bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Democratic Consolidation
Authors: Morlino Leonardo
Published: March 2019

In this chapter, an empirical definition of the key notion that stresses how consolidation can be seen and analysed as a process and as a result is proposed, and the differences with stabilization and institutionalization are spelled out. Then, the key conditions of the phenomenon are discussed with regards to the exclusive and inclusive legitimations, to the development of a weaker consensus as well as to the forms of anchoring (clientelism, neo-corporatism, gatekeeping role of parties, party organization, and more). The process of consolidation has also to be considered as a possible consequence of a successful transition to democracy; the different outcome in terms of a democratic crisis is also possible; and even the unfolding into a process of democratic deepening or development of democratic quality.
Internationalization
Authors: Hoen Herman W.
Published: March 2019

This chapter examines internationalization, which is always seen as essential in fostering a country’s long-term economic growth. Based on the concept of comparative advantages, cross-border trade of goods and services is expected to generate positive welfare effects. However, not all countries have been conducive to internationalization. In particular, centrally planned economies failed to benefit. The system of central planning hindered participation in world markets. Due to the autarkic nature of ‘forced industrialization’, the countries had to rely on barter deals and bilateralism. This impeded internationalization, both within the Eastern bloc as well as between the communist ‘East’ and the market-oriented ‘West’. After the collapse of communism in 1989, the opening up of the economy became pivotal in the transition to a full-fledged market economy. Transition strategies have nonetheless been quite different and by no means implied a severely marginalized role for the state. On the contrary, state capitalism has emerged as a viable outward-looking alternative.
Monetary Transformation
Authors: Gabrisch Hubert
Published: March 2019

Monetary transformation means the conceptual restoration of the functions of money in a former quasi-barter economy, in which the use of legal money and foreign currency was limited and financial markets were widely non-existent. Therefore, the chapter throws special light on the development of a market-based credit system, consisting of commercial banks, a central bank, and other financial institutions. As with any other range of the transformation process, monetary transformation is not free of frictions, crises, and challenges. The chapter discusses the typical challenges at the start of the transformation, such as the problem of non-performing loans, and the frequent banking and currency crises. The new central banks face specific challenges in the stabilization of the domestic and external value of their currencies, and in supervising and guiding monetary/financial intermediation in the transition period.
Parties as Agents of Transition
Authors: Inkinen Saara
Published: March 2019

This chapter reviews recent political science literature on the role of political parties and party systems in regime transition processes. The first part focuses on parties as collective actors, discussing the effects of different regime and opposition party strategies on the liberalization and breakdown of autocratic regimes. It also notes how such strategies may be shaped by autocratic regime subtypes and the internal organization of political parties. The second part goes on to consider party systems as an institutional arena that constrains party interactions. It examines arguments linking democratization to the institutionalization and type of autocratic party system, with an emphasis on competitive and hegemonic autocratic regimes. Directions for further research are provided in the conclusion.
Phases of Transformation
Authors: Merkel Wolfgang , Heyne Lea
Published: March 2019

This chapter examines system change: the interval between an autocratic system and a new consolidated democracy. This transformation can be differentiated in to three phases: (1) the end of the autocratic system, (2) the institutionalization of democracy, and (3) the consolidation of democracy. The end of an autocratic system can be caused by internal legitimacy crises as well as external forces like military conflict, and follows different courses. During the institutionalization of democracy, political actors need to manage to establish institutions and norms that maintain a balance between particular interests and the common good in order to prevent a backslide into autocracy. The consolidation of democracy starts with the adaptation of a new constitution, and takes place on four levels: (a) constitutional consolidation, (b) representative consolidation, (c) behavioural consolidation, and (d) the consolidation of civil society. A democracy consolidated on all four levels has considerable reserves of resistance to meet exogenous destabilization shocks.
Political Repression
Authors: Tanneberg Dag
Published: March 2019

Governments use political repression to govern domestic dissent, trying to defend established patterns of power and authority. Repression, thus, is a means to an end and the decision to either repress or adapt goes straight to the heart of every political, social, and economic transformation. This chapter surveys the highly productive literature on political repression and asks three closely related questions: (1) what causes political repression? (2) what are its effects?, and (3) what stops political repression? Along the way the chapter sketches out the threat–repression nexus and its different manifestations. It describes how the effects of political repression vary by its type, targeting, and timing. Finally, the chapter provides a brief discussion of the domestic democratic peace proposition. The chapter concludes by identifying avenues for future research with special emphasis on the role of domestic legal institutions.
Regional Disparities
Authors: Bürkner Hans-Joachim
Published: March 2019

