bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Eye Tests and Stretcher Drill
Authors: Meyer Jessica
Published: March 2019

This chapter examines the ways in which men were recruited to the Royal Army Medical Corps throughout the period 1914 to 1918 using both official documentation relating to recruitment policy and personal recollections of the recruitment process. It then examines training manuals, both official and unofficial, to explore how civilian recruits were turned into servicemen with particular forms of caregiving expertise. In particular, it examines how these men’s training distinguished them not only from civilian society but also arms-bearing combatant units through the focus on specific forms of training and knowledge acquisition. In doing so, it explores questions of chance and continuity in the identity of the Corps, demonstrating how the status of military medicine altered over the course of the war, with consequences for the subjective masculine identities of the men who served in the ranks of the RAMC.
The Ramifications of the War Origins Debate
Authors: Ingram Norman
Published: March 2019

The debate on war origins had immediate political repercussions for the Ligue des droits de l’homme. The Ligue’s first wartime Congress (November 1916) debated the ‘conditions for a lasting peace’. The debate revolved around two issues: France’s relationship with its autocratic, undemocratic ally, imperial Russia, and in particular how to square support for all that the League stood for with Russia’s treatment of its oppressed minorities, especially the Poles; and secondly, calls for a negotiated end to the war. The debate showed how the LDH was divided between a majority which believed that arbitration could only be applied in times of peace and a minority which demanded an immediate end to the carnage. It also underlined the minority’s deep suspicion of Russia, which was to have deleterious effects twenty years later. The divisions between minority and majority had solidified by the end of the war.
The Wounds of War (1919–24)
Authors: Ingram Norman
Published: March 2019

The beginning of the interwar period brought an intensification of the war guilt debate within the Ligue des droits de l’homme. There was vigorous discussion of the question of the Russian general mobilization in 1914. Repeated attempts by the Ligue’s minority to extract a commitment to seek revision of the Versailles Treaty failed. The most that the majority would concede was that the Treaty was legally flawed because it had been forced on Germany, but it continued to believe that the Treaty expressed a valid moral and historical point. The Ligue demanded—unsuccessfully—the publication of French documents relating to the outbreak of the war. The majority continued to argue that there was no point in opening a debate on war origins, although by the end of 1924 it is clear that it was much less confident in the rectitude of its position.
EU Fiscal Policy Coordination in Hard Times
Authors: Rommerskirchen Charlotte
Published: March 2019

What happens to European Union (EU) fiscal policy coordination in hard times? Recent accounts of the EU have portrayed the Union as plagued by an austerity regime and rampant moral hazard. Charlotte Rommerskirchen provides an alternative account of economic cooperation in Europe during the Great Recession and the European Debt Crisis. Drawing on Mancur Olson’s theory of collective action, EU Fiscal Policy Coordination in Hard Times combines evidence from statistical analysis and extensive interviews with key players. This book reaches an unexpected conclusion regarding the state of collective action in times of crises: Free riding was not rife. Despite heated accusations, member states’ crisis policies matched their fiscal room for maneuver. The real collective action failure is instead diagnosed in the inability to sanction free riders at the EU level and empowering erratic bond markets to discipline governments.
Market Discipline
Authors: Rommerskirchen Charlotte
Published: March 2019

Free riding is endemic. But it is not the type of first-order free riding that politicians and EU officials publicly chastised. Instead, fiscal policy coordination is burdened by a serious internal enforcement problem; that is, second-order free riding. The argument presented here is different from the usual decrying of a lack of enforcement in fiscal policy coordination, which is said to invite member states to engage in rampant fiscal free riding. This chapter contests that without internal enforcement within the EU, fiscal policy coordination has come to rely on market discipline with dire consequences for its members. The chapter demonstrates that, in contrast to fiscal rules and intergovernmental agreements, the incentives provided by market discipline shape public finances.
Just Words
Authors: McGowan Mary Kate
Published: March 2019

We all know that speech is harmful but we need to be as clear as possible about what the harms are and how the speech in question brings about those harms. Clarity on these two points is important for jurisprudential reasons. It is also important for social, political, and moral reasons. Just Words identifies a previously overlooked mechanism by which speech constitutes, rather than merely causes, harm. Speech constitutes harm when it enacts a norm that prescribes that harm (so that following the norm brings about the harm). Just Words argues that there is a ubiquitous but hidden way that speech enacts norms thereby highlighting important but previously overlooked constitutive connections between speech and harm. The investigation begins in the kinematics of conversation where it is argued that conversational contributions (surreptitiously but routinely) enact highly localized norms for the very conversation to which they contribute. It is then argued that the phenomenon generalizes to extra-conversational social practices. Just Words explores many categories of speech including sexist remarks, racist hate speech, pornography, verbal triggers for stereotype threat, micro-aggressions, political dog whistles, SLAM poetry, and even the hanging of posters. It also explores a variety of harms including oppression, subordination, discrimination, domination, harassment, and marginalization. In addition to exploring how speech enacts such harms, Just Words also explores ways to remedy those harms.
On Pornography
Authors: McGowan Mary Kate
Published: March 2019

