提升大学生党员的教育培训水平

大学生党员教育培训作为新形势下党建工作的重要组成部分,必须与时俱进、凸显价值功能。当前,大学生党员教育培训工作仍然存在一些问题和不足,如缺乏长效机制、内容和形式创新不够等。为此,高校要树立可持续发展的教育培训理念,突出教育培训的科学性、创新性、民主性和参与性,建立有效的评价和协同创新机制,切实提升大学生党员的教育培训水平。     

Putting Electronic Voting under the Microscope

Electronic voting entered the political arena some years ago, with some countries advocating its use, some countries trialling and then abandoning it and yet others preferring to preserve the status quo of paper‐and‐pencil voting within a voting booth. In this paper we present the pros and cons of electronic voting and propose a set of characteristics we think electronic voting systems should exhibit. We then briefly review some pertinent concerns, issues and worries. We conclude by introducing the Handivote system, an electronic voting system that supports voting by means of SMS messaging, and explain how it measures up in terms of our own specified characteristics.     

The Political Thought of Scottish Nationalism

This article examines the key arguments and intellectual influences that have come together over recent decades to produce the case for Scottish independence. In particular, the article draws attention to three crucial, but discordant, ideological themes that have become recurrent features of Scottish nationalist discourse: an analysis of the British state indebted to the New Left; a surprising enthusiasm for the politics of the British labour movement; and a belief that we are witnessing the end of the era of absolute state sovereignty.     

Governance Under Surveillance in South Africa

Good governance and legitimacy are becoming more and more important in South African society. Increasingly there are tendencies and trends of corruption, poor service delivery, crime, violence, and xenophobia in South Africa. The lack of accountability, responsiveness, and transparency reflects negatively on governance principles. It is becoming more evident that governance in South Africa must be investigated. Government is finding it difficult to tend to public participation, maintain law and order, provide for the basic needs of citizens, and combat unemployment and strikes. There is a direct link between governance and legitimacy because good governance is one of the essential elements and a prerequisite for legitimacy. Legitimacy depends on the government＇s performance and the support of citizens for the ruling party.     

调适公共行政过程中理性冲突的协商民主思维方式——以处理群体性事件为例

当前我国正面对日益严峻的社会矛盾冲突形势,处于转型期的政府为了维稳就必须制定应对方案。面对频发的群体性事件,要均衡社会政治稳定、发展与民众利益、诉求之间关系,政府在公共行政过程中自然经常面临价值理性和工具理性的冲突。而协商民主这一新的民主理论范式,将原本局限于选举环节的民主拓展到公共行政和决策领域,有利于妥善处理群体性事件,既能充分维护稳定的社会政治局面,又保障了公民正当的利益、诉求的实现。     

The communicative constitution of representation and exclusion

In the light of current debate on representation, specifically engaging with literature showing how representation is communicatively constituted, this paper empirically shows how exclusion also can be seen as communicatively constituted. The interpretive approach toward communication employed in this study presents new insights on how, for citizens, government communicates its responsiveness, and how citizens' interpretations that arise from these communications make sense. Dutch citizens who evaluate government responsiveness as low were interviewed to explore their views. The respondents evaluate government responsiveness on the basis of a set of engagements with government. These engagements are conceptualized in terms of four types of encounter – forms in which government manifests itself to citizens. By ‘thinking with’ these encounters, citizens relegate institutions and processes of representative democracy to the margins of political reality. Situating citizens outside of democratic politics, these interpretations imply the experience of exclusion, despite apparently functioning democratic institutions and processes.     

Religious parties and the problem of democratic political legitimacy

Thinkers committed to an ideal of public reason are suspicious of religiously informed political activity as it undermines democratic political legitimacy. This paper considers Jürgen Habermas’s recent shifts on this question in light of the history of Europe’s religious parties in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These parties made a real and lasting contribution to Europe’s democratization and their history suggests ways in which Habermas and other defenders of public reason misunderstand the nature of democratic political legitimacy.     

Private association and public brand: the dualistic conception of political parties in the common law world

This paper examines the legal conception of political parties. It does so by unearthing the history and ontology of the common law relating to political parties in international perspective. The flexibility of the unincorporated association, in which parties are understood through the private law of contract as networks of internal rules or agreements, rather than as legal entities, has proven to be a mask. In the common law’s imagination, the ideal party is a ground-up organization animated by its membership. But the law mandates no such thing, and in its statutory and constitutional conception intra-party democracy may be sublimated as parties need be no more than an electoral persona or brand.     

协商民主的类型和功能

当代西方协商民主的制度难题是如何解决“协商”与“决策”二元分离问题.罗尔斯主张协商民主只适用于“宪法根本”和基本正义等政治问题;而菲什金则将民主协商排除在代议制之外,推崇公民微型协商小组.哈贝马斯针对上述“单轨”协商民主及其二元分离问题,提出了正式公共领域与非正式公共领域的“双轨”理论,并通过公民与政府间的“交往之流”促使二者的融合;博曼的二元民主强调执法与公民的协商以勾连立法、执法与公民之间的协商;科恩则主张通过政党上传下达的桥梁作用,促成二者的合一.罗尔斯的“公共理性”意味着在公共协商过程中只存在着一个主导着整个协商过程及其结果的单一理性;而多元理性论者古特曼等则认为：单一理性论者忽视了社会现实的差异性和不确定性等,因此主张“互惠原则”和“共融政治”.价值预设性协商民主强调价值、规范和程序的先定性,不免有强奸民意之嫌;价值待定性协商民主则力主：宪法只是一个对未来行动的一般承诺,具有持续性、对话性和再磋商性等.当下中国政治体制改革势在必行,建立健全以党的领导为前提、以协商民主为核心、以程序法治为主导、以宪法统治为保障的民主政治体制,当为可取.     

Rancière and revolution

This paper explores what role Rancière's work can play in the struggle for a more democratic world. It highlights the strength of Rancière's conception of democracy, which clearly identifies democracy as a popular disruption of the prevailing police order. This order claims to have assigned a proper role to all parts of society. Democracy for Rancière is when an element emerges that has not been taken account of and demonstrates the police order's claim to be false. Among the many benefits of this way of understanding democracy, it upsets any easy association between hegemony and democracy – as in Laclau & Mouffe – and it refuses utterly the ideological fusing of democracy, capitalism, and the state offered by the liberal-democratic-capitalist consensus. However, Rancière's approach also introduces significant limits on democracy because it denies that democracy can ever do more than disrupt the prevailing order. It does not allow for the possibility that democracy can grow and spread to the point that it becomes pervasive in the polity. This paper uses the case of the Egyptian uprising to show how this limitation closes off important political possibilities. The paper argues that Deleuze & Guattari's theorisation of revolution, when used carefully, is a necessary corrective to Rancière's too-restricted concept of democracy