This chapter provides a stocktaking of the conceptualization of the spatial dimension of postcommunist social change. It traces the shifts in academic concepts which sought to grasp the effects of transition on the regional level and the diversification of regional trajectories. It identifies three distinct stages of transition research which represents such shifts. An initial phase of nation state-centred accounts of regional transition was followed by a period which highlighted the diversification of patterns of regional disparities, focusing on regional capitals and border regions, and establishing globalization as an important factor of new core–periphery relations and interregional competition. A final post-transition stage has been described as being dominated by socio-spatial polarization and the increasing vulnerability of regions in the face of neoliberal policies and recurring global economic crises. Formerly clear-cut concepts relating inequality to the legacies of earlier stages of transition have gradually vanished, leaving a theoretical gap.
Rule of Law and Statehood
Authors: van Aaken Anne
Published: March 2019

The rule of law and statehood are closely related. The process of forming a state was historically conjoined with the establishment of key monopolies of the state: inter alia the monopoly of the legitimate use of force and the monopoly of the making and the enforcement of law. Those are relevant as necessary although not sufficient conditions of the rule of law. In this chapter the breakup of these monopolies by internationalization and Europeanization on the one hand and privatization and outsourcing of state functions on the other is discussed as potentially endangering statehood and rule of law. New actors and changed forms of activity need to be subject to judicial review in the same way as the exercise of state power. A similar degree of responsibility, including potential liability, would need to be imposed upon the actors. It may result in a shift to the rule of law being secured in procedures.
Transitional Justice
Authors: Weiffen Brigitte
Published: March 2019

Transitional justice denotes the whole spectrum of efforts to deal with human rights violations. This chapter addresses various dilemmas of coming to terms with a violent past in periods of transformation. First, it presents a brief history of the concept of transitional justice and shows that it is imprecise due to the multiple aspects of meaning of ‘justice’ and ‘transition’. Second, it studies the genesis of transitional justice as an instrument and introduces different variants, including judicial and extrajudicial procedures. Third, it addresses the contestations about the role transitional justice can play in transformation processes, particularly in transitions from authoritarian rule to democracy.
Value Change
Authors: Weßels Bernhard
Published: March 2019

Values are conceptions of what is desirable and thus contain moral (or normative) elements. Political values address general political principles, structures, and processes. Values are crucial for social life because they guide and therefore generate action. Values serve as a yardstick for the evaluation of situations and behaviour. Changing values thus imply changes in evaluation criteria. This is why political transformation and processes of democratization are often preceded by value change. With new values new demands arise. In their democratization model, Inglehart and Welzel explicitly mentioned value change as a force driving changes in public demand. This can be called the optimistic perspective on the sequence of human development and has high explanatory power when it comes to successful transformation. However, countermovements in some regions and countries show that transformation processes do not always follow this optimistic model of modernization theory.
Studying Perpetrator Ideologies in Atrocity Crimes
Authors: Leader Maynard Jonathan
Published: March 2019

Scholarly and public commentators frequently discuss the ideological backdrop of atrocity crimes, yet the actual role of ideology in such campaigns of violence remains a key source of disagreement between scholars. This chapter first briefly discusses the variation in contemporary theoretical perspectives on ideology’s relevance to the perpetration of atrocity crimes, and identifies some key shortcomings in most prevailing accounts. It presents the author’s ‘neo-ideological’ approach, which emphasizes ideology’s key role, but departs from some of the cruder, vaguer, or more compartmentalized characterizations of that role found in many existing accounts. It contends that the neo-ideological approach integrates a broad range of key findings from contemporary research on mass atrocities, and explicates the explanatory significance of ideology in the behaviour of various types of perpetrators. It illustrates the plausibility and value of the approach by briefly applying it to the case of the Stalinist Great Terror of 1936–1938.
Competence, Attributability, and Blame
Authors: Kennett Jeanette
Published: March 2019

This chapter takes up the question of whether psychopaths can legitimately be held morally accountable, and the resolution of these issues developed is subtle. First it argues that psychopaths are not accountable for their actions in the sense required for moral blameworthiness. Second, it argues that psychopaths’ actions are not attributable to them in the way that would make them fitting targets of the criminal law. The assertion that attributability is not a face of responsibility is explored and justified. The chapter, while respecting Watson and authors who have followed him in the enquiry into the crucially important attributability ‘face’ of responsibility, also offers a somewhat revisionary account of the ethical significance of attributability and the role of the reactive attitudes in social and moral life.
Transcript of an Interview with Gary Watson
Authors: Buss Sarah
Published: March 2019

This is a transcript of an interview with Gary Watson conducted by Sarah Buss on November 3, 2016. It commences with some autobiographical context: Watson became interested in philosophy after high school upon meeting a philosophy major at an artist’s colony. The study of political philosophy drew him into considering freedom and responsibility, and autonomy. The case of Harris is covered as an investigation of normative competency. Problems with the notion of weak will and self-control are discussed. Asked for any important changes in his thinking, Watson responds that he conflated issues of autonomy and of responsibility; this bears also on responsibility in a weak-willed agent. Finally, Watson asserts that freedom is not just about responsibility; it’s also about having a capacity to direct your life in a certain way. He hopes to investigate this further.
Introduction
Authors: Marshall Shelley
Published: March 2019

