间接民主、代议制与精英统治

直接民主与间接民主的问题是当代政治哲学的一个热点.文章回顾了围绕直接民主和代议制进行的争论,直接民主由于容易导致暴民政治而被视作洪水猛兽,代议制民主则把人民分为普通大众和精英,认为只有精英才能代表人民更好地治理国家.但把代议制民主简单理解为选择代议员的过程会不可避免地滑向寡头统治,只有多元主义民主才能避免寡头统治铁律,尽管这种民主内部存在着民主必需的同一性和多元主义需要的差异性这两种逻辑之间的张力.     

高等教育大众化背景下的警察教育必须坚持精英教育的道路

警察教育精英化是警察特殊职业的要求。在高等教育大众化背景下,警察教育特别是公安警察高等教育,必须坚持走精英教育的道路。应坚持择优录取入学,严格教育,严格训练,严格管理,采用严格的淘汰机制,最终将优秀的警务人才输送到各级公安机关,实现精英从警。     

浅析女性犯罪心理形成的社会历史因素

社会历史对女性犯罪心理有着重要的影响，历史上形成的男尊女思想、三从四德的观念以及封建贞节观是女性犯罪心理形成的社会历史根源。家庭教育和学校教育和社会传媒等多方面的共同努力，是消除社会历史上不良因素影响的有效途径。     

当代中国政治文化内部结构的分化与整合

深入剖析一国政治文化的内部结构及其相互关系对于了解该国政治体系的运作具有重要意义。当代中国政治文化在精英和大众层面都存在着社会主义意识形态、传统政治文化、民主政治文化三种类型的交织与分化,当代中国政治文化的整合与创新应以培育和发展出有中国特色的以权利、民主、法治为核心理念的社会主义公民文化为指向,政治社会化对于政治文化整合与更新尤为重要。     

Capture Theory and the Public Interest: Balancing Competing Values to Ensure Regulatory Effectiveness

Problems arise when a regulatory agency acts in the interests of the industry it is charged with regulating, rather than in the public interest. When a governmental agency established to regulate an industry for the benefit of society acts instead for the interests of the industry it is regulating, it has been “captured” by the industry. This article examines the level of input received from the regulated community and the tendency of regulatory agency capture. Here, the proposed zone of effectiveness suggests a balance between the two scopes by incorporating a stronger focus on public interest.     

Public Finance and Capital Investment: A National Perspective on Colonial Dahomey

How, when and to whom should a woman marry, what constitutes marriage and what rights has a woman to influence the selection of her spouse? These and other questions were subjects of intense contestation between young men and women and their parents, on one hand, and, on the other, between commoners and members of the traditional elite in the Western Igbo district of Igbuzo in Southern Nigeria during the early twentieth century. Disputes over marriage rites centred on the politics of isinmo or the shaving of a woman's head. Isinmo gave the “barber” exclusive and inalienable rights to the woman. Yet, in what amounted to reversal of tradition, women seeking to end or reduce parental and patriarchal control appropriated some the rituals of isinmo to contest its use and efficacy in the hands of its erstwhile beneficiaries.     

Images of terrorism in the media: 1966–1985

Abstract

This paper examines the classification of terrorism articles in two newspaper indexes, the New York Times Index and the London Times Index, and two periodical indexes, the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature and the British Humanities Index, from 1966 to 1985. The indexes are compared in several ways: by the year in which the category terrorism first appeared; by the changing nature and number of headings and related headings; by the changing number of articles under each heading; and by the different tactics, regions, targets, and other themes emphasized in these articles for each year. The changing patterns in these quantitative and qualitative parameters over the 20‐year period are analyzed in terms of regional differences (United States versus United Kingdom) and index differences (newspapers versus periodicals). The results are also compared with other research on media and terrorism that shows that images of terrorism in the media do not represent an accurate picture of the nature and extent of terrorism in the real world.     

Exploring the link between patronage and party institutionalization: an historical-institutional analysis of the Italian transition

This article analyses party patronage transformations in Italy since the early 1990s, a time when political parties and the party system entered a phase of continuing change. It examines how the interaction between the temporality of party system restructuring and historical legacies rooted in the nature of public bureaucracies reproduced patronage practices aimed at capturing state resources. The article employs a historical institutionalist approach as a research framework and concludes that this provides a cogent explanatory argument for the development of state exploitation taken by Italian political parties since the crisis of the early 1990s.     

Legislative Recruitment and Models of Party Organisation: Evidence from Australia

This paper considers the relationship between the growing dominance of career politicians in the Australian federal legislature and models of party organisation. Using data on MPs in the Australian federal parliament, this study maps changes in models of party organisation to the occupational profiles of MPs between 1949 and 2007. The findings show a correspondence between the phenomenon of cartelisation and the appearance of legislators whose previous occupation was in the political sphere. The authors suggest that there is a relationship between different modes of party organisation and both the supply of candidates and the demand-side factors influencing party selectors. The paper concludes that theories of recruitment should include a greater emphasis on models of party organisation to explain better the uniformity of recruitment outcomes across advanced democracies.     

Local Processes of National Corruption: Elite Linkages and Their Effects on Poor People in India

This paper provides a bottom–up view of national corruption in India and presents a framework of corruption involving three actors: bureaucrat, politician and legitimate claimant. The paper then focuses on the public service provision of social security in an Indian village and the role of elites in perpetuating the corrupt practices to access this public provision. This study is based on an extensive fieldwork and uses network data. First, I show that the political elite bridges the ‘structural hole’ between the institutions of state and society, have the advantage of information, referrals and are the main beneficiary of local corrupt practices. Second, factional politics is carried out through the use of corruption and it results in exclusion of the poor persons from the welfare rights to which they are entitled. The paper also explores how the local processes of corruption interact with state-level processes and shows how protest against corruption is silenced.