Historical perspective and better regulatory governance: An agenda for institutional reform

Compared to economics, sociology, political science, and law, the discipline of history has had a limited role in the wide‐ranging efforts to reconsider strategies of regulatory governance, especially inside regulatory institutions. This article explores how more sustained historical perspective might improve regulatory decisionmaking. We first survey how a set of American regulatory agencies currently rely on historical research and analysis, whether for the purposes of public relations or as a means of supporting policymaking. We then consider how regulatory agencies might draw on history more self‐consciously, more strategically, and to greater effect. Three areas stand out in this regard – the use of history to improve understanding of institutional culture; reliance on historical analysis to test the empirical plausibility of conceptual models that make assumptions about the likelihood of potential economic outcomes; and integration of historical research methods into program and policy evaluation.     

Conflict Assessment in Energy Infrastructure Siting: Prospects for Consensus Building in the Northern Pass Transmission Line Project

As energy demand grows rapidly worldwide, power line infrastructure will continue to be a major development planning challenge. This study considers the environmental conflict that has arisen over a transnational transmission line project between Canada and the United States. A qualitative conflict assessment is presented to define the parameters for consensus that could prevent protracted litigation between stakeholders. Proactively designing a process to encourage consensus building during the early development phase remains the most critical determinant of compromise. In this article, we argue that in this case a consensus‐building effort could be feasible if certain design requirements were met, including gaining the participation of key stakeholders, paying attention to trust, and focusing on the issues specific to this transmission line rather than to a larger energy discussion. The research shows that despite potential pitfalls, reaching more widely accepted and ecologically sensitive solutions to environmental conflicts through participatory and collaborative approaches is possible and worth the effort.     

Global attributes or local literacy? International students in Japan’s graduate employment system

International students graduating from Japanese universities are becoming an important component of graduate recruitment strategy in globalising Japanese firms. They are praised for possessing exactly the kinds of attributes seen as lacking in their Japanese counterparts – such as intercultural communication skills, self-confidence and a competitive spirit. Their value is also emphasised in national policies addressing the human resource challenges of globalisation. Higher education policy-makers, too, are increasingly conscious of the need to connect efforts to attract international students to Japan with strategies to maximise their utility in the Japanese workforce. To succeed in the job market, however, international students are required to conform to the conventions of graduate job-hunting. Career support services offered by universities and third-party intermediaries tend to focus on bringing students into line with these conventions rather than developing alternatives thereto. This article explores this interface between policies and practices surrounding international graduate job-seekers, analysing the positions of several different stakeholders – including the job-seekers themselves – in order to develop a more critical understanding of the possible outcomes of current moves towards internationalisation of higher education and employment in Japan and the future of the graduate job-placement system itself. The article highlights a paradox whereby the ‘global’ attributes that underpin the expectations placed on international students originally are overshadowed by a concern with testing local socio-cultural literacy through the application of the conventional norms and practices of the graduate job hunt.     

制度执行力:概念辨析及构建要素

制度执行力就是指制度本身所具有被执行落实的强制力、执行效力,以及相关组织在执行相关制度时的执行力量和执行效力。制度执行力与政府执行力、政策执行力之间具有交叉重叠的关系。制度执行力的构建,需要从完善制度、执行元制度、执行主体、执行行动、执行要件等方面着手。     

What can we Learn from the First Major Statement of Labour’s Economic Policy under Keir Starmer?

Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, Anneliese Dodds, recently set out the first major exposition of economic policy under leader Keir Starmer. Covering a lot of ground, she gave insights into current Labour thinking on macro and micro policy. Much of the speech was aimed at emphasising the fact that Labour would be ‘responsible’, an attempt to reassure voters as well as markets. But there is plenty of room for radical approaches within this framework, so exactly what this all means for practical policy is still to be determined.     

How to estimate the policy preferences of party supporters: Disaggregating data from voting advice applications versus modeling survey responses

Valid and reliable estimates of the policy preferences of political parties' supporters are essential for the study of political representation. However, such estimates are not directly available from standard surveys of public opinion, which are typically representative by design only at the national level and rarely ask questions about public support for specific policies. In this article, we explore the possibility to use data from voting advice applications (VAA) to estimate the policy preferences of party supporters. To do that, first, we identify 10 questions on preferences towards issues of public policy that were asked around the same time and with similar wording in traditional surveys of public opinion and in VAAs fielded in Germany and in the Netherlands. Then we compare the VAA data disaggregated by political affiliation of the respondents to the survey data adjusted via multilevel regression modeling with poststratification (MRP). We find strong positive correlations between the estimates derived from both methods, especially after weighting the VAA data. Yet, point estimates are not always very close, and the match is sensitive to the treatment of neutral and ‘don't know’ answers. Overall, our results bode well for the validity of using VAA data in empirical research on political representation.     

Degrees of influence: Educational inequality in policy representation

Education plays an important role in the political, social and economic divisions that have recently characterised Western Europe. Despite the many analyses of education and its political consequences, however, previous research has not investigated whether government policy caters more to the preferences of the higher educated than to the preferences of the lower educated. We address this question using an original dataset of public opinion and government policy in the Netherlands. This data reveals that policy representation is starkly unequal. The association between support for policy change and actual change is much stronger for highly educated citizens than for low and middle educated citizens, and only the highly educated appear to have any independent influence on policy. This inequality extends to the economic and cultural dimensions of political competition. Our findings have major implications for the educational divide in Western Europe, as they reflect both a consequence and cause of this divide.     

Explaining the immigration policy mix: Countries' relative openness to asylum and labour migration

Western democracies have developed complex policies to manage migration flows. Much of the scholarly literature and political discourse assume that countries have become increasingly selective and that they prioritise economic intakes. Despite clear efforts by policymakers to distinguish between refugees and migrant workers, we know surprisingly little about how countries combine different policy dimensions and which factors shape their relative openness to different target groups. In this article, we shed light on how countries combine two of the main admission channels, asylum and labour migration, by introducing the concept of the ‘immigration policy mix’. A comparative analysis of 33 OECD countries between 1980 and 2010 examines the pattern and drivers behind their immigration policy mix: Does the policy mix follow a pattern of convergence, is it subject to political dynamics or is it path dependent? The results reveal that despite a shift in political sympathies from asylum to labour migration, countries' immigration policy mixes have strongly converged into more liberal policies overall. The immigration policy mix primarily reflects governments’ limited room to manoeuvre due to competing political pressures. These insights demonstrate that the immigration policy mix serves to enhance our understanding of countries’ complex regulation of immigration.     

An optimal anti-drug law enforcement policy

This article presents a model for a drug law enforcement policy whose objective is harm reduction, including the net cost of law enforcement, social harm and surplus of agents. We consider a vertically organized distribution system with two levels, traffickers and retailers. The two questions concern which type of sellers have to be prosecuted and which law enforcement policy should be implemented that is, the probability of being caught and the severity of the punishment. We show that a trafficker-oriented law enforcement regime can avoid counter-productive policies. Moreover, decriminalization or depenalization is optimal under some conditions depending on the relationship between social harm and consumption.     

查办职务犯罪如何贯彻宽严相济的刑事政策

在职务犯罪查办中贯彻宽严相济的刑事政策是一个比较新的课题,试从全面把握宽严相济刑事政策内涵出发,对职务犯罪查办如何在办案程序、实体认定和办案机制三方面落实宽严相济刑事政策进行较为深入的探讨,提出检察机关查办职务犯罪过程中落实这一刑事政策的具体方法和途径.