This introductory chapter begins by telling the story of Elena, a Bulgarian women who found herself without employment following the privatization of the garment factory she had worked in her whole adult life. It explains how she survived the transition to a market economy by scrounging together informal work of various types. This book is centrally concerned with what regulatory strategies can best improve the working standards and lives of Elena and workers like her around the world. It goes without saying that employment creation policies and those that foster industrial growth are crucially important for improving Elena’s well-being. This book is not aimed at addressing these types of policies, however. It is concerned with the realm of regulation—hard laws, soft initiatives and other institutions that shape behaviour and set incentives in particular directions. The chapter describes the prevalence of informal, low paid work worldwide and defines core terms. It concludes by summarizing the outcome of the global search conducted in this book for realizable policy responses to this persistent problem.
New Approaches to the Study of the Regulation of Work
Authors: Marshall Shelley
Published: March 2019

This book attempts to implement a novel approach to the study of the regulation of work in order to generate new insights into the ways that regulation can help to improve the lives of workers. It adopts historical institutionalism and political economy approaches to build a comprehensive picture of the varied dynamics that contributed to the growth of a precarious, informal workforce in four very different countries. The first section of Chapter 3 describes the overarching case-study methodology employed in this book. The second section describes the primary approach deployed in the case studies: historical institutionalism. The third section describes additional methods and disciplines used to put together stories that span macro and micro scales.
Expansion of Labour Laws in Bulgaria
Authors: Marshall Shelley
Published: March 2019

By 2006, seven years after the transition to capitalism began, informal work in Bulgaria constituted somewhere between 20 per cent and 35 per cent of overall work. It was an entrenched feature of the Bulgarian economy. The aim of this chapter is, first, to track the way that national and international factors converged in the 1990s to create dramatic social change, leaving at least a third of the working population in Bulgaria stranded in informality. It is, second, to assess the expansion of the contract of employment as a means to achieve formalisation. In 2011, Bulgaria’s labour law underwent reform, following a successful campaign for the extension of employment laws to cover home-based workers. The state’s expansion of employment law was in part, a reflection of Bulgaria’s desire to demonstrate adherence with European Union (EU) recommendations as part of its integration into the EU.
A Long-Term Vision
Authors: Marshall Shelley
Published: March 2019

This chapter canvasses a long-term vision for improving the lives of poor and precarious workers who work in informal conditions. It proposes a bold, transnational initiative that aims to promote a global living wage and regulate supply chains. The chapter puts forward three interrelated regulatory pathways out of informality. First, the promotion of Global Living Wages through a multilateral instrument such as an International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention or United Nations treaty, which would also establish an International Living Wage disputes mechanism for enforcement of these minima; second, the setting up of National Living Wage Tribunals empowered to hear disputes concerning non-payment of living wages due to supply chain dynamics and to hold parties in the supply chain responsible for non-payment; third, the fostering of local pathways out of informality.
Retrodynamics
Authors: Giles Paul
Published: March 2019

This chapter’s title, ‘Retrodynamics,’ is taken from a term in mechanics when a rotor’s power thrust is generated through inverse and opposite turns, and its general argument is that an analogous kind of backward motion should be seen as integral to the constitution of modernism. This chapter accordingly considers modernism in relation to the science, philosophy, anthropology and geography of the modernist period. It discusses ways in which time is represented ‘inside out’ in the works of Joseph Conrad, Joseph Furphy, and Marcel Proust. It also reads the fiction of James Joyce in relation to the discourses of parallax and empire, arguing that Ulysses brings together different times and places in a global imaginary where past and present, like proximate and distant, creatively interfere with each other.
Epigenetics, Nuclear Organization & Gene Function
Authors: Lucchesi John C.
Published: March 2019

Epigenetics is the study of heritable changes in gene function that do not involve changes in the DNA sequence. Epigenetic changes, consisting principally of DNA methylation, histone modifications and non-coding RNAs, maintain and modulate the initial impact of regulatory factors that recognize and associate with particular genomic sequences. This book’s primary goal is to establish a framework that can be used to understand the basis of epigenetic regulation and to appreciate both its derivation from genetics and its interdependence with genetic mechanisms. A further aim is to highlight the role played by the three-dimensional organization of the genetic material itself (the complex of DNA, histones and non-histone proteins referred to as chromatin) and its distribution within a functionally compartmentalized nucleus. Dysfunctions at any level of genetic regulation have the potential to result in an increased susceptibility to disease or actually give rise to overt pathologies. As illustrated in this book, research is continuously uncovering the role of epigenetics in a variety of human disorders, providing new avenues for therapeutic interventions and advances in regenerative medicine.
The basic structure of chromatin
Authors: Lucchesi John C.
Published: March 2019

