公诉人的诉讼地位探析——兼评检察机关对法院的审判监督

我国已确定控辩式为刑事庭审方式改革的方向和目标。伴随着庭审结构发生的变化,公诉人诉讼地位必须作出如下调整:转变为当事人一方,尊重与维护法官的裁判者权威;与被告人作为平等的诉讼主体出现在法庭审理中;与辩护律师之间的关系应当表现为平等武装理念下的对抗、合作关系;与被害人成为目标与利益一致的控方组合,并在这一组合关系中发挥主导作用。重塑公诉人诉讼地位的另一核心要旨在于摒弃法律监督观念,明确公诉人的当事人地位,实现“法律监督”职能的程序化回归。     

“三个有利于”与“三个代表”的辩证关系

分析了“三个有利于”与“三个代表”的内在联系,指出了“三个有利于”与“三个代表”的不同定位,从而揭示了“三个有利于”与“三个代表”的辩证关系。     

基于KPI指标的综合管理类非领导职务公务员考核体系的研究

公务员考核指标体系在不同的地方以不同的设计模式出现,但困扰着人们的是平时考核的指标如何设计,与年终考核又是什么关系,特别是对不同类别的公务员如何考核,等等。本文以综合管理类非领导职务公务员为例,把德、能、绩、勤、廉作为一级指标,在各个一级指标下依据关键绩效指标KPI建立二级指标,而二级指标的选取也是KPI指标,以此构建一个科学、合理的考核指标体系。     

Beyond protest and discontent: A cross‐national analysis of the effect of populist attitudes and issue positions on populist party support

Studies on populist parties – or ‘supply‐side populism’ more generally – are numerous. Nevertheless, the connection with demand‐side dynamics, and particularly the populist characteristics or tendencies of the electorate, requires more scholarly attention. This article examines in more detail the conditions underlying the support for populist parties, and in particular the role of populist attitudes amongst citizens. It asks two core questions: (1) are populist party supporters characterised by stronger populist attitudes than other party supporters, and (2) to what extent do populist (and other) attitudes contribute to their party preference? The analysis uses fixed effect models and relies on a cross‐sectional research design that uses unique survey data from 2015 and includes nine European countries. The results are threefold. First, in line with single‐country studies, populist attitudes are prominent among supporters of left‐ and right‐wing populist parties in particular. Second, populist attitudes are important predictors of populist party support in addition to left‐wing socioeconomic issue positions for left‐wing populist parties, and authoritarian and anti‐immigration issue positions for right‐wing populist parties. Third, populist attitudes moderate the effect of issue positions on the support for populist parties, particularly for individuals whose positions are further removed from the extreme ends of the economic or cultural policy scale. These findings suggest that strong populist attitudes may encourage some voters to support a populist party whose issue positions are incongruous with their own policy‐related preferences.     

Estimating policy positions of local parties in elections with multi-vote ballots

This paper investigates the potential for estimating policy positions from electoral results in elections with multiple votes. When voters can spread their votes across multiple party lists in open list elections, they are more likely to select candidates from parties with similar policy positions. The electoral results can therefore be exploited to infer parties’ preferences based on the structure of vote combinations. The proposed data provide a valuable tool for analysing party behaviour in circumstances where ordinary methods for estimating policy positions fail, most importantly in electoral contexts with local competitors. Applying an ideal point model for count data, party preferences are estimated for a German municipality.     

‘Breaking the backbone of farmers’: contestations in a rural employment guarantee scheme

This paper examines narratives about the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA) to reveal people's interpretations of changes to agrarian relations in Andhra Pradesh. Through narratives, we are able to reveal more than just the material relations of production, unveiling internalised modes of control, how these have come under threat in recent times, and discursive strategies to restore them – albeit in modified form. It argues that the MGNREGA has become a site of ideological contestation, in which the scheme means either an entitlement to government support, or alternatively a threat to existing modes of control that can only be reinstated through the scheme itself.     

Re-measuring left–right: A comparison of SEM and Bayesian measurement models for extracting left–right party placements

This paper demonstrates the relative strengths and weaknesses of SEM and Bayesian approaches to combining different sources of data when estimating latent variables. Data on party left–right positioning collected from party manifestos and surveys of party experts, MPs and voters are used to illustrate the two techniques. Although widely used and accepted, the SEM approach is less useful than the Bayesian approach, particularly when using the latent variable in subsequent predictive estimations.     

Public opinion and terrorism: does the national economic,societal and political context Really Matter?

ABSTRACT

For national publics, terrorism is today one of the key policy challenges facing European governments. Yet little is known about whether and how the objective national economic, societal and political context influences public opinion about terrorism. The present article addresses this gap in the current research. Using Eurobarometer data, it is demonstrated that excluding a nation’s level of terrorism, no other objective national economic, societal or political indicator sways public attitudes towards terrorism. Objective national economic, societal and political factors are also found not to impact on the relationship between citizens’ economic conditions and public attitudes towards the same. Our results finally demonstrate that people’s perceived economic, cultural and physical (safety) insecurities tend to be a stronger predictor of these attitudes than the objective national context or (social) class differences. The article then discusses the implications of these ?ndings.     

Assessing the ‘Gold Standard’ of party policy placements: Is computerized replication possible?

The Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) offers data on party policy positions based on a coding scheme of 56 categories. To what extent can we replicate the CMP coding results by using computerized topical coding of digitalised manifestos? Both human and computer coding have a number of strengths and weaknesses so that the combination of strengths could help to arrive at both valid and reliable party policy placements, in particular the measurement of policy movements over time. More than 1500 digitalised party manifestos in 20 democracies in the period 1960–2009 are re-coded with a computerized CMP-compatible coding scheme in order to assess the differences with human coding using exactly the same issue categories and the same left–right scale.The analysis shows that it is possible to use computer coding in order to locate the potential weakness of the human coding and the other way around. It also illustrates that the validity and reliability of policy placements is a function of the conceptualisation and operationalisation of issues, of the size of documents and of scale construction. Computerized cross-validation of the CMP-coding results offers a new and powerful tool to assess its reliability.     

Narco-Territoriality and Shadow Powers in a Peruvian Cocaine Frontier

ABSTRACT

Whereas cocaine kingpins are often portrayed as key protagonists and perpetrators of violence in Latin America, in Peru’s Upper Huallaga they are also important powerholders who have formed dynamic systems of governance by dominating socio-economic resources and legitimating their narco-territoriality through arrangements with a variety of “shadow powers.” Although potentially violent armed actors, whether insurgents or the police and military, often abound in these “dangerous places,” in the post-conflict Upper Huallaga most of these groups aimed to gain more power and control by forming coalitions with the local powerholders. Drawing upon the narratives of drug barons, traffickers and producers, insurgents, and state officers, this article seeks to focus on an aspect that is largely overlooked in other analyses: the intricate relationship between contested narco-territoriality, weakening local governance networks, and “new” outbreaks of violence.