Combining Household Income and Asset Data to Identify Livelihood Strategies and Their Dynamics

Current approaches to identifying and describing rural livelihood strategies, and household movements between strategies over time, in developing countries are imprecise. Here we: (i) present a new statistical quantitative approach combining income and asset data to identify household activity choice variables, characterise livelihood strategy clusters, and analyse movements between strategies, and (ii) apply the approach using an environmentally-augmented three-wave household (n = 427) level panel dataset from Nepal. Combining income and asset data provides a better understanding of livelihood strategies and household movements between strategies over time than using only income or asset data. Most households changed livelihood strategy at least once over the two three-year periods. A common pathway out of poverty included an intermediate step during which households accumulate assets through farming, petty trading, and migratory work.     

Voices from the feminine margin: Izumi Shikibu and the nuns of Kumano and Seiganji

Kara Walker's 2005 multimedia creation, Song of the South, marks an important transitional moment in Walker's critical artistic practice, described in this essay as a ‘performative turn’. A close study of the work reveals Walker's increasing attentiveness to engage with the viewer's presence as well as incorporating her own personal and collective experiences as an African-American woman with even greater intimacy than in her previous projects. These elements, combined with Walker's use of filmic interventions and her own body as both a represented image and live performer, result in the production of a richly layered and provocative work of art. Song of the South reflects Walker's continued ability to exacerbate the stinging wounds of history while challenging us to address the trauma of the past as manifested in today's societal ills.     

China's Monetary Reform: The counterrevolution from the countryside

Until the late 1990s, the rapid development of rural cooperative funds as semi-formal financial institutions in the countryside attracted little attention. In many provinces, these funds took over large swathes of rural finance, before the State Council in March 1999 issued a secret decree requesting that they be immediately dissolved. This paper explores the reasons for the rapid development of rural cooperative funds in many localities, examines why this has been an issue of contention, and explains why it has taken the central government such a long time to come up with a coherent—and, furthermore, drastic—response. Although rural cooperative funds are now being dissolved across the country, they may already have achieved their purpose of revolutionizing financial intermediation in the countryside.     

Social Bots in Election Campaigns: Theoretical,Empirical, and Methodological Implications

Social bots mimic and potentially manipulate humans and their behaviours in social networks. The public sphere might be especially vulnerable to their impacts, which is why we first discuss their potential influence on the public sphere from a theoretical perspective. From an empirical perspective, we analyzed Twitter followers of seven German parties before (N = 638,674) and during (N = 838,026) the 2017 electoral campaigns regarding bot prevalence and activities. The results revealed that the share of social bots increased from 7.1% before to 9.9% during the election campaigns. The percentage of active social bots remained roughly the same. An analysis of the content distributed by both the most popular and the most active bots showed that they disseminate few political hashtags, and that almost none referred to German politics. We discuss the results against the background of normative traditions of public sphere theories and address the methodological challenges bots pose in political communication.     

Introduction

The eruption of the "culture wars" in 1989 pushed U.S. arts policy to the forefront of the public agenda, leading to extreme political scrutiny of and controversy over the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and its funding activities. As the premier national-level public agency charged with supporting the arts in the United States, the NEA stood at the heart of debates on related arts policy. With an empirical focus on the NEA in the 1990s, we delineate and examine the broader effects and implications of the surrounding debates and related policy outcomes. In general, in keeping with the conservative political agenda of the 1990s in the United States, the result was the development of policies ostensibly aimed at promoting access to the arts that demoted concerns over artistic excellence, along with direct attacks on the NEA's overall administrative philosophy and decision-making practices. Employing insights from critical theory and reflexive sociology, we analyze the dramatic organizational shifts and programmatic restructuring initiated by the NEA in response to this situation and its ultimate effect on the relationships between art, artist, and audience in U.S. arts policy and society today.     

The impact of abuse allegations in perceiving parricide in the courtroom

One hundred and seventy five undergraduates (105 females) read a fictional criminal trial summary of a parricide case in which the juvenile defendant alleged sexual abuse or physical abuse or did not allege abuse. An allegation of either type of abuse led to a greater likelihood of a manslaughter conviction than a murder conviction and greater pro-child ratings (e.g., sympathy toward the defendant) compared to no abuse allegations. Specific evaluations of the defendant mediated the verdict results. In addition, there was no support for the claim that perceptions are more heinous for sexual abuse than physical abuse allegations and only limited support that perceptions for this type of case result in women being more pro-child defendant than men. The discussion focuses on how abuse allegations impact jurors' decision-making processes in parricide cases.     

Local News Media and Voter Turnout

A reasonably high turnout is a quality of a local democracy. In this article, we investigate whether media coverage of politics leads to increased or decreased voter turnout. Based on a unique data set, our analysis shows that local news media coverage has a positive effect on voter turnout, but only if the news media provide politically relevant information to the voters and only at local elections. Both findings are in accordance with the Information Model, which states that rising levels of political relevant information increases the probability of voting.     

Modernization,ethnic fractionalization,and democracy

In recent years, a number of studies have examined the relationship between ethnic fractionalization and democracy – so far with inconclusive results. We argue that the lacking robustness of existing findings is due to a theoretical and empirical misspecification of how ethnic fractionalization may influence the level of democracy. Ethnic fractionalization does have an impact on the regime form because it moderates the well-established positive effect of modernization on democracy. In other words, at low levels of ethnic fractionalization, modernization has a strong positive effect on democratization, but with increasing levels of ethnic fractionalization, the positive effect of modernization decreases. This relationship is documented empirically by using data on 167 countries since 1972.     

Are powerful presidents always popularly elected? Implications for separating semi-presidentialism from parliamentarism

The traditional conception of semi-presidentialism stipulates that powers are shared by a popularly elected president and a prime minister, who is responsible to parliament. In recent years, an increasingly popular strategy has become to disregard the power dimension and define semi-presidentialism only with regard to whether the president is popularly elected or not. Based on a principal-agent framework the present study sets out to test the relationship between the mode of election and the powers of the president in democratic republics where the government is dependent on the legislature for survival. Findings indicate that although powerful presidents most often are popularly elected there are also instances where a non-popularly elected president shares executive powers with the prime minister. This makes it difficult to define semi-presidentialism only with regard to how the president comes to power.     

Why Be Just? The Problem of Motivation in Hegel and Rawls

At the heart of any theoretical problem of justice lies the problem of motivation: Even if we could conceive of a way to develop a comprehensive system of just laws, and even if we could rationally believe in the justice of these laws, how could we ever ensure that we—or anyone else—would be motivated to abide by them? By unearthing how the problem of motivation sways canonical discussions of justice, the article brings forth intrinsic similarities and differences in these discussions that are often overlooked in the literature. In particular, the article highlights intrinsic similarities in the analysis of the concept of justice in two central works that belong to the continental and the analytic tradition respectively and are otherwise rarely discussed together: Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right and Rawls’s Theory of Justice .