试论新形式下我国行政程序法典的制定

依法行政是实现法治的极为重要一环 ,而程序法定则是依法行政的核心。本文试从行政权力自身的特点、行政法应然的价值定位、保障行政相对人的合法权益和入世的现实要求等方面论述新形势下我国制定行政程序法典的必要性 ;从当今社会程序正义观念的普及现有一些具体制度设计的奠基作用 ,以及国际性资源可资借鉴等方面论述了我国制定行政程序法典的可能性 ;最后简要论述了在制定行政程序法典时应处理好的几种关系。     

析国家赔偿法

随着社会的进步、经济的快速发展,新的国家赔偿法确立的国家赔偿制度已经正式实施,文中结合新旧国家赔偿法几个相关问题的比较,说明新国家赔偿法在赔偿范围、赔偿程序等方面具有的鲜明特色。     

Compelled without direction: Compulsory voting and party system spreading

Much of the current literature on compulsory voting (CV) examines its effects by simulating complete turnout. We argue that these studies do not capture the full effects of CV, as there is something qualitatively different about compulsory voting rules as compared to only increasing turnout. Furthermore, CV and turnout have important, yet unexplored, interactive effects. To test this argument, we look at governments in 43 countries over the 1990–2006 period. Nine of these countries have some form of CV. We examine the effect of CV on the ideological position and range of governments, left party seat share, and the effective number of parties. We find that high turnout in the presence of CV laws spreads out the distribution of voters and leads to an increase in the effective number of parliamentary parties and a larger ideological range of governments. These results have important implications for how we study CV and its consequences for party strategy.     

Economic voting theory: Testing new dimensions

Classical economic voting theory has received considerable empirical support. Voters reward the incumbent for good times, punish it for bad. But the success of this paradigm, which views the economy as strictly a valence issue, has crowded out testing of other theoretical dimensions. In particular, positional and patrimonial economic voting have hardly been examined. The former concerns the different preferences voters have on economic policy issues, such as progressive taxation. The latter concerns the place of voters in the economic structure itself, not merely as members of a social class but as actual property owners. Through analysis of a special battery of economic items, from a 2008 US presidential election survey, we demonstrate that the economy was important to voters in three ways: valence, position, and patrimony. Taken together, these dimensions go far as an explanation of vote choice, at least with respect to the short-term forces acting on this political behavior.     

Economic vulnerability and economic voting in 14 OECD countries

The economic voting literature shows that good economic performance bolsters the electoral prospects of incumbents. However, disagreement persists as to whether voters in vulnerable economic conditions are more likely to engage in economic voting. It is argued in this article that a crucial factor in explaining individual‐level variation in economic voting is the degree of exposure to economic risks, because risk exposure affects the saliency of the economy in voting decisions. In particular, the focus is on job insecurity and employability as key determinants of economic voting patterns. The article hypothesises that the extent of economic voting is greater in voters who are more vulnerable to unemployment and less employable in case of job loss. Support for these hypotheses is found in a test with a dataset that combines survey data on incumbent support with occupational unemployment rates and other measures of exposure to economic risks.     

Holding governments accountable? Individual heterogeneity in performance voting

This study suggests that performance voting is characterised by extensive individual heterogeneity. Most economic voting studies to date treat voters as rather homogeneous in their reactions to economic performance of incumbents. Yet, a large and well‐established line of research from the American context demonstrates the conditional impact of political sophistication and salience on voters' political attitudes and behaviour. Building on this work, this article explores individual‐level variation in performance voting due to political sophistication and salience. Utilising cross‐national data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) including 25 democracies, performance voting is examined across an array of policy areas including the economy, social welfare, immigration and national security, and it is shown that political sophistication and salience are key moderators of performance voting. The findings suggest that holding governments to account for past performance is mainly the prerogative of the highly sophisticated and thus may be more laborious than previously assumed. At the same time, the results indicate that the sophistication gap in performance voting narrows when voters attach a higher degree of salience to a policy area. As long as voters care enough about government activities in a particular policy area, incumbents can expect credit or blame for policy outcomes. This should provide at least some impetus for responsive policy making.     

Domestic adjustment costs,interdependence and dissent in the Council of the European Union

Liberal international relations theory posits that the behaviour of states is affected both by domestic interests and other states with which they are linked in significant patterns of interdependence. This article examines the relevance of this proposition to states' behaviour in the most powerful institution in the furthest reaching example of regional integration in the world today: the Council of the European Union. Compared to previous research, more detailed evidence is analysed in this article on the substance of the political debates that preceded Council votes. It is found that states' disagreement with both discretionary and nondiscretionary decision outcomes affects the likelihood that they dissent at the voting stage. Moreover, in line with the theory posited here, the behaviour of states' significant trading partners has a particularly marked effect on the likelihood that they will dissent.     

Party identification in the Czech Republic: inter-party hostility and party preference

This study introduces basic models of voting behavior and describes in greater detail the findings and starting points of the model of party identification. It recapitulates findings related to the voting behavior in the Czech Republic throughout the nineties, as well as the reasons leading to the application of the party identification model to the analyses of voting behavior. The influence of positive feelings toward the elected party and negative feelings toward the other parties are tested here. The study explores in particular the influence of inter-party hostility on the voting behavior, and tests it both separately and in combination with the subjective social class and subjective political orientation.     

The Effects of Network Expertise and Biases on Vote Choice

Many citizens lack the political knowledge to make informed decisions partly due to the high costs of becoming informed. Previous scholars have argued that if individuals speak with political experts who share their preferences, they can vote as if they were informed without paying information costs. This view of citizens as single-minded seekers of low-cost information is unrealistic. Individuals often choose discussion partners for reasons unrelated to politics, and many communication networks have heterogeneous information levels and preferences as a result. This paper simulates the votes of hypothetical electorates with different individual and network information levels. It demonstrates that network expertise has an effect on vote choice, but this effect is not as large as the effect of individual expertise. Rather, the key contextual determinant of an individual's vote is the partisan composition of his or her discussion network.     

Making Volunteers: Civic Life after Welfare's End,by Nina Eliasoph

Extant research is not very specific about when the media matter for vote choice. In this study, we test multiple theories about the influences of the media on vote choice in 21 countries. The European Parliamentary (EP) election campaign offers a unique research context to test these influences. We rely on a two-wave panel survey conducted in 21 European Union (EU) member states, asking both vote intentions before the campaign and reported actual votes (among 14,000 voters). We link these data to media content data of campaign coverage between the two waves in these countries (37,000 coded news items). We conclude that media evaluations of the EU affect voting for Eurosceptic parties. On average, the more positive the evaluations of the EU a voter is exposed to, the less likely she or he is to cast a vote for a Eurosceptic party. In addition, our findings indicate that in countries where political parties have markedly different views on EU issues, the more a voter is exposed to framing of the EU in terms of benefits derived from membership in these countries, the less likely she or he is to cast a Eurosceptic vote. This suggests that the outcome of the 2009 EP elections was influenced by how the media covered EU-related news during the campaign.