In cells, DNA is associated with histones, non-histone proteins and RNA in a complex referred to as chromatin. Four different types of histones form octamers (nucleosomes), around which DNA is wrapped yielding a chromatin fiber with the configuration of “beads on a string.” Disassembly, followed by reassembly, of this structure occurs during DNA replication, damage repair and transcription. Core histones are replication-coupled; variants are replication-independent. Positioning of nucleosomes on the chromatin fiber is mediated by chromatin remodeling complexes and reflects the functional state of various regions along the fiber. Various biophysical methods have been utilized to study the physical association of nucleosomes and DNA. Chromatin can be differentiated on the basis of the activity of the genes that are present in a given region. Heterochromatin represents repressed or inactive regions of the genome and exhibits a greater degree of condensation than euchromatin, which refers to more unwound regions where active genes are located. The two types of chromatin are present in different nuclear locations.
Nuclear bodies
Authors: Lucchesi John C.
Published: March 2019

The nucleus is subdivided into a number of compartments that are not enclosed by membranes and whose main functions are transcriptional regulation and RNA processing. Many of the same proteins are found in different compartments, highlighting the dynamic exchange of components. The perinuclear compartment (PNC) is a hallmark of a number of different cancers. Cajal bodies (CBs) are sites of assembly of small nuclear ribonucleic particles (snRNPs) that function in messenger RNA (mRNA) or ribosomal RNA (rRNA) processing and in the biogenesis of telomerase. Nuclear speckles contain pre-mRNA splicing components and proteins involved in every aspect of gene regulation. Paraspeckles are involved in the processing and maturation of micro RNAs (miRNAs). Promyelocytic leukemia (PML) nuclear bodies contain the PML protein that has tumor suppressor activity by preventing the inactivation of p53. Under conditions of stress, the number and size of PML nuclear bodies increases. Transcription factories are nuclear regions where several RNA polymerase II (RNAPII) complexes are transcribing several genes. The co-localization of genes in transcription factories may lead to their co-regulation.
DNA repair and genomic stability
Authors: Lucchesi John C.
Published: March 2019

A number of pathways have evolved in order to repair DNA. Mismatch repair (MMR) operates when an improper nucleotide is used or when an insertion or deletion occurs during replication. Nucleotide excision repair (NER) repairs damage that distorts the DNA helix such as the presence of pyrimidine dimers induced by ultraviolet light. Base excision repair (BER) removes damaged or altered DNA bases that do not result in a conformational change in the chromatin. Single-strand break repair (SSBR) uses the same enzymatic steps as BER. Double-strand break (DSB) repair can involve either non-homologous end-joining (NHEJ) or homologous recombination (HR). In NHEJ, the broken DNA ends are joined directly. HR requires that one of the strands of the broken DNA molecule participates in the strand invasion of the sister chromatid. The site of the DSB must be modified to allow access to the repair machinery. This modification involves remodeling complexes, as well as histone-modifying enzymes.
“The Rage of Caliban”
Authors: Davidson Michael
Published: March 2019

Chapter 2 focuses on works that mark the transition from fin de siècle aestheticism to works of high modernism. The primary focus is the role of embodiment in modernist aesthetics, specifically as it appears in music. The chapter looks at several works based on Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656) in which the figure of the court dwarf represented in the painting becomes a site for anxieties about bodily and sexual difference. Alexander Zemlinsky’s opera Der Zwerg (The Dwarf) from 1922 is the primary text, based on Oscar Wilde’s story “The Birthday of the Infanta” (1891). The libretto for Zemlinsky’s opera by George Klaren transforms Wilde’s story of recognition and betrayal into an allegory of dysgenic characterology, based on the work of Otto Weininger. What Wilde perceived as a story about the noble soul beneath the grotesque body, Zemlinsky transformed into a eugenicist allegory of man’s fatal alliance with the femme fatale. As a work that embodies elements of late Romantic chromaticism as well as modernist atonality, Der Zwerg is a site for studying musical representation of bodily difference.
“Every Man his Specialty”
Authors: Davidson Michael
Published: March 2019

Chapter 4 discusses the dialectics of dependency—the interplay between a social contract based on free, equal agents and one that recognizes contingent interrelationships—by looking at one modernist writer, Samuel Beckett, whose work challenges liberal theories of autonomy and independent agency. Beckett’s characters are often disabled and exist in tragi-comic relations of co-dependence that seem to mock communitarian ideals of charity and mutual aid while laying bare the edifice of liberal individualism. Through readings of Happy Days, Rough for Theater I, and Endgame this chapter complicates disability rights’ advocacy of independent living while building upon recent developments in dependency theory advanced by Eva Feder Kittay, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Martha Nussbaum.
Pregnant Men
Authors: Davidson Michael
Published: March 2019

