“What have you done for me lately?” Re-thinking local representation

Scholars have studied the influence that constituents exert on elected representatives’ action in national parliaments at length. Still, academic pundits have usually confined local representation to distributive policies and casework, and limited local legislators’ focus to a territorial perspective. In this study, I try and propose a more nuanced theory of local representation, and I use automated text analysis to capture elected representatives’ propensity to serve functional as well as territorial interests. In an effort to provide empirical backing to my theoretical argumentation, I present an analysis of Italian legislators’ behavior which shows that deputies are willing to divert public spending to their district but also to favor the interests of specific economic sectors. Scholars have already acknowledged the multidimensional character of political representation at the national level, my analysis offers theoretical justification and empirical evidence to support doing so at the local level as well.     

The opposition deficit in EU accountability: Evidence from over 20 years of plenary debate in four member states

Debates about the European Union's democratic legitimacy put national parliaments into the spotlight. Do they enhance democratic accountability by offering visible debates and electoral choice about multilevel governance? To support such accountability, saliency of EU affairs in the plenary ought to be responsive to developments in EU governance, has to be linked to decision‐making moments and should feature a balance between government and opposition. The recent literature discusses various partisan incentives that support or undermine these criteria, but analyses integrating these arguments are rare. This article provides a novel comparative perspective by studying the patterns of public EU emphasis in more than 2.5 million plenary speeches from the German Bundestag, the British House of Commons, the Dutch Tweede Kamer and the Spanish Congreso de los Diputados over a prolonged period from 1991 to 2015. It documents that parliamentary actors are by and large responsive to EU authority and its exercise where especially intergovernmental moments of decision making spark plenary EU salience. But the salience of EU issues is mainly driven by government parties, decreases in election time and is negatively related to public Euroscepticism. The article concludes that national parliaments have only partially succeeded in enhancing EU accountability and suffer from an opposition deficit in particular.     

当代大学语文教育五派主要观点述评

新时期以来,广大语文教育工作者及一些人文学者对大学语文教育进行了多方面卓有成效的探索,出版了数百种大学语文教材,展现了多姿多态、异彩纷呈的大学语文教育理念。当代大学语文教育的先进理念主要体现在选文教育派、人文教育派、文学教育派、语文专题派、人文语文派等五个重要派别里,它们站在时代的制高点上共同引领了中国高校语文教育改革的大潮。当代大学语文教育也存在明显局限,这就是常脱离大学语文本身去谈语文教育,且无视大学语文学科群既高度综合,又深度分化、广度辐射的发展趋势。     

Adolescents Online: The Importance of Internet Activity Choices to Salient Relationships

The purpose of this study was to determine whether using the Internet for different activities affects the quality of close adolescent relationships (i.e., best friendships and romantic relationships). In a one-year longitudinal study of 884 adolescents (Mean age = 15, 46% male), we examined whether visiting chat rooms, using ICQ, using the Internet for general entertainment, or participating in online gaming predicted changes in the quality of best friendships and romantic relationships. Multiple regression analyses indicated that Internet activity choice influenced later relationship quality in both best friendships and romantic relationships. Using instant messaging (ICQ) was positively associated with most aspects of romantic relationship and best friendship quality. In contrast, visiting chat rooms was negatively related to best friendship quality. Using the Internet to play games and for general entertainment predicted decreases in relationship quality with best friends and with romantic partners. These findings reflect the important and complex functions of online socialization for the development and maintenance of relationships in adolescence.

吕贝尔的马克思哲学观

在马克思主义哲学史上,法国吕贝尔较早确定了马克思哲学文本,呈现出马克思哲学文本体系,具有开创性的意义,但其编著的功过得失有待客观历史的评判。吕贝尔认为《资本论》及手稿既是经济学著作,也是哲学著作,表达了他独特的哲学看法,主要包括《资本论》及其手稿中的实践观思想、黑格尔《逻辑学》辩证法思想和人类社会历史发展观。从马克思恩格斯与马克思主义和科学社会主义两者关系的角度,论述他们之间观点的对立。     

检察官“软”约束的规范化研究——以文本检视与实践透析为视角

职业伦理是检察官的软约束,是规范、引导检察官职业行为的重要依据。建构科学的检察官职业伦理规范体系,是司法改革背景下完善中国特色检察制度的必然要求。检视文本,我国检察官职业伦理规范存在的形式混乱、内容重复、类型繁杂等弊端,导致伦理规范缺乏系统性、简练性与明确性,制约着规范理性的实现;透析实践,检察官职业伦理规范在实际运行中陷入了检察权向行政权依附、精英化向大众化倾斜、职业信仰向社会人情屈从等困境,导致其无法真正发挥规范效力。因此,立足于规范理性与实践理性双重视角,应该通过提升检察官职业伦理规范的科学性、巩固检察官职业伦理建构的职业化根基、优化检察官职业伦理培养机制及加强职业伦理规范运行监督等措施,完善我国检察官职业伦理规范体系。     

