How valuable is a cabinet position? While the current literature does not ignore the reality that ministries differ from one another, it does not offer either theoretical or methodological procedures to assess such differences. This article introduces a refined measure of coalescence degree that considers several characteristics ministries may have, as well as politicians’ preferences about cabinet appointments. We estimate the effect of this alternative measure of coalescence on the president’s legislative success using large Brazilian datasets from 1995 to 2014 and an elite survey conducted with 62 Brazilian legislators. Controlling for other coalition management variables (coalition size and ideological heterogeneity), our refined coalescence metric turns out to be a more appropriate tool to assess the president’s performance in Congress.

I present Ned Markosian's episodic account of identity under a sortal, and then use it to sketch a new model of the Trinity. I show that the model can be used to solve at least three important Trinitarian puzzles: the traditional ‘logical problem of the Trinity’, a less-discussed problem that has been dubbed the ‘problem of triunity’, and a problem about the divine processions that has been enjoying increased attention in the recent literature.

Although sociological research has examined the reproduction of Chile’s elites, there is little empirical evidence of how different forms of capital operate among them. Using datasets for members of the Chilean political elite from 1990 to 2010, this country note examines and measures the effect of political, social, and cultural capital on the access of certain individuals to strategic positions in the political field, comparing the legislative and executive branches as represented by deputies and ministers. The empirical analysis includes logit models.

This article argues for a new understanding of pantheism whereby God is a multi-located mereological simple which constitutes the cosmos. I argue that the traditional theist can more readily accept this version of pantheism than a version identifying God with the cosmos.1

Pierre Baillot (1771–1842) was a central figure in the development of the early nineteenth-century French School of violin playing. This school was itself the source of the twentieth-century Russian and American schools, and all the great players of the modern era can trace their lineage back to Baillot and his colleagues. The French School was the first to systematize violin teaching within an institutional framework with normative aspirations. Its history is bound up with that of the Paris Conservatoire, established in 1795. Work by French scholars of the Conservatoire and its teaching has tended to assert a continuity of ideals and aesthetics across time, even an essential Frenchness, and work by English-language scholars has been more concerned with the influence of the School on developments in playing styles and composition than on the evolution of attitudes to music teaching. This analysis of the language of the two founding pedagogical texts reveals a contested cultural landscape, and explores how a revolutionary institution with lofty principles could be overtaken by cultural change in a few short decades. It finishes by questioning the traditional elision of the French and Franco-Belgian schools, and suggests that Brussels, rather than constituting a mere branch of the Paris school, rescued it from premature irrelevance.

This article reflects on the role that urban history can play in contemporary efforts to reduce waste. It is focused on a public history project that uses the history of waste management in World War II as a critical vantage point from which to consider current debates over reduction, reuse and recycling. Placing this project within a broader discussion of public history in the United Kingdom, the article argues that urban history is well placed to encourage a critical understanding of the present.

Since the late 1980s, the interpretations of policy toward Hungary’s minorities—most notably the country’s 1993 minority law and the minority self-governments established as part of a system of nonterritorial autonomy (NTA)—have been the subject of debates in politics and academia in at least two critical respects. Aside from the declarative character of the law, foremost has been the question of Hungary’s kin-state activism toward Hungarians abroad and the implications this has carried for domestic minority issues. A second—and related—question has concerned the extent to which cultural autonomy and minority rights are in accordance with the needs of the Roma, by far the country’s largest ethnic minority group. A growing number of scholars have accepted the argument that the minority law was enacted because of concerns regarding Hungarian minorities living in the neighboring countries. In our view, it is more appropriate to ask instead how Hungary’s kin-state policies have influenced the opportunities for domestic groups, and, in particular, how Hungary fits into the broader context of post-Communist state- and nation-building projects. This is the approach we take in this article, which aims to unpack and reconcile the complex and seemingly contradictory findings on the Hungarian case. Our conclusions are drawn from a content analysis of parliamentary debates on the minority law—something that has never previously been undertaken. This is supplemented by semi-structured interviews with former and current politicians and minority activists.

Numerous contemporary examples attest to the continued political salience of ethnic identification. This is the case even in multi-ethnic societies bound together by a strong overarching sense of patriotism, but it is most especially so in contexts where ethnicity has historically functioned as the building block of modern nations (Rudolph 2006). Since today’s world contains many more ethnoculturally defined nations than it does states, a tension persists between the principle of self-determination of peoples and the principle of territorial integrity of existing polities (Dembinska, Máracz, and Tonk 2014). The almost invariable overlapping of different ethno-national populations within the same territorial space renders the nation-state concept inherently problematic as a modality for ethnically based self-determination, for while all nation-state projects dictate cultural uniformity, all must contend with differing degrees of pluralism. Within the nation-state frame, those who do not profess belonging to the dominant ethnocultural community are consigned to the category of “national minority” and thereby deemed an anomaly and a barrier to the creation of a “good political order.”1 In this context, claims by minority national and ethnic communities for recognition of collective rights can be easily construed as a threat to the security of the state and its dominant ethno-national group, leading to situations of tension and—in the worst case—open conflict.

Russia’s institutions on nonterritorial cultural autonomy (NTCA) can be broadly situated within the country’s political community, in the sense that they—for the most part—recognize the government’s rules of engagement and its role as decision maker, leading to overarching consensus and pursuit of shared objectives. At the same time, they remain at the periphery of the political community. This article outlines the reasons for NTCA institutions’ peripherality and limited influence upon Russia’s minority policies. Such reasons are linked to external factors—Russia’s undemocratic political system—but also to conditions intrinsic to NTCA institutions themselves—forms of passivity and (non)participation, and blurred boundaries between NTCA institutions and state actors. The interaction of such factors generates the noted prevailing consensus between NTCA institutions and the Russian state. Interview data further reveal that representatives of NTCA institutions are far from monolithic: the said external and internal factors affect them in different ways, resulting in variations in forms of consensus and cooperation with state actors. This, in turn, allows for multiple interpretative frameworks of state–civil society coexistence in the sphere of Russia’s diversity management.

Few biographical databases exist giving any information about the lives of ‘ordinary’ local leaders. Who Led Leeds? was a public engagement project that aimed to create a biographical collection at the Leeds Central Library, detailing the lives of Leeds city councillors who served between 1918 and 1939. This article describes the project and considers the extent to which the project was successful. It also reflects on how the creation of such archives using existing resources in local studies and family history libraries has the potential to expand and enrich the field of urban history.

In this brief reconsideration of the roles experts may play in legal proceedings - and concentrating on the role of social scientists in particular - it may, therefore, be useful to revisit some very familiar issues and to address some seemingly peripheral matters that are nevertheless quite central to the way we think about the involvement of experts in legal cases. For purposes of introducing some of these issues it may be helpful to focus on three interrelated concerns: the ascertaining of expert qualifications, the role of evidentiary procedure, and the extra-judicial use of social information.