Chapter 5 investigates the idea of biofuturity within modernism, focusing specifically on the figure of male maternity in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood and in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Although the figure of the pregnant male occurs in ancient and classical literature it surfaces significantly among modernist works—Apollinaire’s Les Mamelles de Tiresias, Marinetti’s Mafarka the Futurist, Joyce’s Ulysses, Freud’s Schreber case—at a moment when biological life was being reimagined through the optic of eugenic science and comparative anatomy. Representations of the pregnant male foreground the spectacle of reproduction loosed from its putative organic site in the female body and displace it elsewhere—the test tube, the surrogate womb, the male body, and, not insignificantly, the novel. This displacement is both a queering and cripping of normative attitudes toward reproductive health and the futures that such embodiment implies.
Uncanny Encounters
Authors: Davidson Michael
Published: March 2019

The emergence of affect theory has returned the body to cultural theory by stressing the phenomenological impact of bodies on other bodies. Chapter 6 opens with a reading of Baudelaire’s “Une Passante” that offers one such instance. Despite its emphasis on what Lauren Berlant calls the “messy dynamics of attachment,” affect theory has not attended to disability where the encounter with the non-traditional body incites emotions of anxiety, confusion, and in some cases solidarity. This chapter explores a structure of feeling around dynamic historical changes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through works by Sigmund Freud, Frank Norris, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Toomer. Each illustrates stages in what Sara Ahmed calls “dramas of contingency” by which world historical changes are registered through quotidian moments of attention and confrontation. These stages mark a trajectory in the novel, from Realism and Naturalism to the modernism of Woolf and Toomer.
‘The Organized Selfishness of Empire’
Authors: Otter Sandra den
Published: March 2019

This essay examines T. H. Green’s evolving ideas on empire. Professor of moral philosophy in Oxford until his death in 1882, Green was the most prominent and respected philosophical idealist in Victorian Britain. The influence of his personal example and of his ideas has been traced by Jose Harris and other historians of the welfare state down to the 1940s. Initially enthusiastic for the civilizing mission of empire, Green came to see that any political system or relationship imposed by force, or dependent on coercion or control, was intrinsically incompatible with the ideals of citizenship, voluntarism, and solidarity that define the good community and make possible the self-realization of individuals within it. The essay opens up a new field for discussion and research: the relationship between idealist welfare thinking and imperialism. It argues that empire had a major impact on idealist notions of social welfare.
Richard Titmuss versus the IEA
Authors: Jackson Ben
Published: March 2019

An influential strand of Jose Harris’s research has emphasized the importance of idealist political thought to the rise and fall of the British welfare state. Harris argues that the mid-twentieth-century demise of political theory about social policy left the welfare state vulnerable because its defenders lacked a philosophical discourse with the depth of idealism. This chapter tests this argument by looking in more detail at a case study from the post-1945 discussion about the welfare state: the debate between the group of socialist social policy academics associated with Richard Titmuss and the neo-liberals at the Institute of Economic Affairs spearheaded by Arthur Seldon. The chapter demonstrates that while the defenders of the Beveridgean welfare state lacked theoretical firepower when confronted by a philosophical counterblast from the right, the major weakness of the left’s social policy analysis was in fact a failure to contest the neo-liberal appropriation of economic theory.
Conservative Thinkers and the Post-War State, 1945–79
Authors: Neill Edmund
Published: March 2019

This chapter examines the reaction of conservative thinkers between 1945 and 1979 to the growth of the post-war state in Britain. It argues that in the earlier post-war period conservatives were broadly united in opposing the state’s growth on the basis of arguments put forward by the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott. Oakeshott rejected arguments based on libertarianism or natural law, but nevertheless emphasized the importance of upholding individual liberty, stressing the value of traditional constitutional arrangements, private property, patriotism, and the rule of law. However, by the 1960s and 1970s, the challenges of the permissive society, an increasingly large tax burden, and constitutional problems associated with both the EEC and Scottish and Welsh nationalism led to a wide variety of responses. Some stressed the importance of upholding the state’s authority, others the necessity of lowering taxes, and others again the vital nature of constitutional reform.
The Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain
Authors: Zimmerman Sarah
Published: March 2019

