充分发挥党校在建设学习型政党中的重要作用

党的十七届四中全会提出了建设马克思主义学习型政党的战略任务。党校作为培训轮训党政领导干部的主阵地，在建设马克思主义学习型政党中，必须充分发挥理论教育作用、研究咨询作用、党性熔炉作用和学习平台作用。     

话语分析与中共党史研究

话语分析方法不仅为中共党史研究提供了一种新的观察分析问题的视角，有利于拓宽研究的广度与深度，还可以促使研究者对已有研究成果进行反思。     

农民流动分化与保持农民工党员先进性

农民流动分化是中国社会结构变迁和转型的内在要求。农民流动分化使农村党员的社会职业、身份发生了变化，同时也使农民工流动党员的教育管理出现了“去向难把握、活动难开展、管理难落实、党费难收缴、作用难发挥”等问题。加强和改进农民工流动党员管理工作，保持农民工流动党员先进性，必须要在创新激励机制、创新基层党组织设置、创新党组织活动内容、创新党内管理制度等方面下工夫。     

新一轮农村改革的重大部署

党的十七届三中全会审议通过的《决定》，是推动农村新一轮大改革，大开放，大发展的行动纲领。《决定》提出的以农村土地流转为重点的改革，是改革开放以来中国农村社会第二次伟大改革，新一轮伟大的农村改革必然需要亿万农民的积极参与，而开展这一群众性的伟大改革实践活动，必须遵循《决定》精神和农村农业发展规律，走有序，有效，快捷，全面健康发展的道路。     

透视党领导改革开放三十年的一个视角——十一届三中全会以来的历届历次中央全会

研究十一届三中全会以来党的历届历次中央全会，并以中央全会为主线和脉络串并党走过的改革开放三十年，应该是客观地评判和把握党领导改革开放三十年发展的一个常规的但又往往容易被人忽视的视角。     

论依法执政的科学内涵

依法执政是一个由一系列相关理论、原则、理念、制度、实践等组成的有机整体。坚持依法执政是践行宪法和党章的应有之义,是改革和完善党的执政方式的重要途径,是实行依法治国的核心,是依法治国理念的进一步深化。在新时期提高党的依法执政能力,就必须对依法执政进行深入探讨和科学的界定。本文在对我国学者近年来关于依法执政的主要观点比较分析后,对依法执政的概念和含义做了一番梳理,认为中国共产党依法执政具有独特的科学内涵。     

What voters want from their parties: Testing the promise-keeping assumption

How should party governments make representative democracy? Much of the democracy representation literature assumes that voters prefer parties to fulfill the promises of their election campaigns, with higher preference for promise-keeping placed on the party a voter supports. That voters agree with these assumptions, however, remains largely unclear and this is the main hypothesis of this article. Within the context of Australia, this article investigates voter preferences regarding three ideal party representative styles: promise-keeping, focus on public opinion, and seeking the common good. Furthermore, it tests whether voters prefer their party – over other parties – to keep their promises. Based on novel and innovative survey data, this study finds that, generally, voters care least about parties keeping their promises and their preferences are unaffected by their party support. These results, if confirmed in other contexts, not only challenge the primacy of promise-keeping, but also the assumed ubiquitous party effect.     

Two strategies for building a personal vote: Personalized representation in the UK and Denmark

Across parliamentary democracies, elected representatives constitute the link between citizens and government. MPs can connect with voters via the party label, or through personalized forms of representation, which is seen to be increasing in importance. However, scholars disagree on what explains variation in MPs' use of personalized representation strategies. In this article, we argue that politicians use different strategies to personalize the link between themselves and citizens: a constituency-oriented and a person-oriented strategy. To test our argument, we develop a new and novel dataset with behavioral measures of personalized representation. Using a content analyses of 698 British and Danish MPs’ personal websites, we demonstrate that the use of personalization strategies is conditional on the incentives MPs face in terms of electoral insecurity, candidate selection procedures, and the electoral context of the system. Our findings show that the level and type of personalized politics vary across political systems and may pose different types of challenges to party democracies.     

What consideration sets can teach us about electoral competition: A two-hurdle model

Consideration set models (CSMs) offer a novel way to study electoral behavior. Until now, they have been mostly studied at the micro-level of the voter's decision process. By contrast, we focus on the implications of CSMs for understanding the phenomenon of party competition. We propose a two hurdle model whereby parties compete for both consideration and selection, pursuant the consideration and choice stages of the CSM. We operationalize these hurdles in terms of a party's inclusivity—is it being considered?—and exclusivity—is it considered on its own?—and formally derive lower- and upper-bounds for the electoral fortunes of the party. We also show how consideration set data can be used to sketch the competition landscape in an election and to characterize the system-wide competitiveness of a political system. We illustrate our concepts and ideas using data from the 2010 Dutch and 2014 Swedish parliamentary elections.     

Why do only some people who support parties actually join them? Evidence from Britain

What makes people join a political party is one of the most commonly studied questions in research on party members. Nearly all this research, however, is based on talking to people who have actually joined parties. This article simultaneously analyses surveys of members of political parties in Britain and surveys of non-member supporters of those same parties. This uniquely enables us to model the decision to join parties. The results suggest that most of the elements that constitute the influential ‘General Incentives Model’ are significant. But it also reveals that, while party supporters imagine that selective benefits, social norms and opposing rival parties’ policies are key factors in members’ decisions to join a party, those who actually do so are more likely to say they are motivated by attachments to their party’s values, policies and leaders, as well as by an altruistic desire to support democracy more generally.