美国国会与《与台湾关系法》的出台

美国国会出台《与台湾关系法》的原因有:相比较中美建交的战略意义,美国国会更注重台湾的“安全”与繁荣;美国国会对于美行政部门在中美建交谈判中的单边主义行动大为不满;美国国会的权力复兴在中国政策上的反映;少数亲台议员的煽动作用。美国总统签署《与台湾关系法》的原因有:美国国会对于台湾利益的强调与美行政部门的本意并不违背;《与台湾关系法》的最后文本是美国府会互动和妥协的产物。     

Policy Feedback and the Politics of the Affordable Care Act

There is a large body of literature devoted to how “policies create politics” and how feedback effects from existing policy legacies shape potential reforms in a particular area. Although much of this literature focuses on self‐reinforcing feedback effects that increase support for existing policies over time, Kent Weaver and his colleagues have recently drawn our attention to self‐undermining effects that can gradually weaken support for such policies. The following contribution explores both self‐reinforcing and self‐undermining policy feedback in relationship to the Affordable Care Act, the most important health‐care reform enacted in the United States since the mid‐1960s. More specifically, the paper draws on the concept of policy feedback to reflect on the political fate of the ACA since its adoption in 2010. We argue that, due in part to its sheer complexity and fragmentation, the ACA generates both self‐reinforcing and self‐undermining feedback effects that, depending of the aspect of the legislation at hand, can either facilitate or impede conservative retrenchment and restructuring. Simultaneously, through a discussion of partisan effects that shape Republican behavior in Congress, we acknowledge the limits of policy feedback in the explanation of policy stability and change.     

Contestability ‘theory’, its links with Australia’s competition policy,and recent international trade and investment agreements

This article examines how contestable market theory (contestability) has come to reconfigure the economic and regulatory concept of competition in order to enhance the compatibility of Australia’s economy with international trade and investment agreements. Australia has recently negotiated and signed a raft of bilateral, plurilateral and regional agreements, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement and the Australia–China Free Trade Agreement. In order to ensure that Australia meets its obligations and commitments to these agreements, two key advisory bodies—the Harper Panel on Competition Policy Review and the Financial System Inquiry—made recommendations, the majority of which were accepted by the government, to ready Australia’s competition governance and economic policy for greater global integration. Such impact is dependent on, among other things, how domestic competition policy meshes with the free market ideology underpinning such international agreements, which favours the breakdown of barriers to markets. Less well known is the role of contestability in radicalising ideology as it countenances monopolisation and privatisation in the guise of market access by justifying the substitution of actual competition with the mere threat of competition. The article concludes that the monopoly power of transnational corporations will be enhanced through the acquiescence of governments to the new governance regime of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which, supported by domestic policy, is set to redraw competition policy in the light of contestability theory.     

Parliament and the Reformation of Edward VI

This article explores the ways in which parliament was used to shape the accelerating protestant reformation undertaken by successive governments under Edward VI. It underlines the significance for constitutional history of Thomas Cromwell's extraordinary promotion of England's parliament to enact the break with Rome and evangelical religious change, and the corresponding use of parliament after Cromwell's fall by conservatives to combat evangelical gains, which at first constituted an obstacle to Protector Somerset's plans. There was a steady deliberate erosion of conservative episcopal votes in the Lords through political man?uvres from 1547; nevertheless, up to late 1549, the weight of conservative opposition in the Lords (without much obvious corresponding traditionalist support in the Commons) dictated crabwise progress in legislation. The convocations of Canterbury and York played a more marginal role in religious change. Somerset's unsuccessful attempt at populist innovation in parliament was, arguably, an important element fuelling the coup against him in autumn 1549. Thereafter, events moved much more rapidly, aided by further compulsory retirements of bishops. Attention is drawn to the frustration felt by some enthusiastic evangelicals at the pace of change dictated by parliament, leading the prominent refugee, Jan ?aski, sarcastically to characterise the Edwardian Reformation in retrospect as ‘parliamentary theology’. From late 1552, divisions between clergy and nobility in the evangelical leadership over plundering of church wealth led to confusion, ill will and the disruption of further progress, even before it was obvious that King Edward was rapidly dying.     

A Changing House: The Life Peerages Act 1958*

The year 2008 marks the 50th anniversary of the Life Peerages Act 1958. The first life peer to obtain his letters patent was Lord Fraser of Lonsdale (Sir William Jocelyn Ian Fraser) on 1 August 1958. The first life peer to be introduced in the Lords was Lord Parker of Waddington (Sir Hubert Lister Parker) on 21 October 1958. The first woman peer to receive her letters patent dated 8 August 1958 was Baroness Wootton of Abinger (Barbara Frances Wootton), and the first woman peer to take her seat in the Lords was Baroness Swanborough (Dame Stella Isaacs, marchioness of Reading), ahead of Baroness Wootton on 21 October 1958. This article gives an overview of the background to life peerages and women peers before 1958, including the importance of two peerage cases, the Wensleydale case 1856 and the Rhondda case 1922. It does so with particular reference to women and the house of lords. It also considers the passage of the act itself; the initial life peers created in 1958; final equality between men and women peers achieved by the Peerage Act 1963; and the impact of life peers on the House since 1958.     

