Institutional interplay and effectiveness: assessing efforts to conserve western hemisphere shorebirds

Bird conservation agencies and organizations can take credit for a long list of transnational policy accomplishments. This article examines one set, a constellation of arrangements developed over the past three decades by those seeking to conserve western hemisphere shorebirds. At the center of this constellation are the US and Canadian national shorebird conservation plans and a cross-border initiative, the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Conservation Reserve Network. We treat these and associated plans, programs, and initiatives as a nested set of institutions, noting that these are operated by a wide assortment of state and societal actors. Exploring the potential of a framework based on Oran Young’s concept of interplay, we analyze the construction of these institutions and efforts to establish effectiveness. Examining activity in three zones of issue proximity, we conclude that shorebird conservationists have responded well to formative interplay challenges. They have made least progress in engaging remote institutions responsible for threats to shorebird habitat. We note, though, that it is important to distinguish between scientific and political levels of interplay work. On a substantive level we conclude that the shorebird community is well-positioned to move beyond generative and programmatic tasks to focus on establishing policy capability. On a theoretical level, we conclude that a framework based on interplay provides a strong foundation for analysis of the forces shaping the effectiveness of informal conservation institutions such as the ones examined.

Decomposing political advertising effects on vote choices

Public Choice - This paper studies the channels through which political television advertising influences individuals' voting decisions. Scholars are interested to learn whether advertising...     

Assessing the developing knowledge-base of product counterfeiting: a content analysis of four decades of research

Considering the steady and rapid growth of product counterfeiting and the damage it causes to society, it is important for criminology and criminal justice scholars to assist criminal justice officials, industry practitioners, and law makers in understanding the product counterfeiting problem and developing strategies to combat it. However, for researchers to be effective in their advisory role they must first establish what is known about product counterfeiting. As a first step in this process, we investigated relevant published research through a content analysis of 47 articles discussing product counterfeiting published in criminal justice and criminology journals through 2014. We analyzed various characteristics about the articles themselves, their authors, the journals they appeared in, and the nature and extent of their focus on product counterfeiting. We conclude this study with an evaluation of the state of product counterfeiting research and recommendations for future research.     

Micropolitics and Collective Liberation: Mind/Body Practice and Left Social Movements

This article explores the growing use of mind/body practices such as meditation and yoga in Left social movements. The analysis is rooted in interviews with activists participating in the transformative movement-building current: the growing number of organizations integrating subjective and social transformation practices. William Connolly’s work on micropolitics is put into conversation with the transformative movement-building current. The epistemological assumption undergirding this article is that textual political theory, and the knowledge being produced by activists, can benefit from dynamic exchange. My argument is that Connolly’s post-Nietzschean political theory offers a powerful justification for the political importance of mind/body practices, one that adds to activist justifications. I also argue that transformative movement-building contributes to recent theoretical debates by concretely demonstrating the integral importance of micropolitics for successful macromovements.     

Historical reconstruction of the community response,and related epidemiology,of a suspected biological weapon attack in Ningbo,China (1940)

During World War II, members of the Imperial Japanese Army biological warfare Unit 731 conducted a live test deployment of plague-infected fleas in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, China. The deployment triggered an outbreak involving 165 cases in downtown Ningbo, 112 of which were fatal (68% case fatality rate). Despite lack of access to effective medical countermeasures, the Ningbo community exhibited a high degree of social cohesion and resilience in the context of effective public health response. These findings support the value of community preparedness and strong public health infrastructure to mitigate the impact of biological weapons.