This chapter uses the framework of covert exercitives to explore potential harms of actions involving certain types of pornography. The sorts of pornography of interest are clarified and the pornographic is shown to be context sensitive. This chapter focuses on the harms of subordination and silencing. Langton’s account of the subordinating force of pornography is critically assessed. An alternative model, relying on the covert exercitive, is presented and its advantages are illustrated using real world examples from the law. Various kinds of silencing are identified, the speech act of refusal is clarified, and both causal and constitutive connections between actions involving pornography, on the one hand, and the harms of subordination and silencing, on the other, are here discussed.
Free Will and the Burden of Proof
Authors: Lycan William G.
Published: March 2019

Moore’s method is deployed in favor of the compatibility of free will with causal determinism. It is pointed out that the compatibilism issue has always been set up prejudicially: the compatibilist has been required to offer an analysis of “free action” that both is correct and exhibits the compatibility with determinism. This chapter argues that according to sound dialectical procedure, but contrary to tradition, the incompatibilist bears the burden of proof, and that an incompatibilist argument will contain a bare philosophical assumption that should be rejected on Moorean grounds. (Moreover, a compatibilist not only need not but should not attempt an analysis of “free action.”) All this is illustrated by a close examination of the impressive “Consequence argument” for incompatibilism.
Intuitions and Coherentism
Authors: Lycan William G.
Published: March 2019

The method of reflective equilibrium is a special case of explanatory-coherentist epistemology. This chapter defends explanatory coherentism against pertinent objections: Keith Lehrer’s problem regarding the data base; the charge of unacceptable conservatism; Stich’s threat of relativism; Goldman’s problem of wild and crazy beliefs; and Hacking’s doubt that explanatory virtues such as simplicity have anything to do with truth. The epistemological picture defended in this book does not incur the traditional problem of “getting from” one’s own sensory experiences to the external world, and so offers an unusual answer to the skeptic. But if one were to engage that problem, the explanatory coherentist has a viable approach.
System
Authors: Merkel Wolfgang , Kollmorgen Raj , Wagener Hans-Jürgen
Published: March 2019

This chapter explores the system concept, which refers to the totality of structures (institutions) and rules (procedures) that place political and social actors (parties, associations, organizations, individuals) in rule-guided interactions with one another in order to fulfil system-preserving functions and reproduce them constantly in a circuit-like manner. Complexity is the raison d’être of system construction. If one were to try to describe society as a whole, one could not get around the sheer multiplicity of constitutive elements and their possible relationships. System-theoretical approaches to social change, e.g., by Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann, shed light on the interrelations between the functional requirements of socio-economic systems and the formation of social and political structures that meet these requirements. The example of the economic system illustrates that transformation as a consciously designed process of system change is possible only within narrow bounds. The recursive structure of relationships within the system and the linkages with the environment generally prevent a sensible intervention from the outside or a cybernetic control from the inside over highly complex processes.
Modernization Theories
Authors: Kollmorgen Raj
Published: March 2019

Modernization theories represent one of the most important and most controversial approaches in transformation research. After their golden age in the 1950s and 1960s, they came under pressure by alternative approaches like World-Systems Analysis or actor-centred transition approaches. But modernization theories have experienced a renaissance with the epochal threshold of 1989/90 and the subsequent wave of democratization. Today, three major currents can be identified: neo-evolutionist approaches, structuralist modernization theory, and the approach of multiple modernities or comparative historical sociology. They consider transformation as a specific type of accelerated transition of traditional, partly, or alternatively modernized societies to hegemonic social modernity. Although all approaches have elaborated an explanatory interpretation framework for empirical analysis often combining various social levels, dimensions, and factors (like structures and actors, or economic and cultural factors), there is considerable need for further research and self-reflection concerning normative foundations, causal mechanisms, and their empirical operationalization, as well as ‘postmodern’ challenges.
Cultural Approaches
Authors: Kubik Jan
Published: March 2019

