Historical Legacies

Author(s):  
Aurel Croissant

How historical legacies influence democratization, help explain continuities between different types of regimes, and delineate diverging developmental processes has garnered much attention in the recent literature on historical sociology, comparative politics, and transformation research. The renewed interest in historical legacies stands in contrast with the conceptual and theoretical vagueness of the term, however, hindering both theory building and empirical analysis. Outlining the similarities and differences within legacy arguments, this chapter begins by categorizing the different types of legacies as well as distinguishing between legacies of authoritarian rule and pre-authoritarian legacies. Next, historical legacies as part of causal explanations are examined, discussing the differing views on legacies conditions, qualities, and characteristics. Lastly, historical legacies are situated in the literature on path dependence and critical junctures, revealing fundamental theoretical differences between the concepts.

2010 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 173-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samantha Perrin ◽  
Benoît Testé

Research into the norm of internality ( Beauvois & Dubois, 1988 ) has shown that the expression of internal causal explanations is socially valued in social judgment. However, the value attributed to different types of internal explanations (e.g., efforts vs. traits) is far from homogeneous. This study used the Weiner (1979 ) tridimensional model to clarify the factors explaining the social utility attached to internal versus external explanations. Three dimensions were manipulated: locus of causality, controllability, and stability. Participants (N = 180 students) read the explanations expressed by appliants during a job interview. They then described the applicants on the French version of the revised causal dimension scale and rated their future professional success. Results indicated that internal-controllable explanations were the most valued. In addition, perceived internal and external control of explanations were significant predictors of judgments.


Author(s):  
Jack Corbett ◽  
Wouter Veenendaal

Chapter 1 introduces the main arguments of the book; outlines the approach, method, and data; defines key terms; and provides a chapter outline. Global theories of democratization have systematically excluded small states, which make up roughly 20 per cent of countries. These cases debunk mainstream theories of why democratization succeeds or fails. This book brings small states into the comparative politics fold for the first time. It is organized thematically, with each chapter tackling one of the main theories from the democratization literature. Different types of data are examined—case studies and other documentary evidence, interviews and observation. Following an abductive approach, in addition to examining the veracity of existing theory, each chapter is also used to build an explanation of how democracy is practiced in small states. Specifically, we highlight how small state politics is shaped by personalization and informal politics, rather than formal institutional design.


Author(s):  
Steven Bernstein

This commentary discusses three challenges for the promising and ambitious research agenda outlined in the volume. First, it interrogates the volume’s attempts to differentiate political communities of legitimation, which may vary widely in composition, power, and relevance across institutions and geographies, with important implications not only for who matters, but also for what gets legitimated, and with what consequences. Second, it examines avenues to overcome possible trade-offs from gains in empirical tractability achieved through the volume’s focus on actor beliefs and strategies. One such trade-off is less attention to evolving norms and cultural factors that may underpin actors’ expectations about what legitimacy requires. Third, it addresses the challenge of theory building that can link legitimacy sources, (de)legitimation practices, audiences, and consequences of legitimacy across different types of institutions.


Author(s):  
Eugénia C. Heldt

Time plays a central role in international organizations (IOs). Interactions among actors are embedded in a temporal dimension, and actors use formal and informal time rules, time discourses, and time pressure to obtain concessions from their counterparts. By the same token, legacies and innovations within and outside IOs can be examined as a dynamic process evolving over time. Against this background, this chapter has a twofold aim. First, it examines how actors use time in IOs with a particular focus on multilateral negotiations to justify their actions. Drawing on international relations studies and negotiation analysis, this piece explores six different dimensions of time in the multilateral system: time pressure, time discourse, time rules, time costs, time horizons, and time as a resource. Second, this chapter delineates the evolution of IOs over time with the focus on innovations that emerge to adapt their institutional system to new political and economic circumstances. This piece looks particularly at endogenous and exogenous changes in IOs, recurring to central concepts used by historical institutionalism, including path dependence, critical junctures, and sequencing. This allows us to map patterns of incremental change, such as displacement, conversion, drift, and layering.


1994 ◽  
Vol 161 ◽  
pp. 385-400
Author(s):  
B.G. Marsden

Past surveys are described in the logical sequence of (1) comets visually, (2) asteroids visually, (3) asteroids photographically and (4) comets photographically. Plots show the evolution of asteroid surveys in terms of visual discovery magnitude and ecliptic latitude, and similarities and differences between surveys for the different types of body are discussed. The paper ends with a brief discussion of more recent discovery methods and some thoughts on the future.


