论党的建设的继承和发展

当前党的建设呈现出大好形势,但也面临一些问题。在纪念党成立90周年之际,我们总结过去的经验,在继承什么和发展什么的认识上,至少应坚持三点：坚持马克思主义对政党功能的基本认识,克服自身组织功能缺陷;坚持勇于担当的政党责任和政党使命,在推进民主化改革、推进党管干部方式改革、推进高度集中的权力适当分权等方面担当起为党负责的精神;坚持改革创新的时代精神,包括观念的创新、思维方式的创新、体制的创新,在制度顶层设计创新上力争突破,为深化改革创造理论和制度条件。     

Finding political capital for monetary tightening: Unemployment insurance and partisan monetary cycles

How do governments find the political capital to raise interest rates in pursuit of inflation stabilisation? Against common wisdom, this article shows that the ability of governments to exercise tight monetary policy largely depends on the level of unemployment insurance. Unemployment insurance is particularly useful to social democratic parties since their core constituency – labour – is the hardest hit by economic downturns. Empirical evidence from 17 OECD countries over thirty years demonstrates that high levels of unemployment insurance present a strong incentive for social democratic governments to respond more aggressively to positive changes in inflation. These findings resolve the puzzle of why partisan monetary cycles are not often observed in the literature and have important policy implications, given continued calls for scaling down social insurance.     

A losing gamble. How mainstream parties facilitate anti-immigrant party success

The emergence of anti-immigrant parties in Western Europe has provoked very different responses from mainstream parties. Some have tried to counter the anti-immigrant parties while others have tried to recapture lost voters by taking a tougher stance on immigration. Country comparative studies have tried to determine the effectiveness of different strategies, but systematic testing has been impaired by small-n problems. This paper therefore exploits sub-national variation in 290 Swedish municipalities to investigate the effect of mainstream party strategy on anti-immigrant electoral success. The paper finds that a tougher stance on immigration on the part of mainstream parties is correlated with more anti-immigrant party support, even when controlling for a large number of socio-economic, historical and regional factors. This result indicates that mainstream parties legitimize anti-immigrant parties by taking a tougher position on immigration. However, the results presented in the paper show that it is not sufficient for one mainstream party to take a tougher position; it is only when the entire political mainstream is tougher on immigration that the anti-immigrant party benefits. What is more, the toughness of the parties on the left seems to be more legitimizing than the toughness of the parties on the right.     

How do established voters react to new parties? The case of Italy, 1985–2008

The Italian party system largely collapsed in the early 1990s, providing us with a natural experimental situation in which voters were confronted with new parties – indeed, with an entirely new party system. How did they react? This paper develops a number of expectations on the basis of existing theory and tests these expectations using a dataset consisting of election studies conducted in Italy between 1985 and 2008. We find that a new party system causes confusion as to where parties stand in left-right terms, making it difficult for voters to make their choices on the basis of ideological cues. The confusion is greatest among older voters – those already set in their habits of voting, but only the very oldest cohorts (containing voters over 60 years old) are significantly debilitated.     

Partisan legitimacy across generations

In this paper we argue that parties shape their supporters’ views about the political system via the messages they communicate about the desirability of the political system. Moreover, we contend that the effectiveness of such communication varies considerably across generations. Combining data from election surveys collected in 15 democracies as part of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project with data on the policy positions of 116 political parties collected by the Comparative Manifestos Project, we find that supporters of parties that express positive positions toward the political system report systematically higher levels of political legitimacy than supporters of parties that communicate negative views. Moreover, this communication is particularly effective among older party identifiers whose partisan identification tends to be more pronounced. Taken together, these findings suggest that political parties play an active role in shaping citizens’ views of the political system but their success in mobilizing consent among citizens in contemporary democracies may weaken with partisan de-alignment and generational change.     

The Impact of the USSR on Lithuania's Domestic Policy and Its International Orientation in the Third Decade of the Twentieth Century

This article investigates links between domestic and foreign policy, topics which are usually discussed rather than analyzed in any detail. The case of the USSR and Lithuania is taken as an historical example of the impact of the external factor on domestic policy, and an attempt is made to elucidate how the Soviets tried to influence and correct Lithuania's policy in the inter-war period by providing financial assistance to parties and their press. In this way they sought to set Lithuania against Poland and fuel the conflict between them, so that they would not become reconciled, would not create the so-called Baltic Union with Latvia, Estonia and Finland and would not orient themselves to the West. Using financial and other levers of secret policy, the Soviets contributed significantly to pushing the pro-Western Christian Democratic Party away from power in Lithuania so that the Nationalists, who sought to establish closer relations with the USSR, came to be established. The overseas financing of parties which remained unknown to the public distorted the political process of Lithuania and hindered the maturing of social awareness.     

A Century After: The ‘Great DIET of Vilnius’ Revisited

The Vilnius assembly of December 1905 in Vilnius, the so-called ‘Great Diet’, is now seen as a watershed in the history of the Lithuanian national movement. The event was the culmination of socioeconomic changes as well as the growing assertiveness and political diversity of the Lithuanian national movement. The assembly radicalized village politics and encouraged the Lithuanian intelligentsia to formulate a vision of a future Lithuanian political entity. One enduring consequences of the Great Diet was increased acceptance of the idea of an independent state in which ethnic Lithuanians would assume the dominant role within a multinational framework.     

A Question of Priorities: Candidate Selection in Estonian Political Parties

This article addresses political-party organization in Estonia, especially candidate selection. Its first objective is to describe the ways in which the main parties chose their candidates before the 2011 parliamentary election. A second objective is to evaluate those procedures in light of expectations generated by established theory. The focus is on two conditions: the institutional framework, particularly the electoral system, and the relative youth of Estonian democracy. The evidence confirms these expectations only partially, which suggests that an individual party’s ideological, organizational and strategic circumstances, in addition to structural and institutional conditions, are critical to understanding why it performs this basic function as it does.     

Party unity and presidential dominance: parliamentary development in the fourth republic of Ghana

Political power in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa is often portrayed as being highly informal and heavily personalised. The assumption that personalised politics is how ‘Africa works’ has led to the neglect of the study of Africa's formal institutions, including parliaments. This article assesses the position of the Parliament of Ghana under the Fourth Republic. It displays evidence suggesting that over successive parliamentary terms parliamentary committees became increasingly adept at handling legislation, and inputting into the policy process. It also shows that the parliament was increasingly able to oversee the implementation of legislation. Although the findings of hitherto undocumented progress represent a valuable nuance, the argument that the parliament became increasingly able to input into the legislative process says exactly that; while the parliament became increasingly capable of amending legislation rarely was this witnessed. The article argues that parliamentary development in Ghana has been a function of three interacting structural factors: the constitution; unified government since 1992; and political party unity. The strong partisan identities of legislators from the two major political parties – the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and National Democratic Congress (NDC) – provide the executive with extra leverage to control the parliament. Throughout the Ghanaian parliament is juxtaposed with the Kenyan National Assembly. More substantially, the article seeks to force a revision of the dominant narrative that generalises African party systems as fluid and fragmented, and African political parties as lacking any recognisable internal cohesion or ideology.     

论民主党派在我国协商民主中的地位及其实现

协商民主是对古典民主与代议民主的继承和超越。中国共产党领导的多党合作制度和人民政治协商制度是我国实现协商民主的重要机制和组织形式。民主党派可以通过参政议政和民主监督,成为我国协商民主的中坚力量之一。