bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Forecasting Severe Convective Storms
Authors: Corfidi Stephen
Published: September 2017

Forecasting severe convective weather remains one of the most challenging tasks facing operational meteorology today, especially in the mid-latitudes, where severe convective storms occur most frequently and with the greatest impact. The forecast difficulties reflect, in part, the many different atmospheric processes of which severe thunderstorms are a by-product. These processes occur over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, some of which are poorly understood and/or are inadequately sampled by observational networks. Therefore, anticipating the development and evolution of severe thunderstorms will likely remain an integral part of national and local forecasting efforts well into the future.

Modern severe weather forecasting began in the 1940s, primarily employing the pattern recognition approach throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Substantial changes in forecast approaches did not come until much later, however, beginning in the 1980s. By the start of the new millennium, significant advances in the understanding of the physical mechanisms responsible for severe weather enabled forecasts of greater spatial and temporal detail. At the same time, technological advances made available model thermodynamic and wind profiles that supported probabilistic forecasts of severe weather threats.

This article provides an updated overview of operational severe local storm forecasting, with emphasis on present-day understanding of the mesoscale processes responsible for severe convective storms, and the application of recent technological developments that have revolutionized some aspects of severe weather forecasting. The presentation, nevertheless, notes that increased understanding and enhanced computer sophistication are not a substitute for careful diagnosis of the current meteorological environment and an ingredients-based approach to anticipating changes in that environment; these techniques remain foundational to successful forecasts of tornadoes, large hail, damaging wind, and flash flooding.
Ocean Mixing
Authors: Wunsch Carl
Published: September 2017

Oceanic mixing is one of the major determinants of the ocean circulation and its climatological influences. Existing distributions of mixing properties determine the rates of storage and redistribution within the climate system of fundamental scalar tracers including heat, fresh water, oxygen, carbon, and others. Observations have overturned earlier concepts that mixing rates might be approximately uniform throughout the ocean volume, with profound implications for determining the circulation and its properties. Inferences about past and potential future oceanic circulations and the resulting climate influence require determination of changed energy inputs and the expected consequent adjustment of mixing processes and their influence.
Forgiveness and Ressentiment in the Age of Traumas
Authors: Demertzis Nicolas
Published: September 2017

Various therapeutic discourses on trauma claim that a successful working through of a traumatic experience amounts to forgiveness and the victim’s reconciliation with the past. Recently, several voices have been raised against this claim, arguing that refusal to forgive is a sort of moral dignity, a defense of the victim’s integral subjectivity, and a moral protest against the unjustifiable evils and wrongdoings the victim has suffered. Among the emotions the victim is left with after the traumatic experience and after the reluctance to forgive the perpetrators and get along with life are, of course, anger, hate, indignation, depression, humiliation, and shame. An additional and far more complex emotion that characterizes the posttraumatic experience is ressentiment.

Forgiveness and ressentiment are discussed as moral stances against evils and traumas. The basic tenets are: (1) the link between agency, forgiveness, and memory; (2) the moral nature of ressentiment as a Schelerean concept that parts company not only from resentment (qua moral indignation) but also from grudges and envy; (3) the dismembering of forgiveness and ressentiment premised not on the victim’s resistance to dealing with the past (or moral hypermnesia), as is usually thought, but on the process of transvaluation inherent in ressentiment, which places forgiveness beyond the victim’s hermeneutic horizon.
The Demobilization of Protest Campaigns
Authors: Demirel-Pegg Tijen
Published: September 2017

All protest campaigns move through cycles of escalation and de-escalation and ultimately demobilize. Some campaigns demobilize quickly as protesters reach their goals. The 2011 Egyptian uprising, when protesters left the streets after they brought down the Mubarak regime, for example, is a case of rapid demobilization. Others, like the 2011 uprising in Bahrain, demobilize over a longer time span before protests come to a complete halt. In Bahrain, the government first cracked down on the opposition by bringing in foreign troops and then continued to repress protesters until the protesters ended the campaign in 2012. Regardless of the length of time it takes for protesters to leave the streets and stop the protests, demobilization is a complex process. Numerous factors, such as severe repression, government concessions, countermobilization of opposition groups, leadership changes, or even unexpected events, can all bring about demobilization. These factors and strategies may occur simultaneously or sequentially, but usually one or a combination of them lead to the demobilization of a protest campaign. Moreover, demobilization is a dynamic process, as it continues to evolve out of the endogenous interactions among governments, challengers, bystanders, and, in some cases, as in Bahrain, external third-party actors.

