选举诉讼体制比较研究

作为现代民主政治基石的选举,必然要求其过程与结果能真正公平和合法,选举诉讼制度作为选举的一项重要救济制度应运而生。目前对于选举诉讼的具体范围并没有定论,而且各国对选举诉讼管辖的规定也是多种多样。本文通过对以上内容的比较研究,对我国选举诉讼体制的现状进行分析,并提出完善的措施。     

Money Matters: The Financing of the Conservative Party

The article examines the financing of the Conservative Party in the aftermath of the 2001 general election. An examination of the party's income and expenditure shows that pre-2001 patterns remain - the Conservatives are the poorer of the two main parties but continue to be the principal recipient of corporate and in-kind donations. However, the article also demonstrates that income rose sharply in the aftermath of the change of leadership in 2003, suggesting that this change may have stimulated donations. Also, as for other parties, questions of probity continue to arise following larger donations but, like Labour, the Conservatives oppose any caps on political giving.     

推动构建“健康优先”的中国特色和谐劳动关系

新时代推动构建中国特色和谐劳动关系,需要在坚守"就业优先"理念的同时,承担起"健康优先"治理的使命,有效预防和化解劳动关系中的卫生健康矛盾,这在实践进路上有其逻辑必然性。我国当前人口结构的老龄化在加速现代化的进程中与经济和健康交融后所呈现出的未富先老、寿而不康、未老先衰等典型人口学特征,要求将"健康优先"嵌入劳动关系的构建中。与此同时,多发性疾病引致的各种经济社会负担、日益增长的健康需要和不平衡不充分的卫生健康服务的矛盾,则为以"健康优先"突破健康困境,助力开创新时代中国特色和谐劳动关系的新局面,提供了直接依据和现实指向。研究认为,为构建"健康优先"的中国特色和谐劳动关系,应以"健康优先"的战略设计减缓与日俱增的疾病负担,以"健康优先"的价值取向呼应日益强劲的健康需要,以"健康优先"的指导原则引领健康服务的供给侧结构性改革。     

Parties as pay-off seekers: Pre-electoral coalitions in a patronage democracy

The study of party coalitions largely focuses on national elections in western democracies. How are coalitions formed in political systems in which competition occurs on a clientelistic rather than programmatic foundation? To examine coalition formation outside the context of western party systems, we study pre-electoral coalitions formed in subnational executive government elections in Indonesia. Using a unique dataset of 5048 such coalitions in combination with fieldwork conducted in several provinces, we analyze coalition patterns. In contrast to conventional ideological and office-seeking explanations we find that, at least until recently, in forming coalitions parties regularly prioritized immediate pay-offs from candidates – which mostly come in the form of cash payments – over longer-term office and patronage benefits. Attributing this finding to the limited influence that parties exert over politicians once they are elected in regional Indonesia, we highlight the interaction between coalition formation and the incentives that politicians have once in office.     

The Personal Sources of Responsiveness. Introduction to a Special Section

Responsiveness is a core value in democratic politics. Individual legislators are important mechanisms for implementing this concern in real‐world settings and thus facilitating responsive government. This introduction to the special section on this topic starts out by highlighting the special relevance of individual legislators in this regard and by sketching important theoretical considerations that emerge from the political science literature on this issue. In its main part, it summarizes the key findings of the contributions in relation to its main theme, namely the personal sources of responsiveness. We end with a short conclusion that reflects on possible tensions between responsiveness and the personalization of representative systems.     

Domestic migrants' responsiveness to electoral mobilization under authoritarianism: Evidence from China's grassroots elections

This study examines citizens' responsiveness to electoral mobilization under authoritarianism by studying the turnout of domestic migrants in China's grassroots elections. While a large literature on authoritarian elections has focused on coercion and material benefits as tactics dictators often use to promote turnout, we argue that social pressure from the community and its leaders plays a crucial role in mobilizing authoritarian constituents. Employing data from the China Labor Dynamics Survey (2012), we show that migrants who share traits with local residents, such as dialect, are more likely to be mobilized to vote, because they are more responsive to local cadres' mobilization efforts and feel more connected to the community. Conversely, we find no support for an explanation rooted in channels of communication. We confirm the findings using an instrumental variable approach. Our findings imply that street-level mobilization for authoritarian elections takes advantage of various social factors in more subtle and embedded ways than is typically assumed.     

Protesting with the ballot: Diffusion of methods of electoral protest in Spain

This paper shows the pattern of diffusion of a tool of protest – blank and null voting (BNV)– in the context of Spanish national elections. It shows how the 2004 protest mobilization by Batasuna (a Basque nationalist party) predicts null voting by identifying the relationship of this form of protest with both the level of grievance of the population and the political resources of the mobilizers. The paper then demonstrates that this large and visible use of a protest tactic is followed by a heterogeneous diffusion process after the main mobilized protest event and beyond the supporters of the original mobilizer. In the 2008 national election, across Spain, citizens with grievances toward the political system and, most importantly, with political affinity with the initiators were the ones to update their individual protest repertoire with this electoral protest tool.     

Estimating the unintended participation penalty under top-two primaries with a discontinuity design

Participation in U.S. elections lags behind most of its developed, democratic peers. Reformers seeking to increase voter turnout often propose changes to the electoral system as means of addressing these shortcomings. One such reform, the top-two blanket primary, has been adopted in California and Washington in part to boost voter participation. Despite the promises of reformers, however, observers disagree as to its efficacy. In this paper, I estimate the participation penalty generated by top-two primaries using a regression discontinuity design (RDD). I estimate that general elections featuring two members of the same party – the arrangement reformers contend would increase turnout – actually decrease voter participation. I find that approximately 7% of voters “roll off” the ballot in the absence of party competition while overall turnout is unaffected. These results suggest that top-two primaries are likely to exacerbate rather than ameliorate trends in participation.     

Exchange Rate Regime,Central Bank Independence,and Political Business Cycles in Brazil

This article examines policy consequences of electoral cycles and exchange rate regime choices in Brazil. The literature on opportunistic political business cycles maintains that governments adopt expansionary economic policies before elections to mobilize voters’ support. However, research findings in Latin America based on the theory has been inconclusive. I argue that the lack of conclusive evidence in Latin America stems from measurement errors common in the use of cross-national aggregate data. Using Brazil’s monthly data from 1985 to 2006, this article shows that there are electorally induced fiscal cycles under fixed and crawling peg exchange rate regimes and electorally induced monetary cycles under floating exchange rates only when the nation’s central bank is not independent. Indeed, accounting for Brazil’s unique economic contingencies and longitudinal variations in the de facto central bank independence, its public policy behavior remarkably resembles that of the more affluent, economically stable OECD countries.

Measuring re-election prospects across electoral systems: a general approach applied to Germany

This research note presents a general approach for measuring the electoral safety of individual MPs across electoral systems that is based on predicted re-election probabilities estimated from multilevel logistic regression models. In contrast to existing measures, this method yields estimates on an intuitive and readily comparable probability scale, captures the higher sensitivity of re-election prospects to electoral change in the range of close races, and can accommodate regional differences in context conditions such as volatility. The paper implements the approach for two archetypical electoral systems – first-past-the-post (FPTP) systems and closed-list proportional representation (PR) – and estimates re-election prospects for the FPTP and PR tiers of the German mixed electoral system in all Bundestag elections since 1957. While the empirical data presented here is mainly illustrative, the concluding section highlights various questions that future research can address with the new measure.