Vaccines ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (7) ◽  
pp. 734
Author(s):  
Xuhua Xia

The design of Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines involves many different types of optimizations. Proper optimization of vaccine mRNA can reduce dosage required for each injection leading to more efficient immunization programs. The mRNA components of the vaccine need to have a 5’-UTR to load ribosomes efficiently onto the mRNA for translation initiation, optimized codon usage for efficient translation elongation, and optimal stop codon for efficient translation termination. Both 5’-UTR and the downstream 3’-UTR should be optimized for mRNA stability. The replacement of uridine by N1-methylpseudourinine () complicates some of these optimization processes because is more versatile in wobbling than U. Different optimizations can conflict with each other, and compromises would need to be made. I highlight the similarities and differences between Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines and discuss the advantage and disadvantage of each to facilitate future vaccine improvement. In particular, I point out a few optimizations in the design of the two mRNA vaccines that have not been performed properly.


Author(s):  
Michelle Hegmon

Path dependence concepts, thus far, have seen little application in archaeology, but they have great potential. At a general level, these concepts provide tools for theorizing historical sequences, such as patterns of settlement on a landscape and divergent historical traditions. Potential applications include issues of historical contingency in the late Rio Grande, settlement in the Mesa Verde region, and divergent trajectories in the post-Chaco period. Specific concepts from path dependence theory, including lock-in and critical junctures, are illustrated by an analysis of the growth of Hohokam irrigation, which exhibited a path-dependent trajectory. As archaeological study of path dependence builds awareness of the importance of decision-making on the future, it contributes to difficult decision-making in today’s world.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-213
Author(s):  
Antonina Petrovna Guskova

Recently transposition became the issue of many research papers for being a complicated and sophisticated language phenomenon, and its definition has been broadened. The issue of transposition and the degrees of verb transitivity are the most controversial and difficult ones both in Hungarian and Russian linguistics. This issue may be investigated on different language levels: lexical, syntactic, morphological and on the level of word formation. Taking into account the mobility of parts of speech boundaries in the compared languages we attempt to find the cause of words transitioning from one lexico-grammatical class into another, investigate transposition as a natural phenomenon both for the Hungarian and Russian languages, differentiate transition in parts of the speech system from other language phenomena, solve some contentious issues regarding parts of speech, for example ‘noun-adjective’ relations, and others. Despite having extensive literature concerning nominalization in Russian linguistics and some works in Hungarian linguistics, some aspects are not comprehensively covered in them. For example, different types of transitions from other parts of speech into nouns, thorough semantic and thematic categorization of substantivized words, characteristics of their functioning in texts of different functional styles, principles of creating lexicography, etc. In this article we compare the process of substantivation amidst the system of parts of speech in languages of such different structure as Hungarian and Russian. Comprehensive and comparative study of the process of transition of other parts of speech into nouns allows us to conduct a deeper investigation of each of these languages’ structure and also to reveal typological similarities and differences between them. These languages have not been explored this way so it provides scientific novelty to the research. For the first time we define the main conditions of a systematic process of transposition in Hungarian and Russian and reveal both specific and universal opportunities for transition in the compared languages. We use comparative analysis for researching semantic models of substantivized words, distinguish different types of transitions into nouns and describe structural and stylistic features. Thus, the topic of the research is the grammatical, semantic, structural and stylistic features of substantivized words in Hungarian and Russian. The objective of the study is to discover linguistic nature of substantivation of adjectives, verbs and verbal formations, numerals and pronouns, to find out specific and universal features caused by typological differences of the researched languages. To achieve this goal we need to solve the following problems: determining the place of substantivation in the system of word formation in Hungarian and Russian, discovering how much substantivation and conversion being productive ways of word formation are identical in Russian and Hungarian, distinguishing semantic models of substantivized words and compare them, comparing models of usual and occasional substantivation and determine its productivity, studying their structure which means showing peculiarities of substantivized words’ grammatical structure in Hungarian and Russian, discovering similarities and differences between them and finding adequate models. The research is based on data of dictionaries of Russian and Hungarian languages, examples of fictional texts, live speech and not the least on the idioms. Theoretical importance lies in the following: 1) the research develops the theory of transitivity as we study transposition in two languages of different structures using comparative analysis of substantivized words and taking into account grammatical, semantic and functional aspects; 2) using the materials of two languages of different structures we discover the main conditions of systematic transposition and distinguish its universal and specific features; 3) for the first time the problem of transposition is studied on the basis of Russian and Hungarian from a theoretical point of view (on the example of transition of other parts of speech into nouns); 4) we develop the methodology of a comprehensive approach to study substantivation in Hungarian and Russian which can be used when describing this phenomenon in other languages of different structures.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document