Street-level Enforcement Style: A Multidimensional Measurement Instrument

This study investigates street-level bureaucrats’ enforcement style and its underlying dimensions by developing and validating a multidimensional measurement scale. Developing a measurement scale for enforcement style is relevant because the number of underlying dimensions is contested and studies developing measurement scales are scarce. This complicates cross-sector and cross-national comparisons. Using a survey among inspectors of the Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority, street-level enforcement style is found to comprising three dimensions: (1) legal, (2) facilitation, and (3) accommodation. This study contributes to more validated measurement instruments by presenting a 13-item measure that can be used to study street-level bureaucrats’ enforcement style.     

Vladimir Iowa Lenin,Part 1: A Bolshevik Studies American Agriculture

A busy year for Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1917 also marked the publication of his study of American agriculture. The report reads as more than a historical curiosity, offering insights, however era-bounded, on a variety of topics of substantive and epistemological interest today. Lenin writes of the history of American agriculture, its dynamic regionalism, and its sector-specific class conflicts. Along the way, despite his obvious structural tendencies, we meet an anti-foundational author who, while upbraiding bourgeois economists for their expedient technicism, often in scathing terms, also warns that sweeping conclusions about the sizes of farm and capitalization are problematic in the face of historically dependent and contradictory trends. Here, in the first of the paper’s two parts, we begin to place Lenin’s project in the broader stream of critical agrarian studies, including the classic contrast with agricultural economist Alexander Chayanov, but also the diseconomies of modern agriculture, the biological limits on industrializing food production, and Stalin’s “dekulakization” campaign. Our aims here are more than academic. The exploration is framed by the roles the structure of agriculture and its impacts on its participants play in political change, from elections to revolution.     

Visions of National Service

While national service enjoys broad support across the political spectrum, the actual goals of programs such as AmeriCorps remain somewhat amorphous. Based on a set of interviews with both experienced. practitioners and key thought leaders in the field, four competing visions of national service are detailed. The article suggests that national service has alternatively been seen as a way to promote an active and engaged citizenship, accelerate the personal growth of the young people in the programs, build social capital in communities, and meet critical social needs through public work. These four competing visions can and do coexist in practice, which helps to explain the widespread and enduring popularity of the idea of national service in America.

Mutual and Self Perceptions of Opposing Advocacy Coalitions: Devil Shift and Angel Shift in a German Policy Subsystem

In political conflicts, actors tend to assume that opponents behave maliciously. This phenomena is part of the “devil shift,” which was introduced in advocacy coalition framework research. We present a multivariate analysis of the perceptions of motives and actions of opposing coalitions in a political conflict and thereby analyze a major dimension of the “devil shift” and of its antonym “angel shift.” The conflict concerning the German infrastructure project Stuttgart 21 serves as a case study. We show that the radicalness of policy‐specific beliefs is the most important predictor for the intensity of mutual misperception in the researched conflict. The results further point to a more systematic inclusion of an actor's deep normative core beliefs in future analyses of distorted perception. Another central finding relates to the importance of the personal environment: actors in the subsystem share the same policy core beliefs with the majority of people in their personal environment.     

The predictive power of the left-right self-placement scale for the policy positions of voters and parties

The left-right self-placement scale is often used in political science as a proxy for the policy positions of voters and parties. Yet studies have suggested that, for voters, this relation is dependent on education level. These studies were, however, hampered by data limitations and restricted statistical analyses. In addition, the extent to which the relation between the left-right self-placement scale and policy positions differs for parties and voters has not been explored. This article looks at the differential relation between left-right self-placement and policy positions for voters with different education levels on an integrated dataset containing over 50 voter and party policy positions. It is found that the left-right self-placement scale is a much better predictor for the policy positions of parties than it is for the policy preferences of voters. Robustness checks show that neither the saliency of the policy positions nor their complexity moderates these findings.     

论教师思维方式的转换与发展

教师作为教书育人的直接实施者,其思维方式的科学性,对学生的健康成长具有重大的影响.针对当前教育教学改革与发展的大趋势,教师思维方式的转换与变革已成为现实的必然.当代教师的思维方式应该具有创新性、灵活性和开放性等基本特点.     

患方拒绝鉴定可能承担败诉后果

在医疗纠纷民事诉讼中,医疗机构提出进行医疗事故技术鉴定或法医学鉴定的申请,是一种履行举证责任的行为。然而,举证责任是可以转换的,它既可能从原告方转换到被告方,也可能从被告方转换到原告方。如果患者一方不配合鉴定或者拒绝鉴定,导致医疗责任不能认定,举证责任就从医方转换到患方,可能带来对患方不利的诉讼后果。因此,在医疗纠纷诉讼中,双方当事人要善于利用举证责任转换的概念,在法律规定的范围内,更好地维护自己的合法权益。     

我国乡镇建制规模、职能定位与机构设置思考

“乡镇”作为国家依法设置的一种地方行政建制,已成为当今世界许多国家管理农村行政事务和为农民提供公共产品服务的通行做法。而我国自秦朝至清末的两千多年,“皇权止于县政”,乡里制度集中地反映了宗法性与行政性的高度整合。进入20世纪的一百年,“乡镇”虽然成为我国县以下的地方行政建制,但是一直存在着政党政治与政府政治互相交叉、国家政权与农民自治互相渗透、乡镇行政体制与财政体制互相脱节的问题。当前,我们应站在政府体制创新与经济市场化进程相适应的高度去认识和把握乡镇改革的基本方向,科学地、审慎地对待“撤并乡镇”的问题,决不能再搞“一刀切”。     

Jurisdiction size and local government effectiveness: Assessing the effects of municipal amalgamations on performance

The optimal jurisdiction size has been debated since Plato and Aristotle. A large literature has studied economic and democratic scale effects, but we have almost no knowledge of the effects of jurisdiction size on the effectiveness of local services. This is due to two methodological problems. First, selection bias and reverse causality often render change in jurisdiction size an endogenous variable. Second, there is a lack of empirical indicators of effectiveness, and most studies therefore focus on spending measures. Extant research thus studies economies of scale, leaving effectiveness of scale unexamined. We address both problems in a quasi-experimental study of public schools. Our findings from the school area indicate that jurisdiction size does not have systematic effects on effectiveness. Our analysis therefore supports recent studies of economic and democratic scale effects that indicate that the search for the optimal jurisdiction size is futile.     

简易精神症状自陈量表对主观夸大精神症状的测试分析

目的 应用简易精神症状自陈量表检测法医精神鉴定中主观夸大精神症状的情况,并分析其测试结果。方法 对206名不同类型的法医精神鉴定的被鉴定人用该量表进行检测．并由两名鉴定专业人员对被鉴定人是否有主观夸大精神症状分别进行评定。结果 （1）以该量表判断主观故意或夸大精神症状的划界分（13分）对测试的被鉴定人进行检测,206例被鉴定人中有71例被判定为主观夸大精神症状（34．5％）。与专家评定的结果相比,量表评定的假阴性为19．8％,假阳性率为1．7％;总准确率为90．8％。（2）工伤和交通事故精神伤残理赔鉴定案例主观夸大精神症状的比例较高（51％）。结论 简易精神症状自陈量表是检测主观夸大精神症状的有效评定工具。