从“救济”到“治理手段”？——当前农村低保政策的实践分析：以河南F县C镇为例

作为国家推行的一项福利政策,农村低保要实现对农村贫困人群的救助。然而,在现实中,低保政策经历了从“绝对贫困”到“相对贫困”、从以户为单位到以人为单位的扭曲和变通,以至低保政策在某种程度上成为了基层政权的一种治理手段,从而背离了政策的本意。事实上,低保政策执行中出现的种种问题既是监管力度不够及制度建设不到位所导致,更与税费改革后乡村组织的治理困境密切关联。在这个意义上,基层政权的治理状况既是保障低保政策能否顺畅执行的根本,也是一个现代国家基本治理能力强弱的重要体现。     

民间对日索赔与中国实施外交保护的可行性

基于人权的推动,传统外交保护的国家自由裁量特征开始发生转变。这既是义务限定,也是权利工具。至于民间对日索赔,中国政府无论是在法理基础上,还是在政治基础上,都具备了实施外交保护的可行性。     

Laughter and Liability: The Politics of British and Dutch Television Satire

Contemporary politicians face immense rhetorical and communicative challenges. Performing on the intertwined stages of politics, media (including Internet) and everyday life, they need to master diverse and contrasting repertoires of talk. Political communication research, at present, has ignored the question of how politicians face and experience these challenges, and how they reflect on the new communicative field. In this article, we begin to redress this situation by analysing and comparing the motives, experiences and reflections of politicians who appeared in the British satirical TV show, Have I Got News for You, and its Dutch adaptation, Dit was het Nieuws. Based on in-depth interviews with seven Dutch and 14 English MPs, we conclude that they draw from three repertoires to legitimise and reflect on their participation: a strategic, indulgent and anti-elitist repertoire. The first repertoire is predictable in the context of current political communication research, whereas the latter two add new dimensions of pleasure and bottom-up representation to it.     

增强高校工会思想政治工作实效性的思考

高校工会思想政治工作是教职工思想政治工作的重要组成部分.高校工会的思想政治工作除了具有思想政治工作的一般特征之外,还具有自己独特的"个性",有其独特的优势,即更能够紧密结合实际,从而更能取得实效.增强工会思想政治工作的实效性,应该做到"五个融入",即在学校改革中融入思想政治工作、在民主管理中融入思想政治工作、在师德师风建设活动中融入思想政治工作、在校园文化活动中融入思想政治工作、在建"家"活动中融入思想政治工作.     

Labor radicalism and the local politics of Chinese exclusion: Mayor Jacob Weisbach and the Tacoma Chinese expulsion of 1885

ABSTRACT

The 1885 Chinese expulsion from Tacoma, Washington Territory highlights the importance of local political economy in shaping how a wider anti-Chinese movement played out in a particular community. Tacoma was a newly emerging city where white residents felt the threat of corporate domination in the form of the Northern Pacific Railroad. In this context, the city’s German immigrant mayor, Jacob Weisbach, could draw upon his longstanding labor radicalism to mobilize a broad anti-Chinese coalition that blurred the divide between white workers and the local business class. The result was the forceful removal of Chinese residents following a year-long campaign that culminated in mob action and became known as the ‘Tacoma Method’. This local violence in turn fed into ongoing national efforts to secure Chinese exclusion. Tacoma’s Chinese expulsion illustrates how radical labor traditions could be turned, under particular conditions, to the politics of racial repression even as the proponents of expulsion framed their efforts in terms of an egalitarian and democratic agenda. The participation of the Knights of Labor and other labor radicals in a politics exemplified by the Tacoma Method was accordingly tied to the larger racialized American state-building project as it unfolded in the late 19th Century.     

