Electoral engineering in Chile: the electoral system and limited democracy

On the eve of Chile's transition from military to elected government, the outgoing regime enacted an electoral engineering project intended to conserve the constitutional order it encoded in 1980. An analysis of 1989 and 1993 general elections shows that the way votes are translated into seats favors, as intended, the second largest electoral block, the Chilean Right. This bias, along with the number of appointed senators and the special majorities required for constitutional amendments, gives the Right a minority veto power on any reform initiative. Moreover, the electoral system produces incentives for parties, candidates and voters that enhances this balance of power. The role that the electoral system plays in Chile therefore consolidates a limited form of democracy, rather than a liberal one.     

生态脆弱区环境资源管理的制度与政策创新

生态脆弱区环境资源管理是区域可持续发展研究中的重大问题,是政府转变职能、进行宏观调控与管理的重要领域。环境资源具有公共物品的属性,只有通过政府的干预才能提高其效率。基于对生态脆弱区基本属性与环境特征以及环境资源公共物品属性的分析,从公众参与、绿色GDP、生态购买、配套政策、政府组织等几个主要方面论述了生态脆弱区环境资源管理的制度与政策创新。     

马克思主义政治冲突思想研究

政治冲突理论是马克思主义政治学说的重要组成部分,但对它的研究还很鲜见。本文试图在马克思主义政治冲突理论发展的历史与逻辑相一致的理论框架下,从一个全新的视角,重新诠释马克思主义的政治学说,通过运用辩证分析的方法对阶级冲突、政治发展冲突、政治冲突的功能取向、政治冲突的发展过程、整合政治冲突的制度性设计进行了比较系统的阐释。     

An electoral calculus? Dual incentives and committee assignment in the UK’s mixed-member legislatures

Although mixed-member electoral systems offer an apparent opportunity to observe how different rules shape politicians’ behaviour, ‘contamination’ between the SMD and PR-list tiers has frequently confounded academic work. Investigating Scotland and Wales’ mixed-member legislatures by exploiting their different chamber sizes and an unusual dual candidacy prohibition in Wales, modelling of committee assignments uncovers a split finding. Controlling for membership of the lead governing party, list members have a higher committee workload than their constituency colleagues, and members with previous employment experience in justice and health are more likely to be assigned to the corresponding subject committee once elected. Elsewhere, expectations that members might seek assignments that best suit theorized re-election interests are not found. The hypothesized influence of electoral rules is strongly conditioned by the small size of the legislature in Wales.     

关于中日公务员考录制度的比较研究

我国公务员考录制度建立后,对推动我国政治体制改革和行政活动法制化、规范化、科学化起了重要作用。但是我国尚处于初级阶段的公务员考录制度不能适应社会发展需要的现象日益突出,影响到我国公务员队伍建设的进行和行政体制改革的推行。文章对中日公务员考录制度进行了详尽的比较,借鉴日本的有益经验对进一步完善我国公务员考录制度提出了合理的意见和建议。     

Behavioral consequences of mixed electoral systems: Deviating voting behavior of district and list MPs in the German Bundestag

Electoral rules should affect parliamentary behavior. In particular, deputies elected from single-member districts should be more likely to deviate from the party line than deputies elected under proportional representation. This paper suggests a framework for conceptualizing and modeling the effect of the type of mandate on deputies’ propensity to cast deviating votes in mixed electoral systems. The proposed modeling strategy uses disaggregated voting data and integrates dependencies among observations in a multi-level design. Empirically, the paper analyses voting behavior in the 16th German Bundestag (2005–2009) and shows that the odds of district MPs to deviate are significantly higher despite frequent claims that the two types of MPs behave alike. However, the behavioral differences cannot be attributed to attempts by district MPs to follow their local constituents as competing principals.     

两大法系惩戒性军事法概要

莫里斯与古斯塔夫斯的《战争法典》对两大法系惩戒性军事法的形成起到了奠基作用。在两大法系主要国家,惩戒性军事法以军事司法权的运作为核心,主要围绕军事司法管辖权及军事司法程序构建军事司法制度。20世纪50年代以来,受《欧洲人权公约》及《联合国公民权利和政治权利公约》的影响,两大法系惩戒性军事法的发展又呈现出了一些新的特点。     

Measuring re-election prospects across electoral systems: a general approach applied to Germany

This research note presents a general approach for measuring the electoral safety of individual MPs across electoral systems that is based on predicted re-election probabilities estimated from multilevel logistic regression models. In contrast to existing measures, this method yields estimates on an intuitive and readily comparable probability scale, captures the higher sensitivity of re-election prospects to electoral change in the range of close races, and can accommodate regional differences in context conditions such as volatility. The paper implements the approach for two archetypical electoral systems – first-past-the-post (FPTP) systems and closed-list proportional representation (PR) – and estimates re-election prospects for the FPTP and PR tiers of the German mixed electoral system in all Bundestag elections since 1957. While the empirical data presented here is mainly illustrative, the concluding section highlights various questions that future research can address with the new measure.     

Ideological congruence over government mandates under majoritarian and proportional representation electoral systems

The existing literature on ideological congruence has typically looked at congruence immediately after elections when governments are formed. This article goes beyond that comparative static approach by examining changes in citizen-government ideological congruence between two fixed points in time, namely at the beginning and end of government mandates. Building on a veto player approach and dynamics of party competition under majoritarian and proportional representation (PR) electoral systems, the results indicate, first, that government positions are more stable in between elections, as the number of parties and their ideological distance increase in cabinet. Second, it appears that single-party and homogeneous coalition governments decrease ideological congruence between elections under low levels of polarisation, while they increase congruence under very high levels of polarisation. Third, it was found that governments under majoritarian systems slightly decrease congruence between elections while congruence stays stable on average under PR systems. The different levels of party system polarisation across majoritarian and PR electoral systems mostly explain this difference.