bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Defective Democracy
Authors: Croissant Aurel , Merkel Wolfgang
Published: March 2019

Both new and established democracies have witnessed setbacks in their democratic quality since the turn of the century, while the number of so-called hybrid regimes has increased. The concept of embedded democracy is a conceptual tool to differentiate between liberal democracy and open autocracy. Composed of five analytically separate yet empirically intertwined ‘partial regimes’, the concept of embedded democracy discerns a political regime’s institutional arrangements and its external environment. In addition, the concept allows one to conceptualize and analyse different types of defective democracy within the grey zone between liberal democracy and autocracy. The chapter conceptualizes embedded and defective democracies and engages in a comprehensive analysis regarding the frequency, persistence, origin, and causes of different types of defective democracy in the early twenty-first century.
Democracy Promotion
Authors: Leininger Julia
Published: March 2019

Studying democracy promotion has become a field of transformation research. It focuses on the interaction between domestic and international factors of democratic transformation. It is a young field of research which has diversified substantively since its beginnings in the mid-1990s. This chapter gives an overview of the state of the art of research on democracy promotion. It outlines common conceptions of democracy promotion and addresses the challenges of measuring international and transnational support for democracy. While a theory of democracy promotion is still missing, this chapter presents empirical problems with democracy promotion and introduces research approaches that are suitable to address them. Finally, the chapter concludes with an outlook on the needs of future research on democracy promotion.
Demographic Transitions
Authors: Morlino Leonardo
Published: March 2019

The demographic trends of the past 150 years have been sustainably influenced by two demographic transitions. Demographic transformations represent periods of interruption in the constant course of demographic development, during which time the way the reproduction of the population takes place changes significantly. Two periods of demographic transformation can be established that came about around 1900 (first demographic transition) and after the Second World War (Europe’s second demographic transition). The first demographic transformation was marked by the transition from a pre-industrial to an industrial society. The second transition was primarily based on a profound cultural change. Both periods of transformation show a considerable decline in birth rates, but also have specific characteristics. One of the striking features of the second demographic transition is that it is exclusively marked by a sharp decline in the birth rate. The first decline in the birth rate showed both a drop in birth and mortality levels. Other examples of demographic change are the changes in population reproduction experienced in the former socialist countries as a direct consequence of the transformation of society.
Economic Restructuring
Authors: Fritsch Michael
Published: March 2019

Technological progress, competition and trade, relative prices fluctuations, and changes of the institutional framework may require companies, industries, regions, or the whole national economy to undergo a process of significant restructuring. The transformation of the centrally planned socialist economies of Central and Eastern Europe to market economies offers us a natural laboratory to investigate how a transformational shock impacts the restructuring process. This chapter focuses on two basic components of this process. First, adjustments made by incumbent organizations (‘top-down’), and second, the opportunity for new businesses and organizations that complement or compete with the incumbents, entry into the marketplace (‘bottom-up’ transformation). The chapter highlights a variety of causes that forced incumbent firms to make adjustments, and demonstrates that the bottom-up component holds significant importance in such a process. This is particularly true if changes in the framework conditions are abrupt, and adjustments on the side of the incumbents are slow.
Founding Elections
Authors: Klingemann Hans-Dieter
Published: March 2019

This chapter discusses (1) origin and concept of a ‘founding election’, (2) expectations associated with the consequences of such elections, (3) empirical findings of current research, and (4) the effects of founding elections on democratic consolidation. The concept is found to emphasize two criteria. The process of a founding election should provoke the formation of political parties, and the rules for the election should ensure that all major competitors regard the election as free and fair. The expectations associated with founding elections are mostly related to voter turnout, types of the emerging political parties, the structure of party systems, and possibilities of government formation. Not a great deal of empirical findings are based on quantitative cross-national research. Historically oriented studies dominate. Findings provided by comparative analyses are not easy to generalize because the countries under study and the temporal contexts are too disparate. None of the expectations to be found in the literature hold for all studies. Founding elections are at the heart of the beginning of democratic consolidation. They pave the way for the consolidation of political behaviour, in particular for the formation of ties between parties and the electorate. More empirical research is needed to generate results that are comparable across time and nations.
Historical Legacies
Authors: Croissant Aurel
Published: March 2019

How historical legacies influence democratization, help explain continuities between different types of regimes, and delineate diverging developmental processes has garnered much attention in the recent literature on historical sociology, comparative politics, and transformation research. The renewed interest in historical legacies stands in contrast with the conceptual and theoretical vagueness of the term, however, hindering both theory building and empirical analysis. Outlining the similarities and differences within legacy arguments, this chapter begins by categorizing the different types of legacies as well as distinguishing between legacies of authoritarian rule and pre-authoritarian legacies. Next, historical legacies as part of causal explanations are examined, discussing the differing views on legacies conditions, qualities, and characteristics. Lastly, historical legacies are situated in the literature on path dependence and critical junctures, revealing fundamental theoretical differences between the concepts.
Property Rights
Authors: Apolte Thomas
Published: March 2019