The Catalytic Effect of IMF Lending: Evidence from Sectoral FDI Data

Our study contributes to the search for the elusive catalytic effect of International Monetary Fund (IMF) lending on inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI). Recent scholarship has found that the catalytic effect is conditional on political regime and program stringency. We contribute to this literature by developing and testing a theory which describes how the catalytic effect also varies by economic sector. This is a departure from existing studies, which have tended to focus on aggregate FDI flows after crises. Our findings corroborate previous research, which finds that in general IMF lending has a substantial and negative effect on FDI. However, we find that the negative effect is concentrated in sectors that are highly dependent on external capital and have low sunk costs in the host country. Our findings are robust to several alternative explanations common in IMF literature, namely the importance of IMF program design and the ability of governments to make credible commitments to reform. Substantively, our findings suggest that investors are more likely to use IMF lending as an escape hatch in countries where FDI is dependent on external capital and has low sunk costs.     

Terrorist violence and the enrollment of psychology in predicting Muslim extremism: critical terrorism studies meets critical algorithm studies

Discourse on terrorist violence has long facilitated an especially liberal form of securitisation. Originally evoked in reference to anarchists and communists, a rational consideration of terrorist violence, inaugurated by the concept, asks for deferred judgement about the nature of, or reasons behind, violence related to terror on the premise that state and international legal norms governing the legitimate use of violence fail to circumscribe the proper capacities of the state to regulate and explain terrorism. Where sovereign powers along with their military and civilian instruments of coercion are deemed unable to regulate violence effectively, analysts of terrorist violence and their readership are invited to consider and cultivate new sensibilities. Beginning in the 1980s, studies by psychologists found renewed urgency among a growing cadre of interdisciplinary terror experts who found religion, Islam especially, a key variable of analysis. I situate their contributions in a longer history of secular and racialising discourse about terrorist violence. Central to this history are practices of reading, translating, interpreting and archiving texts. Evidence for the argument is based on the analysis of an algorithm that allegedly predicts the likelihood of terrorist strikes by counting words spoken by al-Qa?ida leaders and correlating their frequency with over 30 psychological categories.     

Women’s experiences of peacebuilding in violence-affected communities in Kenya

Despite the attention to gender and conflict in empirical positivist peace research, and the interest in local agency in recent peacebuilding literature, women’s understandings and lived experiences of peacebuilding are not necessarily well accounted for. This article, drawing on interviews, focus groups and observation research with 57 female victims/survivors of post-election violence in Kenya, provides an ethnographic study of women’s largely informal peacebuilding activities, ranging from mediation and dialogue to economic empowerment. It analyses women’s constructions and ways of making sense of being peacebuilders, demonstrating that, while participants employed dominant gender frames, they exerted considerable transformative agency in their communities. It argues that their ‘gendered responsibility for peace’ at community level is simultaneously empowering and disempowering. The research aims to increase understanding of the gendered nature of peacebuilding and the ways in which women exercise peacebuilding agency through a focus on their own voices and lived experiences.     

Political Trust,Ideology, and Public Support in the United States for Government Spending on Health Care

The U.S. health-care costs have increased at a rapid rate over the last several decades. How much responsibility the government should bear with the increase in health-care costs is one of the main questions that lack consensus among the American people. Utilizing the 2016 General Social Survey data, this study shows that over two-thirds of Americans want to see more or much more spending on health care by the government. An ordered logit regression model shows that political trust and ideology are significant correlates in predicting attitudes toward government spending on health care. The policy implications of the findings are discussed in the “Conclusion” section.     

Vigilante justice and informal policing in post-Euromaidan Ukraine

During and after the Euromaidan, the Ukrainian society experienced an emergence of non-state groups that combined elements of civic activism and paramilitarism. They operated independently from the state and often used extra-legal violence to restore law and order, deliver justice, and protect Ukraine from external and internal threats. Their conduct closely resembles vigilantism. This article draws on the body of criminological and sociological research on vigilantism in order to understand the diverse landscape of vigilante groups in post-Euromaidan Ukraine. It explores the complex relationship between the most representative vigilante groups, the Ukrainian government, and the political and business elites; analyzes the legal boundaries of vigilantism in Ukraine; and discusses the outcomes of vigilante justice for democratic consolidation, rule of law, and human rights. This article offers a new paradigm for theorizing popular mobilization in Ukraine and sheds light on important dimensions of the formation of an informal system of policing and justice.