中国语境中的“司法调解”——一种非标准性阐释

尽管当下司法调解的实践本身比各种话语表述更富创造力,然而一种以"中国"为中心的司法方法论、以"中国"为中心的司法调解观远远未能被我们发现或发明。这至少是因为我们如何评判司法调解与如何表述它皆成了问题。分析这些问题就是在表述:我们的司法调解不是完全经由法律适用来确认权利或利益,而是主要通过实践智慧弥合了公正问题与合法问题,亦即需要解决的争议重点不在于依据哪些法律来裁断,而是借助于转变了裁判者的身份,使其在现行的法律制度内作为调解者来促使纠纷的解决,并以此来追求某种社会公正与社会和谐。     

Performance Regimes—The Institutional Context of Performance Policies

Performance measurement, targeting, reporting and managing of public services has spread across jurisdictions in recent years. The most usual stance adopted by governments in developing performance policies has been shaped by principal-agent theory and a hierarchy of principal-agent relationships from core executive to service delivery. Such notions have been challenged from several directions, both in theory and empirically. Writers on accountability and those analyzing the “audit explosion” and the growth of “regulation inside government” have pointed to the way in which multiple actors and accountabilities have grown. Drawing on these and other sources this article develops a “performance regimes” perspective that offers a heuristic analytical framework of the main groups of institutional actors who can (but do not always) attempt to shape or steer the performance of service delivery agencies. The aim is to create a framework that can be applied comparatively to study changes in total performance regimes over time and between jurisdictions and sectors.     

Policy Lessons from the Eurozone Crisis

The current European crisis has shed light on several weaknesses and the institutional incompleteness characterizing the euro area. The manifestation of Europe's fragility was preceded by a large build-up of debt in the private sector, associated with national current account divergences and the deterioration of competitiveness particularly of the euro periphery countries. With the economic situation deteriorating, private sector debt became less credible, contaminating banks’ balance sheets and placing a heavy burden on governments. A sovereign-bank vicious circle emerged: on the one hand, with banking risk translating into higher sovereign risk because of the governments’ guarantor role and, on the other hand, with the deterioration of government's creditworthiness affecting the banking systems through banks’ sovereign bond holdings. In principle, this negative feedback can be stopped by breaking one of the channels of transmission. A banking union at the European level is proposed as one solution.     

寻求普遍的中国国际关系理论：一项不可能的使命？

近年来,中国学术界对构建国际关系理论“中国学派”的大讨论缺乏科学哲学的指引,陷入观点之争,形不成共识。诸多观点差异的根本分歧在于国际关系究竟是一门科学还是艺术。自然主义者坚持社会世界的科学研究和社会理论的普遍性。反自然主义者则坚持社会世界的人文研究和社会理论的特殊性。在创建国际关系理论“中国学派”的争论中,自然主义者反对国际关系理论特殊性（如“中国学派”）的提法,反自然主义者则反对国际关系理论的普适性。作者认为寻求一种既具有普遍性同时也包含中国特色的国际关系理论是可能的。原因在于,理论产生包含理论建构和理论证明两个过程,理论证明遵循普遍性逻辑,理论建构遵循特殊性逻辑。理论普遍性体现在它遵循共同的证明逻辑,特殊性则体现在理论假说的创造上。由于理论假说提出是创造性过程,使得中国要素的渗入成为可能。中国人对问题的思考,必然带上中国文化与思维方式的烙印,由此提出理论假说,经由验证而成为理论学说,最终将刻上“中国”印记。基于此,创建一种具有普遍性的中国国际关系理论是可能的。     

Individual Differences and Political Contexts –The Role of Personality Traits and Direct Democracy in Explaining Political Protest

Building on a growing literature concerned with the link between psychological dispositions and political protest behavior, we argue that this relationship is not universal, but rather depends on contextual factors. Political context factors are able to alter the meaning and understanding of participatory repertoires. This, in turn, leads to differential effects of personality on participation. We argue that direct democracy constitutes such a political context that can act as moderating factor with regard to protest participation. In order to test this interaction between person and situation empirically, we conduct a subnational comparative analysis of the Swiss cantons. Hierarchical regression models reveal that the personality traits openness to experience and extraversion affect protest behavior directly. Most importantly, however, the link between openness to experience and protest participation is significantly moderated by direct democracy. This provides evidence for variance in the situational expression of personality traits.     

Contextualizing sentencing disparities: using conjunctive analysis of case configurations to identify patterns of variability

Using national data from felony cases processed in state courts (n = 48,006), the current study investigates the nature and magnitude of contextual variability associated with sentencing outcomes. Multivariate models are first estimated to identify the main effects of various offender and offense variables on sentencing decisions. Conjunctive analysis is then used to evaluate the contextual variability of each of these main effects across all observed combinations of offender and offense attributes. Separate analyses are also conducted among states with and without mandatory sentencing guidelines to explore whether these guidelines reduce this variability across different contexts. Findings from this study and its comparative methods are discussed in terms of implications for future research on criminal sentencing and assessing the contextual variability of the main effects of particular legal and extralegal factors.