bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Gary Watson
Authors: Smith Michael
Published: March 2019

This chapter is concerned with Gary Watson’s overall conception of moral responsibility, and in particular the influence on it of P. F. Strawson’s paper, “Freedom and Resentment.”The chapter provides an anti-Strawsonian theory of responsibility, that is, one in which an agent’s being responsible is independently understood and their being held responsible is understood in terms of this independent notion. It also argues that being held responsible is best understood not in terms of retributive emotions like resentment or indignation, as Strawson suggests, but rather in terms of trust.Two points are made about Watson’s account of being responsible: one, that the demand that we give a folk-psychological explanation of an agent’s failure to exercise a capacity he possesses is unreasonable; two, that it is not the case that, as Watson maintains, the distinction between those who fail to exercise a capacity that they have, and those who lack a capacity altogether, is a distinction without a difference. The proffered anti-Strawsonian theory of responsibility is based on this crucial distinction.
Learning from Psychopaths
Authors: Scanlon T. M.
Published: March 2019

The chapter examines arguments offered by Gary Watson, drawing on the case of psychopaths, for broadening the conditions of moral responsibility that are required for reactive attitudes such as resentment. These broader conditions include what Watson calls accountability as well as attributability. Focusing mainly on ‘negative’ reactive attitudes, of which a few examples are given, there is an examination of associated conditions of responsibility, and in some depth, of Watson’s argument for accountability as a condition for responsibility; the case of psychopaths is the vehicle for this examination.
Compromised Addicts
Authors: Yaffe Gideon
Published: March 2019

The chapter seeks to better understand the prospects of Watson’s account of addiction. In particular, it is concerned with the question of how addiction can weaken the demand that the addict comply with otherwise legitimate demands. Watson answers this question by pointing to the way in which addictive desires distract attention in a way that makes it unreasonable to expect addicts to comply with legitimate demands with the same alacrity with which we expect non-addicts to comply with such demands. Demurring, the chapter argues instead that the expectation that addicts comply with otherwise legitimate demands is weakened because, for the addict, wholehearted effort to comply is simply not possible.
Second Thoughts
Authors: Watson Gary
Published: March 2019

This chapter addresses critical questions about Watson’s distinction between two “faces” of responsibility—responsibility as attributability and responsibility as accountability—addressing the nature of each and what each has to do with responsibility. Along the way, a distinction is elaborated between first-personal and second-personal forms of answerability, the first of which is implicit in attributability and the second of which is a form of accountability. The chapter bemoans the emphasis in much recent writing on reactive attitudes, narrowly construed; this ignores many of the responses that constitute holding others responsible. It also rejects the prevalent idea that moral criticism is basically a response to agents’ quality of will. This leaves out culpable and other forms of objectionable inadvertence. Finally, the chapter explains the motivation behind Watson’s earlier position on weakness of will, and why he now regards that position as misguided.
How Can Regulation Help?
Authors: Marshall Shelley
Published: March 2019

Chapter 2 explores how regulation might help to alleviate the burden on poor workers and reduce the incidence of informal work. Informal work is understood in this study as a regulatory problem or conundrum. The chapter explores insights and concepts from the regulatory literature in order reflect upon the reason why labour regulation is failing so many workers around the world, leaving them stranded in a state of informality. The chapter proposes, first, that traditional state-based labour law is not responding to the various forms of work that have proliferated in recent years. Second, it is not responding to advances in the structures of production and relations of distribution that work occurs within. Third, it is not employing tools that are appropriate to or effective in regulating new working relationships. And fourth, it is not creating incentives for compliance which overcome the countervailing disincentives which arise from private and informal regulation, culture, and informal institutions. Having established the problem, it then draws on various literatures to set up the conceptual framework for examining how institutional change could occur so that a more responsive labour regulation could be generated.
Four Experiments in Reducing Informality
Authors: Marshall Shelley
Published: March 2019

Chapter 8 compares the four innovations described in the case study chapters (Chapters 4–7) and draws out lessons about the way that institutional change occurs. None of the models entail comprehensive reform of the way work is regulated in a nation. Nor do they fundamentally challenge the international institutional arrangements, which have altered and undermined the power of national institutions to regulate work, and which were seen to be at play in each of the case studies. They have instead sought solutions which were politically feasible and improved the conditions of a specific group of workers—homeworkers, head-load workers, and garment workers. They arose out of particular political moments and institutional trajectories. The initiatives have in common that they (a) expand or sidestep the employment relationship so as to encompass broader forms of work (with the exception of the Cambodian initiative); and (b) increase the strength of regulation in order to push against countervailing pressures which lower working conditions. However, each initiative has achieved this in different ways and to different extents. This chapter compares these different methods and explores why some levers are stronger than others.
Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture
Authors: Giles Paul
Published: March 2019

