bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Ethical Anarchism
Authors: Bevir Mark
Published: November 2017

One of the most distinctive features of ethical socialism was the place it gave to personal transformation and communal utopianism. This chapter explores the intersections between this type of socialism and a new anarchism. For most of the nineteenth century, anarchists were individualists, favoring clandestine organization and violent revolution. Yet, at the turn of the century, there arose a new communal anarchism associated with sexual liberation and moral experiments. The prophets of the new anarchism were Peter Kropotkin and Leo Tolstoy, not Mikhail Bakunin. Its organizational homes included the Freedom Group and the Brotherhood Church. It inspired agricultural and urban utopias in places such as the Cotswolds, Essex, Leeds, and London. And it appeared in discussion groups aimed at transforming personal and private relationships, including the Men and Women's Club.
The Labour Church Movement
Authors: Bevir Mark
Published: November 2017

This chapter looks more closely at the main organizational expression of the religion of socialism, namely, the Labor Church movement. Previous historians have usually explained the rise of the Labor Church as part of a transfer of religious energy to the political sphere and then explained its demise by reference to the continuing process of secularization. In contrast, it focuses on the religious self-understanding of the Labor Church. It begins by explaining the rise of the movement by reference to the immanentist theology with which so many Victorians and Edwardians responded to the crisis of faith. Thereafter, it appeals to the ideas of the movement in order to explain its appeal, structure, and activities and to suggest that the decline of the movement reflected the weaknesses of its theology as a political theory.
Socialism, Labor, and the State
Authors: Bevir Mark
Published: November 2017

This concluding chapter explores the later roles of Marxism, Fabianism, and ethical socialism in the Independent Labor Party, the Labor Party, and the social democratic state. The dominant strand of socialism fused Fabianism with ethical socialism. It promoted a labor alliance to win state power within a liberal, representative democracy, and then to use the state to promote social justice. Later in the twentieth century, the rise of modernist social science altered the type of knowledge on which the Labor Party relied, with Fabian approaches to the state and policy giving way to planning, Keynesianism, and other formal expertise. Whatever type of knowledge the Labour Party relied upon to guide state intervention, it was constantly challenged by socialists opposed to its liberal concept of democracy and the role it gave to the state. These latter socialists often advocated the democratization of associations within civil society itself.
Bodies for Rent?
Authors: Phillips Anne
Published: November 2017

This chapter addresses the markets in bodily services, focusing on commercial surrogacy rather than prostitution. The reason for this is that with surrogacy it is easier to separate out concerns about commodification from concerns about the activity itself. With prostitution, the two are almost impossibly entwined. It considers the most powerful objection to commercial surrogacy: the idea that it turns babies into “things” that can be bought and sold, as well as questions about the validity the surrogate's consent. It argues that the key issue in surrogacy is not the commodification of babies, or whether the surrogate knows what she is doing when she enters the contract, or whether she is entitled to some financial reward. The problem is that when surrogacy is put in an explicitly commercial context, this shapes the practices and relationships in potentially damaging ways.
Further Exploring the Salience of Geography
Authors: Phillips Damon J.
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines why there seems to be a disproportionate advantage for jazz recordings that emerged from more disconnected cities than when compared to the more central cities like New York. The previous chapter showed that disconnectedness in the network of geographic mobility has greater influence for how jazz is received than for how it is produced. The evidence suggested that disconnectedness operates through sociological congruence, where difficult-to-categorize aspects of a tune or song make the music more appealing if the (geographic) source is highly disconnected. Using the (early) diffusion of “Milenburg Joys” as a case study, this chapter explores the salience of geography in the shaping of jazz. It considers how musicians removed in time could have been aware of the initial recording location. It also asks whether more can be understood about the process of diffusion that led to long-run appeal for jazz from a highly disconnected source.
The Ever Expanding Domain of Computation
Authors: McGinnis John O.
Published: November 2017

This chapter makes the case that because of computational advances, the world is changing fast, perhaps faster than at any other time in human history. The increasing pace of change could potentially generate social turbulence and instability. However, computational advances are also driving advances in information technology, from the growth and deepening of the Internet, to the burgeoning power of empirical methods, to the increasing capability of artificial intelligence. The key to improving governance is to bring politics within the domain of such information technology. Only a politics that exploits the latest fruits of the computational revolution can manage the disruption that this revolution is bringing to the social world.
Distributing Information through Dispersed Media and Campaigns
Authors: McGinnis John O.
Published: November 2017

