Electoral losers revisited – How citizens react to defeat at the ballot box

The paper seeks to reconcile insights from winner-loser gap research with mainstream understanding of election legitimacy. The paper acknowledges that winning and losing elections creates differential incentives for citizens to remain supportive of their political system, but it argues that losers nevertheless have enough reasons to remain supportive in absolute terms. Drawing on democratic theory, the paper develops a rationale for why citizens are willing to accept electoral defeat voluntarily, and suggest a new way to conceptualize citizen reactions to election outcomes. It presents findings from a sample of election studies in established democracies to show that winners typically become more supportive whereas losers at minimum retain their level of support from before the election. It concludes that elections, when reasonably well executed, as they most often are in established democracies, build system support rather than undermine it.     

完善民主评议政风行风制度的对策思考

政风行风是政府和行业的生命,政风行风的好坏直接关系当地政府的形象。民主评议政风行风对于纠正部门和行业不正之风,促进依法行政,推进党风廉政建设,优化政务环境,构建社会主义和谐社会具有重要意义。完善民主评议政风行风制度,应从确立多方参与机制,增强评议的代表性和权威性、建立统一规范的评议制度,形成评议体系、完善客观公正的评议方法,优化评议过程、开展严格细致的评议考核,巩固评议效果、构筑立体监督机制,推行阳光评议等方面进行。     

论政治责任与公共权力的统一——民主政治建设的理论逻辑

政治责任与公共权力的统一是民主政治的必然要求,也是责任政治实现程度的重要衡量标准。面对现实政治生活中政治责任缺失的恶劣情况,在公共权力内在矛盾之上积极寻求其与公共权力失衡的理论根源,通过权力制约、权利监督、个人道德水平提升的关键点,突出制度功能性建设以确立责任对公共权力的基础性控制,应成为防控公共权力超出合法合理界限的逻辑思路与促使政治责任实现的必要保障。     

Special Issue on electronic media,markets and civil society in East and Southeast Asia: Introduction

Abstract

The government of Hong Kong has been trying to reform the territory's health care financing system since the early 1990s and is finally on the verge of succeeding. The objective of this paper is to assess the reform efforts and explain the causes of repeated failures and eventual success. It will argue that the government's fortunes changed only after it abandoned the core reform goal and decided to pursue peripheral objectives. It will explain the abandonment with reference to the peculiar political system in Hong Kong that makes it difficult for the government to adopt substantial policy reforms in the face of even moderate opposition. The reason for the government's policy incapacity is the existence of liberalism in a non-democratic setting, which allows the government to neither suppress opposition nor mobilize popular support. This has been illustratively evident in its health care reforms when its proposals to improve the system's fiscal sustainability invariably met an early death because they imposed costs on employers, the population or both. The current proposal has fared better not only because it addresses a simpler peripheral problem but also because it offends almost no one and pleases many among the powerful.     

The utility of bonding social capital

Abstract

In most studies of social capital, bridging social capital is emphasized as ‘good’ for democracy and economic performance. It is rarer to find studies showing that bonding social capital can bring positive effects. Mostly, bonding social capital is either overlooked or depicted as the ‘villain’ that leads to ethnic conflict, intolerant behaviour and poor economic and democratic development. In this article, it is argued that this picture needs to be revised. If we assume that bonding trust is a negative force for development and democracy, we ignore a substantial portion of the political history of the West. Also, new empirical evidence from India suggests that bonding social capital is related to good governance. High levels of bonding trust cannot only facilitate political cooperation. They may also work as a shield against public sector employees who attempt to exploit citizens in a corrupt or clientelistic manner. The conclusion drawn in the article is that the view of social capital as a prime mover with inherent normatively attractive qualities should give way to a perspective where social capital is more properly regarded as an intermediate variable where the way it is combined with, or interacts with, other factors determines outcomes.     

