提升公共政策的公共性与构建和谐社会

和谐社会是通过一定的制度安排和道德约束来实现的,其中制度安排主要体现为政府公共政策的制定和实施。公共性是公共政策的本质属性,将直接影响公共政策的效用。然而,现实中公共政策常常会表现出公共性的缺失,从而给社会和谐造成一定的负面影响。为此,应当以提升公共政策的公共性为着力点,构建和谐社会。     

中西小石器文化比较

中国和欧洲地区小石器文化的共同点是打片没有固定程序,石器类型以刮削器为主,但在Arago遗址中仍有少量的手斧和显示进步的技术因素,而在东欧和中国的小石器文化中都没有出现。"莫维斯线"的成因可能相当复杂,单纯归于其中任何一种因素都是不全面的。     

导游人员职业道德行为的维度与影响因素

导游人员的职业道德直接影响旅行社的服务质量和旅游目的地形象。本研究通过实证调研,发现：我国导游人员的职业道德行为是一个多维概念,包括职业形象维护、合理导购、服务质量保障、守法行为等多个组成成分;导游人员感知的组织伦理氛围对四类职业道德行为有显著的正向影响,即处在高伦理标准的旅行社中,导游人员更可能表现出符合职业道德标准的行为;组织的员工工作结果控制系统对导游人员的两类职业道德行为＂合理导购＂和＂守法行为＂有显著的负向影响。     

Text as Policy: Measuring Policy Similarity through Bill Text Reuse

The identification of substantively similar policy proposals in legislation is important to scholars of public policy and legislative politics. Manual approaches are prohibitively costly in constructing datasets that accurately represent policymaking across policy domains, jurisdictions, or time. We propose the use of an algorithm that identifies similar sequences of text (i.e., text reuse), applied to legislative text, to measure the similarity of the policy proposals advanced by two bills. We study bills from U.S. state legislatures. We present three ground truth tests, applied to a corpus of 500,000 bills. First, we show that bills introduced by ideologically similar sponsors exhibit a high degree of text reuse, that bills classified by the National Conference of State Legislatures as covering the same policies exhibit a high degree of text reuse, and that rates of text reuse between states correlate with policy diffusion network ties between states. In an empirical application of our similarity measure, we find that Republican state legislators introduce legislation that is more similar to legislation introduced by Republicans in other states, than is legislation introduced by Democratic state legislators to legislation introduced by Democrats in other states.      

The economic effects of big events: Evidence from the great jubilee 2000 in Rome

This paper assesses the short- and long-term economic impact of the 2000 Great Jubilee, the foremost Catholic event occurring every 25 years, on the city of Rome's economy. By applying the synthetic control approach, we find that the value added per capita increases slightly in the short term, whereas in the long term it is not significantly different from what it would have been if Rome had not hosted the Jubilee. However, we do find a significant effect on the employment rate. Consistent with these findings, we document a shift of the local economy toward less productive sectors, such as construction and services requiring lower skills, and an overall productivity loss with respect to the counterfactual scenario. The investment in infrastructure, facilities, and urban refurbishment did not significantly increase housing prices in the long term, with the exception of peripheral residential areas, which experienced an appreciation.     

The nonprofit arts organization concept and its transformation in Korea

ABSTRACT

After the Korean War, both the autocratic and later democratic South Korean governments actively fostered the development of Korea’s arts sector, in part by emulating the organizational and legal structures of U.S. nonprofits. Yet, in this policy transfer, Korea has taken a different path, notably rearticulating the U.S.-style hands-off facilitation model to reflect and accommodate Korean political, institutional, and cultural exigencies. We analyze the effects of the resulting cultural policy on Korean public arts institutions, using documentary evidence and narratives from our case studies of two national arts organizations restructured by the government: The National Theater Company of Korea and the Seoul Arts Center. We employ the concept of cultural statism, conditioned by "culture as glorification," resource dependence, and path dependence, to understand the development of Korea’s public arts sector. Specifically, we consider: the government’s desire to use the arts to enhance its image on an international stage shaped by western liberal democratic values; arts leaders’ desire for reliable support (resource dependence); and the tendancy of Koreans to want to be associated with the stability and prestige of the government (path dependence).     

Gender and Agenda Diversity: Cognitive Differences in Representatives’ Information Processing

A growing body of research examines the role of information processing on decision making in a variety of organizational settings such as authoritarian and democratic governments, subnational organizations, and market systems. Although an increasing number of scholars point to the importance of cognitive capacities of individuals in explaining macrophenomena, scant attention has been devoted to how individual human beings process incoming information. Utilizing original datasets of parliamentary speeches and the biographies of 1,100 members of parliament (MPs) who served in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey between 2002 and 2011, I explore female–male differences in MPs’ issue attention in the parliament. Drawing together the literatures on political agenda setting, gender studies, and cognitive psychology, I argue that women’s higher potential for empathic response to societal issues (i.e., lower cognitive threshold of urgency for social problems) leads them to speak about a wider range of issues facing society and find strong support for this hypothesis. The conclusion considers potential implications of these findings.     

The Politics of Crisis: Deconstructing the Dominant Narratives of the Housing Crisis

This paper considers how dominant narratives of the housing crisis, since the 2008 banking crisis in England, have been created and what actions taken in its name. The paper deconstructs the term “crisis”, highlighting that its meaning has evolved from a critical moment to a protracted narrative which must be understood historically. Through discourse analysis into housing and party political policy, media and think tank reports, we argue that the employment of housing crisis by the government and others perceives it as an outcome of housing supply constraints and over-regulation—narratives that have justified subsequent policy actions aimed at propping up the housing and financial systems, opening new avenues for housing commodification, deregulation and financialisation and reproducing crisis anew. However, we note that these narratives can also break down and space can be created for the articulation of new narratives which refocus housing crises as emerging from inequality and class divisions.     

CANADIAN NOVELS FOR SOCIAL SCIENTISTS AND HISTORIANS

Most discussions about the impact of Afghanistan on the future of NATO focus on transatlantic relations between the United States and the European Union. But for Canada, which is one of the few NATO allies that voluntarily deployed into the south, facing heavy resistance and fighting from Taliban insurgents, the Afghanistan operations have become the most salient dimension of its continued involvement in the Atlantic Alliance. While this may seem surprising, given the cutbacks in Canadian defense spending in the 1990s and the withdrawal of Canada's standing forces from Germany, it should not. For during that so-called dark decade, Canada continued to make major contributions to NATO and European security. This essay argues that Ottawa's multi-faceted military and political support of the “new” NATO of the post–Cold War era continued when the alliance undertook its involvement in Afghanistan. Indeed, in its efforts in support of NATO's mission in Afghanistan, Canada has demonstrated a dedication to the alliance that seems stronger than NATO's collective commitment to itself.