Even though every protest campaign eventually demobilizes one way or another, the demobilization phase has generally attracted less scholarly attention than the onset and escalation of violent and nonviolent forms of collective action. For a long time, most scholars addressed demobilization indirectly within the context of the repression-dissent nexus as they explored why repression backfires and escalates dissent in some cases, while it succeeds in demobilizing the opposition in others. Nonetheless, factors besides state repression contribute to the demobilization of dissent. In other words, a state’s accommodative tactics, as well as individual, organizational, or even regional and systemic factors that interact with the state’s actions, have the potential to shape when and how political dissent demobilizes. More recently, scholars have begun to examine why and how protest campaigns demobilize by stepping out of the repression-dissent nexus and focusing on a variety of other factors related to organizational structures, regime types, individual-level constraints, and contingent events that affect the trajectory of campaigns. At the same time, recent studies on state repression have also begun to focus more heavily on the different causal mechanisms that explain how a state’s repressive tactics can lead to demobilization. While this new line of research has made significant contributions to our understanding of the demobilization of protests, we are still left with important questions about the demobilization process that have yet to be answered.
The Political Economy of Monetary Policy
Authors: Bodea Cristina
Published: September 2017

The recent global economic crisis has renewed interest in the nature and history of monetary policy, the distributional effects of central bank policy, central bank governance, and the personalities at the helm of major central banks. In modern times, a country’s central bank formulates, or, to a minimum, implements, a country’s monetary policy, or the process of adjustment of a country’s money supply to achieve some combination of stable prices and sustainable economic growth. Monetary policy depends heavily on a country’s exchange rate system. Under fixed exchange rates, the country’s commitment to keep the level of the currency at a certain level dictates monetary policy to a great degree. As the gold standard was unraveling after World War I, many countries experienced high inflation or even hyperinflation. A similar situation faced monetary policy after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates in the 1970s. By the 1980s, however, countries turned toward central bank independence as an institutional arrangement to control inflation. The current issues surrounding monetary policy have emerged from the historical increase in central bank independence and the 2007 economic and financial crisis. In particular, the opacity of central bank decisions, given their autonomy to pursue stable prices without political interference, has increased the demand for transparency and communication with the government, the public, and financial markets. Also, the 2007 crisis pushed central banks toward unconventional measures and macro-prudential regulation, and brought back into focus the monetary policy of the euro area.
Peace, War, Theory, and Evidence in East Asia
Authors: Goldsmith Benjamin E.
Published: September 2017

Historically one of the world’s most conflict-prone regions, since the Sino-Vietnamese war of 1979, East Asia has enjoyed a relative interstate peace. Implications of some of the relevant “East Asian peace” literature for theories of international relations need assessment. The central conclusion is that, contrary to often expressed dissatisfaction with the state of IR theory, it is possible to identify a core of theoretical knowledge that has considerable explanatory power for war and peace in East Asia, and is also based on general theory with considerable support across global regions. This diverges somewhat from the well-known argument of Lake in 2011: It is not the “-isms” that lead us astray, but how we use them. Unlike Lake, but consistent with Legro and Moravcsik (1999), it is argued that broad theoretical constructs are needed, and indeed useful ones exist, while mid-level or problem-focused analysis is no substitute for a theory-based research program. What is often lacking is an effort by empirical researchers to clearly and coherently tie their research design to theoretically important claims.

Empirical political science as a whole is becoming more sophisticated in its methods and capabilities for causal inference, and it is also becoming more relevant and useful for policy makers. We should devote as much attention to the theoretical contributions of our research. The article addresses the role of theory in IR, the ways that empirical analysis of East Asia (and other regions) can contribute to theory building and theory testing, the existing literature on East Asian peace, some informed speculation about how the potential for mid-term military conflict between the United States and China might be assessed, and thoughts about current and potential contributions to IR theory based on the study of the East Asian peace.

