完善对人大代表权力的制约机制

对人大代表的权力缺乏有效的制约,是导致人大代表"不作为"甚至利用代表身份违法犯罪的重要原因。因此,通过深化人大代表的选举制度改革,明确人大代表权责,细化罢免人大代表的条件和程序,从而加强对人大代表权力的制约。只有将人大代表的权力置于原选区的选民或原选举单位的严格监督和控制之下,才能使人大代表真正代表广大选民的切身利益和真实意志。     

Voter Ideology, the Economy, and the International Environment in Western Democracies, 1952–1989

Although it is commonly assumed that voters shift on an ideological spectrum over time, there has been relatively little scientific inquiry into the reasons for shifts in voter ideology. In this article, we attempt to explain why voter ideological shifts occur utilizing an interval measure of voter ideology recently developed by Kim and Fording. A pooled time-series analysis of 13 Western democracies for the period of 1952–1989 identifies several internal and external factors causing shifts in voter ideology. With respect to domestic influences, the state of the country's national economy, primarily inflation, seems to drive movement in voter ideology in a most significant way, but we find that the direction of this relationship is dependent on the ideological disposition of the incumbent government. With respect to international influences, we find significant ideological diffusion across neighboring countries of Western democracies. The effects of ideological diffusion are strongest within countries that are small relative to their neighbors. We also find that ideology is influenced by the international political environment, especially the level of East-West tension during the Cold War.     

The Obama Administration and United States Trade Policy

For all the focus on economic issues in the wake of the crisis of 2008 the Obama administration has remained ambiguous about a central component of economic policy. As both candidate and President, Obama has sent mixed messages about trade policy. This ambiguity reflects wider uncertainty within the Democratic Party about global trading relationships and this paper explores and assesses the reasons for this uncertainty. A large part of the answer lies in the disparate sources of support for the Democrats. That is, the party has courted support from interest groups and core groups of voters that have widely divergent views about the value of trade liberalisation.     

Doubling Down: Inequality in Responsiveness and the Policy Preferences of Elected Officials

Is bias in responsiveness to constituents conditional on the policy preferences of elected officials? The scholarly conventional wisdom is that constituency groups who do not receive policy representation still obtain some level of responsiveness by legislators outside of the policy realm. In contrast, we present a theory of preference‐induced responsiveness bias where constituency responsiveness by legislators is associated with legislator policy preferences. Elected officials who favor laws that could disproportionately impact minority groups are also less likely to engage in nonpolicy responsiveness to minority groups. We conducted a field experiment in 28 US legislative chambers. Legislators were randomly assigned to receive messages from Latino and white constituents. If legislators supported voter identification laws, Latino constituents were less likely to receive constituency communications from their legislators. There are significant implications regarding fairness in the democratic process when elected officials fail to represent disadvantaged constituency groups in both policy and nonpolicy realms.     

Ideological Congruence: Illusion or Imperfection?

Paul Warwick ( 2016 ) argues that much of the research on ideological congruence leaves the erroneous impression that a close match of median left‐right voter opinions and government ideological positions usually emerges from elections. I propose further clarifications. I offer a “natural metric” based on the average distances from the median voter of the most distant and the closest parties competing in all these countries’ elections. I suggest that by these standards average ideological congruence in the Western liberal democracies in the last 20 years has been fairly successful, but not as successful as it could be.     

At the Polls

ABSTRACT

In this study, the authors attempt to add to existing knowledge on voter psyche during elections by examining the roles of voter concern and voters' desire to “keep up to date,” both of which have hitherto not been studied in this context. The analysis of data collected during a specific election in Australia reveals significant relationships with several well known psychological factors. The authors discuss these findings in the context of political marketing and furnish directions for future research.     

Response to Herman and Chomsky

Under what conditions can political elites influence elections to favor their preferred policy outcomes by strategically crafting the language printed on the ballot? Drawing on psychological and political theories of voter cognition, we design a survey experiment to assess the degree to which ballot text can influence voter behavior in direct democracy elections and identify factors that may moderate such effects. We show that the language used to describe a ballot measure does indeed have the potential to affect election outcomes, including measures dealing with contentious social issues affecting individual rights. We also find, however, that exposing individuals to basic campaign information—in our case, endorsements from prominent interest groups—greatly attenuates the framing effects of ballot text. Our results suggest that the extent to which ballot text matters depends on the vibrancy of the campaign environment and other information available to voters.     

Registrants,Voters, and Turnout Variability Across Neighborhoods

Although political participation has received wide-ranging scholarly attention, little is known for certain about the effects of social and political context on turnout. A scattered set of analyses—well-known by both political scientists and campaign consultants—suggests that ones neighborhood has a relatively minor impact on the decision to vote. These analyses, however, typically rely upon data from a single location. Drawing on official lists of registered voters from sixteen major counties across seven states (including Florida) from the 2000 presidential election, we use geographic/mapping information and hierarchical models to obtain a more accurate picture of how neighborhood characteristics affect participation, especially among partisans. Our research shows that neighborhoods influence voting by interacting with partisan affiliation to dampen turnout among voters we might otherwise expect to participate. Most notably, we find Republican partisans in enemy territory tend to vote less than expected, even after accounting for socioeconomic status. Our findings have implications for campaign strategy, and lead us to suggest that campaign targeting efforts could be improved by an integration of aggregate- and individual-level information about voters.     

The Politics of Participation: Mobilization and Turnout over Time

Recent studies have argued that mobilization is not only an important determinant of individual participation, but that it can explain the mystery of declining voter turnout in the United States over the past 40 years. We identify and evaluate three possible ways in which mobilization might have affected levels of turnout over time: (a) aggregate rates of mobilization may have declined, (b) the effectiveness of mobilization contacts may have declined, and (c) the targeting of mobilization may have changed. The first two theories have been well articulated in the literature; the third has not. We find no evidence of a decline in mobilizing activity, nor do we find that mobilizing techniques have become less effective. Although we find that campaigns are more likely to target habitual voters in recent years, this pattern of behavior can only explain a small amount of the overall decline in turnout.     

System failure: it's not just the media — the whole political system has failed

This paper provides a critique of attempts in the field of political communication to explain apparent voter apathy and declining electoral turnout. The response of many commentators is either to blame the media for the problem or to see the media as the solution to any problem that might exist. First, the paper examines the ‘blame the media’ school of thought—as exemplified by liberal commentators in the UK and the USA. Secondly, the paper focuses on the ‘optimists’ who argue that the spin/media nexus is either morally neutral or may actually be improving citizen involvement. The paper argues that both approaches are flawed at the level of conceptualisation and of methodology. The narrow conceptualisation of the field means that even in the unusual cases where scholars look beyond the question of elections, the research agenda is still fixed at the level of media power and not on how the media fit into a wider system of power relations. Most obviously, the field tends to avoid the question of political and economic outcomes. The paper ends by suggesting that the problem of disengagement from formal politics is a response to the crisis of legitimacy in the institutions of democracy in the USA and UK. Copyright © 2004 Henry Stewart Publications