general elections and referendums, but the evidence for differential campaign effects is limited.     

Horses and hippos: Why Italian government bills change in the legislative arena, 1987–2006

Scholars interested in legislative processes pay relatively little attention to the changes made to bills in parliamentary democracies. On the one hand, comparative research has often described parliamentary institutions as ineffectual vis‐à‐vis cabinets throughout the lawmaking process; on the other hand, for a long time the rational choice literature has focused more on the formal rules regulating amendatory activity than on amendatory activity itself. Hence, very few studies have tried to explain how much government bills are altered in parliament and why. This article investigates the changes made to governmental legislation in Italy. Taking the modifications occurring during the legislative process as the dependent variable, a number of explanatory hypotheses derived from both existing scholarship and original arguments are discussed and tested. This also allows the identification of some usually unobserved aspects of the decision‐making process within the cabinet. The findings can also be relevant for comparative research since Italy has been characterised during the period under scrutiny (1987–2006) by two distinct electoral systems, two extremely different party systems (pivotal and alternational), governments with various ideological orientations and range, and both partisan and technical ministers.     

The architecture of risk management

Abstract

Power's book examines how organizations are designed through risk-based science, law and managerial techniques. As organizations have come to think of, reform and govern themselves through the vague but powerful notion of risk, both the fortunes of the managers who conceive of these designs and the behaviour of the organizations themselves have been affected. Power develops four themes as he analyses the consequences of these moves towards risk management as governance. First, he notes the tensions that have emerged as risk management systems take in information about uncertainty in the operational environment and process it into risk, while simultaneously producing yet more uncertainty. Second, he offers an account of developments in the system of professions as the abstractions of mathematical risk analysts have lost ground to managerial approaches to the processing and uses of risk. Third, he applies neo-liberal notions of the individual to organizational behaviour in an analysis of the conflict between risk-embracing profit motives and risk-averse precautionary instincts. Fourth, he argues that the uptake of risk management techniques and discourses in organizations has fundamentally changed the way they view themselves and operate in the world. As better risk management through internal self-control has become the obvious solution to every problem, enterprise values and trust have imploded. We close our review with a critique of this implosion thesis, suggesting directions for future research for socio-legal, governance and organizational behaviour scholars.     

Book Reviews

Using a sample of full-time employees of a public sector organisation in South Korea, this study examines whether transformational leadership (TL) has a significant positive effect on affective commitment (AC) and organisational citizenship behavior (OCB), and whether AC is positively related to OCB. The study also examines whether AC mediates the effects of TL on OCB. The results of higher-order structural equation modeling indicate a positive relationship between TL and AC; no significant relationship between TL and OCB; and a significant positive relationship between AC and OCB. Thus, the results clearly demonstrate that AC fully mediates the relationship between TL and OCB. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed, and proposals for future research are made.     

Balanced or Biased? Interest Groups and Legislative Lobbying in the European News Media

This article examines the coverage of legislative lobbying in European news media. The starting point thereby is that lobbying in the crowded European Union (EU)-level interest community is not only a struggle for direct access to policymakers, but that in order to realize policy goals many interest groups rely on political attention generated by the media. Our main research question is how media attention is skewed toward particular interests and which factors explain these varying levels of prominence. Our empirical analysis is based on a set of 125 legislative proposals adopted by the European Commission between 2008 and 2010. For all these cases we identified 379 interest organizations that made public statements, we coded the amount of media attention these organized interests gained, the type of statements they made as well as some key organizational features. While the aggregate levels of attention look pretty balanced, our evidence shows that media prominence is skewed toward particular types of interests; in particular that organized interests which oppose a proposed policy gain significantly higher levels of media attention.     

The decline of citizen participation in electoral politics in post-authoritarian Chile

Turnout among registered voters remains high in post-authoritarian Chile, but valid votes as a percentage of the voting-age population have fallen significantly in the post-authoritarian period and blank/null voting, non-registration, and abstention are on the rise. Why? This article tests three rival explanations: (1) lack of political support; (2) depoliticization; and (3) a generational shift in political culture. These theories are not mutually exclusive, but rather explain distinct contours of this electoral phenomenon. Compared to valid voters, blank/null voters exhibit less support for the political system, are less politicized, and more likely to have reached legal voting age during the democratic transition. Although non-registrants also exhibit less political support and are more depoliticized than valid voters, their behaviour is largely explained by a new political culture that stresses individual as opposed to collective participation. In addition to shedding light on this Chilean puzzle, the findings enhance the debates over electoral participation, mandatory voting, and quality of democracy in Latin America and other nascent democracies.     

Namibia: Consensus institutions and majoritarian politics

This article assesses the utility of Arend Lijphart's classification scheme of democracies by means of a case study of Namibia. In particular, the article examines whether Namibia represents a case of consensus democracy, based on institutional criteria within the power-sharing and power-division dimensions, as developed in Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy (1999). The application of the ten criteria results in a mixed outcome, with an overall modal value of ‘moderately consensus’, a modal value of strongly majoritarian for the executive-parties dimension, and moderately consensus for the federal-executive dimension. The highly varied scores for each of the criteria, particularly within the first of Lijphart's two dimensions, present several problems. It is argued that the statistical modal value represents a distorted image of Namibian politics. Namibia scores consistently on the majoritarian side for criteria which conceptually concern the essence of the consensus modal. Moreover, apparent consensus features such as tripartite institutions, bicameralism, and a rigid constitution do not ‘behave’ as such due to one-party dominance, and neither does proportional representation produce consensus politics. Lijphart's criteria are too formal, and should not receive equal weight. The article concludes that power-sharing is better investigated by focusing on just two criteria, namely the party system and the strongly related criterion of government coalitions. Moreover, it is essential to examine political behaviour, in particular of governing elites, to look for the presence of cooperation and compromise, paradoxically issues which were more prominent in Lijphart's earlier work.     

The legislature and agenda politics of social welfare: a comparative analysis of authoritarian and democratic regimes in South Korea

The article mainly seeks to explain the legislature’s preferences in social welfare before and after democratization using South Korea as a case study. Based on an original dataset that consists of all executive and of legislative branch-submitted bills between 1948 and 2016 – roughly 60,000– legislative priority on social welfare is compared over time, and tested using logistic regressions. The key focus of analysis is whether and how the level of democracy affected the degree and universality of social welfare priority. The findings show that the promotion of social welfare is positively related to higher levels of democracy in a continuous fashion, which clearly points to the need to avoid applying a simple regime dichotomy – authoritarian or democratic – when seeking to understand social welfare development. Going further, the article examines the legislature's priority in welfare issues within a presidential structure and under majoritarian electoral rule, at different levels of democracy. The result shows that the higher levels of democracy are, the more the legislative branch contributes to the overall salience of social welfare legislative initiatives as compared to the executive branch. Moreover, the legislative branch itself prioritizes a social welfare agenda – alongside democratic deepening – over other issues.     

Economic voting in multi-level contexts: Evidence from Kerala and West Bengal in India

What determines electoral support for national incumbent parties and state-level challengers in sub-national pro-poor contexts? Based on survey data from the Indian states of Kerala and West Bengal, collected prior to the 2019 national election, we find that voters were more (less) inclined to vote for the sub-national incumbent relative to the national incumbent if their household economic conditions were perceived to have improved (deteriorated) relative to national economic conditions. Our findings indicate that voters in these settings correctly assume that the sub-national incumbent cannot be held responsible for changes in national economic conditions, but, at the same time, the existence of a strong welfare state at the sub-national level creates expectations that the sub-national government is responsible for personal welfare. Hence, the national election is used to assess the economic performance of both the sub-national and the national incumbent.