农村基层党组织的现状、挑战及应对之策

改革开放以来,农村基层党组织在贯彻落实党的方针政策,组织和带领群众脱贫致富,维护农村稳定中发挥了重要作用,取得了不小成绩。但由于受市场经济冲击等因素的影响,一些农村的基层党组织失去原有的号召力、领导力,党的先进性、纯洁性难以得到充分体现。为此,要采取发展壮大集体经济,夯实基层党组织执政能力的物质基础;建立健全机制,夯实基层党组织执政能力的组织基础;坚持务实为民,夯实基层党组织执政能力的群众基础;加大教育培训力度,夯实基层党组织执政能力的思想基础等措施,加强基层党组织建设,进一步发挥基层党组织在建设美丽乡村中的核心作用。     

China＇s Changing Development Pattern

正DATA available on the world’s two largest economies,China and the U.S.,for 2013provide an opportunity to take stock of China’s immediate economic prospects and the more general challenges facing its economic development strategy.     

Putting Electronic Voting under the Microscope

Electronic voting entered the political arena some years ago, with some countries advocating its use, some countries trialling and then abandoning it and yet others preferring to preserve the status quo of paper‐and‐pencil voting within a voting booth. In this paper we present the pros and cons of electronic voting and propose a set of characteristics we think electronic voting systems should exhibit. We then briefly review some pertinent concerns, issues and worries. We conclude by introducing the Handivote system, an electronic voting system that supports voting by means of SMS messaging, and explain how it measures up in terms of our own specified characteristics.     

论党的纯洁性建设——兼谈全面建成小康社会

保持党纯洁性是马克思主义政党一以贯之的追求，加强党的纯洁性建设是全面建成小康社会的必然要求，这是在我国全面深化改革的条件下，党的纯洁性面临诸多挑战诸如权力腐败、党员干部的“双面人”问题、行为越轨以及信仰失落等情况下做出的重大战略决策。创新是加强党的纯洁性建设的根本法宝，其中理论创新是基础，制度创新是根本，加强监督是关键。     

The IT Experience: An Example of Change in the Federal Workforce

Abstract

The information technology, or “IT,” functional area has been examined in some detail. This article summarizes the manpower reductions that have occurred in IT and displays the demographic impact (experience, age, educational level, race and gender mix) of these reductions. The author suggests that similar changes may be anticipated, or may have already occurred, in other functional areas that experience personnel reductions. He also reviews some of the management challenges this poses.     

Beyond for or against? Multi-option alternatives to a corrective referendum

Referendums commonly offer a binary choice between supporting and rejecting proposed legislation. Binary designs benefit from simplicity and guarantee a majority result, but also provoke voting biases and interpretation challenges. Referendum designs offering multiple policy alternatives provide a different approach which could alleviate binary referendum challenges whilst maintaining the aggregative benefits. Offering more than two options, however, raises new challenges in designing the referendum process and obtaining majority results. This article uses survey data collected on a corrective referendum held in the Netherlands in 2018 to compare the challenges faced by binary and multi-option referendum designs respectively. The analysis demonstrates how the multi-option design empowers voters in expressing their preferences and delivers more detailed and constructive referendum results. Building on the survey data, the article subsequently discusses the challenges of extending choice and concludes that alternative voting methods can mitigate some of these challenges.     

Thwarted ambitions: the biography of Auvergne Doherty,an aspiring female barrister

ABSTRACT

Auvergne Doherty was the first woman from the Commonwealth to be admitted and called to the Bar of England and Wales.?In the first part of this article, Doherty's family background, education, legal training, and post-Bar experiences are set out. The second part analyses her profile compared with the other women called to the Bar in 1922 and considers why Doherty may not have gone on to practise as a barrister. This article argues that Doherty’s biography is important because it evidences how vital it was to have the necessary financial means and networks to be able to forget a career at the Bar. It was precisely the lack of these factors that impeded Doherty to fulfil her career as a barrister.     

Threats,opportunity, and force: Repression and diversion of domestic pressure, 1948–1982

This paper explores empirically how domestic political and economic challenges affect political leaders’ propensity to respond with the use of force at home and abroad. The foreign policy and world politics literatures are replete with references to leaders’ alleged use of external conflict when confronted with domestic challenges, but rarely consider domestic responses to dissent or the role of interstate threats. Comparative research on repression primarily focuses on linkages between domestic challenges and leaders’ resort to repressive policies, but ignores international alternatives. Neither literature considers the influence of external threats and opportunity structures on resort to use of force and coercion at home and abroad. Alternatively, we contend that foreign conflict and repression are complementary and potentially interchangeable policies that leaders may use to maintain political power in the face of domestic pressure. We hypothesize that the level of domestic political constraints conditions the opportunity and likelihood of selecting either repression or foreign conflict in response to domestic challenges. Since the ability to capitalize on external conflict involvement in all likelihood is not independent of international opportunity structures, we explicitly address differences in the availability of historical interstate animosity. We test our hypotheses on resort to repression and external dispute involvement on a global sample of political leaders for the period 1948–82. Our results indicate that repression and external conflict involvement appear to be largely independent and driven by different challenges: While there is some evidence that domestic conflict increases the likelihood of disputes and that external threat may promote repression, there is little support for the idea of direct substitution in kind since leaders frequently combine both dispute involvement and repression.     

纪念七千人大会坚持和发展民主集中制

50年前召开的七千人大会上,毛泽东等党和国家第一代领导人关于民主集中制的讲话,大大丰富了马克思列宁主义和我们党关于民主集中制的理论宝库。邓小平、江泽民、胡锦涛有关民主集中制的论述,是运用马列主义、毛泽东思想总结我们党的新鲜经验而形成的新的理论成果。重温这些重要讲话,有利于在新的历史条件下更好地坚持和发展民主集中制,使其在全面实现小康社会和中华民族伟大复兴的全过程中发挥更大的作用。     

论中国模式的主体特征及其挑战

"中国模式"是与"欧美模式"相比较而提出来的。讨论"中国模式"直接的意义在于找出中国改革发展的主体特征,以使"中国模式"成为一种稳定的制度形态。从新制度经济学的视角来看,"中国模式"作为一种制度变迁模式的战略选择,它的主体特征可以从三个方面去理解:一是在变迁路径层面,选择了演进理性的变迁方式;二是在宪法秩序层面,完成了宪政的平稳过渡;三是在文化规范层面,实现了传统文化的现代性转化。这三个特征是中国改革发展取得显著成果的重要原因,但"中国模式"同时也面临诸多挑战。