This chapter deals with dispersed media. New information technology has created a more dispersed media that, in combination with empirical inquiry and prediction markets, have the capacity to create a politics more focused on the consequences of public policy. Just as the government in the nineteenth century helped distribute policy and political information through the post office, so today it should be careful to facilitate distribution of such information through contemporary technologies. It is argued that our laws should give as much protection to the new, dispersed media as to the old media. The government should also encourage universal access to the Internet—the portal to much of the dispersed media. Finally, the government should deregulate and subsidize the provision of information in political campaigns, because campaigns remain the most effective route for public policy information to reach the mass of citizens who do not follow specialized media or even the news more generally.
Regulation in an Age of Technological Acceleration
Authors: McGinnis John O.
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers the impact of new technologies on the administrative state. Information technology has the potential to improve administrative government by changing the nature of the information on which it relies. Theorists in the New Deal may have been correct that Congress could not effectively gather information to create the detailed policy directives that would achieve its legislative objectives. But regulatory agencies have not proved all that much better. Only by requiring agencies to rely on the more dispersed sources of information provided by markets and experiments is the situation likely to improve. By creating more objective measures of results, the use of such information technologies also constrains the influence of special interests.
The Past and Future of Information Politics
Authors: McGinnis John O.
Published: November 2017

This concluding chapter shows that our current need to enhance social knowledge is but the latest stage in the long history of exploiting technological progress to improve governance. From ancient Athens, to Britain on the cusp of the industrial age, to the founding of our own republic, successful societies have navigated the turbulences of technological change by creating better mechanisms to gather information about the social world and to translate it into wise decisions. This history underscores the fact that improving information about consequences in politics is an incremental process. The recognition that previous societies have succeeded in enriching social deliberation should give us confidence that we too can seize the opportunities to begin to transform our political life.
Introduction
Authors: Bailey Michael A. , Maltzman Forrest
Published: November 2017

This introductory chapter considers the constraints faced by Supreme Court justices. It begins by discussing the attitudinal model, which assumes that justices are “decision makers who always vote their unconstrained attitudes.” It then turns to three legal principles that might constrain justices: stare decisis, judicial restraint, and strict construction of the Constitution. Stare decisis is the doctrine that decisions should be consistent with past decisions. Judicial restraint implies that justices should defer to elected officials as much as possible within the bounds established by the Constitution. The remainder of the chapter deals with external constraints followed by an overview of the subsequent chapters.
The Measure of Law
Authors: Bailey Michael A. , Maltzman Forrest
Published: November 2017

This chapter articulates the challenges that any empirically oriented scholar would have in devising a measure of judicial preferences. It shows that it is impossible to make robust across-time comparisons using only Court voting. However, if we incorporate additional data we can create a measure of ideology that meets our needs and has face validity. The estimates we produce accord much better with the general understanding of Court movements over time as they indicate that Nixon's appointees moved the Court modestly to the right but that the Court remained quite moderate in historical terms in the early 1970s. The fundamental challenge is that it is hard to separate preference change from agenda change.
Purposive Mass Belief Systems concerning Foreign Policy
Authors: Page Benjamin I. , Xie Tao
Published: November 2017

This chapter proposes a theory of “purposive belief systems,” postulating an instrumental logic that tends to form an important foundation for citizens' policy preferences. This theory is based on the proposition that ordinary citizens are capable of—and tend to engage in—“rational,” instrumental, purposive reasoning about politics. Empirically, substantial evidence for the existence of such belief systems has already been found in the realm of foreign policy. This chapter illustrates and extends those findings, using recent data on the specific case of U.S.–China relations. It also explores the workings of policy preference heuristics that involve feelings toward foreign countries and investigates the ways in which such heuristics do or do not relate to purposive belief systems.
Who Really Votes?
Authors: Ansolabehere Stephen , Hersh Eitan
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers how voters are different from nonvoters with respect to their demographic and ideological attributes, and if election outcomes would change if everyone voted. It first explains why vote misreporting presents a problem for studies of participatory bias. Then, the chapter introduces the vote validation study conducted as part of the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). It then compares voters to nonvoters along key demographic and attitudinal variables, using both CCES and ANES data. Here, the chapter shows how misreporting exaggerates the differences between voters and nonvoters, and it also addresses the problem with bias ratio measures. Finally, this chapter simulates higher voter turnout and shows that if more people voted, election results would hardly be affected at all.
Who Governs if Everyone Votes?
Authors: Sides John , Schickler Eric , Citrin Jack
Published: November 2017