The task of this chapter is to delineate the role of culture in transformations. First, two conceptualizations of culture are introduced: socio-psychological (syndrome of attitudes) and semiotic (web of meanings). Second, the problem of prime movers of transformations is discussed: are they material-economic or cultural? Or perhaps both, in a complex interaction? Third, the significance of agency is highlighted. The point is not to study abstract cultural (ideational) ‘forces’ to determine their relative impact, but rather to reconstruct specific meaning-creating actions of concrete agents and try to gauge their influence on people’s attitudes. Fourth, the different role of culture in three stages of transformation (breakdown, power transfer, and consolidation of a new system) is examined. Both conceptualizations of culture are utilized. Finally, a theory of cultural trauma and a theory of delayed cultural countertransformation are briefly introduced.
Micro-Qualitative Research
Authors: Hildenbrand Bruno
Published: March 2019

In their life worlds people create social structures whose objectifications, in turn, create people. In the light of this assumption, there can be no contradiction between a microsocial or macrosocial approach to the analysis of society. In processes of transformation which are understood as radical changes, the ‘routine grounds of everyday activities’ (Garfinkel) are challenged. As a consequence, processes of transformation are key to the analysis of structures of the life world as created by actors. From this point of view the case is the centre stage of sociological analysis. Foundations of this proposition can be found in symbolic interactionism as well as in a sociology which is based on phenomenological approaches. The appropriate methodologies are grounded theory, ethnomethodological conversational analysis, and objective hermeneutics, each with its own form of sequential analysis. Each methodology has its own strengths and weaknesses which are pointed out in this chapter.
State-socialist Transformations in the Twentieth Century
Authors: Segert Dieter
Published: March 2019

This chapter examines European state socialism, which emerged in the Russian Revolution of 1917. It has two roots, the social democratic labour movement and specific problems of underdeveloped, peripheral capitalist societies. While generally relying on Marx, the Bolsheviks invented the doctrine of the ‘new type of party’. After the conquest and stabilization of power, they built in Russia the institutions of classical state socialism and led the country on a specific path of modernization. After 1945, there was a second wave of state-socialist transformation in eight states of East Central and South East Europe. In all countries except Yugoslavia, the formal institutions of the Soviet model were established but the informal practices between countries differed considerably. At the end of the chapter, the blind spots and desiderata of three scholarly interpretations of state socialism are discussed.
Democratic Transformations after the Second World War
Authors: Merkel Wolfgang , Gerschewski Johannes
Published: March 2019

This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of why and how democratic transformations took place after the Second World War. The chapter is divided into three parts. First, it discusses the external and internal factors that have led to the end of autocratic regimes. It emphasizes the role of external democracy promotion as well as prior experience with democracy and structural characteristics of the pre-existing autocratic regime. Second, it analyses the institutionalization phase, distinguishing between the relevant actors, procedures, and institutions. Third, it discusses the consolidation phase and differentiates between constitutional consolidation, representative consolidation, behavioural consolidation, and the consolidation of civil society. The chapter illustrates the reasoning with the three paradigmatic cases of postwar Germany, Italy, and Japan.
Law
Authors: Kirchner Christian , Ehmke David
Published: March 2019

Law is an instrument as well as a product of change. This chapter investigates the role of informal and formal rules for a political, social, and/or economic transformation. The focus is on the real impact, i.e., the actual enforcement of rules and the interplay of formal and informal rules. Just as the way different rules are made and enforced has to be considered, so too does the type of transformation, e.g., as to whether a law is created as part of a genuine evolution process or imported as a legal transplant from another jurisdiction. The goal is a thorough understanding of how rules might be established and enforced to shape a political, social, and/or economic transformation.
Autocracy Promotion
Authors: Kästner Antje
Published: March 2019

By analogy with democracy promotion, this chapter explores the concept of autocracy promotion, referring to policy measures that have the potential to influence another country’s political system with a view to hampering democratization processes or to fostering autocratic regimes. Initially, it is explained that, although autocracy promotion empirically represents nothing new, the term only entered the scientific discourse following the colour revolutions in the former Soviet Union. Subsequently, a narrow and a wide definition of autocracy promotion are presented and illustrated with examples. Political autocracy promotion is focused on potential mobilization events like elections or mass protests and employs the same mechanisms that autocrats employ internally to consolidate their power: they co-opt or suppress the opposition and manipulate public opinion in favour of the incumbent. In contrast, development-oriented autocracy promotion encompasses all measures that potentially enhance the performance of a non-democratic government, thus helping it to stay in power.
Elections and Transformation
Authors: Schedler Andreas
Published: March 2019

Competitive political elections are frequent objects of cynicism, but also carriers of great transformative expectations. This chapter reviews the comparative literature about their transformational power in three realms. It discusses the democratizing power of multiparty elections in electoral authoritarian regimes; the capacity of elections to deepen the democratic quality of minimal democracies; and their civilizing power in the face of democratic state repression and societal violence. In all three areas, the balance is sobering. The mere existence of competitive elections does not lead to either democratizing or civilizing progress. Their actual transformative power depends on the willingness and capacity of democratic actors to exploit the institutional opportunities they offer.
Institutional Transfer
Authors: Wagener Hans-Jürgen
Published: March 2019