Creation of ownership structures under private law as well as market liberalization can be seen as central to transformation. This chapter examines how private property rights, among others, encourage economic efficiency, strengthen economic competition, make businesses subject to the discipline of the market, and create a capital market. The emergence and development of a property rights structure at a given point in time is always also the result of a conflictual history. One of the advantages of a developed market economy is that conflictual resource acquisition lies in the past and has ceased to play a significant role in the recognition of the existing distribution of wealth. It is astonishing how little conflict was caused by post-socialist privatization.
Religious Change
Authors: Pollack Detlef
Published: March 2019

After the decline of state socialism in the countries of Eastern and East Central Europe, sociologists and political scientists such as Rodney Stark, Andrew Greeley, and Miklós Tomka predicted a revival of church and religion after decades of their repression under communist rule. More than two decades later, it turns out that the religious situation in Eastern and East Central Europe has become more diverse than expected. Some Orthodox countries, such as Russia, Romania, and Ukraine, have certainly seen a significant increase of religiosity; others, though, such as East Germany, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic, are confronted with religious decline; and others still, such as Poland and Croatia, have seen only comparatively minor changes to the observable level of religiosity. Factors that influence religious changes include the fusion between religious and national identity, levels of economic prosperity, and levels of political corruption.
Social Inequalities
Authors: Kollmorgen Raj
Published: March 2019

Social inequality means the existence of social status groups and, therefore, a normatively embedded structure of social stratification. This chapter deals with social inequalities and their dynamics as conditional and causal factors and as results of processes of radical change. Concerning the first aspect, the chapter discusses social class inequalities and dynamics of (absolute) impoverishment, relative deprivation, and rising expectations among certain social groups that may determine ‘transformative’ pressure or even revolutionary situations. Regarding the impact of social transformations on social inequalities, the chapter suggests that the more radical and complex the social transformations, the greater are their effects on social structures and regimes of social inequality. This thesis is underpinned by providing empirical findings on social mobility and income inequality in different historical waves and (sub-)types of transformation. Finally, the chapter identifies seven crucial bundles of factors determining the extent of income inequality as an outcome of current societal transformations and their characteristics.
Transformation Crises
Authors: Fidrmuc Jan
Published: March 2019

The expectation of post-socialist transition was that output would follow a J-shaped trajectory: the necessary reallocation of resources would cause a temporary decline followed by a rapid recovery. Reality, however, proved different. Most countries experienced a deep and protracted decline and the subsequent recovery did not always turn out to be very dynamic. The transition-induced contraction following the demise of the socialist economic system was primarily due to systemic reform and fundamental structural change. China, the only exception to the transformational recession, liberalized the economy only on the margins. Those countries that experienced steeper falls in output seem to have been able to create sounder foundations for subsequent economic growth. On the other hand, excessive recession may cause political backlash against reform.
Studying ‘Perpetrators’ through the Lens of the Criminal Trial
Authors: Bouwknegt Thijs B. , Nistor Adina-Loredana
Published: March 2019

This chapter explores the use of atrocity crime trials as a source in perpetrator studies. It questions what knowledge we can possibly acquire about perpetrators of mass atrocities through the lens of the post-perpetration criminal trial. Informed by trial observations, this chapter contends that the epistemological significance of criminal proceedings to our understanding of perpetrator personality, motive, and rationale is puzzling and less promising than generally assumed. Through a critical appraisal and re-evaluation of Hannah Arendt’s reporting on the Eichmann trial as a standardized model, as well as other examples from a variety of international criminal trials, this chapter unravels limitations of the trial as a source for perpetrator studies. More generally, the chapter introduces the concept of ‘ordinary defendants in extraordinary circumstances’ and argues that the field of perpetrator studies is restrained by its attempt to know the unknowable, by observing the invisible, and by comparing the incomparable.
‘Like Mirrors of Morality’
Authors: Karstedt Susanne
Published: March 2019

In the first sweep of trials after the Second World War, many perpetrators of atrocity crimes were sentenced by Allied and national courts in Germany. Soon campaigns were started, including high-ranking officials and politicians, to commute and reduce sentences. Networks of support emerged that helped sentenced perpetrators and their families during imprisonment and after release, but also assisted those who were the target of further prosecution, thereby often obstructing justice. Networks ranged from loose and informal associations of those who had been complicit in committing the crimes, to personal support groups, professional and local networks, and charitable organizations, including the Red Cross and both churches. This chapter explores the activities of these networks and organizations, their role in a society in transition, and the normative climate of ‘collective defiance’ in which they operated and thrived. Exemplary cases of individuals and organizations are used to illuminate these processes in post-war Germany.
Watsonian Compatibilism
Authors: McKenna Michael
Published: March 2019

