执政安全与党内民主建设中的风险防范

维护执政安全,防控执政风险,是执政党巩固执政地位的必然要求.执政党的执政风险可能来自多个方面,其中包括执政党自身的民主建设状况,故必须加强党内民主建设,发展党内民主.如果在党内民主建设中出现原则性偏差或措施失当,有可能在党内造成思想多元、成员分层、组织分派、政治权威降低等,从而削弱党的凝聚力和战斗力,进而威胁党的执政地位和党的生存发展.因此,在推进党内民主建设时,必须强化风险防范意识,并从目标、方向、道路、制度、程序等方面着手,探索出一条增量式、渐进式的党内民主发展道路.     

Privatised Keynesianism: An Unacknowledged Policy Regime

There have now been two successive policy regimes since the Second World War that have temporarily succeeded in reconciling the uncertainties and instabilities of a capitalist economy with democracy's need for stability for people's lives and capitalism's own need for confident mass consumers. The first of these was the system of public demand management generally known as Keynesianism. The second was not, as has often been thought, a neo-liberal turn to pure markets, but a system of markets alongside extensive housing and other debt among low- and medium-income people linked to unregulated derivatives markets. It was a form of privatised Keynesianism. This combination reconciled capitalism's problem, but in a way that eventually proved unsustainable. After its collapse there is debate over what will succeed it. Most likely is an attempt to re-create it on a basis of corporate social responsibility.     

Roads of change: political transition and state formation in Nepal’s agrarian districts

This paper explores the political field that has opened up in the wake of the recent civil war in Nepal. We focus on cultural-political developments in agrarian districts, where some of the most intriguing openings, and indeed the most pernicious closures, can be witnessed (as opposed to the national-state restructuring that commands more media and popular attention). Our research asks what spaces open up in the emerging political field at the district scale to entrench or transform dominant cultural codes and sedimented histories of socio-economic inequality. Preliminary research identifies specific sectors of local governance that have emerged as significant sites of struggle over the shape and meaning of ‘democracy’, namely forest management and infrastructure development. The primary contribution of the paper lies in specifying an analytical approach to the study of ‘post-conflict’ governance at the local scale via three conceptual terrains of inquiry – governance and planning, political subjectivity, and cultural politics. The ultimate objective is to develop a framework for assessing the conditions of possibility for a democratic restructuring of economy and society to accompany the official political institutions of liberal democracy.     

Measuring subnational democracy: toward improved regime typologies and theories of regime change

Social scientists have been limited in their work by the paucity of global time series data about subnational institutions and practices. Such data could help scholars refine regime typologies, improve theories of democratization and regime change, better understand subnational democracy, and illuminate issues of development, conflict, and governance. This article addresses the lack of data by introducing 22 subnational measures from a new dataset, Varieties of Democracy. Validity tests demonstrate that the measures’ strengths outweigh their weaknesses. The measures excel in covering all subnational levels for most countries, capturing different elements of subnational elections, and including a variety of dimensions of elections and civil liberties. The measures also offer unmatched global and temporal coverage. The article demonstrates how these strengths can provide scholars with the benefits described above.     

International democracy promotion and democratization in the Middle East and North Africa

This article offers an overview of the literature on international democracy promotion in relation to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). It draws on the criteria of process tracing to evaluate the mechanisms, processes and episodes of democratization associated with international democracy promotion in the region. It finds that the literature lacks a clear account of how international democracy promotion relates to conditions for democratization and could pay greater attention to the role of media in either supporting or counteracting democracy promotion activities which impact democratization processes in the region.     

The right to vote and nomadic voter enrolment

What model of voter enrolment is appropriate for states with nomadic minority populations? The present paper examines this question with reference to an equality-based, moral right to vote and considers four models that track some of the different institutional strategies that have been developed by states with transient populations. The paper shows that the right to vote is compatible neither with a model that makes permanent residence in a constituency an absolute condition for voter enrolment and so excludes nomads from the electoral process, nor with a model that enables nomadic voter enrolment but restricts the number of nomads that can enrol in a single constituency. But the right is, subject to certain caveats, consistent with a model that enables nomads to enrol in a constituency of their choice and, as well, with a model that enables nomads to enrol and vote in a distinct, non-territorial constituency.     

Membership ballots and the value of intra-party democracy

On the face of it, membership ballots present a clear case in which intra-party democracy comes into collision with core principles of representative democracy: they weaken the autonomy of representatives, and undermine the authority of the voters. In this article, I investigate whether this is correct, and whether membership ballots are, therefore, democratically illegitimate, using the controversial 2013 Mitgliederentscheid in the German Social Democratic party as a critical case. I argue that there is nothing democratically suspect about membership ballots and mount a defence of intra-party democracy as intrinsically valuable, appealing to a principle of equal respect for persons as autonomous agents. It turns out that endorsing this principle has two possible implications: that the content of the ballot must be open to deliberation, and that these deliberations should be rendered open to non-members. I discuss these implications and offer some institutional design guidelines.     

If territorial fragmentation is a problem,is amalgamation a solution? – Ten years later

ABSTRACT

Over the last decade, municipal territorial amalgamation has occurred in 15 European countries. The same period has seen spectacular progress in research on the relationship between municipal size and the functioning of local governments, as well as the impacts of territorial reforms on economic performance and local democracy. Quasi-experimental designs treating territorial reforms as specific “research laboratories” have constituted an important part of that trend. However, there are still important gaps in the knowledge and the study results are often inconclusive. These observations call for a research agenda for the future.     

The culture of skilled work in a Norwegian shipyard, 1945–90

We anatomise the culture of skilled work in the Solheimsviken shipyard in Bergen, Norway, from 1945 to 1990, linking it to democratic impulses within the workforce. This independent culture had strong if bounded democratic elements that were ultimately reflected in the institutions of a worker’s cooperative which operated from 1985. However, a shift away from shipbuilding immediately preceded the cooperative’s foundation and eroded the position of the older skilled workers who had carried the culture, undermining it even before the cooperative’s collapse.