Public lectures on poetry caught the popular imagination in Britain in the first two decades of the nineteenth century with the performances of John Thelwall, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Campbell, and William Hazlitt. Lecturers aimed to shape auditors’ reading habits, burnish their critical profiles, and establish a literary canon, but auditors also wielded considerable influence, since their sustained approbation was necessary to a series’ success. A number of oral traditions fed the literary lecture’s development, but it emerged most vitally out of and against the radical speaking culture of the 1790s in which Thelwall and Coleridge had participated, and developed in anxious proximity to an expanding literary marketplace. These pressures informed lecturers’ critical arguments as they debated who should receive a literary education, what works they should read, and for what ends. As historical speaking performances, public lectures demand a methodological approach of their own, because lecturers communicated their arguments with words, physical gestures, facial expressions, and via self-presentation. An interdisciplinary scholarly consensus now recommends approaching these events by gathering as many surviving texts as possible from both parties and situating these performances in their specific times and places. Although women were disallowed from being public literary lecturers, female auditors performed significant cultural roles as patrons, and as hosts and guests at private gatherings that sometimes followed public lectures. Auditors including John Keats, Mary Russell Mitford, Lady Charlotte Bury, and Catherine Maria Fanshawe responded to lectures in conversation, poems, letters, and journal entries that should be considered creative works in their own right.
The Thrush in the Theater
Authors: Zimmerman Sarah
Published: March 2019

Hazlitt’s influence on Keats’s poetic development is well known, but as an auditor in Hazlitt’s lectures Keats learned not only from what was said but also from the experience of hearing it live. In the letters and poems written during and after Hazlitt’s first literary series, Keats developed a line of thinking in response to Hazlitt’s disparagement of the quality of “indolence” in James Thomson’s poetry. In an unrhymed sonnet in which the speaker does nothing but hear a thrush sing, Keats developed a poetics of listening as a potentially productive idleness. This insight informed subsequent poems in which the drama is anticipating what another will say and responding to it in the moment. In his letters the recurrent figure of the thrush and an accompanying image of leaves become shorthand for a counter-impulse to the ardent pursuit of what Hazlitt in his lectures called “true fame.”
The Last Word
Authors: Zimmerman Sarah
Published: March 2019

Women were welcomed as lecture auditors who could make a series successful, but lecturers, the institutions that sponsored series, and some male auditors also tried to restrict their participation. They were concerned that female auditors might use the education for their own ends or treat lectures as mere fashionable entertainment. Women authors were acknowledged by lecturers only if they were too prominent to be ignored, such as Anna Letitia Barbauld. Female auditors nevertheless exerted considerable influence in non-print media. They acted as hosts and guests at private gatherings, and as informal patrons for lecturers. Mary Russell Mitford attended lectures to acquire a literary education and wrote accounts of performances by Coleridge, Campbell, and Thelwall. Lady Charlotte Bury acted as host and patron to Campbell, and Catherine Maria Fanshawe circulated poems in manuscript that took as subjects the oral cultures in which she moved as valued guest, including public lectures and private gatherings.
Ancient Rome: The Republic and the Augustan Age
Authors: Attridge Derek
Published: March 2019

This chapter begins with earliest form of Latin verse, the Saturnian, dating from the early centuries after Rome’s founding; little is known about it, however. A native tradition of written verse was established when Ennius created a Latin equivalent of the Greek hexameter, and there is evidence of public performances of his epic verse. During the Late Republic, the two major poets were Lucretius and Catullus, the former inviting a reader imbibing versified philosophy on the page, the latter inviting performance in a convivial setting—but also incorporating performance in the verse itself. Cicero, in the same period, provides testimony to the practice of having skilled readers at symposia. The two poets who dominate the Augustan era, Virgil and Horace, also represent opposing attitudes to performance, the former embracing it, the latter professing to abhor it. Allusions by Ovid and Propertius to poetic performance are also discussed.
Late Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Poetry: The Idea of the Poet
Authors: Attridge Derek
Published: March 2019

Following in Gascoigne’s footsteps, several writers attempted to explain the working of verse, and many tried to emulate classical metres in English; these treatises reveal some of the preconceptions about poetic form common in the period. The notion that Elizabethan taverns were the site of poetry recitations among clubs of wits is examined. The figures of poets in the many pageants and progresses that characterized the Elizabethan period further manifest the governing idea of the poet, as do theatrical representations. Consideration is given to the many poets and would-be poets in Shakespeare’s plays, and further evidence is found in the three ‘Parnassus’ plays. The poets Jonson puts on stage are examined, with attention to the contrast between those who are made fun of and those who embody models. A number of other poets on stage are considered, and the chapter ends with two positive instances from Shakespeare and Jonson.
Subjective Probability and the Content/Attitude Distinction
Authors: Carr Jennifer Rose
Published: March 2019

