Best Practices in Civic Education: Lessons from the Journal of Political Science Education

The Journal of Political Science Education (JPSE) provides over a decade of research on political science pedagogy, featuring empirical research documenting best practices in the field. This article provides an overview of JPSE-published research on the topics of civic education and engagement. It summarizes the number and scope of articles on this topic and highlights key findings from the journal’s first 12 years. This comprehensive overview of past research is designed to facilitate high quality future research. A detailed exploration of past research provides a useful “jump start” for teacher-scholars eager to advance the scholarship and pedagogy of engagement.     

Disabling dissent: the colour revolutions,autocratic linkages,and civil society regulations in hybrid regimes

State elites in hybrid regimes have increasingly sought to manipulate the legal regulation of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as part of the growing backlash against democracy assistance in nondemocratic countries around the world. Sophisticated laws detailing burdensome NGO registration procedures and complex regulations enabling invasive government oversight of NGOs represent upgraded forms of civic curtailment and democracy resistance. This paper analyses these significant developments in a systematic, cross-national fashion over time by constructing a new dataset of NGO legal barriers in hybrid regimes from 1995 to 2013. It demonstrates that the expansion of repressive NGO regulations are shaped by international factors, particularly autocratic linkages, in the form of trade or defence pacts with Russia and China, as well as authoritarian learning from the colour revolutions. It thus contributes to debates on autocracy promotion and authoritarian resurgence by moving beyond the regime level to focus on the sub-regime dimension of freedom of association.     

The Forgotten Educator: Experiential Learning’s Internship Supervisor

Past studies have addressed the role of the university, student interns and, the faculty advisor; here, we attempt to fill in a missing piece of the experiential-learning process by examining the role and importance of the often overlooked internship supervisor. A survey was developed and distributed to 343 recent internship supervisors. Their responses show that many of these supervisors view internships as an important professional and educational experience. We argue here that the internship supervisor can maximize one’s effectiveness when operating within a strong college or university educational infrastructure facilitated by an engaged and competent faculty advisor. Our recommendations were discussed and confirmed by a focus group of experienced faculty advisors.     

Why Have Policies Often Remained Symbolic? Understanding the Reasons for Decoupling between Policy and Practice

Why have policies that are unquestioningly accepted as appropriate remained symbolic? To answer the research question, I suggest two possible reasons for decoupling between policy and practice: the characteristics of normative pressure as “the weak enforcement mechanism of law” through the implementation stage and jurisdictions’ capacity to infuse the stories of success based on others’ use to their own day‐to‐day realities. In this article, I seek to reintroduce a seminal contribution of the early institutionalists by challenging the assumption that dimensions of adoption and implementation are synonymous or positively correlated. Empirical findings contribute to provide scholars and practitioners with a larger picture of policy diffusion and support the arguments by Nicholson‐Crotty and Carley that policy learning takes place based on policymakers’ assessment of both “policy actions” and “outcomes” in previously adopting jurisdictions.     

How NATO remembers: explaining institutional memory in NATO crisis management

This article introduces an argument for how institutional memory of crisis management operations develops in North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Scholars of European security and of international organisations have examined organisational learning, but have yet to explain its precondition: institutional memory. In a context of increasing turnover due to defence budget cuts, it remains unclear how shared knowledge of strategic errors is acquired. This article finds that the NATO secretariat facilitates practitioners’ use of informal processes for contributing to institutional memory in response to the constraints of existing formal learning processes. These formal processes, including a lessons learned centre and a lessons learned database, inadvertently disincentivise practitioners from contributing such knowledge as using them can incur reputational costs. Drawing on NATO documentation and interviews with 27 NATO elite practitioners, the paper provides evidence that practitioners instead share knowledge through three informal processes: interpersonal communications, private documentation and crisis simulations.     

Disentangling Actors from Their Environment? Pitfalls and Added-Value of the Strategic-Choice Approach

ABSTRACT

This article argues that the Strategic-Choice Approach (SCA) put forward by Lake and Powell (1999b) can be further developed in two directions. First, the article highlights the challenge posed by the interdependence between actors and their environment. From this it draws two conclusions. A) The SCA approach is most fruitful for synchronic analysis but more challenging to implement in a diachronic research design. B) The interdependence between actors and their environment can be lessened by distinguishing between three types of actor preferences: meta, ranked, and pragmatic-preferences. Second, it argues that the SCA is an ideal framework to combine qualitative and quantitative research designs.     

推进形成广西少数民族自治地方县级主体功能区划的探讨

广西少数民族自治地方,自然资源丰富,地理位置比较重要,在我国极具典型性和代表性。要从统筹民族地区发展的角度,积极探索推进形成县级主体功能区划工作,遵循国家提出的原则和要求,评估资源环境承载能力,研究分类性政策和评价体系,使广西民族自治地方的发展规划和发展战略更加讲求科学性和合理性。     

村民自治权的司法保障问题研究

村民自治在我国已成为一种最广泛的基层民主的实践,其基本要求是村民自治体尽可能独立于政府的行政权力,同时村民自治体内部应当形成比较完善的民主决策机制。然而,村民在自治过程中亦存在着诸多权利冲突,大致可分为两类：一类是自治体内部的权利冲突,另一类是国家干预村民自治事务引起的行政权与自治权之间的外部权力冲突。由于缺乏完善的法律保障制度,我国的村民自治权往往难以落实。司法保障是权利保障的最后一道防线,我国必须尽快确立村民自治的司法保障,从而最大限度地维护村民的民主决策,并尽可能对村民自治体滥用自治权加以有效控制。     

“乡政村治”治理架构的优化探析

新时期中国“乡政村治”体制是国家在市场经济背景下封农民个人权利承认和保护的制度性承诺,是一种基于市场、民主和法制理念的新的行政管理结构和乡村治理方式,它标志着国家行政权与乡村自治权的相对分离、国家与社会的边界的重新确定,对国家民主建设意义也特别重大。但从实践层面上看,“乡政村治”运行中也暴露了不少矛盾与问题,调整和完善农村治理架构显得刻不容缓。因此,本文着重分析“乡政村治”治理架构下的体制缺憾与运行中存在的偏差,并提出制度完善与体制优化的建议。