Conflict of interest regulation in European parliaments: Studying the evolution of complex regulatory regimes

The growing complexity of parliamentary ethics regulation adopted over the last decades makes the systematic examination of its nature and the rationales underpinning regulatory choices an important endeavor. In this paper we introduce conceptualizations and measurements of conflict of interest (COI) regulation directed toward assuring the impartial and unbiased decisionmaking of national parliamentarians. We distinguish the strictness of rules, the nature of enforcement, sanctions, and transparency requirements as core elements defining COI regimes. Applying our framework to 27 European democracies, we select two cases for in‐depth analysis in which legislators chose very different solutions in response to growing pressures to regulate themselves, to inductively explore the drivers underpinning the choice of COI mechanisms: the United Kingdom, which adopted a highly transparency‐oriented regime, and Belgium, which adopted a highly sanction‐oriented COI regime. Echoing neo‐institutionalist perspectives, the longitudinal analyses indicate how the two democracies’ different institutional environments shape distinct answers to similar functional pressures.     

一体化背景下的国家安全 战略能力探讨

能力是实现国家安全战略目标的基础,在国家安全战略实践中,能力是重中之重,但国家安全理论对能力问题的探讨却有所不足。国家安全战略能力是国家安全理论中的新概念,与国家安全能力、国家战略能力等传统概念既有联系又有区别,主要是指推动和落实国家安全战略的能力。随着国家安全概念不断拓展,国家安全战略能力也需要放在一体化的国家战略体系背景下深化分析。一体化概念运用到国家安全领域时,主要指统筹安全与发展的关系、各安全领域之间的关系、体系与能力的关系。国家行为主体建设和运用国家安全战略能力时,需要统筹这三对关系进行思考。一体化背景下,在国家安全战略能力要素方面,需要注意到战略资源、转化机制和谋划水平的拓展与延伸;在国家安全战略能力的结构方面,需要注意国家安全战略能力建设和运用各环节、各安全领域战略能力、国内外安全战略能力的变化。文章结合中国所处的当前战略环境,认为一体化背景下提升中国国家安全战略能力的主要途径包括强化战略领导能力、聚合国际国内资源、优化能力转化机制、军民融合发展和强化人才队伍建设。     

中国国家安全法治研究四十年: 回眸与展望

中国国家安全法治研究整体上历经起步探索(1978～1993)、逐步发展(1994～20102009)、全面发展(2010～2014)以及总体国家安全观指引(2014年至今)四个阶段。每一阶段的国家安全法治研究都脱离不开其时代背景。贯穿四十年的国家安全法治研究的主题是,围绕“国家安全”法律内涵即国家安全法治研究本体论展开多维度思考与探索。其研究重点涵盖国家安全法律体系研究、国家安全法与部门法的关系、国家安全法学科独立性及其发展等方面。法律意义上“国家安全”的内涵也经历了从“传统(政治)安全”到“总体国家安全观”的转变过程。针对实践需要,国家安全法治研究日益深化和繁荣。在总体国家安全观指引下,新时代国家安全法治研究面临的时代命题包括相关法律体系的建构和阐释,深化国家安全法与相关法律的有机衔接研究,研究方法创新与满足各领域国家安全保障的现实需要,等等。未来仍要坚持聚焦国家安全法治基本问题的研究。     

党内法规与国家法:关联、区别及其关系之协调

党内法规与国家法同属于法的范畴,都是制度理性的产物。二者具有类同性,既相互保障,又相互制约,同时又在制定主体与实施主体、效力来源、适用的对象与领域、规范逻辑以及对公开性的要求方面存在着明显区别。作为我国社会主义法治体系的共同支撑,党内法规与国家法作为社会治理规则而在社会治理方面发挥作用时,难免会因其不同而产生冲突或不协调,而这种不协调显然会对我国全面推进依法治国战略及全面从严治党战略带来负面影响。为此,需要协调二者之间的关系。     

Beyond protest and discontent: A cross‐national analysis of the effect of populist attitudes and issue positions on populist party support

Studies on populist parties – or ‘supply‐side populism’ more generally – are numerous. Nevertheless, the connection with demand‐side dynamics, and particularly the populist characteristics or tendencies of the electorate, requires more scholarly attention. This article examines in more detail the conditions underlying the support for populist parties, and in particular the role of populist attitudes amongst citizens. It asks two core questions: (1) are populist party supporters characterised by stronger populist attitudes than other party supporters, and (2) to what extent do populist (and other) attitudes contribute to their party preference? The analysis uses fixed effect models and relies on a cross‐sectional research design that uses unique survey data from 2015 and includes nine European countries. The results are threefold. First, in line with single‐country studies, populist attitudes are prominent among supporters of left‐ and right‐wing populist parties in particular. Second, populist attitudes are important predictors of populist party support in addition to left‐wing socioeconomic issue positions for left‐wing populist parties, and authoritarian and anti‐immigration issue positions for right‐wing populist parties. Third, populist attitudes moderate the effect of issue positions on the support for populist parties, particularly for individuals whose positions are further removed from the extreme ends of the economic or cultural policy scale. These findings suggest that strong populist attitudes may encourage some voters to support a populist party whose issue positions are incongruous with their own policy‐related preferences.     