The focus of this book is on how time is represented in reverse forms throughout modernist literature and culture, from about 1900 until the middle years of the twentieth century. It is particularly concerned with how antipodean reorientations of chronological scale reconfigure ways in which the conventional temporal categories of modernism are understood. It treats time neither as a philosophical nor as a theological concern but, rather, as a phenomenon shaped by material forces across different spatial and temporal trajectories. By foregrounding the antipodean slant of this project, it not only integrates the literature of Australia and other parts of the Southern Hemisphere into the broader trajectories of modernism, but also considers ways in which canonical narratives might productively be considered in relation to their antipodean dimensions, thereby opening up modernist narratives to various forms of systematic reversal. Backgazing thus reads canonical authors (Proust, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Mann, Auden) in relation to Australasian modernist writers (Mansfield, H. H. Richardson, Dark, White, and others), and it considers how the shape of modernism appears different if viewed from an antipodean perspective. It also considers various neglected modernist writers (Cunard, Farrell, Powell, Slessor, R. D. FitzGerald) and suggests how their modernist idiom becomes more recognizable in relation to an aesthetics of backwardness and burlesque.
Organicist Time
Authors: Giles Paul
Published: March 2019

This chapter traces how an organicist version of time was developed during the interwar period, how it reached its philosophical apogee in the work of Martin Heidegger and was treated sympathetically by American novelist Thomas Wolfe. However, this organicist impulse was kept at a distance by the writing of Theodor Adorno, Thomas Mann, and H. G. Wells, all of whom engage in dialectics with fascism. This chapter also considers how organicist models of temporal sequence inform the fixation on time in William Faulkner’s fiction, and how Sartre’s existentialism attempted to disavow what he saw as Faulkner’s backward-looking nostalgia. This kind of organicist imagination continued to resonate widely even after 1945, as we see from Anthony Powell’s sequence of novels A Dance to the Music of Time, and organicist time formed an integral backbone to many dimensions of modernist culture, even if its visibility became partially suppressed after World War II.
DNA methylation and gene expression
Authors: Lucchesi John C.
Published: March 2019

DNA methylation is an epigenetic modification that consists of the addition of a methyl, or of a hydroxyl and a methyl group, to the cytosine of CpG dinucleotides. Some gene promoters are rich in CpGs that are predominantly not modified; other promoters and most enhancers are poor in CpGs. These elements, as well as most exons, introns and intergenic regions, tend to be methylated. CpG methylation plays an important role in maintaining transposable elements and tandem arrays of repetitive sequences in a repressed state. CpG methylation is also responsible for the uniparental silencing of imprinted alleles, allowing the monoallelic expression of some genes, and for the silencing and clonal transmission of the inactive X chromosome in mammals. The use of this modification as a means of dynamically turning individual genes on or off, illustrated by the activation of individual odorant receptor genes, is less common.
The nuclear envelope
Authors: Lucchesi John C.
Published: March 2019

The nuclear envelope is a double membrane sheath made up of two lipid bilayers—an outer and an inner membrane. The inner surface of the inner membrane is associated with a meshwork of filaments made up of lamins and of lamin-associated proteins that constitute the lamina. A substantial portion of the genome contacts the lamina through lamina-associated domains (LADs). LADs usually position silent or gene-poor regions of the genome near the lamina and nuclear membrane. The position of some LADs is different in some cells of the same tissue, reflecting the stochastic nature of gene activity; it can also change during differentiation, allowing the necessary activation of particular genes. Contact of transcription units with nuclear pores can result in activation or, sometimes, repression. Some of the proteins that contribute to the structure of the pores can activate transcription by associating with genes or with super-enhancers away from the nuclear membrane.
Chromatin replication
Authors: Lucchesi John C.
Published: March 2019

During chromosome replication, each strand of the DNA serves as a template for the synthesis of a new strand (semiconservative replication). Replication originates with the binding of pre-replication complexes (MCM2–7) at multiple sites, termed origins of replication (ORIs). One strand of the parent DNA molecule (the leading strand) is replicated continuously in the 5´ to 3´ direction; the other, or lagging strand, is replicated one short segment at a time. These segments are referred to as Okazaki fragments, and their generation requires the synthesis of short complementary RNA primers. For replication to proceed, DNA must be unwound and freed from nucleosomes. After replication, the nucleosomal structure is re-established using a mixture of old and newly synthesized histones. DNA replication can encounter problems such as nucleotide depletion, DNA damage or topologically unfavorable structures that generate replication stress and replication fork stalling. The DNA replication process itself can also be subjected to errors. Cells have evolved a battery of mechanisms designed to bypass or repair damaged DNA strands.
Inheritance of chromatin modifications through the cell cycle
Authors: Lucchesi John C.
Published: March 2019