This chapter addresses three main questions. First, the chapter considers what the partisan differential is between voters and nonvoters. It then asks which election outcomes would have changed party hands under universal turnout. This issue, of course, directly addresses the substantive political implications of any partisan bias in turnout. Finally, the chapter considers what factors could lead some states and elections to have a larger partisan differential—that is, a greater gap in the electoral preferences of voters and nonvoters. This chapter finds that, on average, nonvoters were slightly more Democratic than voters in each of these elections. However, the magnitude of the partisan differential varies across states and time.
Death and Redemption
Authors: Barnes Steven A.
Published: November 2017

This book offers a fundamental reinterpretation of the role of the Gulag—the Soviet Union's vast system of forced-labor camps, internal exile, and prisons—in Soviet society. Soviet authorities undoubtedly had the means to exterminate all the prisoners who passed through the Gulag, but unlike the Nazis they did not conceive of their concentration camps as instruments of genocide. This book argues that the Gulag must be understood primarily as a penal institution where prisoners were given one final chance to reintegrate into Soviet society. Millions whom authorities deemed “re-educated” through brutal forced labor were allowed to leave. Millions more who “failed” never got out alive. Drawing on newly opened archives in Russia and Kazakhstan as well as memoirs by actual prisoners, the book shows how the Gulag was integral to the Soviet goal of building a utopian socialist society. It takes readers into the Gulag itself, focusing on one outpost of the Gulag system in the Karaganda region of Kazakhstan, a location that featured the full panoply of Soviet detention institutions. The book traces the Gulag experience from its beginnings after the 1917 Russian Revolution to its decline following the 1953 death of Stalin. It reveals how the Gulag defined the border between those who would re-enter Soviet society and those who would be excluded through death.
A New Circle of Hell: The Postwar Gulag and the Rise of the Special Camps
Authors: Barnes Steven A.
Published: November 2017

This chapter takes the Gulag into the postwar era when authorities used the institution in an attempt to reassert social control. At the same time, arrivals from the newly annexed western territories and former Red Army soldiers dramatically altered the social world of the Gulag prisoner. New prisoner populations of war veterans, nationalist guerrillas, and peoples with significant life experience outside the Soviet Union provided a potentially combustible mix. The isolation and concentration of many of these prisoners in a small number of special camps raised even further the potential explosiveness of the population. The Gulag was a political institution, though, and it was only the death of the system's founder that would set off the explosions.
Pragmatism and the Problem of Institutional Design
Authors: Knight Jack , Johnson James
Published: November 2017

This chapter provides a basis for a pragmatist account of democracy. It specifies three features—fallibilism, anti-skepticism, and consequentialism—as central to pragmatism understood as a philosophical position. The chapter also makes two further claims that are distinctive. First, pragmatism has important political consequences and that those sustain a commitment to robust democratic politics. Second, insofar as pragmatists are committed to democratic politics, they necessarily are committed not just to an ethos or ideal but to the analysis of democratic institutions. Each of these arguments will come as a surprise not just to those who come to pragmatism from the outside but to many who consider themselves pragmatists.
Refining Reflexivity
Authors: Knight Jack , Johnson James
Published: November 2017

This chapter focuses on reflexivity and how it operates in democratic arrangements, considering a set of possible objections to this study's argument. The first potential objection is that the study has underestimated the capacity of decentralized markets. The chapter directly compares the relative claims about democracy and markets. In doing so, it highlights the ways in which competition operates in the different environments and the relative importance of reflexivity for the two institutional alternatives. The second potential objection is that the study has failed to consider other more centralized institutional arrangements that might embody reflexivity. The chapter then considers three such alternatives: courts and judicial decision making, bureaucracy, and a hybrid form that combines informal norms within formal institutional arrangements. Drawing on the analysis of the effects of social norms on formal decision making, it also assesses whether the positive effects of social norms might, in fact, be most likely to emerge in an environment of democratic decision making.
Formal Conditions: Institutionalizing Liberal Guarantees
Authors: Knight Jack , Johnson James
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses the free-and-equal-participation condition and develops its implications for the institutionalization of democratic decision making. It defends the following basic claims about the institutionalization of the free-and-equal-participation condition. First, individuals must be guaranteed freedom to participate in all aspects of the democratic decision-making process. This freedom extends from the initial development of one's own ideas, beliefs, and goals through the process of argument and debate to the final collective decision. Second, this guarantee of freedom to participate must be distributed equally among the individual members of the society. Third, the process of applying the normative criteria of free and equal participation to real political institutions will involve difficult and sometimes controversial decisions.
Substantive Conditions: Pragmatism and Effectiveness
Authors: Knight Jack , Johnson James
Published: November 2017