This chapter provides a compatibilist theory of freedom and responsibility built from key elements of Gary Watson’s important essays on these topics. Its aim is the construction of something like a Watsonian theory of freedom and responsibility, using important elements of Watson’s views— preserving his centrally important proposed mesh theory—but also departing from them at critical points. Three features of Watson’s work are addressed. First, that acting freely is explained in terms of acting in accord with one’s evaluative commitments. Second, that Watson’s view is a version of a reasons-responsive theory. The chapter examines his notion of responsiveness or sensitivity to reasons and looks at how it differs from those of others who have developed a reasons-responsive view? Third, Watson’s deepening of our understanding of moral responsibility, by way of both his critical assessment of Strawson’s views and his own work on the topic. How should we understand morally responsible agency in light of his contributions?
Attributability and the Self
Authors: Wolf Susan
Published: March 2019

This chapter offers a close reading of Gary Watson’s important article “Two Faces of Responsibility.” It aims to disambiguate and revise the notions of attributability and accountability that Watson’s essay introduced and to clarify the relation between them. It distinguishes mere negative descriptions of an individual from negative attitudes toward that individual, and further distinguishes negative attitudes that constitute criticism from other attitudes that constitute blame. Accepting Watson’s idea that an act or trait is attributable to someone just in case it discloses a feature of an agent’s self, the essay argues that attributability (of a fault) is sufficient to justify criticism of an individual; blame and public sanctions, by contrast, require accountability.
Moral and Criminal Responsibility
Authors: Duff R. A.
Published: March 2019

Drawing on Gary Watson’s seminal work on responsibility, this chapter focuses on what he calls accountability. It distinguishes (in section 8.1), answerability from liability, and then concentrates on answerability, which operates, it argues (contra David Shoemaker), analogously in both moral and legal contexts. It discusses (in section 8.2) the way in which answerability requires us to attend to the capacities of the person whom we hold responsible, not just at the time of the conduct for which he is now being held responsible, but at the time of the holding. In section 8.3, it then attends to some implications of the requirement that when we hold someone answerable, we must be ready to listen to their answer. Finally, in section 8.4, it tackles the issue of standing: what gives us the right to call another person to account; and what can undermine that standing—with what implications?
Anamorphosis
Authors: Giles Paul
Published: March 2019

This chapter considers how the work of various modernists associated with Bloomsbury during the interwar years—E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Nancy Cunard—engaged with antipodal dimensions that effectively disturbed normative spatiotemporal representation within their narratives. In this way, the heterodox versions of temporality projected more overtly by Australasian writers also associated with Bloomsbury, if more tangentially—Katherine Mansfield, Henry Handel Richardson—appear to be reciprocally mirrored within the Western canon, as if in an anamorphic image. Anamorphosis is a projection giving a distorted image of the subject when seen from a conventional viewpoint but produced in such a way that, if viewed from a particular angle, the distortion will disappear and the image come to appear normal. The term was applied to his own art by Salvador Dalí, but it might be argued that antipodean modernism bears an uncanny, anamorphic relation to Western modernism more generally.
Double Exposures
Authors: Giles Paul
Published: March 2019

This chapter examines how the impetus of ‘backgazing,’ as Australian poet R. D. FitzGerald put it in his ‘Essay on Memory,’ becomes a compelling force within the general framework of modernist poetry. It traces how this retrograde vision was developed not only in FitzGerald but also, in different ways, by his fellow Australian poets Kenneth Slessor and A. D. Hope. It also considers how this counterclockwise strand of modernist poetics runs in parallel to the work of canonical modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens, whose interest in various versions of the antipodal has not been so clearly charted.
Antiphonal Arts
Authors: Giles Paul
Published: March 2019

This chapter considers how the literary representation of time after World War II was shaped by intersections with music and the visual arts. Taking its title from Djuna Barnes’s verse drama The Antiphon (1958), it argues that an antiphonal quality was implicit within works of canonical modernism, which similarly involve interplays between proposition and response, high and low. It suggests how a similar kind of recursive pattern informs Samuel Beckett’s narratives, organized as they are around a dialectic between nostalgia for the sublime and a cathexis of bathos. In relation to Patrick White’s burlesque styles, it argues that this can be seen not as marginal to constructions of modernism, but as endemic to modernism’s antiphonal arts. It also considers the mutual influences of White and Australian painter Sidney Nolan, while discussing the significance of the latter’s collaboration with Boston poet Robert Lowell.
Conclusion
Authors: Giles Paul
Published: March 2019