Following mitosis, the particular transcriptional landscape of the parent cell must be faithfully transmitted to daughter cells. Although transcription ceases, not all transcription factors are displaced. DNA methylation has been implicated in the inheritance of chromatin characteristics because maintenance DNA methyl transferases methylate CpG dinucleotides on the newly replicated strand if the corresponding GpC on the parent strand is methylated. Nucleosomes that are deposited on the newly synthesized DNA strands are made up of old and new histones, and some marks present on the old histones are maintained. The proper distribution of nucleosomes and the topological organization of the genome into topologically associating domains (TADs) must be transmitted to daughter cells. Following DNA replication, centromeres must be specified on the daughter chromatids. In most eukaryotes, centromeres are identified by the presence of nucleosomes bearing the histone H3 variant CENP-A. An additional number of proteins and non-coding RNAs originating from centric and pericentromeric DNA repeats associate with centromeres and appear to play a role in centromere function.
Nuclear reprogramming and induced pluripotency
Authors: Lucchesi John C.
Published: March 2019

Four core transcription factors known to maintain the pluripotent state in embryonic stem cells (ESCs)—Oct4, Sox2, Klf4 and c-Myc—were used to induce pluripotent stem cells in adult-derived fibroblasts. Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), like ESCs, have less condensed and more transcriptionally active chromatin than differentiated cells. The number of genes with bivalent promoter marks increases during reprogramming, reflecting the switch of differentiation-specific active genes to an inactive, but poised, status. The levels of DNA methyl transferases and demethylases are increased, underlying the changes in the pattern of DNA methylation that occur late during reprogramming. The potential therapeutic applications of iPSCs include reprogramming a patient’s own cells to avoid the problem of rejection following injection to restore tissue or organ function. iPSCs derived from individuals at risk of developing late-onset neurological diseases could be differentiated in culture to predict the future occurrence of the disease. Caveats involve the fact that long-term culturing often results in genomic mutations that may, by chance, involve tumor suppressors or oncogenes.
Transgenerational inheritance of epigenetic traits
Authors: Lucchesi John C.
Published: March 2019

Aberrant nutrition during pregnancy or in early postnatal development can result in obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, defective cognition or psychopathologies in adult life. In some cases, the epigenetic modifications responsible for these effects can be transmitted to descendants who have not been exposed to the same environmental factors as their parents. Examples range from the transgenerational inheritance of conditions caused by physiological stress and exposure to endocrine disruptors, and behavioral and psychiatric effects. Transgenerational inheritance has been correlated with changes in DNA or histone methylation. The transmission of methylated DNA signals faces the problem of reprogramming in the germline. A few of the signals that protect imprinted regions for demethylation have been identified. Small non-coding RNAs such as piwi-interacting RNAs (piRNAs) and fragments of tRNAs are clearly involved at some level in transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. This is particularly the case in organisms such as flies and worms that lack DNA methylation.
Immiserizing Growth: An Overview
Authors: Shaffer Paul
Published: March 2019

This chapter provides a survey of theoretical and empirical issues related to immiserizing growth (IG). It reviews historical antecedents, including the towering figures of classical political economy—Malthus, Ricardo, and Marx—who held different versions of the IG idea. A number of the causal mechanisms generating IG outcomes are then reviewed, drawing on diverse traditions of scholarship, with a focus on political economy, politics, and the policy process. Finally, the empirical literature is examined drawing on cross-country and country case information. The chapter concludes that IG is not an insignificant empirical phenomenon, which has been somewhat overlooked in light of the prevailing narrative that ‘growth is good for the poor’.
Exploring the Causes of Immiserizing Growth: A Comparison of Pathways
Authors: Liu Benjamin , Yeo Siyuan , Donaldson John A.
Published: March 2019

Why do some countries experience long bouts of immiserizing growth? This chapter identifies and examines a handful of countries that over at least a five-year period experienced positive GDP growth rates of at least 2 per cent per year while simultaneously experiencing declines in the income of the bottom 20 per cent. Process tracing reveals that the diverse cases traversed three distinct causal pathways: structural reforms (Dominican Republic, 1984–9), structural transformation (Singapore 1978–83), and the systematic exclusion of indigenous populations from the benefits of growth (Bolivia 1991–7). The conclusions have implications for our understanding of the political causes of immiserizing growth, the role of the international system in causing such incidents, and how cases that otherwise might be perceived as successful included the systematic exclusion of vulnerable portions of the population.
Has the Economy Left the Children Behind? Nutritional Immiserization in India
Authors: Thampi Anjana
Published: March 2019