This chapter argues that for democratic competition to be effective, individual participants must be free to contribute their ideas and express their beliefs in the input side of the democratic process and make uncoerced choices as participants in determining the outcomes of the process. Effective institutional performance trades on a causal relationship between individual participation and normatively legitimate collective outcomes. The requirements of this causal relationship dictate that participants establish conditions necessary to create an institutional environment that allows for the highest probability of achieving the desired effects. Here the requirements of effective institutional performance dictate that participants attend to substantive aspects of effective individual participation and its preconditions—freedom and equality.
The Coevolution of Institutions and Behaviors
Authors: Bowles Samuel , Gintis Herbert
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines how group competition favored the coevolution of the distinctive institutions of the hunter-gatherer society along with a predisposition for altruistic behavior. It first considers how selective extinction can favor the evolution of an altruistic trait before discussing the notion of reproductive leveling, along with genetic differentiation between groups. It then discusses the link between deme extinction and the evolution of altruism; archaeological, ethnographic and genetic evidence from Australia; and the coevolution of institutions and altruism. It also presents the results of simulations on the gene-culture coevolution, showing that reproductive leveling and within-group segmentation could have coevolved with altruism.
Introduction
Authors: Bismut Jean-Michel
Published: November 2017

This introductory chapter reviews the hypoelliptic Laplacian. It first explains how to mathematically conceive of a union between index theory and the trace formula through the Lefschetz fixed point formulas. The chapter then embarks on a brief history of the hypoelliptic Laplacian, hereafter turning to the construction of the hypoelliptic Laplacian that is carried out in this volume. Moreover, it discusses the analysis of the hypoelliptic orbital integrals, and its overlap with the analysis of the hypoelliptic Laplacian in previous literature, in which the Riemannian manifold X was assumed to be compact, and genuine traces or supertraces were considered. Here in this chapter X is noncompact, and the orbital integrals that appear are defined using explicit properties of the corresponding heat kernels. After this review, the chapter gives a short overview on the following chapters.
A formula for semisimple orbital integrals
Authors: Bismut Jean-Michel
Published: November 2017

This chapter states without proof the main result of this volume, which expresses the elliptic orbital integrals associated with the heat kernel as a Gaussian integral on t(γ‎). In addition, the chapter shows how to derive from this formula a corresponding formula for other kernels, which include the wave kernel. First, the chapter gives an explicit formula for the orbital integrals associated with the heat kernel of ℒAX in terms of a Gaussian integral on t(γ‎). From the formula for the heat kernel, this chapter derives a corresponding formula for the semisimple orbital integrals associated with the wave operator of ℒAX.
The analysis of the hypoelliptic Laplacian
Authors: Bismut Jean-Michel
Published: November 2017

This chapter constructs a functional analytic machinery that is adapted to the analysis of the hypoelliptic Laplacian ℒA,bX. The analysis of the hypoelliptic Laplacian essentially consists in the construction of Sobolev spaces on which the operators ℒA,bX act as unbounded operators, and in the proof of regularizing properties of their resolvents and of their heat operators. The heat operators are shown to be given by smooth kernels. To make the analysis easier, the chapter first works with a scalar hypoelliptic operator AbX. This operator does not contain a quartic term. The results on AbX then easily extend to a scalar operator AbX acting over X with circumflex, which also does not contain the quartic term. A scalar operator AbX on ̂X containing the quartic term is introduced. Finally, the chapter extends the analysis to the operator ℒA,bX.
The heat kernel qb,tX′ for b large
Authors: Bismut Jean-Michel
Published: November 2017

This chapter establishes the estimates of Chapter 9 on the hypoelliptic heat kernel q−b,tX. More precisely, this chapter shows that as b → +∞, q−b,tX exhibits the proper decay away from ̂Fᵧ = îₐN(k⁻¹) ⊂ ̂X. It first proves similar estimates on scalar hypoelliptic heat kernels over X. Such estimates are then extended to scalar hypoelliptic heat kernels over ̂X. Ultimately, this chapter extends the estimates to the kernel q−b,tX
using the Feynman-Kac formula. The term ½ ∣ [Yᶰ, Y
TX] ∣² in the right-hand side of an equation from Chapter 2 for ℒbX plays a crucial role in proving the estimates.
Introduction
Authors: Gibson David R.
Published: November 2017

This chapter begins with a brief sketch of the events that unfolded during the Cuban missile crisis. It describes the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, or the ExComm, consisting of Kennedy's cabinet, their immediate subordinates, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a number of other top-level advisers. It then turns to Kennedy's secret recordings of many White House meetings and telephone conversations, which capture more than twenty hours of ExComm deliberations. Next, it sets out the book's purpose, namely is to undertake the first sustained analysis of the ExComm recordings. The goal is to mine the details of these discussions from a sociological perspective that views conversation as an achievement unto itself, and anything achieved through conversation as indelibly shaped by its rules, constraints, procedures, and vicissitudes.
Conclusion
Authors: Gibson David R.
Published: November 2017

