北洋政府时期中国矿业法规评述

中华民国建立后,工商业界掀起了振兴实业的浪潮,对法律制定的需要也日渐高涨。有鉴于此,北洋政府积极修订近代经济的专门法律,其中最重要的当属《中华民国矿业条例》,它的制定奠定了中国现代矿业法律制度的基础。民国初年的矿业立法,既继承了晚清相关法律的框架,又吸取了西方法律的物权理念,是中国矿业法律体系走向成熟的重要一步。     

北洋政府时期文官惩戒制度探析

防止官吏违法失职,保证官僚机器的正常运转,北洋政府逐步确立了较为完备的文官惩戒制度。由于此时没有完备的考绩制度,文官惩戒制度在某种意义上而言是对行政官员实施监督的唯一有效的手段。本文将从文官惩戒的创设缘由、过程和制度设计等方面对文官惩戒制度作简要探析。     

北洋政府时期文官惩戒制度探析

为防止官吏违法失职,保证官僚机器的正常运转,北洋政府逐步确立了较为完备的文官惩戒制度。由于此时没有完备的考绩制度,文官惩戒制度在某种意义上而言是对行政官员实施监督的唯一有效的手段。本文将从文官惩戒的创设缘由、过程和制度设计等方面对文官惩戒制度作简要探析。     

北洋政府时期吉林省行政区划变迁述略

1912年至1928年为北洋政府统治时期。这一时期,地方行政区划实行的是省、道、县三级。本文试对北洋政府时期吉林省行政区划即道级政区和县级政区的变迁及其原因作一论述。     

北洋政府时期的乡民防匪

乡民防匪,自古有之。但没有哪个时期能像北洋政府时期那样普遍。北洋政府时期,中国土匪的数量之多达到了历史的顶峰。从当时全国范围来看,“遍全国无一省没有盗匪的,一省之中,又无一县没有盗匪的,一县之中,又无一乡镇没有盗匪的。”该时期的土匪不仅数量多,其危害之烈亦属罕见。     

北洋政府时期顾维钧与中俄建交交涉

北洋政府时期,是中国近代外交史上一个关键性的转折时期,中国政府开始摆脱封建落后的状态,并成功地加入了国际社会。同时中国新一代的职业外交家逐步成熟,顾维钧就是其中的杰出代表,他积极投身于中国的外交事业,对于推动这一时期中俄建交作出了突出的贡献,也使他自己在国际社会享有极高声誉。     

北洋政府时期的九六公债述评

1922年北洋政府对逾亿元的盐余抵押借款进行整理,发行九六公债。九六公债从议起、发行到偿还均遇到困难,遭到非议,并先后造成两次影响很大的公债风潮。北洋时期这样一项重要的公债个案,体现了北洋政府时期发行公债的一些特点并折射出京沪两地证券市场的一些差异。     

北洋政府时期国内公债总额及其作用评析

根据“内债”这一概念的科学界定,北洋政府所发内债总额应为992725449.868元。以往学术界在对北洋政府内债政策的考察和评述中,偏重于揭露其封建性、殖民地性和破坏性等消极作用,而对近代中国内债的两重性分析显得极其缺乏。事实上,北洋时期所发行的内债还是有一定的积极效果的:首先,北洋时期大量国内公债的发行,进一步突破了中国古代惯用的捐输、报效等封建落后的筹款方式,而采用借债的方式应付政府的紧急财政需要,这在财政手段和财政观念上都具有进步意义。其次,从内债的用途上讲,北洋政府所发行公债总额中的1.96亿银元(约占总债额的20%)用之于交通事业建设、教育事业和水利、赈灾等,在一定程度上促进了中国经济的近代化。再次,北洋政府所发公债加速了银行资本的原始积累,促进了中国近代银行业的迅速发展,再由银行资本投资工业资本,促进了中国经济的发展。     

北洋政府时期国家预算的编制与运作

国家预算是北洋政府财政体制的重要组成部分。北洋政府时期出现过两部通过立法机关审议的正式国家预算,六部已由行政机关编成、但未完成立法审议的国家预算案,三部由政府委托机构编出的国家预算参考册。它们多不能反映财政实情,于约束政府开支方面作用亦有限。即使是在被认为预算执行较好的1914、1915年,预算数字也仅有部分约束力。而在其他时期,由于政治混乱、财政困难、地方不听命于中央,国家预算更难起到应有作用。不过,北洋政府时期的预算虽难实现对财政的刚性约束,但常被作为整理财政的起点、各方进行利益分配时的参照和弱势部门争取经费的手段,实际仍以柔性的方式嵌入财政的日常运作中。     