Sir John Coxe Hippisley: That ‘Busy Man’ in the Cause of Catholic Emancipation

The late 18th and early 19th centuries represent a critical time for the emergence of modernity in western political life. Of particular interest is the confluence at that time of increased religious toleration with political reform. Research for an earlier study, Parliamentary Politics of a County and its Town: General Elections in Suffolk and Ipswich in the Eighteenth Century (Westport, 2002), led to an examination of Sir John Coxe Hippisley, MP (1747–1825). In many ways, his political career is an exemplar of the broader conflicts of contemporary English political life writ small. Set between 1790 and 1818, Hippisley's parliamentary career is fascinating, for while he was an active and precocious supporter of catholic emancipation, he represented Sudbury in Suffolk, a borough with a high proportion of protestant dissenters. His constituents found Hippisley's enthusiasm for catholic emancipation repugnant, but not so much so that they could not be convinced to continue to vote for him if the price was right. Consequently a constant and expensive wooing of his constituents marked his parliamentary career. On a national level, Hippisley's constant and public pursuit of catholic emancipation, coupled with his equally avid quest for preferment, led to a series of quixotic contradictions in his political behaviour. Hippisley and his political adventures thus represent a crucial development stage in the movement for religious freedom in England and the west, as well as providing an illuminating case study on the dynamics of local politics in the time leading up to the first great age of reform.     

The Longitude Act of 1714 and the Last Parliament of Queen Anne

Historical literature on the Longitude Act of 1714 has postulated a direct monocausal connection between a British naval disaster off the Scilly Isles in 1707 and the parliamentary enactment seven years later. This article proposes, and provides evidence for, a multicausal interpretation encompassing political, economic, and scientific factors. It argues that the Longitude Act, whose tercentenary was marked in July 2014, was the outcome of general circumstances, the legislation being concurrent with other statutory measures designed to protect shipping at a time of expanding commercial opportunities. The article re‐evaluates the parliamentary process and timetable and considers the role of MPs, men of science and journalists in promoting and seeing through parliament this important statute. It notes that the events in June 1714 mark one of the first instances of expert scientific opinion being heard at parliamentary level. It also evidences an earlier bill in 1712 promoted to protect a time movement invention designed to help in the discovery of the longitude, one of the most controversial subjects in the 18th century.     

宗教与美国革命

长期以来,国内史学界在研究和探讨美国革命时,大多从政治、宪法、经济、贸易、黑奴和民族等视角阐述美国革命的渊源和意义,鲜有宗教因素方面的考量。北美殖民地与英国宗主国在两大宗教问题上存在着冲突,宗教在推动殖民地走上美国革命之路方面发挥了重要作用。法印战争结束后,随着英国在宗教和政治上加大对北美殖民地的干预和控制,宗教自由和政治自由成为一枚硬币的两面,两者不可须臾缺一。正是在这个意义上,殖民地争取宗教自由的斗争促进和推动了美国革命的爆发和发展。     

CONVRT: A COMPUTER PROGRAM FOR THE CONVERSION OF FREE-FIELD DATA TO FIXED-FIELD DATA FORMAT

Abstract

Historians of the U.S. Congress often draw claims from interpretations of legislators’ rhetoric and the outcomes of key votes. In this article, the author tells a cautionary tale: Such strategies ignore the correspondence between roll-call voting on select issues and broader coalitional structures in Congress. He does so by examining contrary positions about a key issue during the New Deal: On the one hand, some researchers claim that reasoned congressional deliberation on the issue of administrative oversight was separate from the prevailing legislative concerns of the day. Other scholars, on the other hand, assert that the prevailing issue dimensions in Congress included administrative oversight. Using a Bayesian measurement method, Ordinary Least Squares, and probit regression, and a novel selection of roll-call data, the author tested these claims, concluding that broader coalitional structures subsumed issues of administration.     

The marriage plot and the plot against the Union: Irish Home Rule and endangered alliances in Henry James's “The Modern Warning”

By the period of the Irish Home Rule crisis – in which Catholics and liberal Anglicans lobbied for limited self-government while northern Presbyterians campaigned to keep Ulster wholly within the Union between Ireland and Great Britain of 1800 – certain of those of pre-Famine northern Irish Protestant origins (the “Scots-” or “Scotch-Irish”) identified with the position of their Presbyterian brethren in Ulster. This identifiably Ulster Protestant engagement with the Home Rule debate is detectable (and generally overlooked) in the Scots-Irish Henry James story “The Modern Warning”. Moreover, equally discounted is the fact that James's story deploys the Irish literary convention of the marriage plot as metaphor for political union in order to grapple with a moment in which that alliance is – in the unionists' view – in danger. This article concludes that the political-union-as-marriage trope still sporadically returns at moments of political crisis in the British Isles, as occurred during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum debate.