Democracy and the European Union: Matching means to standards

In justifying recent European Union Treaty changes, member-state governments have claimed that publics are doubly represented in the EU: through their elected governments and through the European Parliament. This review evaluates ‘dual representation’ as a means of delivering democratic standards. It concludes that present institutional arrangements contain some means of aligning policy outcomes with citizen preferences but they do not match up so well to ‘input’ or procedural conditions for public control with political equality. One troubling aspect of this is that there are good normative grounds for holding ‘input’ standards to be prior to ‘output’ ones. Another is that difficulties of public control are, on Union matters, more acute in relationships between representatives and voters than in those between representatives and other power holders.     

When government fails us: trust in post-socialist civil organizations

The research for this article was motivated by a noticeable discrepancy between levels of participation and trust in post-socialist civil organizations. While civic participation in Central and Eastern Europe is almost nonexistent, levels of trust in post-socialist civil organizations compare favourably to those in Western Europe. The first aim of this article is to understand why citizens place relatively high trust in post-socialist civil organizations. The political context, within which civil organizations operate, reveals one explanation for the high levels of trust in civil organizations: government corruption dissuades citizens from relying on state institutions and creates a void that is filled by informal networks of association and civil organizations. Empirical evidence demonstrates that trust in civil organizations focused on socioeconomic and political development is higher among citizens who express concern about corruption in their country. The second aim of this article is to understand the discrepancy between levels of trust and civic participation. A novel interpretation of past findings suggests that civil organizations' effectiveness, professionalization, transactional capacity and orientation toward service provision may garner citizens' trust while parallel neglect of grassroots mobilization leaves civil organizations short of capitalizing on that trust. Civil organizations' limited focus on interest aggregation, mobilization and representation raises doubts as to whether observers of civil society in the region should look to these organizations as its core component.     

Liberal Nationalism,Imagined Immigration and the Progressive Dilemma

The article critically evaluates liberal nationalist perspectives on immigration by drawing on findings from a qualitative research project undertaken in 2014 among White British interviewees in England. From one perspective the study's participants' attitudes seem to support arguments made by David Goodhart and other liberal nationalists regarding immigration, social trust and integration. However, further analysis suggests that these attitudes are to a very significant extent drawn first from partially imagined ideas surrounding immigration and second from potentially unreliable sources. These findings thus provoke the question of whether social trust and notions of a national community are actually being disrupted by immigration, or whether they are being disrupted by prejudiced nationalist and xenophobic perceptions about immigration and immigrants. The article will conclude by arguing for more nuanced research into attitudes towards immigration and in favour of a sceptical approach to nationalist frameworks for interpreting society and politics in Britain today.     

Economic strain and perceptions of social cohesion in Europe: Does institutional trust matter?

The degree to which different social groups get along is a key indicator of the cohesiveness of a society. This study examines perceptions of social cohesion among Europeans and explains variations in those perceptions by considering the separate and combined effects of economic strain and institutional trust. Analyses were conducted with the 27 member countries of the EU based on the Eurobarometer 74.1 on poverty and social exclusion conducted in 2010. Results show that individuals living in households experiencing economic strain perceive social cohesion to be weaker than their less economically hard‐pressed counterparts. By contrast, individuals trusting their political institutions perceived there to be higher levels of cohesion. Furthermore, institutional trust substantially moderates the negative relationship between economic strain and perceptions of cohesion. These results are robust to various model specifications. Moreover, extending the analysis revealed that this moderating effect held when considering social relations between the poor and rich and between different racial and ethnic groups. Theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.     