Reflecting on the decision-making process after the Cuban missile crisis was over, President Kennedy famously observed that “the essence of ultimate decision remains impenetrable to the observer—often, indeed, to the decider himself ... There will always be the dark and tangled stretches in the decision-making process—mysterious even to those who may be most intimately involved.” This chapter summarizes theoretical and empirical arguments with an eye toward making sense of this striking claim, wherein Kennedy appears to admit that even he felt baffled by what happened in the White House during his presidency. It then discusses the peculiar fact that, at a conference of former ExComm members and academics held twenty-five years after the crisis, the former were forced to admit that their deliberative process was far from systematic. The academics were baffled, but the findings of this book provide an explanation, involving the strange twists and turns that the deliberative process undergoes when it is conducted aloud, subject to the whims of other people and the demands and sensitivities of the conversational machinery that makes the whole thing work.
Introduction
Authors: Rodogno Davide
Published: November 2017

This book examines the European roots of humanitarian intervention as a concept and international practice during the nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on the politics and policies of Great Britain and France. It challenges two assumptions: first, that humanitarian intervention is a phenomenon of international relations that appeared after the end of the Cold War and second, that it emerged abruptly during the nineteenth century. Focusing on the Ottoman Empire, the book investigates when, where, who, how, and for what reasons a humanitarian intervention was undertaken from 1815 to 1914. It argues that the primary motivation of humanitarian intervention is to end massacre, atrocity, and extermination or to prevent the repetition of such events, to protect civilian populations mistreated and unprotected by the target-state government, agents, or authorities. This introduction discusses the concept of rights, including natural rights, before the nineteenth century and provides an overview of the questions, assumptions, and issues raised in the book.
Nonforcible Intervention in the Ottoman Macedonian Provinces (1903–08)
Authors: Rodogno Davide
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the European powers' nonforcible intervention in the Ottoman provinces of Macedonia during the period 1903–1908. Like the case of Crete, the European governments' intervention in the Macedonian provinces was not a full-fludged intervention against massacre. Macedonian nationalists thought that evidence of indiscriminate massacres and atrocities would convince the European powers to intervene. They did not realize that from the European perspective, nationalism was among the factors preventing humanitarian interventions from taking place. The chapter first considers the uprisings of 1902–1903 and the European press' attitude toward the Macedonian Question, and particularly the massacres in the Macedonian provinces. It then discusses the terrorist attacks of 1903 and the Mürzsteg program for reforms in the Macedonian provinces. It also assesses the outcome of the European intervention in Macedonia.
Epilogue
Authors: Rodogno Davide
Published: November 2017

This epilogue discusses the European powers' humanitarian interventions from the interwar period and since 1989. It first considers the massacres, atrocities, and other abuses committed during World War I and World War II before looking at interventions during the Cold War (1945–1989). It then compares instances of humanitarian intervention and nonintervention since 1989 with those of the nineteenth century. It also examines humanitarian intervention as a means of addressing threats to international peace and security, nineteenth-century humanitarian interventions as ex post facto events with unexceptional outcomes and unintended consequences, and the transformation of intervention from one focused on short-term rescue to one focused on long-term protection of victims of massacres and atrocities. Finally, the chapter explores public opinion regarding humanitarian intervention, the emergence of “new humanitarianism,” and the United Nations's The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) document.
The Holocaust and Genocide
Authors: Monroe Kristen Renwick
Published: November 2017

This chapter reviews the literature on genocide to define it, asks what scholars already know about it, and provides a context within which the stories that constitute the heart of the data section of this volume can be analyzed. While the Holocaust and World War II is often considered as so horrific that they become unique, the chapter argues that is not the case. Moreover, it remains conscious of the extent to which understanding the human psychology surrounding the Holocaust can lend insight into a far wider range of related, important, and ongoing political behaviors that emanate in forces deep-seated within the human psyche: prejudice; discrimination; ethnic, sectarian, religious hatred and violence.
Tony: Rescuer
Authors: Monroe Kristen Renwick
Published: November 2017

This chapter relates an interview with Tony, who was a young Dutch cavalry officer when the war began. Tony was bourgeois, with conservative social values and strong feelings of support for the Dutch monarchy. He credits some of his empathic worldview to his wartime experience; he saw heavy fighting during the Nazi invasion of Holland. His narrative is presented in as unadorned a form as possible, with limited editing and no analytical comment, to facilitate the reader's entering into Tony's head, to understand how Tony's ethical framework, and particularly his perceptions of himself in relation to others, worked to limit the choices Tony found available.
The American National Election Studies and the Importance of New Ideas
Authors: Krosnick Jon A. , Lupia Arthur
Published: November 2017

