Bottom-up renewal of the Swiss party system

ABSTRACT

The Swiss party system and the institutional rules guiding elections are an anchor of stability in Swiss politics. This article investigates recent change in cantonal elections, and analyses how electoral swings in cantonal elections diffuse to other cantons, and whether they predict future electoral swings in the national electoral arena. Empirically, the article combines a statistical analysis of electoral results from the period 1990–2017 in cantonal and national elections with a qualitative discussion of the period from 2014 to 2017.     

Representation and district magnitude in plurality systems

Despite the widely accepted theoretical prediction that high district magnitudes should yield less proportional results in plurality systems, empirical evidence is surprisingly mixed. We argue that these mixed results are ultimately due to a lack of clarity about the counterfactual being considered. We use a simple model to show that an increase in district magnitude reduces expected proportionality in a plurality system only if it is accompanied by a reduction in the number of districts. This conditional prediction helps to explain the diversity of existing findings and is consistent with our own analysis of both U.S. congressional delegations and local councils in Britain.     

中共历次党章修改对党员选举权的完善与落实

党章,是党的根本大法,是党内活动的根本准则。建党以来,从党的一大到党的十八大,随着党所面临的形势和任务的变化对其工作提出的新要求,使得党章不断的得以修正和完善,党员选举权利的理论也实现了与时俱进的发展。这一发展不仅体现了我党在不同历史时期的实践探索,而且体现了中国共产党对党员选举权利认识的深化。因此,分析历次党章对党员选举权内容的修订,以及中共历次党章修改对落实党员选举权利的推动作用,对于探索新时期保障和落实党员权利的主要途径也就显得尤为重要。     

Recalibrating social protection: Electoral competition and the new partisan politics of the welfare state

This article investigates the new party politics of welfare states with a particular focus on electoral competition. The argument is that welfare state politics are no longer just about more or less, but involve trade-offs among ‘new’ versus ‘old’ social rights, and hence social investment versus social consumption. However, party priorities on these issues are highly dependent upon their electoral situation. As electoral competition becomes more intense, parties focus more on vote maximisation than on their traditional policy goals. For left parties, this means focusing more on social investment, which appeals to their growing constituency of progressive sociocultural professionals, and less on defending the traditional income maintenance programmes favoured by their core blue-collar voters. Centre-right parties, on the other hand, should hesitate to retrench old social rights when electoral competition intensifies because they need to prioritise their appeal to culturally conservative working-class voters over their traditional fiscally conservative policy profiles. Using a new dataset and a recently published measure of electoral competitiveness, the article shows that as electoral competition intensifies, left governments are willing to prioritise social investment by reducing pension rights generosity in order to expand programmes for new social risks, while centre-right governments by contrast avoid retrenchment of pension rights and pension expenditures. The findings demonstrate that this relationship is moderated by the presence of a credible radical right challenger, which increases the electoral risk of welfare state recalibration.     

论《欧盟运行条约》第102条在知识产权领域的扩大适用——以阿斯利康公司诉欧盟委员会一案为视角

自由竞争和知识产权保护是现代国家建立和完善市场经济制度,保护消费者利益的两把利剑。以往判例所确立的原则是欧盟竞争法在特殊情形下被有限的适用于知识产权行使过程中的某些行为,竞争法的适用通常要满足非常严格的条件。而在新近作出的一份判决中,欧盟普通法院首次将《欧盟运行条约》第102条①适用于知识产权的申请行为,而且在适用过程中,明显放宽适用条件。这种在知识产权领域扩大适用竞争规则的行为有损知识产权法律体系的独立性,而且在今后类似案件中也不具有较强的可操作性,其仅具有特例性,而非普遍意义。     

Holding parties responsible at election time: Multi-level,multi-party government and electoral accountability

This paper highlights the crucial role played by party-specific responsibility attributions in performance-based voting. Three models of electoral accountability, which make distinct assumptions regarding citizens' ability to attribute responsibility to distinct governing parties, are tested in the challenging Northern Ireland context – an exemplar case of multi-level multi-party government in which expectations of performance based voting are low. The paper demonstrates the operation of party-attribution based electoral accountability, using data from the 2011 Northern Ireland Assembly Election Study. However, the findings are asymmetric: accountability operates in the Protestant/unionist bloc but not in the Catholic/nationalist bloc. This asymmetry may be explained by the absence of clear ethno-national ideological distinctions between the unionist parties (hence providing political space for performance based accountability to operate) but the continued relevance in the nationalist bloc of ethno-national difference (which limits the scope for performance politics). The implications of the findings for our understanding of the role of party-specific responsibility attribution in performance based models of voting, and for our evaluation of the quality of democracy in post-conflict consociational polities, are discussed.     

Money,candidates, and mayoral elections

In this paper, we extend a well-trod line of research from congressional and state-level elections—the electoral impact of campaign expenditures and candidate characteristics—to a relatively understudied context, urban mayoral elections. Using a sample of large U.S. cities, we provide evidence that mayoral elections are very similar to elections at other levels of office: there is a tremendous incumbency advantage, one that is overcome only with great effort; campaign spending is closely tied to incumbent vote share but it is challenger rather than incumbent spending that seems to drive outcomes; and challengers are hopelessly outspent. In addition, we find that the effect of local economic conditions on incumbent success is mediated by challenger spending and that incumbent candidates fare better in racially diverse settings.     

Party registration and party self-identification: Exploring the role of electoral institutions in attitudes and behaviors

How do electoral institutions affect self-identified partisanship? I hypothesize that party registration acts to anchor a person's party identification, tying a person to a political party even when their underlying preferences may align them with the other party. Estimating a random effects multinomial logit model, I find individuals registered with a party are more likely to self-identify with that party and away from the other party. Party registration also affects voting in presidential elections but not in House elections, leading to greater defection in the former where voters have more information about the candidates. These insights illuminate varying rates of electoral realignment, particularly among southern states, and the makeup of primary electorates in states with and without party registration.     

An International Chinese Contest for Peace

ON August 3, I was invited to attend the finale and closing ceremony of the 13th Chinese Bridge Chinese Proficiency Competition for Foreign College Students. This contest, organized jointly by the Confucious Institute Headquarters （Hanban）, the Hunan provincial government and Hunan TV, was held, unsurprisingly, in Changsha, capital of the province.     

试论干部管理应坚持的原则

干部管理应坚持竞争原则、更新原则、激励原则、注重实绩原则和民主监督原则。