On an attractive, naturalistically respectable theory of intentionality, mental contents are a form of measurement system for representing behavioral and psychological dispositions. This chapter argues that a consequence of this view is that the content/attitude distinction is measurement system relative. As a result, there is substantial arbitrariness in the content/attitude distinction. Whether some measurement of mental states counts as characterizing the content of mental states or the attitude is not a question of empirical discovery but of theoretical utility. If correct, this observation has ramifications in the theory of rationality. Some epistemologists and decision theorists have argued that imprecise credences are rationally impermissible, while others have argued that precise credences are rationally impermissible. If the measure theory of mental content is correct, however, then neither imprecise credences nor precise credences can be rationally impermissible.
Modal Empiricism
Authors: Casullo Albert
Published: March 2019

Kant contends that necessity is a criterion of the a priori—that is, that all knowledge of necessary propositions is a priori. This contention, together with two others that Kant took to be evident—we know some mathematical propositions and such propositions are necessary—leads directly to the conclusion that some knowledge is a priori. Although many contemporary philosophers endorse Kant’s criterion, supporting arguments are hard to come by. Gordon Barnes provides one of the few examples. My purpose in this chapter is to articulate and examine his argument. I have two goals in doing so. The first is to uncover several significant gaps in the argument. The second is to show that it suffers from a common defect in rationalist arguments. If the argument were successful against empiricist accounts of modal knowledge, it would apply with equal force to extant rationalist accounts of such knowledge. Hence, the cost of refuting modal empiricism is modal scepticism.
Who Wants to Know?
Authors: Nado Jennifer
Published: March 2019

This chapter argues that professional inquirers, including professional philosophers, are subject to special epistemic obligations which require them to meet higher standards than those that are required for knowing. Perhaps the most obvious examples come from the experimental sciences, where professionals are required to employ rigorous methodological procedures to reduce the risk of error and bias; procedures such as double-blinding are obligatory in many experimental contexts, but no parallel bias-reducing measures are generally expected in ordinary epistemic activity. To expect such would, in fact, be over-demanding. I argue that this variation in epistemic requirements cannot be accounted for adequately via the usual standard-shifting accounts of knowledge, such as contextualism or subject-sensitive invariantism. Instead, it calls for a more pluralistic approach—it suggests that knowledge is simply not the only epistemic state worthy of philosophical attention.
What is a Philosophical Question?
Authors: Floridi Luciano
Published: March 2019

There are many ways of understanding the nature of philosophical questions. One may consider their morphology, semantics, relevance, or scope. This chapter introduces a different approach, based on the kind of informational resources required to answer them. The result is a definition of philosophical questions as questions whose answers are in principle open to informed, rational, and honest disagreement, ultimate but not absolute, closed under further questioning, possibly constrained by empirical and logico-mathematical resources, but requiring noetic resources to be answered. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some of the consequences of this definition for a conception of philosophy as the study (or ‘science’) of open questions, which uses conceptual design to analyse and answer them. That is the topic of Chapter 2.
Constructionism as Non-naturalism
Authors: Floridi Luciano
Published: March 2019

Philosophical constructionism is far from being relativistic. This chapter will argue that it does not have to be naturalistic either. The discussion begins with a consideration of a strange predicament in which contemporary science seems to be caught. On the one hand, science holds a firm and reasonable commitment to a healthy naturalistic methodology, according to which explanations of natural phenomena should never overstep the limits of the natural itself. On the other hand, contemporary science is also inextricably and now inevitably dependent on ever more complex technologies, especially Information and Communication Technologies, which it exploits as well as fosters. Yet such technologies are increasingly ‘artificializing’ or ‘denaturalizing’ the world, human experiences, and interactions, as well as what qualifies as real. The search for the ultimate explanation of the natural seems to rely upon, and promote, the development of the artificial, seen here as an instantiation of the non-natural. In this chapter, I shall try and find a way out of this apparently strange predicament. I shall argue that the naturalization of our knowledge of the world is either philosophically trivial (naturalism as anti-supernaturalism and anti-preternaturalism), or mistaken (naturalism as anti-constructionism).
Information Quality
Authors: Floridi Luciano
Published: March 2019

Knowledge, as a non-natural construction, may be based on our ability to hack the data coming from the world. Two questions now become pressing. The first, addressed in this chapter, concerns the quality of the information we are able to generate, when we are dealing with truthful contents. The second question concerns the truthfulness of such contents and is the subject of Chapter 6. This chapter generalizes the analysis and applies it to a popular topic, that of big data. It is argued that the real epistemological challenge posed by the zettabyte era is small patterns. The chapter focuses on information quality (IQ). Which data may be useful and relevant, and so worth collecting, curating, and querying, in order to exploit their valuable (small) patterns? The chapter argues that the standard way of seeing IQ in terms of being fit-for-purpose is correct but needs to be complemented by the methodology of abstraction introduced in Chapter 2, which allows IQ to be indexed to different purposes.
The Canadian Agendas Project
Authors: Gauvin Jean-Philippe , Montpetit Éric
Published: March 2019

