Britain’s Choice: Polarisation or Cohesion

Britain’s Choice, a report published by More in Common, develops a new segmentation of the British public based on their core beliefs, values and identities. Identifying seven segments, the report aims to better understand the British public, the goal being to work out how to build a more cohesive Britain—the choice facing Britain being a path to further division and polarisation or one to greater solidarity and shared values. The report strikes a broadly optimistic turn and highlights the shared values across the seven groups, but there are warning signs in the data that there are still many issues on which these groups could be divided, the overlap between them, for now, limiting the success of attempts to do so and throwing up a ‘kaleidoscopic’ pattern that changes from issue to issue.     

加强网上舆论引导——学习党的十七届六中全会精神

发展健康向上的网络文化。加强网上思想文化阵地建设,是社会主义文化建设的迫切任务。要认真贯彻积极利用、科学发展、依法管理、确保安全的方针,加强和改进网络文化建设和管理,加强网上舆论引导,唱响网上思想文化主旋律。     

当前我国职工舆情的问题和应对——基于历次全国职工状况调查的分析

当前职工舆情的主流是正面的,但工人收入增长缓慢、贫富差距拉大、社会保障制度不健全、劳资纠纷增多等问题较为突出,对职工舆情形成较强的负面影响,导致职工普遍缺乏自豪感和主人翁意识、理想淡漠、缺乏理性,职工舆情呈多元化倾向,也在一定程度上形成社会不稳定因素。为此需要从根本上提高职工待遇,维护职工权益,加强工会组织在职工舆情引导中的作用,新闻媒体要积极报道职工,加大对职工网络舆情的研判,并定期组织对职工舆情的调研,以确保职工舆情渠道畅通。     

Migration and public trust in the commonwealth of independent states

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the post-Soviet space has seen regional integration in the framework of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). The CIS while moribund has affected migration in the post-Soviet space. Despite its persistence and effect on migration, few studies have sought to explore public perceptions towards the CIS. We address this limitation by developing several arguments, anchored on the literature on public opinion and European integration, to explain how perceptions towards migrants and employment status affect public trust in the CIS. Our analyses make use of the sixth wave of the World Values Survey that includes seven CIS member-states and finds strong support for our hypotheses. Our contribution lies in the investigation of public attitudes in a non-EU setting while applying arguments from EU literature and the wide coverage of our study compared to the extant literature on the CIS and public opinion.     

The importance of input and output legitimacy in democratic governance: Evidence from a population-based survey experiment in four West European countries

The study of subjective democratic legitimacy from a citizens’ perspective has become an important strand of research in political science. Echoing the well-known distinction between ‘input-oriented’ and ‘output-oriented’ legitimacy, the scientific debate on this topic has coined two opposed views. Some scholars find that citizens have a strong and intrinsic preference for meaningful participation in collective decision making. But others argue, to the contrary, that citizens prefer ‘stealth democracy’ because they care mainly about the substance of decisions, but much less about the procedures leading to them. In this article, citizens’ preferences regarding democratic governance are explored, focusing on their evaluations of a public policy according to criteria related to various legitimacy dimensions, as well as on the (tense) relationship among them. Data from a population-based conjoint experiment conducted in eight metropolitan areas in France, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom is used. By analysing 5,000 respondents’ preferences for different governance arrangements, which were randomly varied with respect to their input, throughput and output quality as well as their scope of authority, light is shed on the relative importance of different aspects of democratic governance. It is found, first, that output evaluations are the most important driver for citizens’ choice of a governance arrangement; second, consistent positive effects of criteria of input and throughput legitimacy that operate largely independent of output evaluations can be discerned; and third, democratic input, but not democratic throughput, is considered somewhat more important when a governance body holds a high level of formal authority. These findings run counter to a central tenet of the ‘stealth democracy’ argument. While they indeed suggest that political actors and institutions can gain legitimacy primarily through the provision of ‘good output’, citizens’ demand for input and throughput do not seem to be conditioned by the quality of output as advocates of stealth democratic theory suggest. Democratic input and throughput remain important secondary features of democratic governance.     

对我国刑事鉴定结论的反思

近年来备受社会关注的黄静案、代义案以及连丽丽案从不同角度揭示了刑事鉴定结论中所存在的三大弊端:公安机关"自侦自鉴",对是否鉴定以及鉴定人的选择享有决定权;在立案侦查阶段的鉴定结论未经法院认证便当然地被作为证据使用;鉴定结论的采信标准不一,同时这三个案件也让我们看到了若要消除这些弊端,必须将关注.a集中在立案和侦查阶段....     

被误读了的司法审判?——基于新闻、舆论与司法关系的视角

司法的独立性诉求和新闻及公众的参与性诉求经常发生矛盾,导致两个领域之间的误读时有发生。立法的模糊与不周延更加剧了这种趋势。从新闻规则完善和司法体制内部治理两方面入手,较能理想地实现新闻和公众的知情权和监督权,也能为刑事诉讼程序自治创造条件。     

参政党践行"同心"思想的基本原则和任务刍议

统一战线是中国共产党及其领导下各民主党派人士和无党派人士的政治联盟.参政党作为中国统一战线的重要力量,理应做践行"同心"思想的先行者.中国共产党多党合作的历史表明,参政党践行"同心"思想,只有把握住了基本原则,才不会偏离方向,才做到了思想上同心同德、目标上同心同向;只有抓住了践行的主要内容,才做到了行动上的同心同行.     

Meeting the Dalai Lama and perceptions of democracy in China: a quasi-natural experiment

How does the international human rights community affect the likelihood of democratization? Scholarship on Chinese citizens’ preferences about their political system has not explored the importance of the external environment, perhaps surprising given the extensive foreign pressure on China’s authoritarian system over the last 30 years. I use a quasi-natural experiment around the meeting between President Obama and the Dalai Lama in 2011 to examine the impact of foreign pressure on citizens’ perceptions of democracy in China in real time. I show that the meeting significantly increased the Chinese public’s belief that their country is democratic, with those of above average patriotism over 11 percentage points more likely to believe China is democratic in the five days following the meeting than before. The findings suggest that some kinds of external pressure may help to increase satisfaction with authoritarian rule, ultimately boosting autocrats’ ability to hold on to power.     

TOWARD A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF POLITICIZED POLICING ATTITUDES: CONFLICTED CONSERVATISM AND SUPPORT FOR POLICE USE OF FORCE

America is in the midst of an extraordinary public debate about police policy. “Conflicted conservatives,” who are symbolically conservative but operationally liberal, may have a disproportionate influence on policy making. Specifically, conflicted conservatives may be more likely to vote across party lines because they attend more to utilitarian concerns about social conditions and government performance than to symbolic issues. Prior criminological research, however, typically has treated conservatives as a homogenous group. We use data from the General Social Survey to explore the extent and correlates of global and situational support for police use of force among conflicted conservatives and other political groups. The findings from logistic regression models estimated with two analytic samples (N = 11,119 and 2,069) indicate that conflicted conservatives’ attitudes about police use of force are distinct from those of “consistent conservatives” who are both symbolically and operationally conservative, but do not reflect a unique consideration of utilitarian concerns over symbolic beliefs. Two other notable findings emerged: 1) Racial attitudes predicted support for police use of excessive force invariably across political groups and 2) public support for excessive force increased substantially during the first decade of the twenty‐first century, sharply contrasting trends in general punitive sentiment.