Preferences and agreement in legislative parties: testing the causal chain

This research note focuses on two specific dimensions of legislative cohesion: the homogeneity of preferences within a party and party agreement. Although these two dimensions have often been considered as synonyms, it is argued that these two concepts refer to different realities. The authors therefore develop distinct measurements for these two concepts. The authors then examine their statistical relationship, putting to the test the widespread assumption that heterogeneous preferences increase the probability of disagreement. The authors do so by testing the effect of different measures of a member of parliament’s ideological distance to her/his party on her/his self-reported frequency of disagreement with her/his party. It is demonstrated that the causal chain linking both concepts is only verified in the case of a conscious ideological distance. The results have crucial theoretical and methodological implications for future research on party cohesion and party unity.     

公正立法与立法公开

公正立法在本质上是一种现代立法理念,在追求立法价值公正的同时,也追求立法程序的公正和立法结果的公正。公正的立法是在公正价值的指导下通过公正的程序而实现的。立法公开不仅是程序公正的组成部分,也是走向公正立法的重要途径。     

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.     

The effect of televised candidate debates on the support for political parties

During campaigns for legislative elections, a large portion of the general public follows televised debates between the front-running candidates. How can the candidates use the public interest in the debates to increase the support for their party? In this article, we argue that especially challenger candidates can improve the public perception of their valence qualities, such as personal integrity, leadership, and competence, and can - as a result - raise the support of their party. We expect that the perceived policy stances of the candidates matter less. Building on televised debate experiments during the German Federal Elections of 2009 and 2013, we analyse the effect of the debates on party vote and in how far this relationship is mediated by changes in valence and policy evaluations of the candidates. Results show that changes of candidate valence, but not changes in policy perceptions, of the social-democratic front-running candidates mediate the vote intention for the party. Respondents who perceived the candidates more competent, empathetic and have integrity as a result of the debate are more likely to vote for the candidate's party. Our analysis further reveals, however, that this valence effect is not long-lasting and does not carry-over to vote intention briefly before the election.     

我国行政诉讼功能之实证分析

我国行政诉讼法实施以来取得了显著的成就,但通过对<中国法律年鉴>1989年至2004年行政审判相关数据的统计分析发现,我国行政诉讼在一定程度上发挥了维护行政与救济权利的功能,在相当程度上发挥了监督行政的功能.行政诉讼的实有功能、设计功能与应有功能出现偏差.修改我国行政诉讼法应正确认识行政诉讼的功能,合理定位立法目的,选择与行政诉讼性质和立法目的相匹配的制度,使行政诉讼发挥立法者所预设的功能.     

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。