This chapter explains the introduction of certain changes to the ANES, in response to the National Science Foundation's 2004 challenge to the scholarly community to update the ANES in ways that would increase its scholarly and social value. It features a plan to change how the ANES conducted its business. Part of the plan included reactivating the use of pilot studies, which in the past had allowed ANES users to evaluate new measures. Another part of the plan was a mechanism for incorporating ideas from many people into the process of questionnaire design. The chapter begins by arguing that broader participation and greater transparency in the process of survey design improves the content and legitimacy of survey-based election research. It then reviews attempts to achieve such outcomes through the “Online Commons” and the 2006 ANES Pilot Study.
Do We Still Need Media Use Measures at All?
Authors: Althaus Scott L. , Tewksbury David H.
Published: November 2017

This chapter argues that while the ANES media exposure measures used in 2004 and before may have been problematic on methodological grounds, it is important to continue asking questions about the process of information acquisition. A measurement strategy based on information retention, this chapter contends, requires survey instrumentation that is election-specific and unlikely to be valid over long stretches of time. The resulting problems of longitudinal continuity make this approach unsuitable as a stand-alone measurement strategy for the ANES. The chapter suggests that an expanded set of retooled media exposure measures can provide researchers with the variables needed to better understand the predictors of campaign knowledge, political attitudes, and voter turnout.
Sociotropic Voting and the Media
Authors: Ansolabehere Stephen , Meredith Marc , Snowberg Erik
Published: November 2017

This chapter focuses on the accuracy of citizens' estimates of facts about the general state of the economy and on the consequences of that information. It analyzes both the determinants and political consequences of respondents' perceptions of the average price of gas and the unemployment rate in their home states. The chapter finds that individuals overestimate the unemployment rate and that substantial partisan differences also exist. In contrast, estimates of gas prices are on average reasonably accurate, with no partisan differences. These analyses also suggest that perceptions of unemployment, but not of gas prices, are implicated in changes in partisan identification.
Concluding Thoughts
Authors: Aldrich John H. , McGraw Kathleen M.
Published: November 2017

This chapter reflects on the strengths and weaknesses of the content of the 2006 ANES Pilot Study as it played out in practice as perhaps the primary platform for the study of public opinion and voting behavior. Specifically, the chapter first addresses the extent to which the ANES succeeded in increasing the range of interdisciplinary participation and of generating more theoretically rigorous models of voting and turnout. It then considers the limits of the contextual framework within which the ANES is situated. Finally, the chapter finishes by considering the potential that new innovations might have for future ANES survey designs.
Who Was First? Protography and Discovery Catalogs
Authors: McCants William F.
Published: November 2017

This chapter focuses on protographical literature written by those who articulated the culture of the conquerors. The Greeks of Alexander's era saw themselves as the peers and heirs of the Near Eastern civilizations they were about to conquer. They accepted foreign contributions to their culture but were also confident in their own achievements, presaging the skill with which Greek rulers in the Near East would adopt the native traditions of those they conquered while expanding the influence Greek learning. In contrast, Ibn Qutayba and Pliny, wrote after the conquests and thus had to differentiate the conquerors' culture from that of the conquered following decades or centuries of foreign influence. Unlike the Greek authors, the two men are modest about the cultural achievements of the conquerors (Roman and Arab), reflecting the conquerors' genuine lack of a native learned high culture comparable to those they conquered. This lack of sophistication also caused both men to worry about the cultural influence of their imperial predecessors (Greek for Pliny, Iranian for Ibn Qutayba) on the new empires.
How We Hope
Authors: Martin Adrienne M.
Published: November 2017

What exactly is hope and how does it influence our decisions? This book presents a novel account of hope, the motivational resources it presupposes, and its function in our practical lives. The book contends that hoping for an outcome means treating certain feelings, plans, and imaginings as justified, and that hope thereby involves sophisticated reflective and conceptual capacities. The book develops this original perspective on hope—what it calls the “incorporation analysis”—in contrast to the two dominant philosophical conceptions of hope: the orthodox definition, where hoping for an outcome is simply desiring it while thinking it possible, and agent-centered views, where hoping for an outcome is setting oneself to pursue it. In exploring how hope influences our decisions, the book establishes that it is not always a positive motivational force and can render us complacent. It also examines the relationship between hope and faith, both religious and secular, and identifies a previously unnoted form of hope: normative or interpersonal hope. When we place normative hope in people, we relate to them as responsible agents and aspire for them to overcome challenges arising from situation or character. Demonstrating that hope merits rigorous philosophical investigation, both in its own right and in virtue of what it reveals about the nature of human emotion and motivation, the book offers an original, sustained look at a largely neglected topic in philosophy.
To Begin
Authors: Brooks Peter
Published: November 2017

