Trade and the environment in North America

Environmental assessments of trade agreements remain in its infancy, and demonstrate that trade in itself will not green our economies. By examining various aspects of the environmental effects of trade in North America, this special issue not only contributes to deepening our understanding of the key issues in the trade and environment debate, but also helps to formulate mutually supportive trade and environmental policies.     

Measuring community social organization: Sense of community as a mediator in social disorganization theory

The current study utilized an updated systemic model of social disorganization to investigate neighborhood effects on both positive and negative youth outcomes. Although empirical support for updated social disorganization models has increased in recent years, the field continues to rely too heavily on behavioral indicators of community social organization. Unfortunately, these measures do not assess the truly important social processes and dynamics that result in cohesive and supportive neighborhoods. It was proposed that sense of community (SOC) was a more valid, comprehensive, and applicable measure for the mediating variables in social disorganization theory. Results supported the hypothesis that SOC mediates the effect of neighborhood disadvantage on youth outcomes and implications for the field are discussed.     

加工速度、工作记忆与心算能力的发展

以243名10-18岁儿童为被试,研究了加工速度和工作记忆与儿童心算能力发展的关系.验证性因素分析表明,加工速度、工作记忆与心算能力之间存在显著的相关.结构方程建模表明这种显著相关的实质在于三者之间可能存在一个递进式发展过程,即工作记忆能力几乎可完全解释儿童心算能力的发展变化,而加工速度可解释2/3的工作记忆能力的发展变化.这表明工作记忆是心算能力发展的基础,而加工速度可能是工作记忆能力发展的基础,但后者尚需要进一步验证.     

Negative personalization and voting behavior in 14 parliamentary democracies, 1961–2018

Existing research has begun to tackle the electoral consequences of affective polarization through the lens of negative partisanship. However, not equal attention has been paid to voters’ polarized opinions toward political leaders and their impact on electoral behavior. This paper offers a comparative, longitudinal assessment of the relationship between negativity towards party leaders and vote choice in multi-party systems. We develop our negative personalization hypothesis and test it empirically on an original pooled dataset featuring 109 national election surveys from 14 Western European parliamentary democracies collected over the last six decades. Our findings confirm the existence of a robust relationship between negative party-leader evaluations and vote choice. Furthermore, the results demonstrate a sizable growth in the incidence of negative personalization across time, now of a magnitude that compares to that exerted by in-party-leader evaluations. This finding constitutes a central innovation adding to the personalization of politics literature.     

How the coronavirus crisis affects citizen trust in institutions and in unknown others: Evidence from ‘the Swedish experiment’

We study how Swedish citizens updated their institutional and interpersonal trust as the corona crisis evolved from an initial phase to an acute phase in the spring of 2020. The study is based on a large web-survey panel with adult Swedes (n = 11,406) in which the same individuals were asked the same set of questions at two different time points during the coronavirus pandemic (t₀ and t₁). The sample was self-selected but diverse (a smaller subsample, n = 1,464, was pre-stratified to be representative of the Swedish population on key demographics). We find support for the view that the corona crisis led to higher levels of institutional and interpersonal trust. Moreover, reactions were largely homogeneous across those groups that could potentially relate distantly to government authorities.     

Jurisdiction size and local government effectiveness: Assessing the effects of municipal amalgamations on performance

The optimal jurisdiction size has been debated since Plato and Aristotle. A large literature has studied economic and democratic scale effects, but we have almost no knowledge of the effects of jurisdiction size on the effectiveness of local services. This is due to two methodological problems. First, selection bias and reverse causality often render change in jurisdiction size an endogenous variable. Second, there is a lack of empirical indicators of effectiveness, and most studies therefore focus on spending measures. Extant research thus studies economies of scale, leaving effectiveness of scale unexamined. We address both problems in a quasi-experimental study of public schools. Our findings from the school area indicate that jurisdiction size does not have systematic effects on effectiveness. Our analysis therefore supports recent studies of economic and democratic scale effects that indicate that the search for the optimal jurisdiction size is futile.     

论构建WTO框架下竞争法协调机制

从竞争法法律冲突产生的原因和国际上现有的处理竞争法法律冲突的协调模式展开论述,分析了在WTO框架下建立国际竞争规则协调机制的必然性和可能性,并对WTO框架下竞争法协调机制在实体和程序方面的构成提出了建议。     

Breaking the ‘Silence’ of the Military Regime: New Politics of Memory in Brazil

This article elucidates the latest developments in the ‘politics of memory’ regarding the military regime in Brazil. Only recently, I argue, has the Brazilian state abandoned its ‘politics of silence’ and started to actively champion the memory of the left‐wing ‘resistance’. This new strategy climaxed in a governmental crisis over a historic plan to establish a National Truth Commission to investigate human rights violations during the military regime. The article analyses key incidents and debates prior to the crisis, and contrasts the post‐dictatorial collective memory of Brazil with that of other Latin American countries.     

Memory,Melancholia and Political Transition in Amuleto and Nocturno de Chile by Roberto Bolaño

This article explores the significance of melancholy in two novels by Roberto Bolaño: Amuleto (1999) and Nocturno de Chile (2000). These aim to give narrative form to memories surrounding the violent dismantling of the political left that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s in Latin America. Yet in their melancholic articulation, they do so in a way that both haunts narratives of political transition and questions the consensus regarding literature's obsolescence. In so doing they advocate a mode of reading that confers futurity on past remnants and ruins, and that thwarts the transformation of political defeat into a trophy of the victor's triumph.