The opposition deficit in EU accountability: Evidence from over 20 years of plenary debate in four member states

Debates about the European Union's democratic legitimacy put national parliaments into the spotlight. Do they enhance democratic accountability by offering visible debates and electoral choice about multilevel governance? To support such accountability, saliency of EU affairs in the plenary ought to be responsive to developments in EU governance, has to be linked to decision‐making moments and should feature a balance between government and opposition. The recent literature discusses various partisan incentives that support or undermine these criteria, but analyses integrating these arguments are rare. This article provides a novel comparative perspective by studying the patterns of public EU emphasis in more than 2.5 million plenary speeches from the German Bundestag, the British House of Commons, the Dutch Tweede Kamer and the Spanish Congreso de los Diputados over a prolonged period from 1991 to 2015. It documents that parliamentary actors are by and large responsive to EU authority and its exercise where especially intergovernmental moments of decision making spark plenary EU salience. But the salience of EU issues is mainly driven by government parties, decreases in election time and is negatively related to public Euroscepticism. The article concludes that national parliaments have only partially succeeded in enhancing EU accountability and suffer from an opposition deficit in particular.     

Debating War and Peace: US Congress and the Domestic Legitimization of Military Interventions

This article investigates how members of US Congress legitimized their votes in four cases of military interventions after the Cold War (Iraq 1991, 2002–2009; Somalia 1993; Libya 2011). Using an original dataset on congressional rhetoric, the qualitative content analysis highlights that the domestic legitimization of military interventions hinges on members of Congress’s perception of external threats and national interests. So far, international relations research focused on the executive and the war powers literature offered mainly quantitative accounts on voting patterns within the legislative branch―especially for the US case. The relevance of national interest arguments within congressional debates confirms the expectations of neoclassical realism while contradicting previous studies about a dominant discourse in US society, which legitimizes interventions with universal values, such as democracy promotion or human rights.     

Developing political trust in a developing country: the impact of institutional and cultural factors on political trust in Ghana

Political distrust is often widespread in African countries, but the prospects for increasing trust are uncertain given the lack of research on the origins of political trust in the region. Using the 2013 NSS Survey in Ghana and employing hierarchical regression analyses, we develop a model of institutional trust based on insights from both cultural and institutional performance theories. The results clearly support the superiority of institutional performance theories while at the same time providing limited support for cultural explanations. National pride, however, does also substantially encourage institutional trust. This asks for future, cultural-specific studies on trust-building in developing countries trying to establish working institutions using more representative, cross-national, and longitudinal data.     

Turkic poetic heritage as symbol and spectacle of identity: observations on Turkmenistan’s Year of Magtymguly celebrations

This paper presents one case study of state-sponsored cultural activities that occurred throughout 2014, Turkmenistan’s Year of Magtymguly, the 290th anniversary of this Turkmen poet’s birth. Such activities constitute examples of public culture; they can organize representations of a society’s past and present to reaffirm for participants the values and power structure of their society and revalidate its philosophical underpinnings. After examining this Turkic poet’s iconicity, this paper compiles 2014's celebratory events from disparate sources, complementing broader general literature on Central Asia’s spectacles of public culture and their role in nation-building and identity-formation. Rather than merely resulting from any top-down decision specifying required activities nationwide, the year’s events involved numerous synergies as artists, museum and theater administrators, composers, and other cultural-sector workers benefited by responding to the potential of aligning their work with a theme as broad, as widely appreciated, and as eligible for various forms of support as this one. In addition, Turkmenistan’s strong central leadership benefited from this widely shared and highly visible celebration, especially emphasizing one element within Magtymguly’s eighteenth-century vision, an end to his people’s tribal conflicts within a unified Turkmenistan under one leader.     

Retracing the contours of her figure … slippages begin to appear: Reckoning the limits of the archive with Senam Okudzeto’s Large Reclining Nude

Large Reclining Nude (2004) by transnational artist and scholar Senam Okudzeto is an 86-inch by 63-inch acrylic drawing of a nude, black female body released into a bare milieu. At first glance, the figure is grounded as shadows cast across her body hint at the presence of a foundation. However, outside the bounds of the body, Okudzeto resists three-dimensional perspective, calling into question the necessity of mediational signifiers for the orientation of the figure. How are we to read this solitary body after Scenes of Subjection, after Saidiya Hartman recontextualizes black corporeality as social relationality, throwing the “autonomous individual?…?into crisis?” For this article, the author reads the lone, floating body of Okudzeto’s 2004 Large Reclining Nude for new openings into Hartman’s archival reckoning in Scenes of Subjection. She offers a meditation on the aesthetic techniques evident through the visual aporia of the drawing – irresolvable contradictions in the field of the visible – suggesting Okudzeto offers alternative reading practices that afford reengagement with Hartman’s work.