This introductory chapter provides an overview of some of the problems of identity. There would seem to be both public and private issues of identity. In the public sphere, in talk about crime, health, prostitution, and urbanism, the identities of those who make up the social body become a problem in a new way. In broad outline, this must have to do with the growth of cities, along with the institutionalization and increasing bureaucratization of the modern nation-state. The chapter then turns to the private or inner sense of identity that is at the very center of modern thought and imagination from the dawn of the modern world on—starting with the Renaissance, one might say, though one could push the date back to remarkable innovations from the twelfth century but gaining a new momentum and a new accent in the Enlightenment.
“Inevitable Discovery”: Searches, Narrative, Identity
Authors: Brooks Peter
Published: November 2017

This chapter explores how the question of searches and seizures in the law, and the legal doctrines both protecting the individual and providing for his or her capture by social institutions, images a kind of standoff between the self and knowledge of it. To the extent that individual identity is bound up with the notion of privacy, the issue of searches and seizures very much reflects central tenets of modern identity. There must be rules laid down to protect the individual's inner sense of identity against the state's need to know, classify, and inventory that identity. If courts often interpret this as a balancing act, attempting to draw lines and establish rules about where and what can be searched and seized and in what manner, fundamentally it represents a conflict and a clash, in which the internal sense of “inviolate personality” and the state's external need to know persons are at a standoff.
Anti-Insurance
Authors: Cooter Robert D. , Porat Ariel
Published: November 2017

This chapter proposes a novel contract, dubbed “anti-insurance,” that perfectly solves the paradox of compensation. Breach of contract by the promisor poses a risk of loss to the promisee. With anti-insurance, promisor's liability for breach is 100 percent and promisee's compensation is 0 percent, as required for efficient incentives. The chapter first illustrates how anti-insurance works with a numerical example and considers some factors affecting its scope. It then presents examples of anti-insurance for losses and gains before comparing anti-insurance with other legal devices that give incentives to the promisee without eroding the promisor's incentives; these include mitigation of damages, foreseeability of damages, comparative fault, and liquidated damages. It concludes by explaining why anti-insurance is not available in the market.
Liability Externalities and Mandatory Choices
Authors: Cooter Robert D. , Porat Ariel
Published: November 2017

This chapter introduces the general theory of liability externalities and applies it to mandatory choices. “Liability externality” refers to costs and benefits conveyed to others that market prices do not capture and liability law does not correct. In these circumstances, adjusting liability can improve incentives. The contrast between doctoring and driving illustrates the difference between actual and ideal law. According to actual law, a doctor who negligently breaks a patient's leg has the same liability as a driver who negligently breaks a pedestrian's leg. Ideally, however, the doctor's liability should be less than the driver's liability. The chapter considers suitable circumstances for applying the general theory of liability externalities, given limited information available to courts. It also discusses disgorgement damages for risk of accidents and the equalization principle, which states that the difference in expected social harm between mandatory alternatives should equal the difference in the actor's liability.
“Incentives Talk”: What Are Incentives Anyway?
Authors: Grant Ruth W.
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses the meaning of “incentives.” The term has become so ubiquitous that it has almost lost all boundaries and definition. It begins by attempting to distinguish incentives both from other forms of motivation and from other forms of trade or exchange, reward or compensation. It then sets out a distinctive meaning the concept of incentives. Incentives “strictly speaking” are a particular kind of offer: (1) an extrinsic benefit or a bonus that is neither the natural or automatic consequence of an action nor a deserved reward or compensation; (2) a discrete prompt expected to elicit a particular response; and (3) an offer intentionally designed to alter the status quo by motivating a person to choose differently than he or she would be likely to choose in its absence.
Getting Down to Cases
Authors: Grant Ruth W.
Published: November 2017

This chapter explores in more detail four very different domains where incentives have been controversial: plea bargaining, recruiting medical research subjects, the loan policies of the International Monetary Fund, and motivating children to learn. Each of these cases illuminates a web of concerns surrounding the ethics of incentives and illustrates how legitimate and illegitimate incentives can be differentiated. The chapter argues for the usefulness of taking up the question of the ethical use of incentives in very different contexts. Sensitivity to context increases the complexity of the issues but never in exactly the same ways in every case. Despite this diversity, the controversies in each case revolve around the same central questions identified in the last chapter on evaluating incentives.
A Different Kind of Conversation
Authors: Grant Ruth W.
Published: November 2017