Civil Society after Democracy: The Evolution of Civic Activism in South Africa and Korea

The phase of democratic consolidation can significantly impact the motives, dynamics and objectives of civil society. Its internal roles, dynamics and power balances are significantly altered by the advent of democracy, due to shifting resources, political opportunities and a general reframing of goals and objectives. By adopting a definition of civil society as an ‘arena’ (which highlights the continuously evolving composition and leadership of civil society) and borrowing a number of theoretical dimensions from social movement theory (which underline the importance of resource mobilization, political opportunities and conceptual framing processes), the article shows that the advent of democracy has posed a number of challenges to civil society organizations in Korea and South Africa. Moreover, the consolidation of democracy has inevitably changed the nature of government–civil society relations. While in South Africa institutional politics reasserted itself in the first years of democracy, thereby sidelining organizations and movements concerned with public accountability and good governance (which have only recently resurfaced through the action of new social movements), in Korea corruption and lack of transparency immediately marred the dawn of democracy, providing civic movements with a fertile terrain to galvanize civic mobilizations vis-à-vis the lack of responsiveness of the political class.     

以民主法制规范社会主义市场经济(上)

社会主义市场经济是中国经济矛盾演变的必要阶段.作为经济体制,它是社会主义制度的具体化,因此必须坚持社会主义原则,其核心就是民主.民主原则的制度化,形成社会主义法制体系.实行社会主义市场经济是克服旧的统制经济体制缺陷的历史性变革,其关键就在于以民主法制规范经济生活的各个层面和环节,并以执法、立法机构予以保证,由此促进经济的健康有序发展.     

Women in contemporary Soviet society

What enables democracies to succeed has much in common with what enables other forms of modern rule to succeed: notably the capacity for effective military selfdefence and the reasonably efficient functioning of a domestic economy. When the factors favouring the success of any form of modern regime are broken down, most of them may readily be secured for a time under autocratic rule, and none is strucurally ensured by democratic rule. At present there is good reason to believe that the special advantages of democratic rule - above all the heuristic merits of open and competitive political deliberation - at least offset the inherent disadvantages long ago identified by its enemies. The distinctive preconditions for the success of democratic regimes are furnished, if at all, only by the workings of democracy itself. They are both instances and products of success in learning how to live freely as, and within, a large collectivity. That outcome can be menaced or precluded by the causal properties of ill-conceived institutions. But it can only be brought about by free and practically intelligent political action. This is a task for citizens and career politicians, not a potential gift from the social sciences.     

Is Britain Facing a Crisis of Democracy?

This article contributes to the debate in this journal about the state of British democracy. I criticise the tendency to use a ‘demand–supply’ dichotomy in interpreting the strong distrust experienced by institutions and politicians, and especially the idea that all the blame for current problems is to be attributed to the inadequateness of the British political tradition (BPT). By referring to international data on democracy and to recent British trends in both public attitudes and institutional innovations, a more nuanced picture on the state of democracy emerges. I argue that the BPT is not incompatible with incremental changes that have already introduced innovations in the way politics works in Britain today, and that the task of empowering citizens is one of the most delicate aspects in this process of innovation.     

领导干部提拔模式对地方政府权力运行方向的影响

利用实证调查数据,通过交叉表分析,发现在提拔领导干部时,存在侧重考察"工作能力"与侧重考察"社会活动能力"两种模式,并且这两种模式对地方政府权力运行的集体决策的程度、为亲友用权、政府工作取向、决策偏好、政策执行取向有显著影响;通过探索性要素分析发现,领导干部提拔模式对政府权力运行方向的影响可以简化为"权力为整体利益服务"和"权力为小团体服务"两个方面;通过综合性结构方程模型分析验证了探索性分析的结论,表明领导干部选拔模式确实会对政府权力运行方向产生显著影响。同时发现:在提拔领导干部时,若强调后备人选的"能力和工作业绩"及"口碑",政府权力将更多地偏向于为公共利益服务;若"背景和关系"、"跑官买官"因素发生关键影响,政府权力则容易演变成为小团体牟利的工具。