This concluding chapter takes its title from a book of photographs about Australia published in 1931 by E. O. Hoppé. The cover of The Fifth Continent showed the photographer atop a globe looking back at a map of Australia, and it is this attempt to reconstitute the world in relation to alternative spatial perspectives that provided the impetus for Hoppé’s work. Similarly, to read authors such as Slessor or Dark in parallax with canonical types is not only to correlate relatively neglected figures with modernism’s larger orbit, but also to highlight various neglected aspects of more established writers, the complex ways in which their narratives face backwards as well as forwards. The particular force of backgazing within a sphere of modernism thus lies in the way it resists conventional classifications by projecting not an oppositional but a reversible world, one whose boundaries are rendered enigmatic.
Introduction
Authors: Giles Paul
Published: March 2019

Drawing on theories of temporality and anthropology, and focusing in particular on Paul Ricoeur’s notion of ‘retrodiction,’ this Introduction lays out a framework for understanding antipodean transnationalism. It reconsiders the canonical strains of early or ‘high’ modernism through late modernism’s backward trajectory and thus articulates ways in which modernism was always a more belated phenomenon than has generally been recognized. It argues that modernism systematically incorporated retrograde modes of burlesque and buffoonery whose formal perspectives can be understood intellectually as commensurate with their spherical geographic provenance. By reorganizing the time of modernism according to antipodean coordinates, we come to recognize how antipodean modernism’s twisted, recursive properties are integral to the definition of modernism within a global compass.
The basic mechanism of gene transcription
Authors: Lucchesi John C.
Published: March 2019

Transcription is initiated by factors that interact with RNA polymerases and recruit them to specific sites, unwind the DNA molecules and allow the synthesis of RNA transcripts complementary to one of the single DNA strands. RNA polymerase II (RNAPII) transcribes genes that encode proteins and some non-coding RNAs; RNAPI transcribes ribosomal RNA genes; RNAPIII transcribes genes that encode tRNAs and other non-coding RNAs. The transcription process starts with a pre-initiation complex (PIC), its activation and promoter clearance. Activation involves chromatin looping, usually promoted by the large multiprotein Mediator complex. RNAPII often makes a promoter-proximal pause, then resumes productive elongation of the transcript. Transition through the different phases of transcription is orchestrated by the phosphorylation of the main subunit of RNAPII. The 5´ end of many transcripts is protected by a methylated guanosine “cap,” and the 3´ end by the addition of a chain of adenosine monophosphates (polyadenylation). Many transcripts undergo splicing to remove regions that interrupt the coding sequence.
Epigenetic chromatin changes and the transcription cycle
Authors: Lucchesi John C.
Published: March 2019

In order to allow transcription to occur, the association of DNA with histone octamers and the compacted physical state of the chromatin fiber must be modified by the opportunistic binding of pioneer transcription factors to their cognate DNA binding sites. Once bound, pioneer factors recruit chromatin remodelers and histone-modifying enzymes for the purpose of repositioning nucleosomes and exposing regulatory regions (enhancers and gene promoters) to the components necessary for the initiation of transcription. Histone modifications, such as acetylation, methylation and ubiquitination, and the dynamic phosphorylation of specific amino acids on the major RNA polymerase II subunit activate transcription and attract the factors necessary to eliminate the pausing that normally occurs soon after initiation. Further histone modifications and the replacement of certain core histones by histone variants facilitate transcript elongation and termination. Two additional major epigenetic modifications that impact the process of transcription consist of the action of non-coding RNAs and DNA methylation.
Maintenance of the active and inactive states
Authors: Lucchesi John C.
Published: March 2019

The maintenance of a gene in an active or inactive state is carried out by epigenetic modifications of the histones and of the DNA itself. Two major classes of complexes (PRC1 and PRC2), containing Polycomb group (PcG) proteins mediate transcriptional repression. PRC2 trimethylates histone H3 at lysine 27, a modification that attracts PRC1 leading to the ubiquitination of histone H2A. Variant PRC1 complexes can be targeted first, and mono-ubiquitinated histone H2A recruits PRC2 complexes that serve as the target for canonical PRC1 complexes. PRC2 can be targeted to sites of repression by associating with long non-coding RNAs. Trithorax group (TrxG) proteins form complexes that counteract PcG-mediated repression. Some subunits of these complexes maintain and enhance transcription by carrying out different lysine methylations (H3K4me, H3K36me and H3K79me) that are associated with active gene function; other subunits remodel chromatin by displacing and repositioning nucleosomes. Additional effects on transcription are transvections, whereby somatic pairing allows the regulatory region of one allele of a gene to influence the activity of the promoter of the allele on the homologous chromosome
Stem cells
Authors: Lucchesi John C.
Published: March 2019