Diversionary cheap talk: economic conditions and US foreign policy rhetoric, 1945-2010

ABSTRACT

This study explains how the economy affects the foreign policy rhetoric used by American presidents. When economic conditions deteriorate, presidents criticize foreign nations to boost their approval ratings. Presidents use this “diversionary cheap talk” in response to the misery index of unemployment plus inflation, which poses a unique threat to their popularity. They target historical rivals, which make intergroup distinctions most salient. Diversionary cheap talk is most influential for and most frequently used by Democratic presidents, whose non-core constituents prefer hawkish foreign policy but already expect it from Republican presidents. I test the observable implications of the theory with the American Diplomacy Dataset, an original record of 50,000 American foreign policy events between 1851 and 2010 drawn from a corpus of 1.3 million New York Times articles.     

A model for the translation of news agency texts (Sapa) for radio (OFM) news

Abstract

Radio news differs from news provided by other media. According to Oosthuizen (1996), radio is an alerting medium. Leiter, Harriss and Johnson (2000) refer to this attribute as immediacy. The time available to news is very limited and this is why radio news stories are condensed into only a few sentences. Furthermore, news for broadcast is written in a conversational style, because it is heard and not read. Simple, short sentences are used; adjectives and adverbs are kept to a minimum; and strong, active verbs are used rather than passives. In the case of news wires, such as the South African Press Association (known as Sapa), news reports are written for print media. Therefore, bulletin producers need to edit these texts according to the requirements for radio news. In a bilingual or multilingual newsroom a more problematic situation arises, namely that all these texts (originally intended for use in print) need to be translated for a radio news bulletin and the radio station's specific audience. This article aims to describe how translation is used in the operational functioning of a radio newsroom, with a specific focus on OFM – a bilingual commercial radio station broadcasting to the Free State, Northern Cape, North West and southern parts of Gauteng, in South Africa. OFM's bulletin producers therefore not only edit news texts, but also translate them from English into Afrikaans. Certain strategies are followed to edit the original texts, but as there are also translation processes involved and specific translation problems which need to be addressed, appropriate translation strategies need to be identified. This study uses Christiane Nord's functionalist model (specifically her looping model) to describe the broad methodological framework in which these translating and editing (or transediting) processes take place at OFM. The study and findings will also show how certain elements of the looping model need to be adjusted in the translation of Sapa texts for OFM News.     

A framework for the multimodal analysis of online news galleries: What makes a “good” picture gallery?

The development of digital technology in recent years has led to a revolution in news production and dissemination. In terms of production, we have witnessed a fundamental shift towards visual story-telling. Images dominate the verbal story space and have the potential to become the story themselves. Beyond this, they are also creating unique spaces for themselves (e.g. the online news gallery), with new multimodal genres posing challenges for practitioners and analysts alike. The potential effects of such fundamental shifts on the professional news story-telling practices of the legacy news media provide a rich research opportunity for understanding both how and whether news organisations fulfil their mandate of making sense of the plethora of information that is now available. In this paper, we concern ourselves with one particular innovation in visual news reporting – the online news gallery, or picture gallery in journalism terms. We report on a qualitative analysis of 35 galleries from 12 English-language newspapers with online presence from Europe, North America, Australia and Asia, and interrogate the choices made by institutions in composing this particular type of multimodal “text”, as it is situated in a professional, news story-telling context. In doing so, we explore how a systemic-functional semiotic approach to multimodal news discourse may help us to access the meaning potential of this emerging genre as a vehicle for multimodal digital news reporting, present a framework for the multimodal analysis of online news galleries and consider its implications for the education of media practitioners.     

文本与实践的悖离——对我国村民自治发展困境的解读

我国村民自治制度产生的20多年里,一方面村民自治的制度文本不断完善,另一方面又出现了实践对文本的不断偏离,致使村民自治难以充分实现其治理绩效。文章借用国家与社会的研究范式以及制度分析与行动者概念,通过对村民自治生长与变迁路径的解读,合理诠释了其文本与实践之间的差异。村民自治的制度文本与具体实践间的悖离,应归因于国家在村民自治的制度建立与实践运作过程中限制了村民的主体性,因而难以实现其基层民主训练的愿景。