A view from the policy community: a new strategic narrative for Europe?

ABSTRACT

Reflecting on the results presented in articles in this special issue, European leaders should take greater account of external perceptions in crafting the European Union's strategic narrative and guiding its actions. Failure to do so has impaired external policies like the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, the European Neighbourhood Policy and Eastern Partnership. Leaders emerging from the Arab uprisings perceived the EU as complicit with their countries’ former anciens régimes and Russian leaders see EU support for democracy and the market economy in former Soviet states as duplicitous and instrusive. Awareness of such perceptions should be filtered into EU decision-making, without validating views that European officials and diplomats consider misleading.     

环境时代宪法的权利生态化特征

文章首先指出无论是近代宪法的法理基础———个人主义 ,还是现代宪法的法理基础———团体主义 ,都难以对付当前日益严重生态危机的挑战 ,主张可在团体主义的基础上将生态主义作为环境时代宪法的法理基础 ;而后 ,文章通过对传统宪法价值取向在环境时代所表现出种种局限的反思 ,提出环境时代宪法的价值取向———当代人与后代人 ,人与自然 ;最后 ,文章认为随着环境时代宪法法理基础———生态主义的建立和宪法价值取向———当代人与后代人 ,人与自然的确立 ,宪法将在权利社会化的基础上向权利生态化扩展 ,并围绕“人类和生态共同利益”之保护而精心构建 ,从而极具权利生态化的特征。     

浅谈监狱警察职业化建设

监狱警察职业化是维护监狱安全稳定、提高行刑效率和改造质量、实现司法公正的基本保障,也是建设社会主义法治国家的内在要求。文章就监狱警察职业特质培养的基本内容、主要途径,职业化建设的法制保障作了具体分析。     

开展科技教育活动培养队员创新品质

组织开展少先队科技教育活动,是学校落实创新教育的有效形式.面对新的历史时期,交口少科院在继承优良传统的基础上,对科技教育从更新教育观念,提高辅导员的创新素质;营造科学探索氛围,培养队员创新意识;开展全方位活动,培养创新品质这三方面入手作了实践探索.     

后现代性与宗教走向

前现代性、现代性、后现代性意味着三种不同社会的范式转换或超越。宗教在其中呈现着不同特征:在前现代性中,宗教是一元的、垄断性的;在现代性中,宗教是多元的、具有世俗化的倾向;而在后现代性中,宗教除仍具有世俗化的倾向外,还具有灵性追求、教主崇拜、家庭式社区型小宗教团体等特征。这代表了后现代宗教的发展趋势。     

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.     

Challenging U.S. Policymakers' Image of an Isolationist Public

A persisting question in international studies is whether academic research can have an impact on the making of foreign policy. Much research has shown that policy decisions can be greatly influenced by misperceptions, just as much as by objective factors. The article describes an effort by academic researchers to challenge U.S. policymakers' image of an actor in the U.S. foreign policy process—the American public. The study's focus was a widely held assumption in the U.S. foreign policy community that the American public in the wake of the Cold War was entering a renewed phase of isolationism, similar to the interwar years. The study first interviewed policy practitioners on their perceptions of the public, then performed a comprehensive review of existing polling data, and finally conducted new polls with input from policymakers themselves. The net result of the elite interviews and the analysis of public attitudes revealed a significant gap in all areas, which is presented in synopsis. Interviews with policy practitioners reveal two key dynamics that could well contribute to policymakers' misreading the public: a failure to seek out information about the public and a tendency to assume that the vocal public is representative of the general public. Indications that the study did have some impact on the thinking of policy practitioners are discussed in the conclusion.     

Voter perceptions of parties’ left–right positions: The role of party strategies

Left–right semantics help voters simplify the complex political reality as they reduce party views on a variety of issues to a single dimension. Less studied, however, is the question of how voters arrive at parties’ left–right positions and how parties can influence voter perceptions. In this article, I demonstrate that the party can shape the voter’s understanding of the content of its left–right ideology by using three strategies: avoidance, ambivalence, or ambiguity. Specifically, the party may avoid or de-emphasize, embrace a conflicting position, or becloud its position on the controversial issue; by so doing, it induces voters to place less weight on this issue when perceiving the party’s left–right position. The empirical analysis connects voter and party data from 21 European democracies in the period 1996–2014 and finds empirical support for the effectiveness of these strategies. In particular, the study finds robust empirical evidence that strategic avoidance, ambivalence, and ambiguity strongly moderate the association between the party’s perceived ideological brand and its underlying issue content.     

Do parties perceive their voter potentials correctly? Reconsidering the spatial logic of electoral competition

Political parties strive for maximizing their vote shares. One way to achieve this goal is to attract voters from competitors. A precondition for strategies aiming at attracting these voters is that parties perceive their voter potentials among their rivals' electorates correctly. Yet, hardly anything is known about such perceptions. To fill this gap, we develop analogue measures of a party's perceived and its actual voter potential for each competitor in a party system. Combining elite and mass surveys conducted in Germany, we show that perceived and actual voter potentials depend on spatial considerations but also that not all parties are able to correctly evaluate their potentials. These deviations can be traced back to differences in the perceived placement of political actors between elites and citizens. This supports the spatial logic of party competition but it also points to potential pitfalls for strategic behavior of political parties.