The deconstruction of what is termed “the public sphere” in recent decades has resulted in an important shift in scholarly attention towards networks and forms of association. This article explores how greater sensitivity to the unstable and ephemeral nature of “publics,” combined with a stronger awareness of the role of cultural exchange, has undoubtedly enriched our understanding of early modern politics. Some analytical precision has, nonetheless, been lost. A justifiable emphasis on the artificiality of the territorial borders that have defined units of enquiry has occurred at the expense of deeper consideration of the cultural boundaries that dictated the terms on which people could participate in and shape public discourse. Study of the British archipelago can offer new ways of thinking about these problems. Linguistic and ethnic differences, the search for religious concord as well as the reality of confessional division, institutional variation, and the consequences of London's increasing dominance of the archipelago, are key facets of the reassessments undertaken here. The article concludes by reflecting on how interactions between varieties of “public” and other forms of association can nuance our understanding of early modern state formation.

A consideration of political participation in early Stuart Ireland suggests modifications to the prospectus outlined by Peter Lake and Steven Pincus in “Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England.” By investigating the structures that facilitated public debates about politics in Ireland, as well as the factors that complicated it, this article challenges the periodization of the public sphere offered by Lake and Pincus and suggests that there is a clear need to integrate a transnational perspective. Unlike England, Scotland, and Wales, the majority of Ireland's population was Catholic. The flow of post-Tridentine Catholic ideas from the Continent and Anglo-Britannic political culture meant that competing ideas of what constituted the common good circulated widely in Ireland and led to debates about the nature of authority in the early modern Irish state. These divisions in Irish society created a distinctive kind of politics that created particularly unstable publics. Thus, Ireland's experience of the early modern public sphere differed considerably from concurrent developments in the wider archipelago.

Statisticians have proposed formal techniques for evaluation of treatments, often in the context of models that do not explicitly specify how treatments are generated. Under such procedures they run the risk of attributing causation in settings where the implementation neutrality condition required for causal interpretation of parameter estimates is not satisfied. When treatment assignments are explicitly modelled, as economists recommend, these issues can be formally analysed, and the existence (or lack thereof) of implementation neutrality, and therefore quantifiable causation, can be determined. Examples are given.