This chapter examines institutional transfer, a special form of the knowledge diffusion process and an imitation of best practices that follows the model of the somewhat better-studied technology transfer. Central to the concept is the deliberate reference to a foreign model. The most common motive for institutional transfer is catch-up modernization and the urgent need for developed institutions. There are numerous examples of such transfers: Japan, Turkey, but also postcommunist Eastern Europe, where expectation of EU membership speeded up the transition process. A central problem is the fact that political, economic, and social institutions are embedded in a social context. They correspond to certain social values. Where they are too far apart from the latter transplanted institutions are hardly adaptable.
Military Intervention
Authors: Grimm Sonja
Published: March 2019

A military intervention can open a window of opportunity for the reorganization of a political system. Military intervention through outside forces into sovereign states is strictly limited in international law. Since the end of the Cold War, however, the UN Security Council has begun to classify gross human rights violations in intrastate and substate armed conflicts increasingly as a threat to world peace and international security and mandated humanitarian interventions on the basis of a so-called responsibility to protect (R2P). Such peace-enforcement missions can trigger a regime change. They nowadays include substantial state-building efforts under external oversight, but rarely if ever lead to successful democratization.
Privatization
Authors: Dallago Bruno , Guglielmetti Chiara
Published: March 2019

Privatization was a fundamental component of the process of transformation in Central and Eastern European countries. It was also the most important case of privatization when considering the number of countries involved, the number of enterprises privatized, and the value of privatized assets and jobs in proportion to the size of the economies and employment. The apparent similarity of privatization blueprints notwithstanding, different countries operated under different conditions, faced different constraints, and had different political and social preferences concerning transformation and privatization. These led countries to pursue different goals via privatization and to use different methods. Consequently, economic and institutional outcomes were also different. It turns out that there was a clear, direct relation between the quality of institutions and the outcome of privatization: Central European countries fared much better than Eastern European countries thanks to the more developed market-institutional context and the perspective of EU access in the former.
Social Security
Authors: Müller Katharina
Published: March 2019

Social security is the protection provided by a given society to individuals and households, particularly in the case of old age. The design and scope of social security protection differs significantly across geographical regions, countries, and population groups, while also undergoing constant transformation over time. On a global scale, the area of social security witnessed three major paradigm shifts over the past 125 years: (1) formalization, sparked by Bismarck’s social insurance legislation in the 1880s; (2) privatization, initiated in the 1980s in Latin America and subsequently spreading to other regions, mainly Eastern Europe; and (3) universalization, as exemplified by the proliferation of non-contributory benefits in the Global South since the 2000s. This chapter outlines these trends to illustrate the transformation of social security in both the Global North and the Global South.
Strategies of Economic Transformation
Authors: Popov Vladimir
Published: March 2019

The collapse of output during transition can be best explained as an adverse supply shock caused mostly by a change in relative prices after their deregulation due to distortions in industrial structure and trade patterns accumulated during the period of central planning (additional adverse supply shocks came from the collapse of state institutions), while the speed of liberalization, to the extent that it was endogenous, i.e., determined by political economy factors, had an adverse effect on performance. At the recovery stage, in contrast, the ongoing liberalization starts to affect growth positively, while the impact of pre-transition distortions disappears. Institutional capacity and reasonable macroeconomic policy, however, continue to be important prerequisites for successful performance.
Interviewing Perpetrators against the Backdrop of Ethical Concerns and Reflexivity
Authors: Rauschenbach Mina
Published: March 2019

This chapter takes stock of experiences gained through a research project on the perspective of individuals accused by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Using interviews, it analyses the discourse of eighteen individuals accused of having indirectly (i.e. ordered, planned, not prevented) or directly (i.e. personally committing a crime) participated in international crimes. It shows how identity positions and power relations must also be accounted for in terms of their specific implications for ethical concerns and reflexivity when carrying out such research. It discusses how the interviewees’ particular status, in its legal and political dimensions, affected the sampling procedures, the organization of the interview situation, process, its outcomes, and outputs, as well as the researchers’ roles in shaping the interview process and research outcomes. It concludes by reflecting upon the significance of the ‘figure of the perpetrator’ in academia and beyond.
Religion and International Crimes
Authors: Nanninga Pieter
Published: March 2019

