垄断行业管制体制再改革的战略重点

垄断行业管制体制的再改革是中国深化市场体制和行政体制改革的重要议题。政府管制是市场经济体制下政府的重要基本职能,但政府管制作为一种自由裁量权很容易被滥用,从而出现管制失灵的问题。因此,有效的政府管制必须以有效约束政府行为为核心,实现法治,消除利益集团的阻碍和行政体制运行的内耗,从而建立有效的管制治理制度体系。     

Ageing in forensic psychiatric secure settings: the views of members of staff

Background: Although the prevalence of older patients in forensic psychiatric services is increasing, research around service provision for this population is very limited. We aimed to gather the views of members of staff on how well secure services are meeting the challenges of an ageing population.

Methods: Three focus groups were carried out with 13 members of staff working with older patients in secure services. A topic guide, based on the research team’s previous research, guided the sessions. The focus groups were audio-recorded, transcribed and analysed through thematic analysis.

Results: Two themes were identified: (1) Identifying patients’ needs, which focused on how promptly any emerging issues in the older patients are identified and reported; (2) addressing patients’ needs, which focused on how the unique needs of the older patients are addressed, once established.

Conclusions: There are unique age-related issues that may have an impact on the older patients’ opportunities for recovery, including a lack of specialist training for members of staff, prolonged stay in secure care and a limited number of age-relevant activities. Far from optimal, provision requires improvement through the active involvement of the primary stakeholders.     

Doctors Doing Gender at Eye Clinics—Gender Constructions in Relation to Waiting Times for Cataract Extractions in Sweden

Why do eye clinics differ in their waiting times for women’s and men’s access to cataract extraction (CE)/“grå starroperation”? Taking a doing-gender perspective as the starting point, this study explores how gender constructions embedded in Swedish eye clinics contribute to longer waiting times for women than for men. Focus group interviews were conducted with doctors at two Swedish eye clinics: one with a larger and another with a smaller than average gender difference in waiting times for CE. Several differences were found between the clinics regarding how gender was constructed: Women and men were constructed as different with respect to ascribed traits such as assertiveness and care-seeking behaviour. Their need for visual acuity in working life was perceived as different by the doctors, and the study indicates differences between the clinics regarding their interest and awareness concerning issues related to inequity, reflected in the dissimilar prevalence of jokes with racist and misogynist connotations at the two clinics.     

Researching norms,narratives, and transitional justice: focus group methodology in post-conflict Croatia

This article is based on the assumption that norms can help better understand one of the expressivist aims of transitional justice, that of building a new narrative about the past. The main argument is that focus groups, as an interactive method of inquiry, are well suited to investigating how this “judicial” narrative interacts with the official and dominant war narrative in Croatia. Focus groups are more adept at this than other methodological approaches since they can effectively reflect independence of opinion; they lead to more truthful answers through spontaneity; they effectively probe taken-for-granted concepts; and they can more easily overcome distrust in post-conflict societies, especially with ex-combatants. The approach faces new challenges in such a situation since recruitment problems, insider/outsider status, and post-traumatic stress disorder, among other ethical concerns, present problems that often arise due to the group process. The powerful and unpredictable effect of the group dynamic can, therefore, provide a deep exploration of social norms, but it can also cause significant upset among participants. In this instance the methodology explores how widely accepted the war narrative is, how it is constructed, and how important the public believes it is not to question it.     

The Feminisation of the Conservative Parliamentary Party: Party Members' Attitudes

Under David Cameron's leadership reforms have been made to the Conservative party's parliamentary selection procedures and distinct women's policy initiatives have been developed. This article, based on focus group data with party members, explores attitudes towards measures designed to recruit more women Conservative MPs. Broadly, we find that, despite widespread support for the principle of greater social diversity among PPCs, members are uncomfortable with the specific measures that have been introduced. This is largely on the grounds that anything approaching 'positive discrimination' should be eschewed in favour of the 'meritocratic' selection of candidates. Further, the members tend to resent central party 'interference' in what has traditionally been the domain of local Constituency Associations.     