The zygote and the very early cells are totipotent because they can produce a whole organism. Later, cells become pluripotent because they can differentiate into different subgroups of tissues. These cells can be extracted as embryonic stem cells (ESCs). Their pluripotent nature is due to the action of the pioneer transcription factors Oct4, Sox2 and Nanog. Multipotent or progenitor stem cells are present in adult organisms where they can differentiate into the various cells present in specific tissues. Differentiation depends on their microenvironment or niche. Differentiation of stem cells requires the silencing of the pluripotency genes and the activation of genes that are characteristic of different cell types. The genome of stem cells exhibits the same features of topological organization that are found in somatic cells. At the onset and throughout differentiation, the topological organization of the ESC genome changes, reflecting the changes in transcriptional activity that underlie the progression of pluripotent cells to multipotent progenitor cells and then to differentiated cells.
Invalid Modernism
Authors: Davidson Michael
Published: March 2019

The opening chapter discusses representations of the aesthete and convalescent as seminal figures in the late nineteenth-century formation of modernist art and literature. Unlike the more fashionable treatment of disease in the Victorian period, embodied often in the figure of the female invalid, modernist representations of disease or illness were more likely to be considered pathological, subject to increasing medicalization, diagnosis, and incarceration. The figures of the male aesthete and convalescent offer a more transgressive model to ideals of health and improvement by which modernity is measured. This figure was, not insignificantly, formative in the appearance of the sexual other or “invert” in sexological research. By looking at several writers—Friedrich Nietzsche, John Addington Symonds, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot—this opening chapter seeks a correlation between the aesthetic and the body, between autonomy and contagion.
Exquisite Corporeality
Authors: Davidson Michael
Published: March 2019

Chapter 3 intervenes in debates about whether the historic avant-garde (Dada, Futurism, Surrealism) represented a general tendency within modernism or a critical alternative to ideas of artisanal autonomy. The impact of World War I on medical, prosthetic, and psychoanalytic technologies was instrumental among postwar artists in imagining a damaged, wounded, or psychotic body. If the body could be seen as fragmented, recombined, and disjointed, as it was in Surrealism, it could also be imagined as promising a different ontology, one in which fragmentation or madness could be enlisted in revolutionary projects. Through readings of F. T. Marinetti’s novel, Mafarka the Futurist, Tristan Tzara’s The Gas Heart, and the self-portraiture of Frida Kahlo, the chapter explores works in which bodies are removed from narratives of reproductive futurity, organic coherence, and normalcy and seen through the optic of disability.
Missing Bodies
Authors: Davidson Michael
Published: March 2019

Chapter 7 moves into the contemporary period by studying the relationship between bodies erased from the socio-political sphere and the missing body in the aesthetic sphere. For every newly visible body (queer, racialized, disabled) there are alarming numbers of missing bodies—disappeared in internecine conflicts, abducted in sectarian warfare, or rendered stateless by suspension of habeas corpus. To what extent have these absences been chronicled in recent cultural production and to what extent do these works challenge classical autonomy aesthetics? The chapter responds to this question through treatments of Indra Sinha’s novel, Animal’s People, the neurodiversity activist and artist Amanda Baggs’ film, “In my Language,” Rachel Zolf’s Neighbour Procedure, and M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! These works look back at modernist precedents of appropriation, fragmentation, and displacement to examine contemporary arguments about neurodiversity, citizenship, and racial identity.
Cleavings
Authors: Davidson Michael
Published: March 2019

Using poems by Emily Dickinson and recent work in cultural and queer theory, this final chapter explores the fine line between “gain” and “loss” in disability studies. Using the author’s own experience of gradual hearing loss, the chapter argues that recent claims for the positive values of “deaf gain” through the use of American Sign Language have vaunted possibilities of cultural inclusiveness to the exclusion of affective realms of frustration, loss, and failure that are seldom acknowledged experiences of deaf and hard-of-hearing persons. While endorsing the general thrust of Deaf Gain and its implications for the larger context of disability, the chapter argues for a more critical understanding of loss in the politics of gain.
Early Medieval Poetry
Authors: Attridge Derek
Published: March 2019