Theorizing in social science is hard, and any scholar’s dissatisfaction with existing theory should be heavily tempered with acknowledgment that s/he has not proposed a more powerful one. Regional analysis, and comparative regional analysis, can provide important potential gains by challenging current theory with hard tests. East Asia not only is a crucially important part of the world for the future of interstate peace, it also presents challenging and useful empirical puzzles for our theories.
How the Contractualist Peace Overtook the Democratic Peace
Authors: Mousseau Michael , Cao Xiongwei
Published: September 2017

The democratic peace—the absence of war between democratic nations—shook the field of International Relations when it emerged as a widely accepted true fact roughly a quarter-century ago. In the context of the rapid spread of democracy that coincided with the end of the Cold War, the promise was vast: A world of democracies would be a world in peace. The democratic peace had a crucial weakness, however: a convincing explanation. While many potential explanations were developed, only a few produced supportive evidence, and not one yielded evidence supportive enough to render it widely convincing.

Into this void emerged the contractualist peace—the dearth of militarized conflict between nations with advanced market-oriented economies. Unlike the democratic peace, the contractualist peace was not discovered after the fact but predicted ex ante. Economic norms theory predicts societies that are market oriented to embrace democracy as the best means to ensure their state’s impartiality in the enforcement of contracts. These societies also seek global markets, and any nation interested in global markets can have no economic incentive of attacking another nation that abides by market rules. On the contrary, contractualist nations are friends, for among nations seeking global markets each is always better off when the other is better off, as wealthier nations make better customers than poorer ones.

Economic norms theory thus explains the democratic peace as spurious, with contractualist economy causing both democracy within nations and the peace among them. Early examinations of the economic norms explanation tested for an interaction of democracy and development as a proxy measure for contractualist economy and yielded supportive but not widely convincing results. Then a direct measure of contract-intensive economy was discovered, and the result was striking: Whereas prior studies showed that no two democracies ever fought each other in war defined as one thousand or more battlefield-connected deaths, it now appears that no two contractualist nations have ever experienced even a single battlefield-connected death. About half of all democracies lack contractualist economies, and these nations fight each other about as often as everybody else: There is no democratic peace.

Defenders of the democratic peace have made multiple attempts to rescue their observation, but the evidence against them remains overwhelming. Instead it appears that it is market-oriented development that causes both democracy and peace. The implications are more substantial than the democratic peace, since the contractualist peace is far deeper than the democratic one, rooted in common interests and perfect peace rather than mere constraints that only diminish the probability of militarized conflict. It is also more practical, suggesting that global peace can be achieved without a war-inducing crusade to democratize the world: It can be achieved by a peace-inducing campaign for global economic development.
Do We Have Too Much Theory in International Relations or Do We Need Less? Waltz Was Wrong, Tetlock Was Right
Authors: Ward Michael D.
Published: September 2017

The field of international relations has developed the notion that world politics is made up of dyads, a thing that no one has actually ever seen. This notion is referred to as a theory by many scholars. Both the notion that world politics is dyadic as well as the idea that this is a theory need to be jettisoned from our scholarship. They have deleterious effects on what we can learn about the world.
The Poliheuristic Theory of Political Decision-Making
Authors: Mintz Alex , Redd Steven B. , Tal-Shir Eldad
Published: September 2017

Poliheuristic theory focuses on the why and how of decision-making. The primary argument is that decision-makers are sensitive to both cognitive and environmental constraints and are particularly likely to focus on the political consequences of their decisions. Decision-makers use a two-stage process en route to choice, wherein heuristic shortcuts are implemented in the first stage in an effort to reduce complexity and in the second stage a maximizing strategy on the remaining alternatives in the choice set. The theory focuses on five main information-processing characteristics: order-sensitive, nonholistic, and dimension-based searching and noncompensatory and satisficing decision rules. The theory has been tested using numerous case studies and statistical and experimental analyses. These studies have provided strong empirical support for this theory.

In 2013, the United States decided not to attack Syria, despite domestic and international pressure to do so. This case shows the importance of political constraints on President Obama’s calculus of decision, leading to the adoption of the chemical disarmament of Syria.
Symbolic Politics as International Relations Theory
Authors: Kaufman Stuart J.
Published: September 2017

The symbolic politics theory of ethnic war starts from the insight that most political behavior is not rational but intuitive, driven by “symbolic predispositions” such as ideological beliefs, normative values, and prejudice. The way leaders lead is by using rhetoric not to appeal rationally to followers’ interests but to appeal emotionally to their symbolic predispositions.