朝野纠葛:北京政府时期的舆论与外交--以关税特别会议为个案的考察

关于北京政府时期的外交,尽管学术界近来已开始有了较为客观的评价,不过对于其背后因素的考察还有待深入。实际上,在北京政府时期,由于特殊的时代背景,各种社会舆论被全面动员起来,以汹涌澎湃之势冲击着外交这一特殊的政治领域,从而形成了近代史上国民外交的黄金时期。于是,由于中央政府统治的虚弱,在其决策者进行外交运作时,就处处受到来自舆论界的影响,这是一个极为明显的历史特色,通过对当时舆论的考察,就会更深层次地探究北京政府外交的两难境地。笔者在考察时,主要以关税特别会议为个案,以上海舆论为核心,以《申报》、《东方杂志》等报刊为第一手资料。     

试析辛亥革命期间《大公报》的舆论导向——以《君主民主立宪问题之解决》征文为中心

1911年10月10日武昌首义爆发,舆论界有摇旗呐喊的支持者,也有发出质疑之声的反对者,造成这一现象的原因各异。北方大报《大公报》对革命的态度,在辛亥革命期间的日常报道和《君主民主立宪问题之解决》的征文活动过程中一览无余,即使在起义爆发之后全国争相响应,革命一发而不可收拾之时,英敛之主持下的《大公报》仍然坚持着一以贯之的君主立宪理想。有奖征文不但是报纸和社会之间互动的有效方式,亦成为报纸引导舆论导向、传播自身理念的又一途径。     

The Determinants of Public Policy: What Matters and How Much

This article is a research synthesis addressing four questions critical to our understanding of the determinants of public policy. How often and how strongly do hypothetical determinants of policy—public opinion, interest groups, the party balance, and other factors—actually influence policy? Do some hypothetical determinants of policy have more influence than others? Does the way we measure policy affect our ability to explain it? And is there a connection between how strongly particular variables affect policy, and how much effort we devote to studying them? It turns out that variables hypothesized to influence policy more often than not have no effect. When variables do affect policy, researchers very seldom say anything about how much impact they have. Variables that convey the most information to policymakers about what the public wants have a greater impact than other variables, but it is less clear how the measurement of policy affects our findings. Researchers pay much attention to hypothetical determinants of policy unlikely to matter very much, and little attention to those likely to be the most important. Implications for future research are considered.     

The Effects of Beneficiary Targeting on Public Support for Social Policies

We assess the tendency for the public to use group‐centric policy evaluations with evidence from a survey experiment concerning two issues within the social policy domain, health care and aid to cities. By randomly varying target group identity within each issue and using both negatively and positively regarded groups our evidence shows that differences exist in the tendency for members of the public to use group‐centric heuristics. Group‐centric evaluations are related to party identification and political ideology. Across both issues conservatives and Republicans are more likely than liberals or Democrats to adopt a group‐centric heuristic. Partisan and ideological differences suggest that established theories miss the mark by emphasizing how universal policy designs are preferred to designs that target unpopular groups.     

戊戌政变后的社会舆论

戊戌政变后,虽有统治者严酷的言禁,但社会各界仍对相继发生的事件相当关注,以各种方式和途径表达自己的见解和态度。当时参与较多的报纸,如《中外日报》、《国闻报》、《申报》、《知新报》和《清议报》等都刊登了相关报道和文章,从不同立场对政变作出各种反应和思考。与此同时,包括各级官员、各类知识分子和各界民众在内的社会各阶层人士,或公开或私下表达自己的意见和态度。这些出自各方面的舆论,说明政变后的社会舆论比较复杂,反映了社会各阶层对时局的不同主张以及先进与落后势力的复杂斗争。     

Political Attention and Public Spending in the United States

According to Jones and Baumgartner's disproportionate information processing model, it is crucial to study fluctuations in congressional attention over time and across policy issues to understand congressional policy decisions including decisions on the federal budget. Drawing on classical ideas about reelection-oriented behavior, on the one hand, and the blocking power of federal agencies, on the other, this paper extends and specifies the attention-spending predictions of the disproportionate information processing model. Specifically, spending effects of congressional attention shifts are argued to be crucially dependent on both the spending preferences expressed by the U.S. public and on pressure from spending advocates. An empirical evaluation of the association between changes in congressional attention measures and federal budget appropriations across 12 spending domains and 33 years (1970–2003) supports this conditional hypothesis derived from the extended disproportionate information processing model.     

