The classification of electoral systems: Bringing legislators back in

It is widely assumed that electoral institutions shape politicians' incentive for personal vote-seeking, with important behavioral and policy consequences. Yet, there is a surprising lack of consensus on how to compare real-world electoral institutions. Using new data this paper examines how legislators' own perception of their electoral incentives in fifteen democracies correspond to some of the most seminal classification schemes in political science. Our survey of 2326 legislators – the empirically broadest study of personal vote orientation so far conducted – demonstrates that legislators do not always understand electoral incentives in the same way scholarly rankings do, highlighting the need for scholars of political institutions to justify their choice of classification scheme. If not, an entire body of literature may be misguided.     

Ethnic statistics and social classifications in France: how the ‘black community’ was born

Abstract

The status of France's ethnic minorities has become a major issue in recent years owing to the riots in October and November of 2005, as well as the National Assembly debates on the Taubira law,1 1. Christiane Taubira is a French female politician and activist born 2 February 1952, in Cayenne, French Guyana. She is a militant of the PRG (Parti Radical de Gauche) et ‘deputée’ (a member of the French National Parliament). She is best known for the law that she devised and proposed and bears her name, the Taubira Law. Voted in 21 May 2001, it recognizes the slave trades and slavery as a crime against humanity. ethnic statistics, affirmative action, and the memory and commemoration of slavery and the slave trade,2 2. The decision to commemorate slavery was taken on 30 January 2006, by the French President Jacques Chirac. The date for the commemoration is 10 May, each year. and communautarisme 3 3. Communautaire/communautarisme/communautariste refers to something along the lines of ‘multiculturalism’, although its connotations are almost entirely negative. Communautarisme, to the French, is what happens when you let immigrants form their own communities, speak their own languages, and practice their own religions. Consequently, France becomes less ‘French’ and more open to foreign values and cultural practices (http://inthefray.org/content/view/482/39). .The present paper shows how, against the aforementioned backdrop, the black community is creating itself as a visible group ‘endowed with value systems and representation systems’ (Champagne, P., 1984. La manifestation: La production de l'evenement politique. Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 52–53(1), 18–41), and how the positions taken by the various actors (associations, journalists and politicians) have contributed to this process of legitimation. Thus, it appears that although France's Blacks are still a largely fragmented group, they are constructing an identity for themselves in the republic via a process that is a reaction to the apparent rigidity of France's republican system and to the real (albeit denied) stigmatization and discrimination that some Blacks say they are subjected to on a daily basis.

This work is a revised version of a paper accepted for presentation at the ‘Strangers, Aliens and Foreigners’ conference organized in Mansfield College, Oxford, UK, between Tuesday 22 September and Thursday 24 September, 2009.     

Negative Classifications and the Symbolic Order of Social Inequality: Evidence from East Asia

ABSTRACT

This article explains a cultural sociological approach to research on social inequality. “Cultural sociological” means that we do not regard social inequality as resulting only from a distributive order of goods, income and positions, but also from an evaluative order created and reproduced by the actions of social groups. Concerning the topic of this thematic issue, this means that, from a sociological perspective, we see “weakness” not only as the social vulnerability of actors and groups resulting from a lack of material resources, education and power, but also as an attribution and assessment which can have a variety of social consequences. “Weakness” can compel others to help the weak and defend their interests. But if the weak are to be protected and empowered, they must be identified as “weak” in the first place, and this act of identification can have paradoxical consequences. As we demonstrate with evidence from East Asia, the social designation as “weak” can have many adverse effects for the weak groups themselves, because it blames them for their own weaknesses and publicly condemns, disparages, or stigmatizes them. Based on an analysis of the situation of victims of the Fukushima disaster in Japan and of rural migrants and their offspring living in Chinese metropoles, we show how social designations of weakness can produce negative classifications that signal disrespect to weak actors and limit their opportunities for action.     

民事行为能力制度重构

民事行为能力的立法体例有三级制、二级制之别.我国《民法通则》关于民事行为能力的规定采德式三级制.比较各国行为能力制度,二级制立法模式更符合民法作为私法之趣旨.我国未来《民法典》应确立二级制行为能力制度,并完善与二级制立法模式相关的制度协调.     

Mapping Organizational Units in the State: Challenges and Classifications

The article discusses possible answers on three key questions for attempts at mapping the pattern of state organizations:

1. What constitutes a state organization?

2. What constitutes one state organization?

3. What constitutes different types of state organizations?

The main focus is on structural relations within and between organizational units, but the article also draws upon other classifications of units from the academic literature in organization theory and public administration. As an illustration, the article also outlines how these questions have been handled in the development of the Norwegian State Administration Database.