According to symbolic politics theory, the path to ethnic conflict begins with group narratives that are hostile to another group. These narratives help to generate hostile and prejudiced symbolic predispositions. If group members perceive a social threat, such as to their group identity or status, they become more likely to join mass movements agitating for a politics of redistribution—discriminating in favor of their own group at the expense of rival groups. If people feel physically threatened, they become more likely to support a politics of protection leading to violent ethnic conflict. These popular attitudes and moods are turned into social movements or military mobilization if aggressive leaders emerge, framing political issues in terms of these threats, and if those leaders are both credible and supported by effective organizations. A series of case studies has demonstrated that this process—from narratives to prejudice and threat perceptions, harnessed by leadership and organization—is what occurred in ten ethnic civil wars, including the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Israel-Palestine, and the Philippines. The theory also explains less violent cases such as Gandhi’s nationalist movement in India.

This theory is hypothesized to apply to international war, as the politics of national identity is similar to the politics of ethnic identity. The theory also suggests a way of reconciling realist, liberal, and constructivist accounts of international relations through political psychology and a scientific realist ontology.
Searching for Middle Powers
Authors: Neack Laura
Published: September 2017

What is a “middle power,” and what foreign policy is associated with it? Scholars and diplomats in Canada, Australia, and a more or less stable collection of northern countries—and increasingly scholars from the Global South—have proposed that the term denotes a particular international position, rights, and responsibilities. Canada has been especially associated with claims that it deserved unique representation in the halls of international power by virtue of its secondary or middle contributions to World War II and the post-war peace. Middle powers, it was proposed, were countries who both made significant contributions to that global order and were more likely than the self-interested great powers to protect the values of that order.

However, the term “middle power” never has had a clear meaning or definition, and the so-called middle powers have largely been self-electing (whether the self-election was by scholars or practitioners). Scholarly efforts to bring more rigor to the concept have failed to agree on its basic definition and membership list. This failure results largely from a fundamental disagreement over whether the “middle power” is defined by its functional capabilities, characterized by its strong moral imperative as a “good international citizen,” designated by its position in the international hierarchy, or revealed in its foreign policy behaviors. In time, the behavioral notion that middle powers engaged in “middle power diplomacy” held sway in the scholarship such that any country that pursued multilateral compromises, engaged in acts of “good international citizenship,” and promoted coalition building was labeled a middle power. This subsequently led to a growing scholarship on which states were “middle powers” based on their foreign policy behaviors. In particular, countries from the Global South who embraced multilateralism were included in the ranks of the middle powers.

The inclusion of countries from the Global South created a fundamental problem for the term, since middle power advocates portrayed them as strong supporters of the international order. Southern middle powers, on the other hand, were champions or leaders of states who stood against that order because of historical and present injustices in it. However, even those countries said to be Southern or emerging middle powers seem more interested in establishing their own status within the existing order rather than asserting a common vision on behalf of a revised order.

Ultimately, the lack of agreement about what “middle power” means leaves scholars and practitioners uncertain about whether the term is a useful guide for any particular country’s foreign policy.
Immigration and Foreign Policy
Authors: Oltman Anna , Renshon Jonathan
Published: September 2017

Immigration has taken on renewed prominence in both domestic and international politics. Typical approaches to this pressing theoretical and policy problem, however, focus on either domestic politics (e.g., filling labor needs and integrating migrants into society) or international relations (e.g., international law or norms regarding the treatment of migrants). In this sense, work on immigration has coalesced around two ways of seeing this problem, one micro, one macro, and neither one related to foreign policy. This is particularly unfortunate given that a foreign policy approach—grounded in “mid-range theory,” an “actor-specific” approach, and a sensitivity to factors both above and below the state level—has the potential to add a great deal to our understanding of immigration in IR. A review of the literature reveals two approaches to immigration in IR. The first, largely grounded in the methods and assumptions of political economy, focuses on the “pull” or demand factors that incentivize and regulate migration to a receiving country. The second focuses on “push” factors that drive people from their homelands. This latter approach concentrates on displaced populations, human rights norms, and institutions and cooperation among states. Both approaches contribute a great deal, but are, unfortunately, isolated from each other: an outcome that is at least partly attributable to an arbitrary and politically expedient distinction between “refugees” and “ economic migrants” that countries found it in their interests to make in the aftermath of World War II.

