预算监督体系完善对策研究

预算监督是现代公共财政的重要组成部分,是遏制腐败、增强政府财政透明度的制度条件。目前,我国预算监督体系还存在着不完善的地方,为此,必须以提高人大及其常委会的监督能力和增强审计监督的独立性为要点,构建起立法机关、审计机关和社会力量三重监督相互配合与补充的监督体系。     

法律监督在适用社区矫正中的形式构造

在许多国家,适用社区矫正的人数大大超过监禁人数,并取得了良好的社会效益。社区矫正作为一种新型的行刑执行模式,对于维护社会秩序的稳定,改革我国的刑罚制度,降低刑罚执行成本,提高罪犯改造质量,都具有重要的价值。对于执行权的监督是宪法和法律赋予检察机关的一项重要职能。我国现有30个省（区、市）相继开展了社区矫正工作,但对于相关的社区矫正现存的一些适用条件,许多人并不很熟悉,尤其是对适用社区矫正如何进行法律监督,在社区矫正适用中则更为＂生疏＂。为减少在适用社区矫正的执行过程中发生适用不当,防止执行权滥用和异化、维护公平正义,应当强调在适用社区矫正中的法律监督作用,并设计一套科学的运作规范,以合理寻求在适用社区矫正合理性与合法性的合理平衡。     

From a Top-Down to a Bottom-Up Approach to Legislative Oversight

Over the years there have been several studies of oversight in the context of the US Congress; much less attention, however, has been paid to the study of oversight in parliamentary systems. Comparative studies spearheaded by several international organisations in recent years offer a different perspective of legislative oversight. They emphasise a new concept, oversight potential, and suggest that strengthening this potential would help promote good governance, fight corruption and improve democracy. This study examines the concept of oversight potential in a pure parliamentary system – the Israeli Knesset. It shows that low potential impairs actual oversight in a parliamentary system that uses mainly police-patrol techniques as defined by the 1987 work of McCubbins and Schwartz. It suggests that increasing oversight potential will help improve the oversight outputs of the legislature. Finally, it develops a bottom-up legislative approach for measuring oversight potential, and by doing so it enriches this neglected field of research.     

Beyond committees: parliamentary oversight of coalition government in Britain

Abstract

A legislature’s ability to engage in oversight of the executive is believed to derive largely from its committee system. For example, powerful parliamentary committees are considered a necessary condition for the legislature to help police policy compromises between parties in multiparty government. But can other parliamentary instruments perform this role? This article suggests parliamentary questions as an alternative parliamentary vehicle for coalition parties to monitor their partners. Questions force ministers to reveal information concerning their legislative and extra-legislative activities, providing coalition members unique insights into their partners’ behaviour. In order to test our argument, we build and analyse a new dataset of parliamentary questions in the British House of Commons covering the 2010?2015 coalition. As expected, government MPs ask more questions as the divisiveness of a policy area increases. Legislatures conventionally considered weak due to the lack of strong committees may nevertheless play an important oversight role through other parliamentary devices, including helping to police the implementation of coalition agreements.     

Institutional change in parliament through cross-border partisan emulation

Institutional responses of parliaments to international developments are widely regarded as efficient changes because they tend to be unaffected by partisan preferences and benefit all members of parliament equally. This article challenges that common notion by providing evidence that the institutional responses of national parliaments to European integration are in large part the result of international partisan emulation. Spatial regression analyses robustly show that parliamentary EU oversight institutions diffuse across member states whose majority parties have similar constitutional preferences. A parliament is more likely to emulate the EU oversight institution of another parliament if their majority parties have similar ideas about the territorial distribution of power and institutional framework for policy making. This result has important implications for our understanding of institutional change in parliament. Responses of parliaments to external developments may appear non-partisan at first sight but unfold partisan characteristics if one looks beyond the domestic level.     

论我国刑法修正案（七）中的网络犯罪立法

目前网络犯罪集中发生于经济领域并呈现出网络化的特征,原有网络犯罪相关刑法规定不能满足有效遏制犯罪的需要,2009年通过的刑法修正案（七）增设了非法获取计算机数据罪,非法控制计算机信息系统罪和为非法侵入、控制计算机信息系统提供程序、工具罪,对我国网络犯罪立法体系有着重要的补充完善作用,但仍然存在明显的不足,需要进一步完善。     

加强政协民主监督 推进干部执行力建设

执行力是政府工作的生命力。当前,干部执行力不强,直接影响到组织决策和目标的实现,党和国家政策的落实,关系到党的事业的成效。民主监督是政协的基本职债,政协对干部执行力的监督是题中之义。要加强政协的民主监督,推进干部执行力的建设。     

Dimensions of Authority in Oversight Agencies: American and Australian Comparisons

Fraud, waste, and abuse damage public administration. Responding involves law enforcement and best practice administration. Many jurisdictions create watchdog agencies to perform this role. A model, which includes seven dimensions of jurisdiction and authority that policymakers should consider when creating an oversight entity, is presented. The model goes beyond the simple functional jurisdiction, i.e., who is overseen and how oversight occurs. Four subnational watchdog agencies in two countries are examined to demonstrate the trade-offs that occur in each dimension when the agencies are designed. This analysis demonstrates there are significant balancing issues at stake, which impact watchdog effectiveness.     

Influencing the Penal Agenda? The Justice Select Committee and ‘Transforming Justice’, 2010–15

This article assesses the policy influence of the House of Commons Justice Select Committee, established to oversee the work of the Ministry of Justice following its creation a decade ago. The committee has, from the outset, overseen many contentious policy and legislative developments in the penal field, although none so extensive as those introduced following the formation of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government in 2010. Despite the newsworthy nature of its business, the committee has, to some extent, operated in the shadows of its high‐profile sister, the Home Affairs Select Committee, and has received surprisingly limited attention from criminologists and political scientists alike. Forming part of a wider investigation into the work of the committee, this article examines the extent to which it was able to influence penal developments during the coalition years. This period is of particular interest given that it heralded the end of the New Labour administration and welcomed the ‘fresh thinking’ of a coalition leadership keen to emphasise its progressive attitude towards law and order. While the committee was able to influence the direction of penal policy on several occasions, this mostly occurred as a result of its proactive or niche inquiries. The committee had less impact when conducting inquiries that assessed the government's flagship policy agenda, however. Such findings brought into question the ability of the committee to influence the most significant justice transformations in this era of new penal governance.     

Q&A in legislative oversight: A framework for analysis

Parliamentary questions are an essential tool of legislative oversight. However, the extent to which they are effective in controlling the executive remains underspecified both theoretically and methodologically. This article advances a systematic framework for evaluating the effectiveness of parliamentary questions drawing on principal–agent theory, the public administration literature on accountability and communication research. The framework is called the ‘Q&A approach to legislative oversight’ based on the premise that the study of parliamentary questions (Q) needs to be linked to their respective answers (A) and examined together (Q&A) at the micro-level as an exchange of claims between legislative and executive actors. Methodologically, the Q&A approach to legislative oversight offers a step-by-step guide for qualitative content analysis of Q&A that can be applied to different legislative oversight contexts at different levels of governance. It is argued that the effectiveness of Q&A depends on the strength of the questions asked and the responsiveness of answers provided, which are correspondingly operationalised. To illustrate the merits of the approach, the article includes a systematic case study on the relationship between the European Parliament and the European Central Bank in banking supervision (2013–2018), showing the connection between specific institutional settings and the effectiveness of parliamentary questions.