In spite of rapid economic growth and recent progress in certain nutritional parameters, children in India continue to have among the worst anthropometric indicators in the world. This chapter constructs a hunger index for each state in India for 2006 and 2016 on the lines of the Global Hunger Index. It studies two of the component indicators of the index—child stunting and wasting—in relation to per capita state incomes. This shows a weakening relationship between the levels and growth rates of per capita incomes and the levels and changes in nutritional indicators since the late 1990s, particularly in the case of child wasting, which has worsened in absolute terms. With the qualifier that further nutritional progress is harder to attain at improved levels, these results indicate that economic growth has had a limited role in explaining the improvements in child anthropometry over the past two decades. Three explanations are assessed, all of which are found to be plausible. The experiences of certain states indicate the need for more committed interventions towards improving health and nutrition services.
Invalid Modernism
Authors: Davidson Michael
Published: March 2019

Invalid Modernism contributes to an intersectional moment in disability studies by looking at aesthetics through non-conforming bodies and minds. It also offers an intersectional understanding of modernism by studying the representation of physical and cognitive difference during a period marked by progressive reforms in health, labor, and welfare. Readings of texts by Henry James, Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Oscar Wilde, F. T. Marinetti, Jean Toomer, an opera by Alexander Zemlinsky, and paintings and constructions of Dadaists and Surrealists are set against historical developments in sexology, medical discourse, and eugenics and anthropometry. Modernist works are well known for challenging formal features of narration and representation, but this challenge has often been enabled by shell-shocked veterans, tubercular heroines, blind soothsayers, invalid aesthetes, and neurasthenic women. Such figures complicate an aesthetics of autonomy by which modernism is often understood. Since its evolution in the eighteenth century modern aesthetics has been seen in terms of judgments based on detached appreciation. What begins as a private sensory response to an object or natural formation results in a disinterested judgment about the value of that response. By looking at modernist aesthetics through a disability optic, Invalid Modernism attempts to restore the missing body to aesthetic discourse through figures marked by medical discourse of the period as “invalid” subjects.
Private Benefit, Public Finance?
Authors: Whyte William
Published: March 2019

This chapter explores the way in which developments in the apparently rather narrow field of undergraduate finance tell us something about perceptions of the university in the late twentieth century and, more importantly, about how debates over higher education illuminate wider attitudes to the relationship between the individual, the state, and civil society. It also uses these debates—and the legislation they inspired—to discuss the difficulties the state and other actors faced in dealing with higher education in an era characterized by anxieties about Britain’s perceived decline, and about inequities in British society. The tangled and tortured development of student finance in the last four decades of the twentieth century illustrates the value of Jose Harris’s approach, whilst also enabling historians to trace the longer-lasting legacy of idealist thought.
Reshaping the Welfare State?
Authors: Davis John
Published: March 2019

This essay looks at evolving approaches to urban deprivation in 1960s and 1970s London, a period when poverty was ‘rediscovered’ and attention drawn to the holes in the established welfare state. New social organizations sprang up in response to new urban problems and to the reality of multiple deprivations in London’s twilight zones. These new organizations answered contemporary calls for a revival of civic involvement through greater grass-roots participation in public life. They brought energy and innovative methods to the task of tackling poverty, but in the process they frequently placed themselves in opposition to the existing statutory agencies, with the result that social action as a whole lost focus and direction as it succumbed to public/private turf wars and ideological conflict. The ‘mixed economy of welfare’ was tottering even before Margaret Thatcher entered Downing Street.
John Thelwall’s School of Eloquence
Authors: Zimmerman Sarah
Published: March 2019

Thelwall could not escape the ghosts of his radical past as a political speaker who had been tried for treason. In reinventing himself as a speech therapist and lecturer on elocution he channeled his previous democratic commitments into teaching how to represent oneself through effective speaking. As he expanded the role of poetry in his elocution lectures, Thelwall developed a distinctive literary criticism that was particularly suited to public lectures. His key criterion for judging poetry was how well it lent itself to being read aloud or recited. At his London school he institutionalized this critical perspective, but his preference for extemporaneity left it vulnerable to loss in the historical record. Collecting the newspaper advertisements and other surviving texts of his literary lectures can help piece together a speculative account of his Romantic-era critical manifesto.
Acting Like an Author
Authors: Zimmerman Sarah
Published: March 2019

William Hazlitt was steeped in a 1790s culture of radical speaking. Listening to Coleridge as a Dissenting preacher and hearing him recite his verse fostered Hazlitt’s hopes in political and aesthetic reform. In Lectures on the English Poets (1818) he responded to the dashing of those hopes by developing an aesthetic agenda that might renew them and a conversational prose that would become his signature as a critic. He advocated looking to the earliest British poets for examples of how to achieve lasting fame and, rejecting Coleridge’s extemporaneity, honed a delivery style that emphasized qualities he associated with the kind of authorship he championed by preparing full scripts and adopting a studied distance from auditors. In assuming the role of lecturer Hazlitt attempted to supplant his former mentor and assume his own cultural authority.
Early Tudor Poetry: Courtliness and Print
Authors: Attridge Derek
Published: March 2019