This, the first of four chapters on the Middle Ages, explores the rise of vernacular verse from the fifth to eleventh centuries. There is a little surviving evidence for oral poetry in the vernacular languages prior to the fifth century, and the first written example comes from the beginning of that century. The story of Caedmon’s inspired poetry is examined, as is Bede’s ‘death song’ and other evidence for poetic activity in England in the seventh and eighth centuries. Several Old High German poems of the ninth century are considered, as well as Alfred the Great’s interest in poetry. Beowulf, dated somewhere between the late seventh and the eleventh century, includes scenes of poetic performance and may be itself an example of the kind of poem it depicts in performance. Also discussed are the Old English poems Deor and Widsith and the Viking and Viking-influenced poems of the tenth century.
The Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
Authors: Attridge Derek
Published: March 2019

This chapter is concerned with the vernacular poetry of Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Side-by-side with the monastic production and preservation of poetry, the castles and courts of the nobility became centres of culture. France, in particular, saw extensive poetic activity, notably in the genres of the chanson de geste and the troubadour lyric. Other French genres of the time include saints’ lives, romances, lais, and fabliaux; the use of the octosyllabic line for these poems is examined. Poetry in the Germanic languages, notably the Middle High German courtly epics and Minnesänger lyrics and the Old Norse eddic and skaldic poetry of Iceland, is discussed, as is the lyric poetry of Italy. The evidence for the experience of poetry in Dante’s Vita nuova is considered. The rhythmic variety of Middle English verse, it is argued, suggests some uncertainty in the adoption of French metres.
Perceptual Justification and the Cartesian Theater
Authors: Barnett David James
Published: March 2019

According to a traditional Cartesian epistemology of perception, perception does not provide one with direct knowledge of the external world. Instead, your immediate perceptual evidence is limited to facts about your own visual experience, from which conclusions about the external world must be inferred. Cartesianism faces well-known skeptical challenges. But this chapter argues that any anti-Cartesian view strong enough to avoid these challenges must license a way of updating one’s beliefs in response to anticipated experiences that seems diachronically irrational. To avoid this result, the anti-Cartesian must either license an unacceptable epistemic chauvinism, or else claim that merely reflecting on one’s experiences defeats perceptual justification. This leaves us with a puzzle: Although Cartesianism faces problems, avoiding them brings a new set of problems.
Accuracy and Educated Guesses
Authors: Horowitz Sophie
Published: March 2019

Credences, unlike full beliefs, can’t be true or false. So what makes credences more or less accurate? This chapter offers a new answer to this question: credences are accurate insofar as they license true educated guesses, and less accurate insofar as they license false educated guesses. This account is compatible with immodesty; : a rational agent will regard her own credences to be best for the purposes of making true educated guesses. The guessing account can also be used to justify certain coherence constraints on rational credence, such as probabilism. The chapter concludes by discussing some advantages of the guessing account over rival accounts of accuracy.
Expressivism, Normative Uncertainty, and Arguments for Probabilism
Authors: Staffel Julia
Published: March 2019

I argue that in order to account for normative uncertainty, an expressivist theory of normative language and thought must accomplish two things: first, it needs to find room in its framework for a gradable conative attitude, degrees of which can be interpreted as representing normative uncertainty. Secondly, it needs to defend appropriate rationality constraints pertaining to those graded attitudes. The first task—finding an appropriate graded attitude that can represent uncertainty—is not particularly problematic. I tackle the second task by exploring whether we can devise expressivist versions of the standard arguments used to support rationality constraints on degrees of uncertainty, Dutch book arguments, and accuracy-dominance arguments. I show that we can do so, but that the resulting arguments don’t support the same rationality constraints as the original versions of the arguments.
The Social Market Economy
Authors: Caldwell Peter C.
Published: March 2019

The social market economy was a first key term used in the formation of the Federal Republic of Germany, firstly to describe how a market economy (i.e. capitalism) could contribute to social order, and secondly to suggest that the market alone could not preserve social order but required social supplements. The term was initially associated with the self-described neoliberals (now known as ordoliberals), and justified a return to the free market. Even within this group, however, there were differences about how a market economy could be “social” and what kinds of measures were necessary to make capitalism compatible with social order and democracy. Beyond this group, Social Democrats also adopted similar ideas at the same time. Despite the intentions of the most economically liberal of the ordoliberals, the idea of a social market economy came to include extensive state intervention to preserve social order.
Conceptualizing the New West German Sozialstaat
Authors: Caldwell Peter C.
Published: March 2019

