城市弱势群体贫困的政策分析

城市弱势群体的贫困问题在世界各国都是普遍存在的。如由于农村人口涌入城市形成贫民窟、因为经济不景气导致大量失业等等。但我国城市贫困的形成原因却有所不同,我国城市贫困问题的主要原因是社会转型时期政策失误。具体表现为相关政策的缺位以及已有政策中存在的诸多不合理。     

美国劳动法上雇用自由原则的公共政策例外:形成、实践与反思

公共政策例外是美国各州法院司法实务中形成的普通法例外,它构成了对美国传统劳动法上雇用自由原则的限制。该例外的适用,为那些因拒绝从事违反公共政策行为而遭解雇的员工提供了侵权法上的诉因。由于法院在适用该例外时对公共政策的涵义和法源存在不同认识,因而导致司法判决的不统一,对全面保护劳动者权益造成不利影响。为了改变这种状况,应当通过对法律的明文规定探求公共政策的法源,并在此基础上扩大公共政策例外在不当解雇案件中的适用。     

论刑事政策的演进与和谐社会刑事政策构建

刑事政策是在不断发展变化之中的。社会主义和谐社会刑事政策的价值取向是追求社会和谐和科学发展,指导思想是以人为本,关注人性,重视个性。主要内容包括宽严相济、保护人权、恢复性司法,实施主体包括国家及其司法机关、社会组织。和谐社会刑事政策需要在刑事立法、刑事司法、刑事预防各个层面加以深入贯彻。     

Migration and Healthcare Reforms in Spain: Symbolic Politics,Converging Outputs,Oppositions from the Field

ABSTRACT

Migrants’ healthcare entitlement represents a conflictive issue in the political battlefield, with research pointing towards the determinant role of party politics in determining policy outputs. Addressing the 2012 healthcare reform and 2018 counter-reform adopted in Spain by a right-wing and left-wing government respectively and drawing on qualitative analysis of parties’ discourses and policy measures, we argue that ideological differences along the healthcare-migration nexus were overemphasised to play symbolic politics. Partisan competition had less impact on actual outputs, while clashes between the central and regional governments, path-dependent practices and opposition from multiple venues played a central role in the policymaking process.     

Indispensable,yet Invisible: Drinking water management as a local political issue in Swedish municipalities

ABSTRACT

Local policy-makers’ incentives to address an issue is conditioned by how they perceive public attention. Our study focuses on drinking water management at the municipal level in Sweden. Provisioning and management of drinking water is a responsibility of the local governments. Interviews with local politicians and public administrators in seven municipalities reveal that local policy-makers think that citizens view provisioning of drinking water as a taken for granted service, and also lack knowledge of and interest in drinking water issues. Public attention is further seen as a double-edged sword since engagement in water issues often is a result of problems with water provision. The findings are discussed from a theoretical perspective of the role of agenda-setting in public policy. It is argued that the view of policy-makers of citizens as unengaged negatively affects the incentives to bring drinking water to a prominent place on the local policy agenda.     

Can non-democracies support international democracy? Turkey as a case study

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a rise of interest in the concept of autocracy promotion, with scholars questioning whether the efforts by authoritarian governments to influence political transitions beyond their borders are necessarily pro-authoritarian. An extension of this question is whether some authoritarian governments may at times find it in their interest to support democracy abroad. This article aims to answer this question by focusing on the case of Turkey. It argues that, despite its rapidly deteriorating democracy since the late 2000s, Turkey has undertaken democracy support policies with the explicit goal of democratic transition in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region during the Arab Spring and, while not bearing the intention of democratic transition, has employed democracy support instruments in the form of state-building in sub-Saharan Africa since 2005 to the present day. Based on original fieldwork, the article finds that non-democracies can turn out as democracy supporters, if and when opportunities for strategic gains from democratisation abroad arise. The article further suggests that even in those cases where strategic interests do not necessitate regime change, a non-democracy may still deploy democracy support instruments to pursue its narrow interests, without adhering to an agenda for democratic transition.     

Single-party government,Prime Minister psychology,and the diversionary use of force: theory and evidence from the British case

ABSTRACT

This paper develops expectations about the likelihood of diversionary conflict initiation by parliamentary democracies with single-party majoritarian (SPM) governments. While most of the literature on diversion and governmental arrangement claims that SPMs have little incentive and/or limited capacity to execute diversionary gambits, we contend that the structural and environmental impetuses for diversion in such states are in fact largely indeterminate. We posit that the psychological attributes of prime ministers under SPM – in particular, their level of distrust – is the most important predictor of how they view structural and environmental constraints, and thus of whether they will militarily divert from poor economic conditions. Distrustful prime ministers are predisposed to the use of force, will dwell on the costs of economic problems, and fear that co-partisan MPs (especially in the cabinet) have designs on their office. Thus, despite having a legislative majority, these leaders will choose diversionary conflict over economic policy fixes. We conduct a partial test of this hypothesis in the British case from 1945 to 2007, and our analyses provide robust support.     

Is it Population or Personnel? The Effects of Diversity on Immigration Policy Implementation by Sheriff Offices

Abstract

The federal-local cooperative immigration removal program Secure Communities (S-Comm) has resulted in wide variation into how aggressively national interior immigration policy has been implemented locally. Some communities have removed thousands, but others have removed few if any. Community composition explains much of the variation, but representative bureaucracy tells us agency diversity also influences implementation. Focusing on county sheriff offices, a vital local partner in S-Comm, this study finds that agency personnel diversity (specifically, offices with larger percentages of Hispanics and African Americans) produce fewer removals and submissions to ICE for immigration background checks. Other agency-specific factors are also important. Both the agency’s total budget and whether it has a 287(g) agreement with federal immigration authorities increase removals. Despite recent efforts to blur the distinction between immigration and criminal justice policy, this study finds no relationship between local removals and local crime.     

Collective Action,Civil Society,and Public Policy in Turkey

Abstract

Understanding policy change mechanisms has been a key question for scholars of public policy and collective action. However, policy scholarship mostly ignores civil society-based explanations of policy processes. In order to address this gap, this study combines the Advocacy Coalition Framework with networked collective action perspectives and analyzes a successful case of mobilization of women’s rights organizations in Turkey to reverse a bill on child marriage. Study findings suggest that advocacy coalitions are not static entities. When different issues in a policy subsystem are invoked, the structure of inter-coalition networks can change substantially and these variations in inter-coalition interactions may have consequences for influencing policy change. Moreover, this paper argues that extensive street protests and online campaigns by civil society organizations have the capacity to boost the bargaining power of minority coalitions, especially in contexts that lack multiple formal venues for making policy claims.