The Role of Public Input in State Welfare Policymaking

This article reports findings from a survey of 257 state officials involved in public assistance policymaking in the American states during the early to mid-1990s. Respondents were asked to comment on the impetus for welfare reform, on methods employed to gauge public preferences, and on sources of policy ideas. These officials, including state legislators, social service agency directors, and senior advisors to governors, revealed a variety of forums for gathering public input. Although few respondents affiliated with elective office reported significant direct electoral challenges on welfare issues, they often cited constituent contacts regarding welfare reform.     

Japan's Political Leadership Deficit

Analysts have long pondered the question: 'Who rules in Japan?'. Prime Ministers who have exercised strong leadership have been the exception rather than the rule. Despite the widespread acknowledgment that Japan's political leadership deficit undermines the ability of the government to act swiftly in a crisis and to exercise international leadership in trade and foreign policy, a systematic explanation for Japan's weak political executive is yet to be advanced. While historical and cultural factors cannot be ignored, more relevant in a contemporary context are institutional factors that restrict the power of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. A parliamentary Cabinet system is not incompatible with strong leadership but, in Japan's case, the inability of the political executive to exercise indisputable authority, or indeed, merely to exercise the legitimate prerogatives of Prime Ministerial and Cabinet Office, is directly attributable to the constraints imposed by a collection of informal power structures within the ruling conservative party and by an autonomous central bureaucracy, all of which have held power away from the political executive. Various institutional remedies are currently being pursued to enhance the leadership of the executive branch. They are part of a deliberately engineered shift in power from non-elected bureaucrats to elected politicians. The reforms will also help to diminish the influence of ruling party factions over personnel selections to executive office and the ascendancy of internal policy cliques within party policymaking.     

Public Opinion and Policymaking in the States: The Case of Post-Roe Abortion Policy

Whether public opinion should be expected to play a role in the shaping of abortion legislation in the states is a debatable question. Representation is a difficult task, especially if legislators receive mixed cues from the public, activists, and the political parties. In this study, we find that grass-roots activism and public opinion tend to match, and both are reflected in state abortion policy. In addition, more Pro-Life policies are found in states with a tradition of conservative policies in other areas, Republican majorities in the state legislature, more Catholic residents, and fewer women legislators. These patterns hold true for a composite index of abortion policies and for the specific policy area of government funding of abortions. Slightly different patterns occur for parental consent laws, though these statutes also tend to reflect general preferences on abortion and interest group activity in a state.     

Women and the Public Sphere

In Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the contrast between ‘public’ and ‘private’ worlds drew not on one, but on multiple, contrasts. However, recognising such variations does not necessarily provide us with new analytical tools. This article examines some of the ways in which twentieth-century commentators have attempted to categorise these contrasts. In particular the article critically engages with Habermas's definition of the public sphere and suggests the advantages and disadvantages of using his notion through a discussion of the relationship of the British women's suffrage movement to the debate over citizenship in the 1860s.     

马来西亚华人女性权力参与试析

马来西亚女性权力参与程度一直较低,华人女性权力参与程度更低。随着1999年以来马来西亚的民主转型,华人女性政治参与日趋活跃,女性权力参与水平也有所提高。论文分析了马来西亚华人女性权力参与的演变过程、特点和影响因素。认为民主化扩大了华人妇女的政治参与空间,加强了她们权力参与的能力,出现不少引人注目的女政治家。马来西亚华人女性权力参与具有滞后性、边缘性、依附性等特点,深受马来西亚威权政治、种族政治、政党政治和性别观念的影响和制约。     

Ancient Israel on Political Leadership: Between the Book Ends

Abstract

Looking to the US presidential election of 2008, this paper considers models of leadership as they are rendered in the Books of I and II Kings in the Hebrew Bible. That corpus of historical memory is informed by the theo-political traditions of covenant in the book of Deuteronomy. At the beginning of the corpus, Solomon is presented as a leader committed to the pursuit of self-aggrandizement on the basis of political autonomy that need account to none. At the end of the corpus Josiah is presented as a king who practiced public power congruent with the neighborly requirements of Torah. The issue raised by this critical tradition concerns autonomy and moral accountability. There is, of course, no direct transfer of this tradition to US politics. But the testimony of the text lingers, ever critical, even until our time and place, a testimony about limit, connectedness, and consequences.     

The Politics of Crisis Policymaking: Chernobyl and Swedish Nuclear Energy Policy

Public policy scholars often accentuate the key role of crises in explaining policy change; however, much empirical work still remains to be done in order to explain crisis‐induced policy outcomes. This article explores the prediction of the Advocacy Coalition Framework that stable coalitions and impediments to learning reduce the likelihood for policy change after a crisis. Strategic action is emphasized as a supplementary variable focusing on the role of political motivations in post‐crisis policymaking. Sweden's decision not to accelerate the nuclear power phaseout following the 1986 Chernobyl disaster provides a case study to assess the utility of these explanations. Findings corroborate theoretical expectations about stable minority coalitions, cast doubts over the presumed rigidity of policy core beliefs, and emphasize strategic action and cognitive heuristics as important motivations for policy choice. The article concludes by outlining three sector‐specific variables (ideological salience, level of conflict, and previous crisis experiences) that add to the explanation of crisis‐induced policy outcomes.     

从政治参与看古罗马后期的妇女地位

罗马共和早期,妇女在政治领域还完全处于依从地位。但从共和晚期以来,上层妇女大量参与到政治生活中去,在国家政治事务中发挥了重要的作用,政治地位有了很大提高。尽管这种提高是相对而言的,还不能被无限夸大,但其在女权发展史上仍然占据着极为重要的地位。