This chapter introduces insights from the field of religious studies to research on perpetrators in order to examine the relationship between religion and international crimes. To this end, the chapter focuses on the case of the Islamic State, and particularly its crimes against the Iraqi Yazidi community and its attacks in the West. Based on primary sources, it argues that religion plays a primary role in the perpetrators self-understandings, serving as a significant framework through which they shape, justify, and give meaning to their violence. However, the chapter also demonstrates that religion cannot be consistently distinguished from non-religious or secular aspects of violence. Therefore, it argues, attributing a particular role to religion in explaining international crimes is inconsistent, and distinguishing between ‘religious violence’ and its secular counterpart not very helpful. Based on these observations, the chapter concludes by providing suggestions for future research on the topic.
Plausible Deniability
Authors: Vukušić Iva
Published: March 2019

Outsourcing illegal violence and plausible deniability feature among the main reasons for states to establish, finance, equip, and direct actions of paramilitary units. Political and military leaders have an interest in distancing themselves from crimes, which are committed to further their political goals. This chapter discusses some of the reasons that make prosecuting paramilitary violence more difficult by analysing examples from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). After reviewing relevant trials and their outcomes, the main conclusion is that plausible deniability works and results in shielding high-ranking officials from criminal responsibility. Overall, it is the lower-level perpetrators that receive punishment, and not those who have sent them on their missions, especially when those missions are across state borders. If courts do not find ways to hold accountable those that establish, fund, and direct paramilitaries as they persecute civilians, future perpetrators will not be deterred.
Displacement of Traditional Labour Laws
Authors: Marshall Shelley
Published: March 2019

This chapter tracks the creation of a highly successful model for regulating the performance of head-load work in the Indian state of Maharashtra. The work normally consists of loading, unloading, carrying, shifting, weighing, tapping, and stacking goods. This is harsh physical labour, often undertaken in extreme heat. Following a concerted campaign in the 1960s, a tripartite regulatory system was introduced to overcome many of the problems historically faced by the mathadi workers, such as a lack of job security and access to social security. The study is a fruitful site of regulatory learning because India’s legislatures have been more active in regulating informal work, particularly in the domain of providing social security, than perhaps anywhere else in the world. The Indian state has used various mechanism to do this, the best-documented of which are the Welfare Boards of Kerala. In contrast to the Welfare Boards, there is very little written about the Mathadi Boards of Maharashtra, which have a broader regulatory reach and have arguably been far more successful.
Expansion and Layering of Labour Regulation
Authors: Marshall Shelley
Published: March 2019

Workers in developed economies have not been immune to the dynamics of global trade and economic liberalization that have stranded vulnerable workers in poorer countries. This chapter tracks the informalization of apparel production in Australia throughout the 1980s and 1990s, asking how national and international factors converged to leave a migrant group stranded, without the employment conditions and protections that Australia prided itself on providing to its working population. It then examines the subsequent attempts to re-formalize work by the creation of innovative legislation and ethical initiatives that add levers and regulatory agents. This study is important because Australia’s novel regulation combines market and non-market forms of regulation, with a successful ethical labelling system at the heart of the model.
Chromatin modification and remodeling
Authors: Lucchesi John C.
Published: March 2019

Chromatin is refractory to the process of transcription and must be modified to allow access to the DNA. The usual initial step of this modification is the binding of “pioneering” transcription factors to their cognate sequences. These factors then recruit chromatin remodeling and modifying complexes. Nucleosomes can be displaced, or their association with DNA can be altered by multiprotein complexes that hydrolyze ATP to generate the energy necessary for their functions. Other complexes replace certain canonical histones with specific histone variants. Histones can undergo acetylation, methylation, phosphorylation, ubiquitination, sumoylation, glycosylation, ADP ribosylation or hydroxyisobutyrylation of particular amino acids along their molecules. DNA nucleotides can be modified by methylation or hydroxymethylation, without altering the coding sequences. All of these chromatin changes are associated with gene function, with sets of modifications usually present on active or repressed genes. Not surprisingly, mutations that affect the timely occurrence or removal of these modifications result in particular diseases.
The role of non-coding RNAs
Authors: Lucchesi John C.
Published: March 2019

Most of the genome is transcribed into non-coding transcripts that far exceed in number the transcripts of protein-coding genes. These RNAs are subdivided into different classes. Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are at least 200 nucleotides in length and are transcribed from promoter, coding, intergenic or enhancer regions (eRNAs). These RNAs repress or enhance the transcription of target genes by facilitating the interaction between promoters and enhancers or by interacting with transcription factors and targeting histone-modifying enzymes. Short non-coding RNAs include a diverse group of functional types: miRNAs (micro RNAs) and siRNAs (small interfering RNAs) are negative regulators of gene expression; piRNAs (Piwi-interacting RNAs) suppress the action of transposable elements in the germline; snRNAs (small nuclear RNAs) are involved in mRNA splicing and rRNA maturation; tRNA-derived non-coding RNAs are involved in the cellular reaction to stress and in the repression of gene function. Additional short RNAs are rasiRNAs (repeat-associated small interfering RNAs) that appear to be involved in centromeric heterochromatin formation.
Architectural organization of the genome
Authors: Lucchesi John C.
Published: March 2019

