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As the US faced its lowest levels of reported trust in government, the COVID-19 crisis revealed the essential service that various federal agencies provide as sources of information. This Element explores variations in trust across various levels of government and government agencies based on a nationally-representative survey conducted in March of 2020. First, it examines trust in agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services, state health departments, and local health care providers. This includes variation across key characteristics including party identification, age, and race. Second, the Element explores the evolution of trust in health-related organizations throughout 2020 as the pandemic continued. The Element concludes with a discussion of the implications for agency-specific assessments of trust and their importance as we address historically low levels of trust in government. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
We undertake the first quantitative and broadly comparative study of the structure and performance of partnership communities to our knowledge. Our study addresses several important research questions. How connected are the members of partnership communities? How can we understand the quality of the projects a community undertakes? How do political institutions shape their structure and performance? After defining partnership communities as networked communities of private firms which form the consortia that enter into long-term contractual arrangements with governments, we show how they are affected by government demand for partners. We then provide an overview of those factors predicting success in financing projects. Finally, we focus on the political economy of partnership communities. We develop and test theoretical predictions about how national institutions shape partnership communities and the quality of projects. We also investigate voters' preferences over alternative arrangements of infrastructure delivery before drawing out implications for research and practice.
Many forest-related problems are considered relevant today. One might think of deforestation, illegal logging and biodiversity loss. Yet, many governance initiatives have been initiated to work on their solutions. This Element takes stock of these issues and initiatives by analysing different forest governance modes, shifts and norms, and by studying five cases (forest sector governance, forest legality, forest certification, forest conservation, participatory forest management). Special focus is on performance: are the many forest governance initiatives able to change established practices of forest decline (Chloris worldview) or are they doomed to fail (Hydra worldview)? The answer will be both, depending on geographies and local conditions. The analyses are guided by discursive institutionalism and philosophical pragmatism. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This Element aims to elucidate the concept of language teacher agency by exploring the 'what' question, offering major conceptualisations of agency and explaining how they shape the way we approach teacher agency. The authors then continue with the 'why' question, and elaborate on the reasons that language teacher agency matters, based on a discussion of the varied purposes of teacher agency at multiple levels. They also acknowledge that teacher agency does not operate alone, and discuss how it intersects with such concepts as teacher identity, emotion, belief and knowledge. Based on this, they identify ways to promote teacher agency through making changes to contexts and/or actors. They then introduce the concept of collective agency and propose a multi-layered model based on an illustrative study. The Element ends with a call for a trans-perspective on understanding language teacher agency so as to facilitate the professional development of language teachers.
Historically, philosophical discussions of relations have featured chiefly as afterthoughts, loose ends to be addressed only after coming to terms with more important and pressing metaphysical issues. F. H. Bradley stands out as an exception. Understanding Bradley's views on relations and their significance today requires an appreciation of the alternatives, which in turn requires an understanding of how relations have traditionally been classified and how philosophers have struggled to capture their nature and their ontological standing. Positions on these topics range from the rejection of relations altogether, to their being awarded the status as grounds for everything else, to various intermediary positions along this spectrum. Love them, hate them, or merely tolerate them, no philosopher engaged in ontologically serious metaphysics can afford to ignore relations.
This study focuses on the spread of print in colonial India towards the middle and end of the nineteenth century. Till the first half of the century, much of the print production in the subcontinent emanated from presidency cities such as Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, along with centres of missionary production such as Serampore. But with the growing socialization of print and the entry of local entrepreneurs into the field, print began to spread from the metropole to the provinces, from large cities to mofussil towns. This Element will look at this phenomenon in eastern India, and survey how printing spread from Calcutta to centres such as Hooghly-Chinsurah, Murshidabad, Burdwan, Rangpur etc. The study will particularly consider the rise of periodicals and newspapers in the mofussil, and asses their contribution to a nascent public sphere.