By the late 1950s, three distinction conceptions of the welfare state had formed in West Germany, each with strong connections to a particular world view. Father Oswald von Nell-Breuning, in the tradition of Catholic social thinking, defended social policies as a dialectical combination of solidarity and subsidiarity, which could counter the inequities of capitalism to help integrate workers into society and ensure human dignity. Hans Achinger, with his roots in private charity and social work, by contrast, was skeptical of the institutions of the welfare state and described how programs created a permanent bureaucracy with a popular clientele, manipulated information, and had a series of unintended consequences on state, family, and individual alike. Ludwig Preller, finally, the leading Social Democratic expert on social policy, justified extensive social policies as a way to empower individuals, to give them the tools they needed to shape their own lives.
Modernization and Its Discontents
Authors: Caldwell Peter C.
Published: March 2019

The period from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s has been characterized by historians as one of “planning euphoria.” This enthusiasm was especially evident in the Social Democrats’ ambitious plans for steering the economy and reshaping society through social policy. At the same time, however, social theorists on both right and left criticized these efforts for their tendency toward alienation and bureaucratization. On the right, Hans Freyer and Arnold Gehlen predicted that secondary institutions would end human creativity, ushering in a period of post-history; Ernst Forsthoff feared state paralysis and the loss of real political leadership. And on the left, both Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas also feared the “refeudalization” and paralysis of society, and Habermas feared that the logic of these systems would undermine the life-worlds that gave meaning to humans, creating a sense of alienation.
The Australian Policy Agendas Project
Authors: Dowding Keith , Martin Aaron , Evans Rhonda L.
Published: March 2019

Keith Dowding and Aaron Martin launched the Australian Policy Agendas Project (APAP) in 2012 under an Australian Research Council Discovery grant. Their work has resulted in ten publications to date. Under the leadership of Rhonda L. Evans, the Edward A. Clark Center at the University of Texas at Austin began work on the APAP in 2014, collecting data on decisions of the High Court of Australia and front-page stories from the Sydney Morning Herald. This chapter outlines some features of the Australian political system; what was coded as part of APAP; and an example of how the data has been used by the authors.
The Israeli Agendas Project
Authors: Kosti Nir , Shpaizman Ilana , Levi-Faur David
Published: March 2019

The Israeli Agendas Project was launched in 2012 in order to study the production of law and regulation over time. This chapter provides an overview of the Israeli Agendas Project. The chapter starts with a brief overview of the Israeli political system, and continues with the presentation of our datasets. To demonstrate part of the project, the chapter shows how the codification of the CAP codebook enables observation of the expansion of the Israeli Omnibus Arrangement Law in a novel way. Finally, the chapter addresses unique features of the coding procedure, which arise as a result of several challenges that are unique to Israeli politics.
Agenda Dynamics in Spain
Authors: Chaqués-Bonafont Laura , Palau Anna M. , Màrquez Luz Muñoz
Published: March 2019

The main goal of the Policy Agendas Project in Spain is to promote a comprehensive theoretical and empirical understanding of agenda dynamics across time, issues, and levels of governance. The project establishes a link between policy dynamics research and other areas of concern within political science, mainly media studies, political representation, and the quality of democracy in multilevel systems of governance. It also provides a new tool for the development of quantitative measurements of policy dynamics. Over the last few years comprehensive and far-reaching datasets about Spanish political and media agendas (following the methodology of the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP)) have been created, which are free and accessible to download from the webpage: www.q-dem.com.
The Media Agenda
Authors: Vliegenthart Rens , Walgrave Stefaan
Published: March 2019

This chapter discusses what role the media agenda has played in (comparative) agenda research. Studies into the characteristics of the media agenda demonstrate that, compared to other agendas, the media agenda is characterized by high levels of responsiveness and volatility and that various outlets that jointly constitute the agenda strongly influence each other. In recent years, a vast amount of research has considered the impact of the media agenda on the parliamentary agenda (political agenda-setting) and how the size of this impact depends on a wide variety of contingent factors. Our empirical example uncovers considerable overlap in media agendas across various Western European countries, reflecting the importance of the international context in the construction of news.
Connecting Government Announcements and Public Policy
Authors: Breunig Christian , Grossman Emiliano , Schnatterer Tinette
Published: March 2019

A key component of democratic governance is that elected governments implement their promises. This chapter advances previous work on electoral pledges by systematically linking governments’ announcements in speeches to their actual legislative behavior. Results show that introducing a political topic during a government speech substantively increases the amount of legislation in this particular policy domain. The study utilizes two series of comparative policy agendas—government speeches and legislation—from eight countries—Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States—for the period between 1983 and 2004. In addition to the direct link from speeches to legislation, the chapter also examines a number of prevalent alternative mechanisms of law production such as institutional effects, economic context, or party ideology.
Using CAP Data for Qualitative Policy Research
Authors: Shpaizman Ilana
Published: March 2019