In the nucleus, chromosomes occupy particular positions (territories) based on their size and gene content. Within each territory, chromosomes are subdivided into loops that contain mostly active or inactive genes. These loops associate, respectively, into domains called topologically associating domains (TADs). These domains are defined by binding sites present at their borders and occupied by architectural proteins that, in mammals, include CTCF (CCCTC-binding factor), cohesin complexes and TFIIIC (a transcription factor for RNA polymerase III). Enhancers and their target promoters are located within the same TAD where they are prevented from promiscuous interactions with other promoters by the presence of insulators. In Drosophila, architectural protein binding sites associate to group TADs together and form insulator bodies thought to facilitate the rare inter-TAD interactions that may bring into proximity genes that should be co-regulated. A similar situation appears to exist for regions within and between TADs that are enriched for Polycomb group (PCG) repressive complexes; grouping of these regions forms PcG bodies.
Introduction
Authors: Shaffer Paul , Kanbur Ravi , Sandbrook Richard
Published: March 2019

This chapter provides context for the volume chapters. It addresses definitional and conceptual matters concerning growth, poverty, and the time frame and level of analysis. The distinction between ‘failed inclusion’ and ‘active exclusion’ is then presented to distinguish some of the underlying causal mechanisms. Next, the centrality of political economy and politics to the analysis of immiserizing growth (IG) is explained on the grounds that many of the causal mechanisms leading to IG are public policy measures or stand to be affected by them. The relationship of IG to poverty dynamics is then explored to determine if immiserizing growth is characterized by distinct types of transitory or chronic poverty.
Richer but Not Happier: Four Areas of Reforms in the Next Phase of Development in China
Authors: Wei Shang-Jin , Zhang Xiaobo
Published: March 2019

Despite rapid economic growth, the proportion of people who report to be happy has declined and male adult mortality has increased in the past decade in China. This is a case of immiserizing growth—growth that comes with a lower level of welfare. We explore several potential causes of immiserizing growth: rising inequality, corruption, air pollution, and competitive pressure. Increasing marriage market competition due to a rise in the sex ratio imbalance seems to be a leading contributing factor. Facing intensive marriage market competition, parents with sons have to work harder and take more risks, which in turn diminishes happiness. The gain in utility as a result of additional income growth is not sufficient to offset the utility loss in the process of pursuing wealth
The Experience of Poetry
Authors: Attridge Derek
Published: March 2019

The question this book addresses is whether, in addition to its other roles, poetry—or a cultural practice we now call poetry—has, across the two-and-a-half millennia from the composition of the Homeric epics to the publication of Ben Jonson’s Works and the death of Shakespeare in 1616, continuously afforded the pleasurable experience we identify with the crafting of language into memorable and moving rhythmic forms. Parts I and II examine the evidence for the performance of the Iliad and the Odyssey and of Ancient Greek lyric poetry, the impact of the invention of writing on Alexandrian verse, the performances of poetry that characterized Ancient Rome, and the private and public venues for poetic experience in Late Antiquity. Part III deals with medieval verse, exploring the oral traditions that spread across Europe in the vernacular languages, the importance of manuscript transmission, the shift from roll to codex and from papyrus to parchment, and the changing audiences for poetry. Part IV explores the achievements of the English Renaissance, from the manuscript verse of Henry VIII’s court to the anthologies and collections of the late Elizabethan period. Among the topics considered in this part are the advent of print, the experience of the solitary reader, the continuing significance of manuscript circulation, the presence of poet figures in pageants and progresses, and the appearance of poets on the Elizabethan stage. Tracking both continuity and change, the book offers a history of what, over these twenty-five centuries, it has meant to enjoy a poem.
Archaic to Classical Greece: Festivals and Rhapsodes
Authors: Attridge Derek
Published: March 2019

Some of the so-called Homeric Hymns, dating from the seventh century BC, provide evidence of poetic performance at festivals in Greece. Alongside the sung hexameter epics, two other verse traditions appear to have been recited without music: iambics and elegiacs, both of which were used in public performances. We hear of a new kind of recited performance in the sixth century, that of the rhapsode, the fullest account of which (admittedly from a hostile perspective) is that given by Plato in the Ion. This chapter discusses the figure of the rhapsode, and the significance of a performance tradition in which a fixed text is used, perhaps with the aid of a written script. The chapter ends with a consideration of Plato’s hostility to poetry and Aristotle’s response to his arguments.
Classical Greece to Ptolemaic Alexandria: Writers and Readers
Authors: Attridge Derek
Published: March 2019