After noting the evidence for the public performance of poetry in Continental Europe, this chapter turns to the impact of print on English poetry: from the late fifteenth century, the printers Caxton and de Worde gave readers a new way to experience poems. At the court of Henry VIII, Skelton exploited both manuscript and print. The Devonshire manuscript, which circulated around Henry’s courtiers, is discussed, as is Tottel’s 1557 Songes and Sonettes, whose cachet lay partly in its making the private poetry of the elite available to a large public. Another popular collection was A Mirror for Magistrates, in which a gathering of poets impersonating famous tragic victims of the past was staged. Although there were signs of a suppler use of metre, the 1560s and 1570s were characterized by highly regular verse. The most skilled poet of this period, Gascoigne, was also responsible for a pathbreaking treatise on poetry.
On the Accuracy of Group Credences
Authors: Pettigrew Richard
Published: March 2019

We often ask for the opinion of a group of individuals. How strongly does the scientific community believe that the rate at which sea levels are rising has increased over the last 200 years? How likely does the UK Treasury think it is that there will be a recession if the country leaves the European Union? What are these group credences that such questions request? And how do they relate to the individual credences assigned by the members of the particular group in question? According to the credal judgement aggregation principle, linear pooling, the credence function of a group should be a weighted average or linear pool of the credence functions of the individuals in the group. In this chapter, I give an argument for linear pooling based on considerations of accuracy. And I respond to two standard objections to the aggregation principle.
Stakes, Practical Adequacy, and the Epistemic Significance of Double-Checking
Authors: Goldberg Sanford C.
Published: March 2019

In their chapter “Knowledge, Practical Adequacy, and Stakes,” Charity Anderson and John Hawthorne present several challenges to the doctrine of pragmatic encroachment. In this brief reply to their chapter two things are aimed at. First, the chapter argues that there is a sense in which their case against pragmatic encroachment is a bit weaker, and another sense in which that case is much stronger, than Anderson and Hawthorne’s own argument would suggest. Second, the chapter highlights and then builds upon their extremely interesting reflections on one sort of practical matter that has not received proper attention in the literature: the epistemic significance of double-checking. This is done with an eye towards pointing in the direction of further work.
How Much is at Stake for the Pragmatic Encroacher
Authors: Russell Jeffrey Sanford
Published: March 2019

People who defend “pragmatic encroachment” about knowledge generally advocate two ideas: (1) you can rationally act according to what you know; (2) knowledge is harder to achieve when more is at stake. In their chapter in this volume, Charity Anderson and John Hawthorne argue that these two ideas may not fit together so well. This chapter extends Anderson and Hawthorne’s argument. By applying some standard decision theory, we can calculate a precise quantity of “how much is at stake” that does fit together with knowledge and action. While this calculated quantity matches intuitions about how much is at stake in certain standard cases, in others it does not.Keywords
The Logic of Information
Authors: Floridi Luciano
Published: March 2019

This is a book on the logic of design and hence on how we make, transform, refine, and improve the objects of our knowledge. The starting point is that reality provides the data, to be understood as constraining affordances, and we transform them into information, like semantic engines. Such transformation or repurposing is not equivalent to portraying, or picturing, or photographing, or photocopying anything. It is more like cooking: the dish does not represent the ingredients, it uses them to make something else out of them, yet the reality of the dish and its properties hugely depend on the reality and the properties of the ingredients. Models are not representations understood as pictures, but interpretations understood as data elaborations, of systems. Thus, the whole book may also be read as an articulation and defence of the thesis that knowledge is design, and that philosophy is the ultimate form of conceptual design. This is the third volume in a tetralogy that includes The Philosophy of Information (OUP 2011) and The Ethics of Information (OUP 2013). The three volumes are all written as stand-alone, but they are complementary. By working like a hinge between the two previous books, this third one prepares the basis for volume four, on The Politics of Information. There, the epistemological, conceptual, and normative constructionism supports the study of the design opportunities we have in understanding and shaping what I like to call “the human project” in our information societies.
Philosophy as Conceptual Design
Authors: Floridi Luciano
Published: March 2019