The Comparative Agendas Project is among other things a retrieval system and as such can be leveraged for qualitative case-oriented research. This chapter aims to demonstrate CAP’s usefulness for such qualitative analysis, starting from case selection, going through familiarization with the case of interest and ending with a collection of the needed evidence. After explaining each phase in case-oriented research and the role CAP can play, each use is demonstrated using CAP data from Spain and the United States. The case selection procedure is demonstrated using the concept of policy drift, and the familiarization and evidence collection through childcare policy.
Making Murder Public
Authors: Kesselring K.J.
Published: March 2019

Homicide can seem timeless, somehow, determined by unchanging human failings. But a moment’s reflection shows this is not true: homicide has a history. In early modern England, that history saw two especially notable developments: one, the emergence in the sixteenth century of a formal distinction between murder and manslaughter, made meaningful through a lighter punishment than death for the latter in most cases, and two, a significant reduction in the rates of homicides individuals perpetrated on each other. This book explores connections between these two changes. It demonstrates the value in distinguishing between murder and manslaughter, or at least in seeing how that distinction came to matter in a period which also witnessed dramatic drops in the occurrence of homicidal violence. Focused on the ‘politics of murder’, the book examines how homicide became more effectively criminalized from c. 1480 to 1680, with chapters devoted to coroners’ inquests, appeals and private compensation, duels and private vengeance, and print and public punishment. The English had begun moving away from treating homicide as an offence subject to private settlements or vengeance long before other Europeans, at least from the twelfth century. What happened in the early modern period was, in some ways, a continuation of processes long underway, but intensified and refocused by developments from the late fifteenth to late seventeenth centuries. Exploring the links between law, crime, and politics, bringing together both the legal and social histories of the subject of homicide, the book argues that homicide became more fully ‘public’ in these years, with killings seen to violate a ‘king’s peace’ that people increasingly conflated with or subordinated to the ‘public peace’ or ‘public justice’.
The Phenomenology of Life
Authors: Flood Gavin
Published: March 2019

This chapter takes up more explicitly the problem concerning the relationship between life understood as a system or process and life in relation to the person. This is to re-tell the story of the relation of life to the living from a different perspective of twentieth-century philosophy. There is a tension between the living system rooted in a materialist metaphysics and the lived reality of persons, between system and lifeworld. This chapter traces the development of the phenomenology of life focused on human experience, juxtaposing this with a new materialism that emphasizes the objective constancy of life itself as material reality beyond the human. This involves delineating the contours of the discussion to show how this debate is relevant to some contemporary religious understandings of the person.
Introduction
Authors: Flood Gavin
Published: March 2019

There is a deep connection between the ideas of life, religion, and civilization: life has impelled religion, which has driven civilization, and we need to understand religion through the category of life. Although the history of religions has often been characterized by oppression and violence, religions have also promoted human wellbeing and the fulfilment of life variously conceived, often seen as correcting an error or fault in the human condition. Two sources account for this: first, the history of civilizations themselves and, in particular, the religions that drive them that offer accounts of the relationship between life itself and the living; second, we need to turn to human evolution and to read civilizations in terms of niche construction, the environmental structure that promotes the flourishing of particular life forms. The first account locates explanation in the history of civilizations; the second locates it in the evolutionary and cognitive sciences.
Wondering at Ruins
Authors: Mottram Stewart
Published: March 2019

This chapter explores Spenser’s ambivalence towards the violence of reformation, and its ruination, not just of medieval monasteries, but the lives and legends of saints in monastic manuscripts. It offers a comparative analysis of two texts—William Vallans’s A Tale of Two Swannes (1590) and Spenser’s Ruines of Time (1591)—both written in the aftermath of the 1588 Spanish armada and with England’s war with Spain in the Low Countries ongoing. The chapter shows how both poets use a chorographical focus on the ruins of Roman Verulamium as a frame for their patriotic praise of Anglo-British heroism across history. Yet while both use historical examples of heroism to counter contemporary invasion anxieties in the early 1590s, both poems also reveal British history itself as a battleground between competing catholic and protestant versions of the past. These are tensions foregrounded by each poet’s respective approach to the life of St Alban, Verulamium’s most famous citizen. Vallans follows the medieval, monastic accounts of Alban’s life that are dismissed by John Foxe as ‘Abbeylike additions’ in his post-dissolution, protestant rewriting of Alban’s life in Actes and monuments, and this echoes Vallans’s interest in monastic history and monastic ruins elsewhere in his poem. If St Alban is the site of controversy in A Tale, he is a figure conspicuously absent from Spenser’s poem. The chapter argues for Alban’s shadowy presence in The Ruines of Time nonetheless, pointing to Spenser’s hitherto unacknowledged indebtedness to Gildas’s sixth-century De excidio Britonum and other ‘Abbeylike’ accounts of Alban.