政治行政两分:起源、争议与应用

作为公共行政的主要基石,"政治行政两分"源于欧洲,威尔逊和古德诺对此进行过详细阐释.它可被理解为政策制定和政策执行两种活动,也可被理解为政治家和行政人员两类人,还可被理解为目标和手段.今天的行政环境迥异于威尔逊时期,通过对行政进行程序上的约束或者引入公众的控制和监督,都是现代社会对两分法的修补.两分法在美国的典型应用是布郎洛委员会和议会经理制."政治行政两分"有助于人们更好地理解政府的运转,没有它,许多理论的发展是不可能的.     

FEAR IN THE NEWS

Fear pervades popular culture and the news media. Whether used as a noun, verb, adverb, or adjective, an ongoing study finds that the word "fear'pervades news reports across all sections of newspapers, and is shown to move or "travel'from one topic to another. The use of fear and the thematic emphases spawned by entertainment formats are consistent with a "discourse of fear,'or the pervasive communication, symbolic awareness and expectation that danger and risk are a central feature of the effective environment. A qualitative content analysis of a decade of news coverage in The Arizona Republic and several other major American news media (e.g., the Los Angeles Times , and ABC News) reveals that the word "fear'appears more often than it did several years ago, particularly in headlines, where its use has more than doubled. Comparative materials obtained through the Lexis/Nexis information base also reveals that certain themes are associated with a shifting focus of fear over the years (e.g., violence, drugs, AIDS), with the most recent increases associated with reports about children. Analysis suggests that this use of fear is consistent with popular culture oriented to pursuing a "problem frame'and entertainment formats, which also have social implications for social policy and reliance on formal agents of social control.     

Band Spectral Regression with Trending Data

Band spectral regression with both deterministic and stochastic trends is considered. It is shown that trend removal by regression in the time domain prior to band spectral regression can lead to biased and inconsistent estimates in models with frequency dependent coefficients. Both semiparametric and nonparametric regression formulations are considered, the latter including general systems of two‐sided distributed lags such as those arising in lead and lag regressions. The bias problem arises through omitted variables and is avoided by careful specification of the regression equation. Trend removal in the frequency domain is shown to be a convenient option in practice. An asymptotic theory is developed and the two cases of stationary data and cointegrated nonstationary data are compared. In the latter case, a levels and differences regression formulation is shown to be useful in estimating the frequency response function at nonzero as well as zero frequencies.     

Robustness and Precision: How Data Quality May Influence Key Dependent Variables in Infant Eye‐Tracker Analyses

In recent years, eye‐tracking has become a popular method for drawing conclusions about infant cognition. Relatively little attention has been paid, however, to methodological issues associated with infant eye‐tracking. Here, we consider the possibility that systematic differences in the quality of raw eye‐tracking data obtained from different populations and individuals might create the impression of differences in gaze behavior, without this actually being the case. First, we show that lower quality eye‐tracking data are obtained from populations who are younger and populations who are more fidgety and that data quality declines during the testing session. Second, we assess how these differences in data quality might influence key dependent variables in eye‐tracking analyses. We show that lower precision data can appear to suggest a reduced likelihood to look at the eyes in a face relative to the mouth. We also show that less robust tracking may manifest as slower reaction time latencies (e.g., time to first fixation). Finally, we show that less robust data can manifest as shorter first look/visit duration. We argue that data quality should be reported in all analyses of infant eye‐tracking data and/or that steps should be taken to control for data quality before performing final analyses.     

Comparing the Social Attitudes of Young Adult Evangelicals in Canada and the United States: Differences in Subcultural Boundaries among Evangelical School Graduates

In this study, we examine social trust and the social attitudes of young adult evangelicals in the United States and Canada to better understand how national context shapes these attitudes. While some differences are predictable in light of national cultural differences, other differences between Canadian evangelical school graduates and American evangelical school graduates do not mirror national differences in the larger population of public school graduates. Here we suggest that differences are better understood by the ways evangelicals draw selectively from their cultural (and religious subcultural) repertoires to create unique boundaries. In general, we find lower levels of social trust and more restrictive subcultural boundaries in the United States.     

Subalterns ‘speak’: migrant bodies,and the performativity of the arts

ABSTRACT

The contemporary globalizing world has unleashed new flows of migrant labour, among which are young women working in homes. As is well known, many find themselves in a situation of virtual slavery, having no juridical protections against both physical and emotional abuse, and against being held in servitude against their wills. While the situation of migrant domestic workers is increasingly well known, there has been little analysis of how their precarious lives look from their points of view and the complex set of affects and relations that make their lives meaningful. The following investigation treats the way their precarity can become political critique. It focuses on a critical locus of enunciation supplied by the conditions of migrant female domestic workers as it is articulated not in ethnographic work that solicits their actual voices, but through a focus on literary and cinematic texts in which the female protagonists compare domestic servitude to colonialism (in the case of Ousmane Sembene’s film Black Girl) and to war crimes (in the case of Zadie Smith’s story, The embassy of Cambodia). Mediated with some thoughts from Gayatri Spivak’s Can the subaltern speak and Mahasweta Devi’s short story The breast-giver, we also reflect on the ethical significance of aesthetic interruptions through other genres as illustrated by our reading of images from Ramiro Gomez’s Happy Hills painting and cardboard cutting series. In effect, the artistic texts we analyse raise an important ethico-political question regarding the effect of capitalist modernization on ethical life while provoking us to recognize the ethical weight of proximate and distant others.     

Adaptive nonparametric density estimation with missing observations

It is well known that if some observations in a sample from the probability density are not available, then in general the density cannot be estimated. A possible remedy is to use an auxiliary variable that explains the missing mechanism. For this setting a data-driven estimator is proposed that mimics performance of an oracle that knows all observations from the sample. It is also proved that the estimator adapts to unknown smoothness of the density and its mean integrated squared error converges with a minimax rate. A numerical study, together with the analysis of a real data, shows that the estimator is feasible for small samples.     

Santé au travail en Thaïlande: le processus de transition

La Thaïlande a connu une transition économique rapide, de l'agriculture aux secteurs manufacturier et tertiaire, puis vers l'emploi plus formel. Toutefois, la réglementation du marché du travail et la représentation des salariés sont moins affirmées que dans les pays développés, où cette transition s'est effectuée graduellement et plus lentement, il y a plusieurs décennies. Les auteurs examinent le renforcement des politiques et de la législation thaïlandaise sur la sécurité et la santé au travail en réponse aux normes internationales du travail, à l'adoption d'une nouvelle constitution démocratique, à la crainte d'embargos commerciaux étrangers et aux accidents mortels du travail. Ils concluent en identifiant les principaux défis auxquels sont confrontés les décideurs politiques, y compris l'application de la législation et les méthodes pour mesurer les nouveaux risques professionnels sur la santé mentale et physique des travailleurs.     

Talent,the Staying Power of Racism,and Transformation: Trans-Atlantic Observations

Abstract

This paper argues that the transformation of universities will not happen until the central issue of racial discrimination is consciously addressed at Predominantly White Universities (PWUs) in South Africa. The paper makes a concerted effort to address issues that reveal why Black faculty members in North American and South African academies have had to struggle to make their presence felt as far back as the beginning of the twentieth century. It does this by looking initially at the history of intelligence testing the early pioneering South African Black faculty members, and by comparing the current contemporary scenes of both societies insofar as what African American and Black South African faculty members undergo. The paper concludes by positing that only in the event of a strong anti-racist agenda will genuine transformation of the PWUs be possible without alienating Black talent.