When the Phoenician alphabet was adapted for use in Greece remains a matter of debate, but the impact of writing on poetry appears most clearly around the end of the sixth century BC when papyrus rolls became more common. However, it was not until the establishment of Alexandria as a major centre of Greek culture in the later fourth century that the reading of poetry on the written page became the norm. This chapter focuses on the experience of poetry in Alexandria in this period. With the loss of the musical dimension of Greek lyric, poetry became more exclusively a matter of the speaking voice, and the epigram became a favoured genre. The extensive collection of papyrus rolls in the Library of Alexander made the work of earlier writers accessible and encouraged highly allusive verse. These qualities are best demonstrated in the poetry of Callimachus, one of whose poems is discussed as an example of the dramatic recreation of performance in a work designed to be read.
Late Antiquity: Latin and Greek, Private, Public, Popular
Authors: Attridge Derek
Published: March 2019

The fourth to sixth centuries AD witnessed considerable poetic activity, which is the subject of this chapter. Itinerant poets gave performances, and festivals flourished. Poetry in both Latin and Greek was composed, and the reading of poems remained both a public and a private activity. This chapter pays particular attention to two poets: Ausonius, as an example of a poet who wrote for private consumption, and Claudian, whose poetry was performed in public for political ends. The rise of Christianity produced a more popular body of verse derived from Jewish psalmody: hymns in Latin metres that evolved from quantitative to accentual, reflecting the loss of quantitative distinctions in the language. The same loss occurred in Greek, the language of the eastern Empire centred on Constantinople, where one verse composer of particular interest in the sixth century was Romanos the Melodist.
Late Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Poetry
Authors: Attridge Derek
Published: March 2019

Chapters 12 and 13 examine the experience of poetry in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, and assess the claim that the public performance of poetry was common in England at this time. The publication of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender in 1579 shows a concern for the reader of the printed page, while Sidney’s influential Astrophil and Stella, written around the same time, exploits the tones of the speaking voice. Manuscript circulation continued, and several poets avoided print; others, however, including Shakespeare, made use of the new opportunities provided by the printed book. Popular verse was also widely disseminated through printed sheets. The publication of Jonson’s 1616 Workes definitively marks the establishment of the modern print poet. Several anthologies were published, though individuals also kept manuscript miscellanies; in favour, too, were commonplace books, both printed and handwritten. Paratexts and marginalia furnish further evidence for readers’ experience of poetry.
Space, Structuralism, and Skepticism
Authors: Vogel Jonathan
Published: March 2019

The chapter takes structuralism to be the thesis that if F and G are alike causally, then F and G are the same property. It follows that our beliefs about the world can be true in various brain-in-a-vat scenarios, giving us (some) refuge from skeptical arguments. The trouble is that structuralism doesn’t do justice to certain metaphysical aspects of property identity having to do with fundamentality, intrinsicality, and the unity of the world. A closely related point is that the relation…lies-at-some-spatial-distance-from…obeys necessary truths that need not apply to other relations with the same causal profile. This observation is especially important if, as David Lewis argued, the only alternatives to skepticism are structuralism and an anti-Humean stance toward modality. Some pertinent views of David Chalmers’s are discussed, and parallels are drawn between the structuralist response to skepticism and functionalism in the philosophy of mind.
What to Believe About Your Belief that You’re in the Good Case
Authors: Worsnip Alex
Published: March 2019

Going about our daily lives requires us to dismiss many metaphysical possibilities. We take it for granted that we are not brains in vats, or living in the Matrix, or in an extended dream. Call these things that we take for granted “anti-skeptical assumptions.” What should a reflective agent who believes these things think of such beliefs? The chapter surveys and criticizes some prominent answers to this question, then offers a positive view that blends externalism about evidence with a mild, qualified kind of pragmatism. The view offered aims to do justice to the sense that anti-skeptical assumptions are evidentially groundless while also maintaining that one cannot rationally believe something that one judges oneself to lack sufficient evidence for.
Knowledge, Practical Adequacy, and Stakes
Authors: Anderson Charity , Hawthorne John
Published: March 2019

Defenses of pragmatic encroachment commonly rely on two thoughts: first, that the gap between one’s strength of epistemic position on p and perfect strength sometimes makes a difference to what one is justified in doing, and second, that the higher the stakes, the harder it is to know. It is often assumed that these ideas complement each other. This chapter shows that these ideas are far from complementary. Along the way, a variety of strategies for regimenting the somewhat inchoate notion of stakes are indicated, and some troubling cases for pragmatic encroachment raised.
Clarifying Pragmatic Encroachment
Authors: Fantl Jeremy , McGrath Matthew
Published: March 2019