Is All Politics Indeed Local? A Comparative Study of Dual Mandate‐Holders’ Role Attitudes and Behaviours in Parliament

The practice of dual mandate‐holding, i.e. the simultaneous occupation of a political mandate at the (sub)national and the local level, is understudied in the comparative literature. Dual mandate‐holders embody the most direct link between local and central government, yet research has disregarded whether these actors actually feel and act as local ambassadors in parliament. In this article, we study whether councillors in parliament feel responsive for local grievances in terms of their respective role attitudes and behaviour, using the PARTIREP Comparative MP Survey. The estimated regression models demonstrate that dual mandate‐holders indeed perceive themselves as local brokers, even when controlling for various systemic‐, party‐ and individual‐level factors. On the other hand, they struggle to translate their localized attitudes into localized parliamentary behaviour, which could call one of the main arguments in favour of dual mandate‐holding into question.     

The broadcast media: A persuasive institution

At present, the broadcast media (radio and television) because of their pervasive presence in society are a “taken‐for‐granted” part of the social environment, as natural as the air one breathes. The persuasive power of the media is not so readily ascertained by all who watch and listen. Looking at the growth and spread of the media in three highly industrialized countries, namely Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, each with its own particular broadcast system, one can see the variety of emphasis on commercial and public broadcasting. Since the media have more in common with interpersonal communication than they have differences, the public is constantly open to media messages, continuously processing as well as responding to information received via media sources. The persuasive effect of these broadcast media in terms of the latent function of commercial messages needs deep and careful analysis.     

Excavating Concealed Tradeoffs: How Russians Watch the News

Citizens in democracies are expected to make better decisions if they understand policy tradeoffs. However, politicians rarely have incentives to communicate them; citizens are uncomfortable choosing among valued outcomes; and devising a common metric is difficult. It is not surprising that in the United States the environment provides relatively little cuing or priming of tradeoffs in television news. Russian citizens, on the other hand, face a media environment in which tradeoff cuing is intentionally suppressed by owners' agendas, yet viewers detect concealed tradeoffs even in the absence of tradeoff priming and viewpoint diversity. Analysis of discourse among ordinary Russians in 16 focus groups convened in four cities, differentiated by political reform and media market environments, showed that when watching news in which tradeoffs are thoroughly concealed, viewers challenge stories by offering a broad spectrum of uncued tradeoffs. Tradeoffs come from diverse policy domains and represent a range of cognitive strategies, some of which are considerably more abstract than others and link elements of their observations and assumptions (together with what they can extract from the stories) into complex reasoning outcomes.     

建立城乡统筹发展的政府运作机制

统筹城乡发展是一项非常复杂的社会系统工程,加强政府对城乡关系的宏观调控至关重要,不可或缺。政府必须把加快城镇化建设、实现城乡劳动者充分就业、培育城乡统一市场、实现城乡居民收入增长作为调控现阶段城乡关系的方向和重点。注意充分发挥规划、政策、法律等机制在调控城乡关系中的作用。     

我国司法鉴定立法现状及展望

随着社会的发展和科技的进步,诉讼中遇到的专业性疑难问题越来越多,司法鉴定的重要性也日益受到人们的重视。由于我国目前缺少统一的司法鉴定立法,相关制度构建不够完善,以至于司法鉴定实践中法律规范缺位,秩序混乱,问题颇多,制约了司法鉴定活动的开展,也在不同层面上造成了不良的社会影响。本文着重对我国司法鉴定立法现状和立法变迁予以解读,深入剖析司法鉴定的现实困境,主张在立足现实的基础上寻求破解之道,从理论、实践、宏观、微观的多重角度对我国司法鉴定统一立法的可行性进行系统探讨,并在强调关注司法鉴定统一立法若干要素的基础上对我国未来的《司法鉴定法》予以展望。