This discussion of immigration and foreign policy thus begins by surveying the theoretical and empirical landscape and providing a framework with which to understand contributions thus far. The following section will highlight three major themes emerging in an innovative new body of research. Fundamentally, these themes revolve around integration: whether it is the integration of security into immigration studies (typically dominated by an economics-based approach), of identity concerns into the public’s immigration preferences, or a focus on the multiple actors located in between the domestic public and international regimes. Suggestions for future research will conclude our discussion.
Nuclear Weapons and International Conflict: Theories and Empirical Evidence
Authors: Geller Daniel S.
Published: September 2017

The balance of conventional military capabilities is intrinsic to understanding patterns of war among nations. However, cumulative knowledge relating to the effects of nuclear weapons possession on conflict interaction is largely absent. Framework is provided for analyzing the results of quantitative empirical research on this question and to identify any extant strong and consistent patterns in the interactions of states that can be associated with the possession of nuclear weapons.

Since 1945, a vast, sophisticated, and contradictory literature has developed on the implications of nuclear weaponry for patterns of international conflict and war. This theoretical and empirical work has principally focused on the conflict effects of these weapons for the interaction of nuclear-armed states, although a growing number of studies have explored the impact of a state’s possession of nuclear weapons on the behavior of nonnuclear opponents. Given the destructive capacity of these weapons and their questionable value for battlefield use, most of this work has concentrated on the requirements for successful deterrence. In categorizing the studies, some scholars note that “classical deterrence theory” derives from the Realist paradigm of international politics and subdivide this theory into two complementary strands: structural (or neorealist) deterrence theory and decision-theoretic deterrence theory. In contrast, other analysts choose to classify work on nuclear deterrence into three schools of thought: nuclear irrelevance; risk manipulation, escalation, and limited war; and the nuclear revolution. The essence of these divisions involves a debate about what the possession of nuclear weapons does for a state that controls them. Does the possession of these weapons affect the behavior of nuclear and nonnuclear opponents in disputes over contested values? Do the weapons impart political influence and hold military utility, or are they useless as tools for deterrence, compellence, or war?
To Arms, To Arms: What Do We Know About Arms Races?
Authors: Stoll Richard J.
Published: September 2017

Arms races are important phenomenon They can involve the commitment of vast amounts of resources that might otherwise be used to help societies. And arms races can be a cause of war, although there is a debate on how this happens. With the arrival of the behavioral revolution in international relations, the number of quantitative studies of arms races exploded. But with the end of the Cold War, interest in studying arms races declined sharply. This is unfortunate because it is fair to say that most of the important questions involving arms races were not resolved in the empirical work that was done during the period of the Cold War.
Democratization and Conflict
Authors: Örsün Ömer Faruk , Bayer Reşat , Bernhard Michael
Published: September 2017

Is democratization good for peace? The question of whether democratization results in violence has led to a spirited and productive debate in empirical conflict studies over the past two decades. The debate, sparked by Mansfield and Snyder’s foundational work, raised a challenge to the notion of a universal democratic peace and elicited numerous critical responses within the literature. One set of such responses has emphasized issues of replicability, mismatches between the research design and directionality of the proposed causal mechanism, the role of outliers, and model specification. In addition, two issues have not been discussed sufficiently in the existing literature. First, conceptually, is the issue of concept stretching, specifically the form Sartori labeled the “cat-dog” problem. While past criticisms were mainly about model specification, we debate whether Mansfield and Snyder’s findings can be seen as a product of concept misformation. Second, quantitatively, are conceptual and empirical issues that Mansfield and Snyder use to capture state strength in their most recent attempts to provide ongoing evidence for their theory. The most optimistic estimates show that even when democratization has a statistically significant association with war onset at lower levels of institutional strength, the effect is substantively insignificant.
Public Diplomacy and Foreign Policy
Authors: Tago Atsushi
Published: September 2017

Public diplomacy has become an essential subject for both practitioners of foreign policy and scholars of international relations/world politics. The more the term achieves popularity and is used in policy papers, magazines, academic books, and articles, the greater the number of different definitions of the concept. Unfortunately, no universally agreed-upon definition exists. With regard to the international relations debate on the “-isms,” some researchers claim that public diplomacy is part of constructivism. Yet, while it may be appropriate to categorize public diplomacy as constructivist for norm-oriented reputation politics such as “naming and shaming,” many realists working from the rationalist paradigm have recognized the importance of public diplomacy in international relations. Recently, beyond discussions on definitions and scope of public diplomacy, many data-oriented, empirical studies have been published on the subject. For instance, moves have been made to rank which state can achieve the greatest level of soft power through the effective practice of public diplomacy. Moreover, quantitative text analysis (QTA) or content analysis frameworks have frequently been utilized to study how international media focus on controversial diplomatic issues between states. Even tweets and social networks are being studied to reveal what types of international diplomatic communications are supported and opposed by third-party domestic audiences. Rapid developments continue to be made in the methodological sophistication of public diplomacy studies.
Signaling in Foreign Policy
Authors: Gartzke Erik A. , Carcelli Shannon , Gannon J Andres , Zhang Jiakun Jack
Published: September 2017

