坚定中国特色社会主义自觉自信

坚定中国特色社会主义自觉自信,源于中国特色社会主义发展成型、源于辉煌成就、源于对现实的深刻把握和自我反省、源于探索实践创新,是全体中国人民的共同心声,是中国共产党代表全体中国人民在党的十八大上向世人发出的最强音!     

关于死刑案件中刑事和解的探讨

刑事和解在司法实践中的适用虽已初步形成思路,但在具体适用范围上尤其是在死刑案件能否适用刑事和解方面仍尚无定论,以致其在司法界的大胆尝试和学界的谨慎保留中处于尴尬境地.现阶段,死刑案件适用刑事和解纵然有其合理之处,然其终究难以避免与公权力的权威、公平正义和平等观念之间的冲突.笔者认为,死刑案件中被告人与被害人之间的和解并不符合刑事和解的本义,其实为国家救济制度建立之前的一种迫不得已的救济措施.因此,刑事和解不应延伸适用到死刑等重罪案件领域,国家应尽快建立国家救济制度以代替刑事和解在死刑案件中对被害人及其亲属的救助作用.     

转变行政管理思路 发展市场经济制度——皖粤黔川稳增长和转方式调结构调研报告

2012年经济增长下行压力加大,各地方采取了积极有效应对措施,实现经济平稳发展。该文根据对皖粤黔川四省的调研,在肯定成绩的同时,也找出了一些存在的困难和问题,并从长期困扰中国社会主义市场经济发展的思维习惯、管理体制、政策法规和运作路径入手,提出转变行政管理思路、改善行政工作方法等对策建议。     

党的第四代领导集体处理民族问题的理论创新与实践

党的第四代领导集体,围绕“什么是社会主义民族问题、怎样正确处理社会主义民族问题”的主线,自觉地进行理论创新和实践落实。在理论创新方面,丰富发展了中国特色社会主义民族理论体系。在实践落实方面,围绕促进民族地区科学发展、谋求民族地区社会和谐两大任务,开创了民族工作新局面。     

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.     

European integration and electoral democracy: How the European Union constrains party competition in the Member States

The assignment of policy competencies to the European Union has reduced the divergence of party policy positions nationally, leaving the electorate with fewer policy options. Building upon insights from spatial proximity theories of party competition, the convergence argument predicts convergence particularly in policy domains with increasing EU competence. As the policy commitments that derive from EU membership increase, parties become more constrained in terms of the feasible policy alternative they can implement when in office. The analysis uses manifesto data at the country‐party system level for nine policy domains. It uses ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation with country fixed effects, a lagged dependent variable and country corrected standard errors. Controlling for other factors that could plausibly explain policy convergence, the models also assess whether the convergent effect of party positions varies across different types of parties. The main finding is that in policy domains where the involvement of the EU has increased, the distance between parties' positions tends to decrease. The constraining impact of EU policy decisions differs between Member and non‐Member States. This effect is more apparent for the policy agendas of larger, mainstream and pro‐EU parties in the Member States.     

The meaning of war: A heterodox perspective

This article raises serious methodological, conceptual, historical and empirical questions concerning the notion of China as the next world superpower. The most dynamic sector of growth is the private sector, but within that sector foreign capital is growing the fastest, especially in strategic export sectors and increasingly in finance and the domestic market. Historically China has passed from a semi-colony to a collectivist state to a state capitalist economy toward a neo-liberal economy which contains the seeds for the re-emergence of a foreign capitalist-dominated economy. Contradictions in the current neo-liberal economy are leading to increased class struggle especially in the countryside and increasing tension between the super-rich Chinese bourgeois allied to foreign capital and ‘national statist’ sectors of the governing class. The efforts by the new leadership to ameliorate the contradiction through increased social spending are too little and too late.     

A critical note on UNDP's gender inequality indices

This article explains the diverse responses among the Chinese bourgeoisie in Hong Kong and Singapore to Chinese nationalist movements in the 1930s. In Singapore, the slogan of “Chinese buy Chinese goods” boosted the Chinese bourgeoisie in their business competition with Japan. The same slogan was used by the Chinese bourgeoisie in Hong Kong to emphasize increased sales of Chinese goods while Japanese imports were used by Chinese manufacturers in Hong Kong. I also interpret Chinese bourgeois nationalism in Hong Kong and Singapore as a move toward transnational economic citizenship. Emphasising their Chinese ethnicity, the bourgeoisie in Hong Kong and Singapore asked the Chinese government for favourable import tariffs. At the same time, the bourgeoisie requested the British for favourable tariffs, when they wished to export goods to markets in Britain and its colonies.     

State,identity, and the politics of music: Eurovision and nation-building in Azerbaijan

Albeit often – and fairly – degraded in the world of high culture as a populist and politicized representation of music, the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) – by sheer virtue of the populist and politicized nature of its essence – stands among the most consequential cultural encounters to which post-independence Azerbaijan has been exposed, in that the extent to which Baku's victory in the ESC-2011 – and the further developments this victory has generated – can potentially impact on, and contribute to, the very process of nation-building and national identity formation, with which this post-Soviet Muslim-majority country is currently struggling, is unparalleled by any of the state's earlier encounters of the kind. This paper focuses on, and examines, four intimately related ways in which the ESC and Azerbaijan's successful involvement with the latter worked to interfere with the country's nation-building: as a dubious factor in the evolution of the Western sense of self among Azerbaijanis; as a unifying force within the structure of the country's rapidly maturing civil society; as a medium working to open up a channel through which Western popular cultural elements could interfere with the evolving dynamics of, and work to globalize, indeed de-endogenize, indigenous Azerbaijani culture, on one hand, and unify the discursive realm within which the country's cultural domain is to further evolve, on the other; and, finally, as an important element serving to decouple the evolving processes within the country's cultural domain from the unfolding dynamics of conflict settlement and hence conducive to the diversification of public discourse in Azerbaijan.     

Gypsies: A selected bibliography (central and Eastern Europe)

National identity is constructed through successive identifications with significant Others. This article discusses the phenomenon of change and continuity in Czech identity. It is focused here on the identification towards the EU, which has become the most significant Other of today in two ways: (a) (change) contributing to overcoming the identity crisis provoked by the drastic changes that occurred between 1989 and 1993 (change of regime, disappearance of the USSR and the break-up of Czechoslovakia), and therefore the subsequent drastic changes in relations with past significant Others: communism, the USSR, and the Slovaks; and (b) (continuity) reaffirming one of the fundamental elements during the national revival in the nineteenth century, democracy, upon which the various identifications towards the EU have been aligned. According to the differing interpretations of what democracy means, and three other criteria of the “levels of Othering,” the EU has been “imagined,” on the one hand, as an entity where Czechs can flourish in their identity and ensure their freedom and democratic values (positive Other), and, on the other, as an “oppressor” entity which portrays democratic deficit, restricts freedom, and threatens Czech national identity (negative Other).