Visual cognitive processes have traditionally been examined with simplified stimuli, but generalization of these processes to the real-world is not always straightforward. Using images, computer-generated images, and virtual environments, researchers have examined processing of visual information in the real-world. Although referred to as scene perception, this research field encompasses many aspects of scene processing. Beyond the perception of visual features, scene processing is fundamentally influenced and constrained by semantic information as well as spatial layout and spatial associations with objects. In this review, we will present recent advances in how scene processing occurs within a few seconds of exposure, how scene information is retained in the long-term, and how different tasks affect attention in scene processing. By considering the characteristics of real-world scenes, as well as different time windows of processing, we can develop a fuller appreciation for the research that falls under the wider umbrella of scene processing.
An overview is given of cross-cultural psychology and cultural psychology, focusing on theory and methodology. In Section 1 historical developments in research are traced; it is found that initially extensive psychological differences tend to shrink when more carefully designed studies are conducted. Section 2 addresses the conceptualization of “culture” and of “a culture”. For psychological research the notion “culture” is considered too vague; more focal explanatory concepts are required. Section 3 describes methodological issues, taking the notion of the empirical cycle as a lead for both qualitative and quantitative research. Pitfalls in research design and data analysis of behavior-comparative studies, and the need for replication are discussed. Section 4 suggests to move beyond research on causal relationships and to incorporate additional questions, addressing the function and the development of behavior patterns in ontogenetic, phylogenetic and historical time. Section 5 emphasizes the need for applied research serving the global village.
This Element provides an opinionated introduction to the debate in moral philosophy over identifying the basic elements of well-being and to the related debate over the nature of happiness. The question of the nature of happiness is simply the question of what happiness is (as opposed to what causes it or how to get it), and the central philosophical question about well-being is the question of what things are in themselves of ultimate benefit or harm to a person, or directly make them better or worse off.
Imaging and visualizing fossils in three dimensions with tomography is a powerful approach in paleontology. Here, the authors introduce select destructive and non-destructive tomographic techniques that are routinely applied to fossils and review how this work has improved our understanding of the anatomy, function, taphonomy, and phylogeny of fossil echinoderms. Building on this, this Element discusses how new imaging and computational methods have great promise for addressing long-standing paleobiological questions. Future efforts to improve the accessibility of the data underlying this work will be key for realizing the potential of this virtual world of paleontology.
Recent arguments concerning the nature of causation in evolutionary theory, now often known as the debate between the 'causalist' and 'statisticalist' positions, have involved answers to a variety of independent questions – definitions of key evolutionary concepts like natural selection, fitness, and genetic drift; causation in multi-level systems; or the nature of evolutionary explanations, among others. This Element offers a way to disentangle one set of these questions surrounding the causal structure of natural selection. Doing so allows us to clearly reconstruct the approach that some of these major competing interpretations of evolutionary theory have to this causal structure, highlighting particular features of philosophical interest within each. Further, those features concern problems not exclusive to the philosophy of biology. Connections between them and, in two case studies, contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of physics demonstrate the potential value of broader collaboration in the understanding of evolution.
Evidential Decision Theory is a radical theory of rational decision-making. It recommends that instead of thinking about what your decisions *cause*, you should think about what they *reveal*. This Element explains in simple terms why thinking in this way makes a big difference, and argues that doing so makes for *better* decisions. An appendix gives an intuitive explanation of the measure-theoretic foundations of Evidential Decision Theory.
Have you ever wondered how your telephone company or Internet service provider can give you access to almost all people in the world, or how electricity suppliers can compete with each other if there is only one electric supply line passing through your street? This Element deals with the economics and public regulation of such network industries. It puts particular emphasis on the specific economic concepts used for analyzing them and on the regulatory reform movement and the compatibility of regulation and competition. Worldwide most of these industries have changed dramatically in recent years, telecommunications in particular. Network industries mostly exhibit economies of scale in production and similar economies in consumption. Both of these properties cause market power problems that often require industry-specific regulation. However, due to technological and market changes network policies have moved on from end-user regulation to wholesale regulation and in some cases to deregulation.
America's racial sands are quickly shifting, with parallel growth in theories to explain how varied groups respond, politically, to demographic changes. This Element develops a unified framework to predict when, why, and how racial groups react defensively toward others. America's racial groups can be arrayed along two dimensions: how American and how superior are they considered? This Element claims that location along these axes motivates political reactions to outgroups. Using original survey data and experiments, this Element reveals the acute sensitivity that people of color have to their social station and how it animates political responses to racial diversity.