Costly signaling offers a solution to many foreign policy dilemmas. Though most commonly studied in the context of the bargaining theory of war, signaling can also play an important role in nonzero-sum interactions such as those characterized by chicken (e.g., nuclear deterrence) and the prisoner’s dilemma (e.g., tariff reductions). A rich game theoretic literature explains how actors can signal credibly in these situations. The most prominent strategies are sinking costs (actions that are costly ex ante) or tying hands (actions that are costly ex post). These strategies are theoretically elegant but have generated considerable controversy when studied empirically. One controversy concerns the existence of hand-tying domestic audience costs under different regime types. A second controversy involves the degree to which sinking costs increase or decrease the risk of war. These controversies speak to the inherent tension between theories of strategic interactions and measuring their outcomes in the foreign policy process, where some events are off the equilibrium path and thus unobserved.

The limited availability of foreign policy data was a major hindrance in earlier empirical efforts. Even as the quality of this data has improved, focus has been on the outcomes of conflict (crisis onset, escalation to war, victory, defeat) rather than the strategy. This is problematic given that all crises are sequential in nature and understanding the action–reaction cycle is vital to illuminating patterns of war, capitulation, and settlement. The frontier of research in the signaling literature is in bridging this gap. The advent of big data and machine learning has enabled more systematic empirical analysis of strategic moves by various foreign policy actors, including signaling. Some researchers, such as Lindsay & Gartzke, are harnessing these new data and methods to explore the means of signaling. Other scholars are beginning to ask questions about the efficacy of public versus private signaling, the role of ambiguity, and dyadic versus multi-actor signaling. This new wave of research seeks to nudge signaling closer to the concerns of foreign policy practitioners.
The Global Spread and Contraction of Democracy: A CoEvolutionary Approach
Authors: Owen John M.
Published: September 2017

Much of the literature on international democratic diffusion appeals to mechanisms—competition, learning, emulation or socialization, and coercion—that typically are treated as competing and theoretically separate. All four, however, fit within a coevolutionary framework, that is, one integrating the concepts of variety, retention, and selection of traits (in this case, regime type). Competition, learning, and emulation are not mutually exclusive and all find support in the large literature on cultural and social evolution. Coercion may seem anti-evolutionary, inasmuch as it implies design and implementation by a powerful rational actor (state, international institution, etc.), but co-evolution can accommodate coercion as well. In co-evolution, agent and environment evolve together: an agent shapes its environment (engages in niche construction), and that reshaped environment alters the fitness of the agents’ traits. A powerful democracy can alter its social and material environment so as to increase the fitness of its own regime. Co-evolution can provide a framework to integrate mechanisms by which democracy and other regime types spread and contract across time and space, and hence can aid empirical research on the effects of global power shifts, including the rise of China, on the fate of democracy in various regions around the world.
Soft Balancing
Authors: Feng Huiyun , He Kai
Published: September 2017

Soft balancing is a conceptual product of one of the academic debates triggered by unipolarity in world politics. Examination of the soft balancing debate from 2005 to 2016 and critical evaluation of the progress and problems of the soft balancing research program suggest that the significance of the soft balancing debate does not lie in the answers offered by soft balancing scholars. Rather, its significance rests in the question that scholars pose for analysis under unipolarity—the underbalancing phenomenon—and the later endeavor to expand the soft balancing program beyond unipolarity. The future of the soft balancing program depends on continuous scholarly efforts to further clarify the concept of soft balancing, theorize a generalizable model of soft balancing across different cases, as well as demarcate the boundary of soft balancing theory from other research traditions.
International Norm Change
Authors: Sandholtz Wayne
Published: September 2017

