Are We Civilized Yet?

The term “civilization” has been used in many contexts where accusations of Western imperialism, racism, and the like do not at all apply. Works on the history of science and technology in ancient cultures provide one such example, when they speak of Egyptian civilization or early Chinese civilization. It is also not true that works of the Enlightenment view the non-western world as less civilized and inferior. An entire genre of writing inspired by Jesuit accounts discovered in China a higher form of society that Europe should emulate. Two such works were Oliver Goldsmith’s Letters from a Citizen of the World and François Quesnay’s Le Despostisme de la chine, which offer, respectively, an extended satire and a sharp critique of European society.     

Coercive Leadership

We develop a model of leadership in which an informed leader has some degree of coercive influence over her followers (agents). Agents benefit from coordination but face two distinct challenges: dispersed information and heterogeneous preferences. The leader's coercive power facilitates coordination by weakening the effect presented by both of these challenges through “binding” agents to a strategically chosen policy. The leader's policy choice becomes more informative to the agents about the leader's privately held information as her coercive capacity increases. By adjusting her policy choice in response to available private and public information, the coercive leader achieves her preferred average of agents' actions, and in so doing, neutralizes the possibly deleterious coordinating influence of public information. We develop implications of our analysis for understanding autocratic leadership in different political and organizational contexts.     

Explaining Public Support for Counterproductive Homelessness Policy: The Role of Disgust

Federal, state, and city governments spend substantial funds on programs intended to aid homeless people, and such programs attract widespread public support. In recent years, however, state and local governments have increasingly enacted policies, such as bans on panhandling and sleeping in public, that are counterproductive to alleviating homelessness. Yet these policies also garner substantial support from the public. Given that programs aiding the homeless are so popular, why are these counterproductive policies also popular? We argue that disgust plays a key role in the resolution of this puzzle. While disgust does not decrease support for aid policies or even generate negative affect towards homeless people, it motivates the desire for physical distance, leading to support for policies that exclude homeless people from public life. We test this argument using survey data, including a national sample with an embedded experiment. Consistent with these expectations, our findings indicate that those respondents who are dispositionally sensitive to disgust are more likely to support exclusionary policies, such as banning panhandling, but no less likely to support policies intended to aid homeless people. Furthermore, media depictions of the homeless that include disease cues activate disgust, increasing its impact on support for banning panhandling. These results help explain the popularity of exclusionary homelessness policies and challenge common perspectives on the role of group attitudes in public life.     

Early Impacts of the Affordable Care Act on Health Insurance Coverage in Medicaid Expansion and Non‐Expansion States

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) aimed to achieve nearly universal health insurance coverage in the United States through a combination of insurance market reforms, mandates, subsidies, health insurance exchanges, and Medicaid expansions, most of which took effect in 2014. This paper estimates the causal effects of the ACA on health insurance coverage in 2014 using data from the American Community Survey. We utilize difference‐in‐difference‐in‐differences models that exploit cross‐sectional variation in the intensity of treatment arising from state participation in the Medicaid expansion and local area pre‐ACA uninsured rates. This strategy allows us to identify the effects of the ACA in both Medicaid expansion and non‐expansion states. Our preferred specification suggests that, at the average pre‐treatment uninsured rate, the full ACA increased the proportion of residents with insurance by 5.9 percentage points compared to 2.8 percentage points in states that did not expand Medicaid. Private insurance expansions from the ACA were due to increases in both employer‐provided and non‐group coverage. The coverage gains from the full ACA were largest for those without a college degree, non‐whites, young adults, unmarried individuals, and those without children in the home. We find no evidence that the Medicaid expansion crowded out private coverage.     

Semiotising the student perception of learning outcomes in British higher education

This article presents a semiotic analysis of the student perception of learning outcomes in British higher education. It centres on three annotated images in Frank Furedi’s article “The Unhappiness Principles”, published in Times Higher Education in 2012. Drawing upon Peircean semiosis and iconicity, it provides a rhetoric-infused interpretation of the word–image complementarity exhibited in student participants’ written commentaries on the three images. This leads to a dialectical view of formative and summative assessment, in which process and product create each other through the same continuum of learning and teaching. In highlighting intellectualism as central to the ethnography of university life, this article argues that learner autonomy and the potential for transformation is deemed essential to the student experience in higher education.     

Shaping the Evolution of the Information Flow: The Centralizing Mechanisms in the Evolution of the North American Tobacco Quitline Consortium

The research reported here is an analysis of the evolution of the relationships that comprise a single public health network, focusing especially on the position of the network administrative organization (Provan and Kenis 2008 Provan, K. G. and P. Kenis. 2008. “Modes of Network Governance: Structure, Management, and Effectiveness.” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 18(2): 229–252.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) in the flow of knowledge among a large number of organizations providing similar services. Our study examines the North American Quitline Consortium (NAQC), a multi-sector network that spans the US and Canada and whose members provide telephone-based tobacco cessation services to anyone interested in quitting smoking. Data were collected using web-based surveys at three different points of time. Implications are discussed for network organizing, for both theory and practice, focusing especially on the importance of the network administrative organization in shaping the evolution of the whole network information flow.     

Competition and switching in public service markets: Can they reduce inequalities?

Regulatory reforms to public infrastructure services across European Union (EU) countries were aimed at increasing consumer welfare by introducing competition and choice into service markets. However, empirical evaluations have questioned whether these reforms have benefitted all consumers, suggesting that vulnerable groups of service users (especially those with lower levels of formal education), might be locked into poorly performing services. We assess the relationship between the level of competition in electricity and fixed telephony markets in EU countries and evaluate the affordability of these services for different socio‐educational layers. Our findings show that – although in countries where there is a relatively high frequency of switching, inequalities between socio‐educational groups are smaller and eventually disappear – competition as such does not play a part. These results suggest that demand‐side regulation that successfully enables consumer switching has the potential to equalize social welfare, thereby reflecting a possible convergence of regulatory instruments and the central aims of the welfare state in this context.     

Interwar fascism and the post-1989 radical right: Ideology,opportunism and historical legacy in Bulgaria and Romania

Do contemporary Bulgarian and Romanian radical right movements represent a legacy of interwar fascism? We argue that the key element is not that interwar movements provided legacies (of structures, ideologies, or organizations) but rather a symbolic “heritage” that contemporary movements can draw upon. The crucial legacy is, rather, the Socialist era, which in asserting its own definitions of interwar fascism created a “useable past” for populist movements. The Peoples’ Republics created a flawed historical consciousness whereby demonized interwar rightist movements could be mobilized after 1989 as historical expressions of “anti-Communist” — and, ergo, positive symbols among those of anti-Communist sentiment. Although radical right parties in both countries may cast themselves as “heirs” to interwar fascism, they share little in common in terms of ideology. Their claims to a fascist legacy is, rather, a factor of how their respective Socialist states characterized the past.