Philosophy, understood as the study or science of open questions and their answers, becomes primarily a form of conceptual design. This is what we are going to see in this chapter, which offers an account and a defence of constructionism, both as a metaphilosophical approach and as a philosophical methodology, with some references to the philosophical tradition that has inspired it, the so-called ‘maker’s knowledge’ tradition. Here, we shall see that such constructionism needs to be reconciled with naturalism (recall that philosophy as conceptual design may be critical but also respectful of the best knowledge and reasonings we may have).
A Defence of Information Closure
Authors: Floridi Luciano
Published: March 2019

In this chapter, the principle of information closure (pic) is defined and defended against a sceptical objection similar to the one discussed by Dretske in relation to the principle of epistemic closure. If successful, given that pic is equivalent to the axiom of distribution and that the latter is one of the conditions that discriminate between normal and non-normal modal logics, one potentially good reason to look for a formalization of the logic of ‘S is informed that p’ among the non-normal modal logics, which reject the axiom, is also removed. This is not to argue that the logic of ‘S is informed that p’ should be a normal modal logic, but that it could still be, insofar as the objection that it could not be, based on the sceptical objection against pic, has been removed. In other words, this chapter argues that the sceptical objection against pic fails, so such an objection provides no ground to abandon the normal modal logic B (also known as KTB) as a formalization of ‘S is informed that p’, which remains plausible insofar as this specific obstacle is concerned.
The Logic of Design as a Conceptual Logic of Information
Authors: Floridi Luciano
Published: March 2019

This final chapter outlines a logic of design of a system as a specific kind of conceptual logic of the design of the model of a system, that is, the blueprint that provides information about the system to be created. Section 1 uses the method of levels of abstraction to clarify that we have inherited from modernity two main conceptual logics of information understood as logics of modelling systems: Kant’s transcendental logic of conditions of possibility of a system, and Hegel’s dialectical logic of conditions of in/stability of a system. A logic of design is a third conceptual logic that is still missing and needs to be developed. Thus, section 3 outlines this third conceptual logic of information and then interprets the conceptual logic of design as a logic of requirements, by introducing the relation of ‘sufficientization’. In the conclusion, it is argued that the logic of requirements is exactly what we need to make sense of, and buttress, a constructionist approach to how we model systems informationally, that is, a shift from a representationalist (mimetic) to a constructionist (poietic) understanding of knowledge.
The Comparative Agendas Project
Authors: Walgrave Stefaan , Boydstun Amber E.
Published: March 2019

This chapter looks at what scholars of the CAP community have been interested in and working on during the last decade. What are CAP scholars actually doing with their data? Therefore, the study draws on a meta-analysis of the papers that have been presented at CAP conferences 2006–17. We analyze not only the type of agendas that have been examined, but also whether these analyses tried to grasp effects from one agenda on another, whether the data were comparative (more than one country), whether all issues and thus a general pattern was examined or rather a single (or a few) issues, which countries have been mostly looked at, and all that in a longitudinal perspective. Our meta-analysis suggests that CAP scholars are mostly interested in mainstream political science questions focusing on representation. They use agenda data to answer questions about power and about how politics reacts to societal changes and demands. A notable weakness is the small number of comparative studies; and, so far, inter-country comparison does not seem to be on the rise yet.
The Belgian Agendas Project
Authors: Walgrave Stefaan , Joly Jeroen , Sevenans Julie
Published: March 2019

The Belgian Agendas Project started in 2001 and has been funded by four different research grants. Initially, the Belgian Project used a codebook other than the common CAP codebook widely used right now. The bulk of the data has been coded manually and now mostly covers the 1999–2010 period (with many datasets going back to earlier periods). A peculiarity of the Belgian data is the fact that it comes from two, largely separate political systems that ‘clash’ on the national level. Party and media systems, for example, are entirely separate. The Belgian media agenda is coded particularly extensively, as the Belgian team started from an interest in the media’s effect on politics. The Belgian team has also played a pioneering role in the party manifesto coding and the protest coding.
The Italian Agendas Project
Authors: Borghetto Enrico , Carammia Marcello , Russo Federico
Published: March 2019

Since the beginning of its Republican history, the Italian political system has functioned according to two rather different logics. From 1948 to 1994 the Christian Democratic Party was uninterruptedly in office, often in coalition, while the Communist Party remained the major opposition party. After the collapse of these parties, a new system based on the alternation between a centre-right and a centre-left coalition emerged. To date the Italian Policy Agendas Project has released six datasets covering party manifestos, parliamentary questions, investiture speeches, laws, decrees, and budgetary data. Through their analysis, it is possible to assess the elements of stability and change that characterized Italian politics since the mid-eighties as well as some recent evolutions such as the mediatization and personalization of politics, the crisis of mainstream parties, and the advent of anti-establishment and populist parties as key actors of the system.
The Dutch Policy Agendas Project
Authors: Timmermans Arco , Breeman Gerard
Published: March 2019