In the first wave of scholarship on international norms, the primary task was to convince a skeptical discipline that norms affect domestic and international outcomes. A second phase of international norms research developed political theories of the emergence and establishment of new international norms. Transnational actor models as well as “legalization” and “rational design” approaches tested propositions on norm creation but did not theorize what happens after norms are created. General norms inevitably collide with the relentless specificity of experience. Actors constantly dispute the meaning and application of norms. The resultant arguments modify the norms being contested, and the modified norms then shape subsequent behavior and disputes. The third wave of international norms research has focused on the inherent dynamism of norms and norm systems. Norms emerge through processes of transnational advocacy and institutional design, but they also evolve through cycles of application and disputation.
Military Intervention in Interstate and Civil Wars: A Unified Interpretation
Authors: Shirkey Zachary C.
Published: September 2017

Military intervention into interstate and civil wars is both common and important. It lengthens wars, makes them more severe, and shapes how they are fought. Even the mere possibility of intervention can alter the course of a war as belligerent powers alter their strategies to either encourage or dissuade potential interveners. These effects of military intervention are found in both civil and interstate wars. Yet, is state intervention into interstate and civil wars essentially one phenomenon or are they distinct phenomena? By looking at which states are likely to intervene, why and when they intervene, and which wars are most likely to experience intervention, it becomes clear the similarities between state military intervention into civil and interstate wars are more significant than are the differences. In other words, despite some important differences, they are subsets of the same phenomenon. In both types of wars, allies, geographically proximate states, and great powers are more likely to intervene. Also, information revealed by events within both types of wars prompts intervention and explains its timing. Last, wars in which international organizations become involved, both civil and interstate, are more likely to experience intervention. There are, however, important differences notably in the areas of cross-border ethnic ties, the presence of great powers in the war, the use of non-state proxies, and wars caused by commitment problems.
Empires Versus States
Authors: Colomer Josep M.
Published: September 2017

The classical analytical category of “empire,” as opposed to “state,” “city,” “federation,” and other political forms, can account for a large number of historical and current experiences, including the past United States of America, the European Union, Russia, and China. An “empire” has been conceived, in contrast to a “state,” as a very large size polity with a government formed on movable frontiers, with multiple institutional levels, overlapping jurisdictions, and asymmetric relations between the center and the diverse territorial units.
Methods of Health Behavior Change
Authors: Tombor Ildiko , Michie Susan
Published: September 2017

People’s behavior influences health, for example, in the prevention, early detection, and treatment of disease, the management of illness, and the optimization of healthcare professionals’ behaviors. Behaviors are part of a system of behaviors within and between people in that any one behavior is influenced by others. Methods for changing behavior may be aimed at individuals, organizations, communities, and/or populations and at changing different influences on behavior, e.g., motivation, capability, and the environment. A framework that encapsulates these influences is the Behavior Change Wheel, which links an understanding of behavior in its context with methods to change behavior. Within this framework, methods are conceptualized at three levels: policies that represent high-level societal and organizational decisions, interventions that are more direct methods to change behavior, and behavior change techniques that are the smallest components that on their own have the potential to change behavior. In order to provide intervention designers with a systematic method to select the policies, interventions, and/or techniques relevant for their context, a set of criteria can be used to help select intervention methods that are likely to be implemented and effective. One such set is the “APEASE” criteria: affordability, practicability, effectiveness, acceptability, safety, and equity.
Psychological Aspects of Tobacco Control
Authors: McGowan Jennifer , Shahab Lion
Published: September 2017

Worldwide, tobacco use is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality. However, the health effects of smoking are reversible, making smoking cessation an important target for public health policy. Tobacco control is a field of public health science dedicated to reducing tobacco use and, thereby, to reducing cigarette-related morbidity and mortality. For tobacco control to be effective, it is necessary for policy makers to understand the personal and interpersonal factors which encourage people to smoke, factors which motivate smokers to quit (e.g., health, social pressure, cost), and the personal and population-level methods that are most effective at encouraging and prolonging attempts to quit. Research has identified that social norms, mental health, and individual personality factors are most associated with smoking uptake, so interventions which reduce social smoking (e.g., smoking bans, plain packaging) would be most effective at preventing uptake. Conversely, the use of cigarettes is maintained by nicotine addiction and attempts to quit are often motivated by health concerns, social pressure and the cost of tobacco products. As such, interventions that address physiological and behavioral addiction inherent in tobacco product use (e.g., nicotine replacement therapy combined with counselling), that create social pressure to stop (e.g., mass media campaigns), or that increase the cost of tobacco products are most likely to be effective at encouraging attempts to quit.
Overqualification in the Workplace
Authors: Erdogan Berrin , Bauer Talya N. , Karaeminogullari Aysegul
Published: September 2017

Overqualification is a unique form of underemployment, which represents a state where the employee’s education, abilities, knowledge, skills, and/or experience exceed job requirements and are not utilized on the job. Potentially conflicting upsides and downsides of the phenomenon created a fruitful area of research. Thus, overqualification has received considerable attention both in the academic literature and popular press.

