SENSITIZING PARENT EDUCATION PROGRAMS TO DOMESTIC VIOLENCE CONCERNS: The Perspective of the New York State Parent Education Advisory Board

Education programs for divorcing and separating parents are a valuable vehicle for providing to parents the awareness, knowledge, and skills that can lead to a smoother transition and healthier outcomes for their children. Attention to safety concerns in referral guidelines, administrative protocols, and curriculum content is integral to the efficacious and responsible delivery of parent education. This article examines the recent experience of New York State in developing guidelines for safety and quality assurance in parent education programs.     

地方政府公共服务能力生长的动因分析

当前,我国地方政府公共服务能力生长的动因既存在于客观的社会环境之内,也存在于主体的内在需求之中。概括起来,地方政府公共服务能力生长的动因可归结为外部动因、内部动因和主体动因三类。而动因之间的相互作用、相互影响推动着地方政府公共服务能力的生长。     

Liberal Democrat Councillors: Community Politics, Local Campaigning and the Role of the Political Party

Liberal Democrats have long displayed the success of community politics since its adoption at the Liberal Party Assembly in 1970. Community politics, however, brings with it not only electoral success but an expectation amongst voters that Liberal Democrat councillors will act in certain ways as local representatives. The article presents the results of national research conducted amongst councillors of the three main parties, and compares the attitudes of Liberal Democrat councillors to aspects of local democracy with those of their Labour and Conservative counterparts. It identifies two types of Liberal Democrat councillor and uses these to explain the attitudinal differences and similarities found with Labour and Conservative councillors.     

关于地方政府依法行政若干问题的思考

以国务院《全面推进依法行政实施纲要》颁布为标志,我国政府机关依法行政进入了新的历史发展时期。但是,在对地方政府依法行政若干重要问题的认识上,仍值得进一步深入思考。而通过深入思考,对这些地方政府依法行政中带有普遍性和倾向性的问题进行认真梳理和评析,能够使我们更加全面、准确地认识地方政府依法行政的发展规律,更加自觉地、理性地推进地方政府依法行政。     

地方经济立法与经济发展——粤、浙、赣、湘、川、甘6省的比较分析

经济立法在中国地方立法中居于重要地位,在各省及各阶段的发展呈现出不平衡性,其总体上对地方经济发展的影响较大,但各项具体立法指标的影响程度存在明显的差异。其中,地方经济立法的数量、自主率及更新率,对地方经济发展的影响较明显,而地方经济立法的比率和地方经济发展则存在微弱的负相关关系。地方经济立法只是地方经济发展所需法治环境的一个方面,在加强地方经济立法的同时,相应执法与司法机制的完善也非常重要。     

ROMANCING THE COURT

Problem‐solving courts, created at the end of the twentieth century, make court‐based solutions central to addressing significant societal problems, such as substance abuse and its impact on criminal activity and family functioning. Yet, lessons gleaned from over 100 years of family court history suggest that court‐based solutions to intractable social problems have rarely been effective. This article asks three questions of the problem‐solving court movement: What problem are we trying to solve? Is the court the best place to solve the problem? What are the consequences of giving authority to a court for solving the problem? Answering those questions through the lens of specific examples from family court—the original problem‐solving court—leads to the conclusion that neither the structural issues that courts face, such as overwhelming numbers of cases, nor the momentous societal issues that problem‐solving courts have recently begun to shoulder can be adequately addressed through court‐based solutions. The factors that allegedly distinguish new problem‐solving courts from earlier exemplars, especially the family court, are both less unique and less successful than they have been portrayed by problem‐solving court enthusiasts. These factors alone fail to justify the expansion of problem‐solving courts without further evidence of their effectiveness. Moreover, the potential dangers inherent in problem‐solving courts are not theoretical. By examining illustrative examples from the history of the family court, the dangers become clearly apparent.     

Outcome‐focussed planning in Australian local government: How council plans and cultural development plans measure up

Contemporary public policy increasingly emphasises a focus on outcomes, the difference that occurs in the lives of citizens from policy and activity of government. Other contemporary imperatives for effective planning include: recognition of the values of the community whom plans serve, direction towards goals and objectives, utilisation of evidence, articulation of theories of change that underpin planning and responsiveness to evaluation. This article reports a desk‐based research project to assess how local government planning documents meet these imperatives. Two documents are examined for 67 councils across Australia: the major strategic document, council plan or other‐named document and the cultural development plan (CDP) or other‐named document that directs staff and investment aimed at cultural enrichment of the LGA. Findings indicate that the majority of councils’ documents appeared only concordant with one or two of these planning imperatives. No plan addressed more than three. Overall, council plans and cultural development plans did not clearly indicate their responsiveness to values of their communities, nor include objectives that formed measurable steps towards goals or formally refer to the use of evidence in decision‐making. No plans included theories of change to underpin decision‐making. This analysis indicates clear areas of improvement for planning for local governance.     

Constitutional courts as arbiters of post-conflict territorial self-government: Bosnia and Macedonia

Constitutional and supreme courts frequently end up examining the political and legal questions at the heart of peace agreements and post-conflict constitutions. Where a peace agreement has included territorial self-government (TSG) provisions courts are often endowed with the capacity to adjudicate disputes between state and sub-state levels of government. The effectiveness of courts in fulfilling this role as not been comprehensively examined. This article fills this important gap examining whether the results of existing research on the role of constitutional and supreme courts in resolving disputes in traditional federalism also apply in these particular circumstances. It finds that where TSG is used as a conflict management mechanism judicial review can have centralizing tendencies if this occurs it can largely be attributed to the processes used to select though the devolutionary multinational nature of the states is also relevant.     

英、美、澳地方政府绩效评估指标比较及启示

在分析了英国、美国、澳大利亚几个国家对地方政府进行评估而采用的指标体系和框架之后,通过比较他们的共同点与不同之处,提出了对中国地方政府绩效评估有价值的启示,以更加完善的评估指标体系来引导地方政府真正为了人民群众公共利益而提升责任性和绩效管理水平。     

Offender’s Personal Circumstances and Punishment: Toward a More Refined Model for the Explanation of Sentencing Disparities

Prior research suggests that offender sex, age, and race are often influential determinants of sentencing outcomes. According to focal concerns theory, they affect sentencing because—due to limited time and information—judges rely on stereotypical behavioral expectations when assessing offender blameworthiness and dangerousness. As such, extralegal offender characteristics may serve as proxies for more specific risk indicators. Whether more complete information on additional risk factors helps account for the effects of extralegal characteristics, however, remains an untested assumption. Therefore, this study analyzes the Dutch data on standardized pre-sentencing reports to examine the influence of personal circumstances of the offender, such as employment, family, and drug use factors, on the likelihood and length of incarceration. The results suggest that personal circumstances exert inconsistent influence over sentencing outcomes and that they fail to significantly mitigate the direct effects of sex and age, but do mitigate the effects of national origin.