The Dutch political system with its coalition governments, backed by a parliamentary majority and a strongly plural media system is mirrored in the datasets collected so far. The legislative process can be seen as the business of turning coalition intentions into bills, which become law in the majority of cases. Increasing sensitivity to issues attended to by the media and raised in parliamentary questions has influenced this policymaking machinery and led to sometimes drastic agenda changes during the term in office. This is visible in the annual speeches from the throne, in the way party think tanks address policy topics, and in the attention to problems given by advisory bodies of the government. An analysis of safety issues shows that attention cascades over different topics related to safety and impact on longer-term policy plans.
The Turkish Policy Agendas Project
Authors: Bulut Alper Tolga , Yildirim Tevfik Murat
Published: March 2019

How do politicians respond to the policy priorities of the public in developing democracies? Do policymakers take into account their electoral mandate during their tenure in parliament? How does the relationship between media and politics work in a country that has a history of authoritarianism? The Turkish Policy Agendas Project aims to answer questions similar to these by providing systematic institutional data. The project content codes various parliamentary activities such as parliamentary debates, oral and written questions, parliamentary bills and laws. It also includes budget data dating back to the founding of the Turkish Republic. This chapter explains the construction of the dataset from data collection to coding, describes its features, and provides examples of possible applications.
The UK Policy Agendas Project
Authors: Bevan Shaun , Jennings Will
Published: March 2019

The UK Policy Agendas Project has collected a wide range of data on the policy agenda of major institutional venues in British politics and on the public and media agendas. This rich data source allows systematic and consistent analysis across institutions, and across countries, extending back over a century in the case of some agendas. The data provide measures of the policy agenda of the executive (the Speech from the Throne) and the legislature (Acts of UK Parliament), along with aggregate survey data about the public agenda (public opinion about the most important problem), media (front-page stories of The Times), Prime Minister’s Questions, and bills and hearings of the Scottish Parliament. Through its extensive collection of data, the project has enabled novel insights into the policy agenda of UK government, how it responds to shocks and external pressures, and how patterns of policy change and stability compare to other countries.
The US Policy Agendas Project
Authors: Eissler Rebecca , Jones Bryan D.
Published: March 2019

The US Policy Agendas Project studies the many outputs of the US national policy process, ranging from the formal institutions to mass public opinion and mood. This chapter provides a brief introduction to the US political system and the datasets that are currently collected and managed by the Project. These include media, interest-group, legislative, and executive activities, as well as spending data over many decades, typically since 1947. Finally, this chapter offers an illustrative example of how scholars can use the data to study attention in the policy process, by looking at attention to healthcare over time and different parts of the political system.
Agenda-Setting in the Florida Legislature
Authors: Fahey Kevin , Merle Patrick , Cornacchione Teresa , Weissert Carol
Published: March 2019

The Florida? Policy Agendas Project was founded in?2014?to assess issue attention in the legislature and news media of Florida. Stemming from a multi-disciplinary approach, this project explores individual state legislators’ priorities in the policymaking process and how sub-national actors deviate from longstanding theories of national legislatures. A recent network analysis highlights the role of non-partisan networks in legislators’ agenda-setting. The relatively fixed nature of legislators and their districts promote stability in the legislative agenda. And the interdependence of legislators’ decisions helps explain the infrequent, but rapid shifts in the agenda; occasionally the decisions of a few legislators will reverberate throughout the network, creating a cascade of attention to new topics. Our work helps explain when those transformative shifts are likely to occur. The project is managed exclusively at Florida State University.
Pennsylvania Policy Database Project
Authors: Jennings Jay , Kasparek Stefanie , McLaughlin Joseph
Published: March 2019

The Pennsylvania Policy Database Project is the first sub-national digital archive within the Comparative Agendas Project. It provides a wide range of government documents, public opinion records, and media data going back as far as 1979. This chapter provides a historical overview and the general political context to the government system of Pennsylvania. In addition to the information available at the Comparative Agendas Project websites, the Pennsylvania Policy Database Project website maintains further extensive supplementary datasets on Pennsylvania. To provide an example of how this data can be used, the chapter concludes with an analysis of drinking water safety records and how this policy area relates to natural gas fracking policies in Pennsylvania.
Protest and Agenda-Setting
Authors: Walgrave Stefaan , Vliegenthart Rens
Published: March 2019

This chapter discusses the relevance of the protest agenda; it is an indicator of what active segments of the public care about. The literature about the agenda-impact of protest is briefly reviewed, there are few systematic and comparative studies. Almost all protests have as an aim to increase political attention to the underlying issue. But studies examining this agenda effect have come to mixed conclusions. The chapter then explores the CAP protest data from a comparative perspective. It looks into the overall similarity of the protest agenda in six countries, and it examines whether the same issues gain protest attention at the same time.
Horizontal and Vertical Attention Dynamics
Authors: Breeman Gerard , Timmermans Arco
Published: March 2019