The Canadian Agendas Project includes a variety of datasets that highlight how the country’s political system shapes policymaking. It started originally as way to study legislative outputs, but the project has grown well beyond its initial objects and goals to embrace a wide set of other research questions and directions. The combination of British parliamentarism with federalism, which concentrates powers in the hands of the executives, is studied through Speeches from the Throne and intergovernmental meetings data. The responsiveness of the legislative branch to public opinion is analyzed through oral questions, legislative bills, and most important question data. Finally, the project also looks at the judiciary and Supreme Court decisions and leaves for appeal.
Croatian Political Agendas
Authors: Širinić Daniela , Čakar Dario Nikić
Published: March 2019

The Croatian Agendas Project is the newest member of the Comparative Agendas network. The project was set up to investigate agenda-setting of the main political institutions and organizations—political parties, the parliament, the government, and the president—in the last twenty-five years. The dataset’s coverage of the entire life span of a new democracy enables the comparison of agenda-setting between different stages of regime change, but also between large institutional changes such as the change from a semi-presidential to a parliamentary system of government. Finally the project is ultimately also seeking to contribute to comparative research agendas on these and related topics.
Political Agendas in Germany
Authors: Breunig Christian , Schnatterer Tinette
Published: March 2019

This chapter describes the German political system and connects its working to agenda-setting theories. Given its institutional configuration, politics and policy-making in Germany is typically described in terms of deliberation, moderation, and gridlock. We introduce six data series—public opinion, party platforms, policy processes, government speeches, parliamentary questions, bills and laws—that comprise agenda-setting in Germany. The data for these political activities are obtained from official sources. We delineate the processing and coding of these series. A brief application that examines the German reunification process illustrates the potential of the database. The illustration shows that reunification has not really been politicized but occupied considerable agenda space in government speeches and legislation.
The Hungarian Agendas Project
Authors: Boda Zsolt , Sebők Miklós
Published: March 2019

The chapter presents the Hungarian Comparative Agendas Project. It delineates its origins at the Centre for Social Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences and situates it in the context of Hungarian political science. The project developed numerous databases, including those on budgets, laws, decrees, parliamentary speeches, newspaper articles, and public opinion polls. Due to the post-communist political development of Hungary our country project shows some specificities vis-à-vis more established projects. First, the codebook includes a few country-specific minor topic codes (such as those related to post-communist restitution) that are directly linked in to the comparative codebook (therefore our results remain fully comparable). Second, one added value of some of our datasets is their relative length which—in some cases—covers multiple centuries as well as various political regimes, including non-democratic ones. This allows for not only cross-country comparative analysis but also for comparing policy agendas in different regimes.
The Swiss Policy Agendas Project
Authors: Gava Roy , Sciarini Pascal , Tresch Anke , Varone Frédéric
Published: March 2019

This chapter describes the Swiss political system and adopts an issue attention approach to explore one of its defining institutions: direct democracy. By means of referenda and popular initiatives, voters regularly decide on the continuity and change of policies. Welfare and education (27%) and environment, energy, and transportation (21%) account for almost half of all the votes during the period 1990–2014. The direct democracy venue is often activated as a result of citizens’ pressure (“bottom-up”). However, the majority of these bottom-up proposals are refused by voters. Policy change through direct democracy occurs more frequently in a “top-down” manner, when political elites are required by constitutional rules to put the fate of some of their most important decisions to the ballot box.
The EU Policy Agendas Project
Authors: Alexandrova Petya
Published: March 2019

The EU Policy Agendas Project (EUPAP) was initially developed by Sebastiaan Princen in the context of his work on agenda-setting in the European Union. The first large data collection project focused on the European Council and was carried out in the Netherlands and Italy under the coordination of Petya Alexandrova and Marcello Carammia and with the participation of Arco Timmermans and Sebastiaan Princen. The EUPAP has developed in a decentralized network with researchers of other country Agendas Projects and scholars outside this community embracing the approach and developing new datasets.
From Public to Publics
Authors: Cavari Amnon , Freedman Guy
Published: March 2019

A rich body of work examines the public agenda in democratic countries. These studies rely on aggregate responses to survey questions that ask respondents to report their issue priorities—commonly using topline data of the most important problem survey series (MIP). This research design, however, is not sensitive to differences in issue priorities between individuals and groups and, therefore, fails to account for the possible variation within the general public. To overcome this neglect in existing literature, we examine individual-level responses to the most important problem question in two countries—the United States and Israel—focusing specifically on economic and foreign policy priorities. We reveal that beyond aggregate trends in the public agenda, socio-demographic factors in both countries explain some of the variation in issue dynamics.