This chapter addresses concerns that pragmatic encroachers are committed to problematic knowledge variance. It first replies to Charity Anderson and John Hawthorne’s new putative problem cases, which purport to show that pragmatic encroachment is committed to problematic variations in knowledge depending on what choices are available to the potential knower. It argues that the new cases do not provide any new reasons to be concerned about the pragmatic encroacher’s commitment to knowledge-variance. The chapter further argues that concerns about knowledge-variance are not limited to the pragmatic encroacher, but come up for traditional purist invariantism as well.
Democracy, Capitalism, and the Welfare State
Authors: Caldwell Peter C.
Published: March 2019

This book investigates political thought under the conditions of the postwar welfare state, focusing on the Federal Republic of Germany (1949–89). It argues that the welfare state informed and altered basic questions of democracy as those institutions take on broader and more concrete forms after the 1950s. These questions were especially important for West Germany, given its recent experience with the collapse of capitalism, the disintegration of democracy, and National Socialist dictatorship after 1930. Three central issues emerged. First, the development of a nearly all-embracing set of social services and payments recast the problem of how social groups and interests related to the state, as state agencies and affected groups generated their own clientele, their own advocacy groups, and their own expert information. Second, the welfare state blurred the line between state and society that is constitutive of basic rights and the classic world of liberal freedom. Rights became claims on the state, and social groups became integral parts of state administration. Third, the welfare state potentially reshaped the individual citizen, who became wrapped up with mandatory social insurance systems, provisioning of money and services related to social needs, and the regulation of everyday life. This book describes how West German experts sought to make sense of this vast array of state programs, expenditures, and bureaucracies aimed at solving social problems. Coming from politics, economics, law, social policy, sociology, and philosophy, they sought to conceptualize their state, which was now social (one German word for the welfare state is indeed Sozialstaat), and their society, which was permeated by state policies.
Gone Fishing
Authors: Bevan Shaun
Published: March 2019

Every data-gathering effort is a story, often a horror story from the perspective of those that created it. This chapter presents a historical tale of the creation and logic behind the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) Master Codebook. The CAP is in reality a network of many projects aimed at classifying political agendas according to the policies they address. However, with no central administration or common source of funding the original coding framework experienced noticeable drift based on the context of each project. To harmonize the data across projects resulted in the creation of a common Master Codebook that was only possible with the support of the CAP community. This chapter further discusses the limitations of the CAP data. Ultimately the master coded CAP data presents a common way of understanding policy attention and provides the framework for more detailed work in and outside the CAP community.
The French Agendas Project
Authors: Grossman Emiliano
Published: March 2019

The French Agendas Project was initiated as a way to better connect research on France to comparative research on institutions and public policy. This chapter provides a good overview on the research undertaken over the past decade. It also explains methods and specificities concerning the French datasets. In addition to its original focus on institutions, a large part of the project today concerns research on party pledges and manifestos, as well as media. In particular, much recent research has dealt with issue attention and competition in the French context. CAP has very clearly enabled the comparability of France to other countries to be improved.
The New Zealand Policy Agendas Project
Authors: Evans Rhonda L.
Published: March 2019

Rhonda L. Evans launched the New Zealand Policy Agendas Project (NZPAP) in 2013 with support from the Edward A. Clark Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies that she directs at the University of Texas at Austin. The NZPAP now has a complete dataset of decisions for the New Zealand Supreme Court (2004–15) and Questions for Oral Answer for the 49th Parliament (2008–11). The project has produced one publication (Evans and Fern, 2015) and a series of conference papers. This chapter outlines some features of New Zealand’s political system; what was coded as part of NZPAP; and an example of how the data have been used.
The Portuguese Policy Agendas Project
Authors: Belchior Ana Maria , Borghetto Enrico
Published: March 2019

This chapter presents the Portuguese Agendas Project. It contextualizes the project through a characterization of the Portuguese political system, describes the Project’s datasets, and discusses and illustrates its main specificities. The Portuguese Agendas Project coded policy attention given between 1995 and 2015 to: oral parliamentary questions to the prime minister on the floor, oral parliamentary questions to the ministers on the floor, written parliamentary questions to the cabinet, party pledges in manifestos, prime minister’s speeches, and the media. Each of the Project’s datasets is presented in detail, reporting the data sources, the samples sizes, and the particularities underlying the Portuguese case. Finally, at the end of the chapter, summary descriptive data is presented regarding the analysis of party pledges.