Russian geopolitical culture and public opinion: the masks of Proteus revisited

In this paper, we build on the work of Graham Smith, who was developing a critical geopolitics of Russia in his posthumous paper of 1999, published in this journal. Like Smith, we link the evolving geopolitical orientations of Russia to the search for a post-Soviet identity amongst its citizens and its political leadership. While Smith saw a core concept in Russian geopolitics having Protean masks, it is the leadership of the Russian state, specifically President Putin, who has successfully adopted a Protean strategy to appeal to the disparate elements of the Russian geopolitical spectrum. Based on a nationwide survey in spring 2002, we identify six clusters in Russian public opinion by socio-demographic characteristics and we connect each cluster to the main geopolitical orientations competing in contemporary Russia, including democratic statism and the increasingly marginalized Eurasianism that formed the core subject of Smith's paper.     

论晚明东林党的舆论活动及其影响

晚明是中国古代舆论最活跃的时期,其中又以东林党的舆论力量最为显著。从万历初年到天启末年,东林党人的舆论活动经历了三个阶段。东林党围绕官员诠选、官员考察、对阁臣的批判、以学术促清议等方面开展了一系列舆论活动,其主张在邸报发抄、印刷刻传和书信交流等方式的扩散之下,迅速流通于士林。东林党以舆论为载体,形成了与朝廷对峙和对话的政治力量。东林党的舆论活动加剧了明政府的党争态势,加速了官僚系统的分裂,不利于政治局面的稳定。但东林党的舆论主导了当时的社会思潮,对社会风气尤其是士大夫的气节产生了一种鼓舞作用。     

Positive Returns and Equilibrium: Simultaneous Feedback Between Public Opinion and Social Policy

This paper pushes forward political research from across disciplines seeking to understand the linkages between public opinion and social policy in democracies. It considers the thermostatic and the increasing returns perspectives as pointing toward a potentially stable set of effects running between opinion and policy. Both theoretical perspectives argue that opinion and policy are reciprocally causal, feeding back on one another. This is a general argument found in opinion‐policy literatures. However, much empirical research claims to model “feedback” effects when actually using separate unidirectional models of opinion and policy. Only a small body of research addresses opinion‐policy endogeneity directly. In this paper I consider an opinion‐policy system with simultaneous feedback and without lags. I argue that there is a theoretical equilibrium in the relationship of opinion and policy underlying the otherwise cyclical processes that link them. Given that available cross‐national data are cross‐sectional and provide limited degrees of freedom, an ideal theoretical model must be somewhat constrained in order to arrive at empirically meaningful results. In this challenging and exploratory undertaking I hope to open up the possibility of a general system of effects between public opinion and social policy and how to model them in future research. I focus on social welfare policy as it is highly salient to public interests and a costly area of government budgets, making it an area of contentious policymaking. Social policy is also a major part of the thermostatic model of opinion and policy, which was recently extended to the cross‐national comparative context (Wlezien & Soroka, 2012) providing a critical predecessor to this paper because identification of equilibrium between public opinion and social policy in any given society is greatly enhanced through comparison with other societies. This counterfactual approach helps to identify opinion‐policy patterns that may not change much within societies, but can be seen as taking on discrete trajectories between societies.     

About time: age,period, and cohort effects on support for Quebec sovereignty

Can age, period and cohort effects help explain support for Quebec sovereignty? Previous work on this question has focused mostly on the effects of age and cohort. We contribute to this debate by adding a period perspective. As such, our study is the first to investigate the impact of age, cohort and period effects in a single study of opinion towards sovereignty in Quebec. We take advantage of an original dataset that includes survey data collected between 1985 and 2012. We use these data to examine the impact of age, birth year and survey year on support for this constitutional option among francophone Quebeckers. Our results are in line with previous work: we show that younger Quebeckers are more likely to support sovereignty, and that some cohorts – namely, respondents born between 1945 and 1959 – are also more likely to favour this option. Perhaps more surprisingly, we find that specific events are comparatively the most important factor to explain fluctuations in Quebeckers' attitudes towards sovereignty.