合作型信任:政府与第三部门合作关系的基础

进入21世纪后,随着社会事务的复杂化,政府与第三部门之间形成了密切的合作关系,通过相互合作来进行社会管理。合作是以信任为基础的,政府与第三部门合作也应以合作型信任为基础。合作型信任与契约型信任、习俗型信任相比更有利于政府与第三部门的合作。为此,通过建立公共承诺机制,构建平等的对话机制,完善制度体系以及培育相互信任的社会文化来构建合作型信任。     

财政分权、地方财政赤字与土地财政

基于地方财政赤字的视角,研究财政分权与地方政府土地财政策略的内在作用逻辑,通过理论分析发现:地方财政赤字激励了地方政府在利益觉醒后利用预算制度缺口,用"扭曲之手"来攫取预算外财政收益,进而驱动地方政府实施积极的土地财政策略来实现财政增收的政策目标。省际面板数据的实证结果进一步验证了财政分权、地方财政赤字对土地财政的正向驱动作用。土地财政的治理从深化分税制改革、改善地方财政收入结构、变革土地财政形成机制、完善行政绩效考核体制、加强预算监管等方面入手。     

论无效信托及其法律后果

无效信托,是指已经成立但因欠缺信托的有效要件,因而不发生法律效力的信托。确定无效信托时,不能仅限于《信托法》第11条的规定,而应结合《信托法》的其他相关条文以及其他法律的相关规定进行。已成立的信托被确定无效后,其法律后果应视无效的原因以及所造成的结果而定。     

Political trust during the Covid-19 pandemic: Rally around the flag or lockdown effects?

How can we explain the rise in diffuse political support during the Covid-19 pandemic? Recent research has argued that the lockdown measures generated political support. In contrast, I argue that the intensity of the pandemic rallied people around political institutions. Collective angst in the face of exponentially rising Covid-19 cases depresses the usual cognitive evaluations of institutions and leads citizens to rally around existing intuitions as a lifebuoy. Using a representative Dutch household survey conducted over March 2020, I compare the lockdown effect to the dynamic of the pandemic. I find that the lockdown effect is driven by pre-existing time trends. Accounting for non-linearities in time makes the lockdown effect disappear. In contrast, more flexible modelling techniques reveal a robust effect of Covid-19 infections on political trust. In line with an anxiety effect, I find that standard determinants of political trust – such as economic evaluations and social trust – lose explanatory power as the pandemic spreads. This speaks to an emotionally driven rally effect that pushes cognitive evaluations to the background.     

公共信托原则与土地环境损害赔偿的甄别标准

作为英美法系的一项古老原则,公共信托原则指的是政府应当保障社会公众能实现对环境资源所应当享有的权益,有时出于公共利益不得不使个人的财产权利作出一定的让步。但公共信托原则的适用经常与美国宪法的公用征收条款发生混淆或冲突,特别是如果事前政府并未获得财产所有权,却实际上由于对私人财产造成环境损害而侵犯了私人财产所有者对其财产享有的权利,政府是否应当向财产所有者赔偿损失,这就涉及公共信托原则与反向征收的甄别。二者甄别标准的确定需要对一系列相互冲突的范畴进行权衡,如社会的经济发展目标与环境资源保护目标、私人所有权与公众对环境资源的正当权益、公民的生存权利与环境权利等,不同的案例凸现不同的社会需求,因而需要彰显的价值目标亦各有区别。     

Trust,regulation, and redistribution why some governments overregulate and under-redistribute

For many social scientists, government intervention is linked to low levels of social trust and corruption, while others associate it with high trust and low corruption. We aim to reconcile these contrasting views by distinguishing the opposing effects of trust on two alternative types of government intervention: regulation and redistribution. We argue that distrusting individuals demand more governmental regulation (H1) but less government redistribution (H2), and this could be one of the mechanisms explaining why countries with low levels of trust tend to both overregulate and under-redistribute. And the effects of trust on policy preferences are conditional on the quality of institutions. The higher the level of quality of government in a particular region, the more high-trusting individuals will like government redistribution and dislike government regulation that restricts the operations of free markets (H3). We test these hypotheses with data from the latest round of the European Quality of Government Index (EQI) survey, which covers 77,000 individuals from 185 regions of 21 EU member states.