Legislative responses to wrongful conviction: Do partisan principals and advocacy efforts influence state-level criminal justice policy?

The number of discovered wrongful criminal convictions (and resulting exonerations) has increased over the past decade. These cases erode public confidence in the criminal justice system and trust in the rule of law. Many states have adopted laws that aim to reduce system errors but no study has examined why some states appear more willing to provide due process protections against wrongful convictions than others. Findings from regression estimates suggest that states with a Republican controlled legislature or more Republican voters are less likely to pass these laws while the presence of advocacy organizations that are part of the ‘innocence movement’ make legislative change more likely. We thus identify important differences in the political and social context between U.S. states that influence the adoption of criminal justice policies.     

Why do American Indians vote Democratic?

We examine the relationship between a relatively large population of American Indians in eastern Oklahoma and the slow pace of that region's partisan realignment. With a 2012 exit poll, we empirically examine whether American Indians’ cultural ties and their socio-economic characteristics affected their vote choices. Because of their greater poverty, American Indians are more economically progressive and vote more Democratic than their white counterparts.     

汉末政治风暴与“处士”的文化表现

汉末社会的激烈动荡中,处士作为"党人"的对照,在历史记忆中保留了鲜明的文化形象。这一情形,可以看作儒学群体分流的迹象之一。与激进的"党人"不同,"处士"对政治取全面回避的态度,坚守平民立场,以纯正的在野方式始终保持和执政者的距离,始终不与当权者合作,不为最高执政集团服务,表现出"崛然独立"的风格。历史文献称他们彻底的"独立"意识的表现为"绝迹"。他们与"党锢之祸"受害者形成鲜明对比的消极倾向,研究者也有探索其心理背景的必要。后世对汉末"处士"的评价各有褒贬,亦表现出不同历史时期、不同社会人等、不同文化倾向的差异。     

Partisan strength,political trust and generalized trust in the United States: An analysis of the General Social Survey, 1972–2014

The literature on political parties suggests that strong partisan identities are associated with citizens’ effective interaction with the political system, and with higher levels of political trust. Traditionally, party identity therefore is seen as a mechanism that allows for political integration. Simultaneously, however, political parties have gained recent attention for their role in promoting societal polarization by reinforcing competing and even antagonistic group identities. This article uses General Social Survey data from 1972 – 2014 to investigate the relationship between partisan strength and both political and generalized trust. The findings show that increases in partisan strength are positively related to political trust, but negatively related to generalized trust. This suggests that while partisan strength is indeed an important linkage mechanism for the political system, it is also associated with a tendency toward social polarization, and this corrosive effect thus far has not gained sufficient attention in literature on party identity.     

Partisan Effects on Welfare State Retrenchment: Empirical Evidence from a Measurement of Government Intentions

The effect of partisanship is disputed in the literature on welfare state retrenchment. The ‘new politics’ school argues that partisan conflicts are irrelevant to the understanding of retrenchment, but the second generation of retrenchment research concludes that such conflicts are still important. We engage in this debate by introducing a new empirical approach. Our method provides a necessary but currently missing link in the second generation of retrenchment studies which theorize on the input side of welfare state reform but conduct empirical studies on the output side. Our empirical approach entails a new type of data, compiled on the basis of content analysis of adopted laws, and we analyze the intentions pursued by incumbent governments in social policy‐making. Based on an empirical study, we find partisan effects in programmes protecting against social risks that are disproportionally distributed among social strata.     

后汉“党锢之祸”起因新探

“党锢之祸”是东汉末年发生的重大政治事件。从某种程度而言,党锢事件影响了之后的历史走向,魏晋南北朝的士人气象亦由此而定。因而“党锢之祸”成因的研究对于深入了解后汉末年的政治史颇具意义。而且,党锢事件的爆发并非由宦官一手促成,士大夫阶层本身亦有问题。“党锢之祸”主要由以下三个方面造成：一是东汉皇权与地方士族的冲突;二是宦官集团对党人集团利益的侵犯;三是党人“错误”的政治理念。     

半岛战争——初探伊比利亚半岛人民的抗法斗争

自1807年延续至1814年的半岛战争不仅在摧毁拿破仑帝国,而且在改变整个欧洲的经济和政治结构方面都起了重要的作用。然而至今国内还未见有关这方面的力作。本文依据我在法国进行国际学术交流期间所收集到的历史文件对此次战争的起源及过程作了详尽的描述。     

Selective exposure to partisan media: Moderating factors in evaluations of the president

The conditions in which moderating factors – media trust, mediabias, and political ideology – increase or limit the approval ratings of a politician in a partisan media environment were investigated using data obtained from the 2010 Pew survey. The findings show that media trust and media bias intensify negative presidential evaluations among consumers of conservative news programs, whereas these factors do not influence presidential approval among consumers of liberal news programs. The findings also reveal that conservatives tend to choose to be exposed to news messages that are congenial to their ideological orientations, while liberals select a more balanced diet of news messages. This study proposes that moderating factors have different effects on conservative and liberal news consumers.     

Partisan ideology,veto players and their combined effect on productive and protective welfare policy: how the left still matters after all?

Quantitative analysis of the question whether ‘parties still matter’ has largely focused on the dynamics of aggregated expenditure-based dependent variables or protective welfare policies such as unemployment, sickness and family benefits. This article develops a series of pooled time-series cross-section regression specifications predicting changes in disaggregated protective welfare policies alongside productive welfare policies, namely family services, active labour market programmes and public education, across 17 Western democracies (1971–2010). In so doing, it employs the latest Comparative Manifesto Project [Volkens, A., P. Lehmann, N. Merz, S. Regel, and A. Werner. 2014. The Manifesto Data Collection. Manifesto Project (MRG/CMP/MARPOR). Version 2014b. Berlin: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB). Accessed January 2015. https://manifestoproject.wzb.eu/information/information] and Veto Player [Jahn, D., T. Behm, N. Düpont, and C. Oberst. 2012. Parties, Institutions & Preferences: Veto Player (Annual), Version 2012–02. Accessed January 2015. http://comparativepolitics.uni-greifswald.de/data.html] data to explore the effect of the ideological position of prime ministers’ parties, veto players and their combined effect on these welfare policy areas. The article confirms that Left and Right governments ceased to make any substantive difference for protective welfare policies from the early 1980s onwards. Yet, it also finds that positive Left partisan effects have largely persisted for productive welfare policies. In the era of global competition, Left party ideology has continued to be an important factor in realising a social investment perspective in practice; in terms of the expansion of family services, its effects have been contingent on the veto power Left prime ministers faced.