While the term 'bestseller' explicitly relates books to sales, commercially successful books are also products of individual creative work. This Element presents a new perspective on the relationship between art and the market, with particular reference to bestselling writers and books. We examine some existing perspectives on art's relationship to the marketplace to trouble persistent binaries that see the two in opposition; we break down the monolith of the marketplace by thinking of it as made up of a range of invested, non-hostile participants such as publishing personnel and readers; we articulate the material dimensions of creative writing in the industry through the words of bestselling writers themselves; and we examine how the existence of bestselling books and writers in the world of letters bears enormous influence on the industry, and on the practice of other writers.
Under Kim Jong-un, North Korea has experienced growing economic markets, an emerging 'nouveau riche,' and modest levels of urban development. To what extent is North Korean politics and society changing? How has the growth of markets transformed state-society relations? This Element evaluates the shifting relationship between state, society, and markets in a deeply authoritarian context. If the regime implements controlled economic measures, extracts rent, and subsumes the market economy into its ideology, the state will likely retain strong authoritarian control. Conversely, if it fails to incorporate markets into its legitimating message, as private actors build informal trust networks, share information, and collude with state bureaucrats, more fundamental changes in state-society relations are in order. By opening the 'black box' of North Korea, this Element reveals how the country manages to teeter forward, and where its domestic future may lie.
The study of echinoid evolution, diversity, and ecology has always suffered from the fact that they are represented by taxa showing widely differing architectural designs of their multi-plated skeletons, inhabiting a large range of marine paleoenvironments, which result in highly varying taphonomic biases dictating their presence and recognition. This Element addresses the taphonomy of echinoids and includes: a general introduction to the morphological features of echinoids that play a role in their preservation; a review of processes which play an important role in the differential preservation of both regular and irregular echinoids including predation and transport; a summary of taphonomic pathways included in actualistic studies for recent sea urchins and then reconstructed for fossil taxa; and finally, a case study of the variation of echinoid taphonomy across a shelf gradient using the rich Miocene echinoid fauna of Sardinia.
Measurement burst designs, in which assessments of a set of constructs are made at two or more times in quick succession (e.g., within days), can be used as a novel method to improve the stability of basic measures typically used in longitudinal peer research. In this Element, we hypothesized that the stabilities for adolescent-reported peer acceptance, anxiety, and self-concept would be stronger when using the measurement burst approach versus the single time observation. Participants included youth between 10 and 13 years old who completed (a) sociometric assessments of acceptance, and measures of (b) social and test anxiety, and (c) self-concept across three times with two assessments made at each burst. Findings broadly showed that the stabilities were significantly stronger with the measurement burst when compared to the single time assessment, supporting our main hypothesis. We discuss the utility of the measurement burst in a broader context and considerations for researchers.
A central question in political representation is whether government responds to the people. To understand that, we need to know what the government is doing, and what the people think of it. We seek to understand a key question necessary to answer those bigger questions: How does American public opinion move over time? We posit three patterns of change over time in public opinion, depending on the type of issue. Issues on which the two parties regularly disagree provide clear partisan cues to the public. For these party-cue issues we present a slight variation on the thermostatic theory from (Soroka and Wlezien (2010); Wlezien (1995)); our “implied thermostatic model.” A smaller number of issues divide the public along lines unrelated to partisanship, and so partisan control of government provides no relevant clue. Finally, we note a small but important class of issues which capture response to cultural shifts.
In the United States, politics has become tribal and personalized. The influence of partisan divisions has extended beyond the political realm into everyday life, affecting relationships and workplaces as well as the ballot box. To help explain this trend, we examine the stereotypes Americans have of ordinary Democrats and Republicans. Using data from surveys, experiments, and Americans' own words, we explore the content of partisan stereotypes and find that they come in three main flavors—parties as their own tribes, coalitions of other tribes, or vehicles for political issues. These different stereotypes influence partisan conflict: people who hold trait-based stereotypes tend to display the highest levels of polarization, while holding issue-based stereotypes decreases polarization. This finding suggests that reducing partisan conflict does not require downplaying partisan divisions but shifting the focus to political priorities rather than identity—a turn to what we call responsible partisanship.