Comparing regulatory processes in genome editing and autonomous vehicles: How institutional environments shape sociotechnical imaginaries

This study compares the regulation of two emerging technologies, the CRISPR genome-editing system and Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAV) in the United States. The study draws on 33 in-depth interviews with innovation and governance experts to study the relationship between their regulatory environments and developing beliefs about these technologies. Using sociotechnical imaginaries as a framework, we explore how social actors envision technologically driven futures and the social order that enables them. These imaginaries are essential to emerging technologies, where experts build a framework of potentialities for innovation still underway. While scholarship has documented how sociotechnical imaginaries arise among policymakers, groups of scientists, state and local stakeholders, and public actors in different countries, less has been said about how regulatory organizations and their actors shape expectations around technologies that are in the early and middle stages of development. This article finds that regulatory institutions shape emerging imaginaries along three related axes: the distribution of authority, technological novelty, and risk. Interviewees negotiate these three contingencies differently based on relevant extant regulatory structures and ideologies, resulting in distinct imaginaries around each technology. CRISPR actors envision genome editing as largely diminishing biomedical harm and eventually suitable for health markets, while CAV actors diverge on whether self-driving cars alleviate or exacerbate risk and how they may enter roads. That organizational structures and practices of regulation inform broadly held sociotechnical imaginaries bears significance for studies of innovation trajectories, suggesting regulators can take an active role in shaping how risks and benefits of emerging technology are defined.     

Support for the environment post-transition? Material concerns and policy tradeoffs

Though many individuals are aware of the need to address environmental concerns, fewer are willing to pay for climate action or think the environment should be a priority for government spending. One compelling reason is that they prioritize using scarce resources to address immediate material concerns. This is particularly likely for individuals facing absolute material scarcity or for those who think they are relatively economically worse off, especially in contexts characterized by rapid transformation and volatility in the levels and quality of social welfare provision. To test these expectations, we analyze survey data from formerly Communist economies, which today find themselves with vastly different fortunes. Empirical findings suggest that absolute and relative material scarcity affect opinions regarding government spending on, and the willingness to pay more for, environmental action. However, willingness to pay more for government public services, inclusive of anti-poverty initiatives, has an impact on willingness to pay more for climate action, but in counter-intuitive ways. Overall, the results appear to suggest that explicitly addressing and relating individual living standards and inequality with environmental concerns may expand support for climate action.     

Competition and cooperation in artificial intelligence standard setting: Explaining emergent patterns

Efforts to set standards for artificial intelligence (AI) reveal striking patterns: technical experts hailing from geopolitical rivals, such as the United States and China, readily collaborate on technical AI standards within transnational standard-setting organizations, whereas governments are much less willing to collaborate on global ethical AI standards within international organizations. Whether competition or cooperation prevails can be explained by three variables: the actors that make up the membership of the standard-setting organization, the issues on which the organization's standard-setting efforts focus, and the “games” actors play when trying to set standards within a particular type of organization. A preliminary empirical analysis provides support for the contention that actors, issues, and games affect the prospects for cooperation on global AI standards. It matters because shared standards are vital for achieving truly global frameworks for the governance of AI. Such global frameworks, in turn, lower transaction costs and the probability that the world will witness the emergence of AI systems that threaten human rights and fundamental freedoms.     

Intermunicipal cooperation,municipal amalgamation and the price of credit

In many countries, local government size is increasingly thought to be insufficient to operate efficiently. Two possible solutions to this problem are amalgamation and intermunicipal cooperation. This paper applies a novel methodology to shed light on the efficiency implications of this choice. Using a unique and rich micro-level dataset, we find that intermunicipal organisations (IOs) in the Netherlands consistently pay higher interest rates than municipalities, while there is no economic reason to do so. We interpret this as a form of inefficiency. Municipal amalgamation, on the other hand, does not result in higher interest rates. Our analysis eliminates one possible explanation, dispersed ownership of IOs, as the number of partners cooperating in an IO does not affect interest rates (no ‘law of 1/n’). This leaves the introduction of extra hierarchical layers as a result of cooperation, and the ensuing reduction in monitoring, as the most probable explanation.     

社会保障法概念探析

本文通过对社会保障的概念与法的概念、社会保障的本质与法的本质、以及现有社会保障法的概念的全面分析 ,对社会保障法进行了重新定义。本文认为 ,社会保障法 (广义社会保障法 )是关于基于社会理性、为保证每一个人的生活安全、维持基本生活并保证生活质量从而保证其生存权和发展权而采取的社会互助行为的法律规范的总称 ,包括社会救济法、社会保险法和社会福利法三个次级法律规范群 ;狭义社会保障法是关于基于社会理性、为保证每一个人的生活安全、维持基本生活从而保证其生存权和发展权而采取的社会互助行为的法律规范的总称 ,包括社会救济法和社会保险法两个次级法律规范群。     

Not Child's Play: Tactics and Strategies in Viva Cuba and Habanastation

Recognition of the national and international contexts in which Viva Cuba (Juan Carlos Cremata, 2005) and Habanastation (Ian Padron, 2011) were made and marketed highlights the coexistence of a pragmatic, tactical approach to filmmaking with the expression of specific, national concerns. Indeed, the two elements are inextricable, since both directors exploit the association of children with universality and the apolitical in order to pursue both personal and national goals, so that these films for children, about children must be seen not as child's play but as contracandelas: strategic and affective responses to uncertainty and threat.     

El referéndum en latinoamérica: Un análisis desde el derecho comparado

This paper tells of the proliferation in recent decades, formulas referendums in Latin American constitutions. The comparative analysis of this mechanism to identify severalunique features in the treatment of this formula of direct democracy, which distinguish it from reflections from other disciplines. For now the simple regulation has meantaltering the form of state and government of various constitutional systems of our region.     

La sumisión del poder público al derecho en el civil law y en el common law: estado de derecho,rule of law y su expansión al ámbito internacional

Generally regarded as synonyms, the Rule of Law and the Rechsstaat are different. There are between the two legal institutions substantial differences that we must distinguish rigorously. The idea of the public power submission to the law —expressed through both theoretical constructions— has gone beyond the State borders and, progressively, made its way into international scenario. For some authors, the root for the application of the principle of the Rule of Law to interstate relationships, within international society, could date back to the XVIII century. However, it was until a few years ago that the Rule of Law analysis, from a sttrictly international point of view, started to take off. In this article the author analyzes the differences between the Rechsstaat and the Rule of Law in order to study the extension of these conceptions and how it could be applied to highlight the preeminence of law at international level.     

The effect of social status on women's age at first childbirth in the late seventeenth- to early eighteenth-century Korea

While records on historical population are available and do exist, the fact that they are so limited in nature is a critical problem. We applied the method of family reconstitution to a Korean household register to deal with these limitations. Based on family reconstitution from five successive registers, we calculated women's age at first childbirth for each social status in two ways: “observed woman's age” at first childbirth = woman's current age–age of her first child, and “estimated woman's age” at first childbirth, which uses linear regression analysis on the basis of positive association between women's age and the age of their firstborn. Our results shed light on the effects of social status and cultural factors on the age at which women in pre-industrial Korea bore their first child.