Studies of overqualification have emerged and received considerable attention in diverse fields including education, labor economics, sociology, management, and psychology. Antecedents of overqualification include individual differences (such as education, personality, age, sex, job search attitudes, previous work experience, past employment history, vocational training and type of degree, migrant status) and environmental dynamics (such as the characteristics of the position held and size of the job market). Commonly studied outcomes of overqualification include job attitudes, performance, proactive behaviors and creativity, counterproductive behaviors, absenteeism and turnover, health and well-being, feelings of job security, wages, upward mobility, and interpersonal relationships. While the effects are typically negative, there are some contemporary findings revealing the potential benefits of overqualified employees for their work groups and organizations. In recent years, boundary conditions shaping the effects of overqualification have also been identified, including factors such as empowerment and autonomy, overqualification of referent others, personality traits, and values.

Despite the accumulating research on this topic, many unanswered questions remain. Conflicting findings on some of the outcomes and limited empirical investigations of theory-based mediators promise a lively and still developing field of research.
Homicide in Television Drama Series
Authors: Crofts Penny
Published: September 2017

This chapter analyzes the representation of homicide in contemporary television drama series. The chapter draws upon critical analysis from the fields of criminal law, criminology, law and literature, and cultural studies to provide various analytical frameworks and perspectives through which to understand and critique specific dramas and the portrayal of homicide drama generally. If criminology is an effort to understand crime and criminals, then crime dramas including homicide television dramas can be considered a form of popular criminology that can and should be analyzed in terms of cultural representations of crime and criminal justice. Theorists have proposed that crime fiction can be categorized as mystery, detective fiction, or crime fiction. This framework provides a means for analyzing homicide drama, including the possibility of resolution and justice, geographic and temporal settings, the portrayal of the murder, and the construction of the three stock characters of crime fiction (the victim, the detective, and the murderer). The chapter concludes with a presentation of theories about the impact of media portrayals of crime upon public beliefs about crime, criminality, and the criminal legal system.
Serial Killing and Representation
Authors: Simpson Phillip L.
Published: September 2017

Serial killing is an age-old problem, though it was not popularly known by that name until the 1980s. It took the rise of mass media and the mechanisms of mass production to create the conditions for the rise of serial murder in the modern world. The mass media representation of a series of murders arguably dates back to the notoriety accorded to the so-called Jack the Ripper killings of prostitutes in London in the autumn of 1888. The Ripper murders stand at a particular nexus in the representation of true crime, where fact and legend immediately fused in popular media to create a terrifying new modern, urban mythology of a preternaturally cunning human super-predator: one who strikes from the shadows to commit ghastly murder with impunity and then retreats back into that darkness until the next atrocity. Since the days of Jack the Ripper, a ghoulish pantheon of other serial killers has captivated the public imagination through representation in media: the Zodiac Killer, David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy Jr., Henry Lee Lucas, Richard Ramirez, and Jeffrey Dahmer, just to name a few. However, the term “serial killer” did not enter the American popular vocabulary until the 1980s, so in another sense, the true representation of what we now know as serial killing could not begin until it had this latest, proper name. In tandem, as cultural consciousness of serial murder expanded, fictional serial killers proliferated the media landscape: Patrick Bateman, Norman Bates, Francis Dolarhyde, Lou Ford, Jame Gumb, Mickey and Mallory Knox, Leatherface, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, Dexter Morgan, Tom Ripley, and a host of others. Serial killers as they exist in the popular imagination are media constructs rooted in sociological/criminological/psychological realities. These constructs originate from collective fears or anxieties specific to a particular time and place, which also means as times and the cultural zeitgeist change, the serial killer as a character epitomizing human evil is endlessly reinvented for new audiences in popular media.