This chapter raises the broader question of the relation between incentives and democratic politics. The use of incentives as a tool of government policy appears to increase our choices and protect a space of freedom. This seems to be better than government regulations that foreclose options and establish penalties for transgressions. However, to the extent that incentives are one of the ways in which experts seek to manipulate behavior, and to the extent that incentive systems substitute for persuasion and foreclose deliberation and debate, a democratic people ought to be deeply suspicious of them. At the very least, the question of the ethics of incentives leads directly to the question of the role of experts in a democracy and finally, further still, to the question of what kind of citizens we aspire to be.
Nimrod, or Cynegetic Sovereignty
Authors: Chamayou Grégoire , Rendall Steven
Published: November 2017

This chapter focuses on Nimrod, whose story in Genesis describes him as the son of Chus, the grandson of Cham, the founder of Babel and the world's first king: “He was the first on earth to be a mighty man. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord.” The chapter concludes that what emerges with the story of Nimrod is a forgotten continent of Western political thought. If Foucault could say that beginning with the rise of Hebrew, and then Christian, pastoralism, politics has been largely considered a matter of the sheepfold, we can add that it was also, though in accord with a parallel and opposed genealogy, a matter of hunting.
Hunting Indians
Authors: Chamayou Grégoire , Rendall Steven
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses how the conquest of the New World gave rise to vast manhunts that continued for almost four centuries and took place all over the Americas. This was a massive phenomenon with its specially trained dogs, professional hunters, weapons, and culture. As a social phenomenon, Indian hunting was indissolubly a large-scale economic activity, a way of life, and a cruel pleasure, a macabre form of sport—and this was so from the beginning of the conquests. Acquisition hunts were intended to take future slaves. Extermination hunts were entirely different; their main goal was the eradication of the population in order to conquer the territory. These hunts of conquest had to be provided with legitimations, with theories. How could the hunts for Indians be justified? That is where, very early on, philosophers made their entrance.
Life Politics after Chernobyl
Authors: Petryna Adriana
Published: November 2017

This book examines how government and scientific interventions have recast the Chernobyl aftermath as a complex political and health experience with its own bureaucratic and legal ramifications. In Ukraine, a decade after the Chernobyl disaster, waves of citizens poured into medical offices for care and compensation. Their “idiosyncratic” diseases would now encode different kinds of treatment discriminations and different kinds of neglect. The book shows how the Chernobyl explosion has been shaped as a tekhnohenna katastrofa, or technogenic catastrophe, and how Ukraine's response to the disaster combines humanism with strategies of governance and state building, market strategies with forms of economic and political corruption. The book focuses on the emergence of a collective and individual survival strategy known as biological citizenship, which it argues reflects a failure of politics and science to account for human welfare, particularly the welfare of Chernobyl sufferers.
Self and Social Identity in Transition
Authors: Petryna Adriana
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines how the self and social identity have been transformed in post-Soviet Ukraine within the legal and medical context of claiming illness from radiation dose exposure. It shows how the political and bureaucratic aspects of Chernobyl pervaded sufferers' lives, bringing to the fore the complexity of life's disruption by unstable parental and marital relations, unpredictable physical symptoms and emotional stress, patterns of hospitalization, unemployment, and bureaucratic transactions. The chapter tells the story of an elderly couple, using the concept of lichnost', or personhood, to shed light on some of the social and personal dynamics that influenced their life. It explains how the husband's pains, truths, instincts, and acts became key components in realization of his biological citizenship. It also considers how the deep intrusion of illness into personal lives fostered a type of violence that went beyond the line of what could be policed.
Bayesian Statistical Inference
Authors: Ivezi Željko , Connolly Andrew J. , VanderPlas Jacob T. , Gray Alexander , Ivezi Željko , Connolly Andrew J. , VanderPlas Jacob T. , Gray Alexander
Published: November 2017

This chapter introduces the most important aspects of Bayesian statistical inference and techniques for performing such calculations in practice. It first reviews the basic steps in Bayesian inference in early sections of the chapter, and then illustrates them with several examples in sections that follow. Numerical techniques for solving complex problems are next discussed, and the final section provides a summary of pros and cons for classical and Bayesian method. It argues that most users of Bayesian estimation methods are likely to use a mix of Bayesian and frequentist tools. The reverse is also true—frequentist data analysts, even if they stay formally within the frequentist framework, are often influenced by “Bayesian thinking,” referring to “priors” and “posteriors.” The most advisable position is to know both paradigms well, in order to make informed judgments about which tools to apply in which situations.