This chapter presents an empirical analysis of rises and falls in attention to environmental issues on the political agendas of four EU member states (Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom) and show how the pattern is affected by a multilevel dynamic and an issue competition dynamic with other policy issues. European environmental policymaking is a multilevel game and thus we study and link policy agendas at the EU member state level with the European Union level. The attention to the environment, however, is also seriously affected by issue competition dynamics with other topics—especially with the economy. We conclude that political attention for environmental policies is sensitive to cyclic attention patterns, and that attention to the environment in the Netherlands and Denmark is more affected by the issue-competition dynamic, whereas in Spain and the United Kingdom more by the multilevel dynamic.
‘In Corona Populi’
Authors: Kesselring K.J.
Published: March 2019

Chapter 2 examines the coroner’s inquest, asking how homicides become known and categorized, and how this changed over the period. Coroners held an office that dated from the late twelfth century, but one freshly charged from around 1487, when statutes sought to press the coroners to action through fees and fines. The coroners’ determinations of the nature of a sudden death, in early years, focused on the financial incidents owed to the king. Over time, financial interests in a killing became more diffuse and the king’s interests became more expansively understood. The active intervention of the Privy Council and the Court of Star Chamber helped police the efforts of inquests. The mix of lay participation and central oversight gave the early modern inquest a special flavour. Coroners’ inquests came to be seen as serving not just the king’s interest and the king’s peace, but something conceived as public justice.
‘An Image of Deadly Feud’
Authors: Kesselring K.J.
Published: March 2019

Chapter 3 turns to the history of private satisfaction-seeking, or feuding, and focuses on compensation for homicide. It shows that payments continued longer than we might have thought. When such compensation served as a means to bypass legal sanctions, it hindered the successful imposition of the king’s peace, let alone any emerging notion of a public peace. Mediated through the ancient mechanism of the appeal, however, compensation continued into the sixteenth century and beyond, thanks in part to the needs and actions of victims’ widows. But appeals did decline over the early modern period. Here, too, a statute of 1487 played a part, as did the uses judges made of the new manslaughter verdict. Judges and others derided appeals as ‘suits of revenge’, tainted by association with the feud and an approach to peace-making and satisfaction-seeking that had less and less legitimacy as public justice came to supersede private interests.
Religion and the Philosophy of Life
Authors: Flood Gavin
Published: March 2019

This book considers how religion as the source of civilization transforms the fundamental bio-sociology of humans through language and the somatic exploration of religious ritual and prayer. It offers an integrative account of the nature of the human, based on what contemporary scientists tell us, especially evolutionary science and social neuroscience, as well as through the history of civilizations. Part I contemplates fundamental questions and assumptions: the current state of knowledge concerning life itself, the philosophical issues in that understanding, and how we can explain religion as the driving force of civilizations in the context of human development within an evolutionary perspective. Part II offers a reading of religions in three civilizational blocks—India, China, and Europe/the Middle East—particularly as they came to formation in the medieval period. It traces the history of how these civilizations have thematized the idea of life itself. It then takes up the idea of a life force in Part III and traces the theme of the philosophy of life through to modern times. On the one hand, the book presents a narrative account of life itself through the history of civilizations and, on the other, it presents an explanation of that narrative in terms of life.
Sacrifice
Authors: Flood Gavin
Published: March 2019

The affirmation of life through a culture of hunting was a major element in early human practices, but with the Neolithic farming revolution, we have new modes of producing food and new kinds of societies that could be much larger; the first urban landscapes beginning to appear in places such as Jericho, along with the emergence of religion characterized by sacrifice. While the origins of sacrifice are obscure, sacrifice is a category central to our understanding of religion and of human cultural life generally. Sacrifice has had a central place in the history of civilizations as an attempt at human self-repair and bringing people into a fullness of life, attempting to fulfil the desire for life itself and to go beyond death.
The Sacrificial Imaginary
Authors: Flood Gavin
Published: March 2019

This chapter examines the vitalism entailed in Vedic sacrifice, the Axial transformation of that theme in the Upaniṣads, and the philosophies that attempted to categorize and analyse life into specific components. Finally, we will see how a full philosophy of life comes to articulation in the tantric traditions. All these modes of thinking and practice were deeply concerned about offering repair, correcting ignorance and giving relief from the constant suffering entailed by life, and the desire for life that has so often been negatively evaluated in this history. The chapter examines the earliest sources that articulate some understanding of the category of life itself in terms of sacrifice, namely the Vedic scriptures, and goes on to discuss medieval Brahmanism, the tantric traditions, and modernity.