Party Organisation of PiS in Poland: Between Electoral Rhetoric and Absolutist Practice

The article analyses the organisation of the Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość [PiS]) in Poland. The case of PiS does not only allow us to explore the organisational features of a strongly institutionalized, incumbent party which uses populist radical right (PRR) politics. PiS, we argue, is also an ideal case to contrast what such parties might rhetorically declare and substantively do about their organisational features. Using party documents, press reports, quantitative data, and insights from the secondary literature based on interviews with activists, we evaluate the extent to which PiS has developed a mass-party-related organisation, and centralized its intra-party decision-making procedures. We find that while PiS made overtures to some aspects of mass-party-like organisation for electoral mobilization, the party remained reluctant to actively expand its membership numbers and put little effort into fostering the integration and social rootedness of its members through everyday intra-party activities. Furthermore, despite attempts to enact organisational reinvigoration, in practice PiS continued to revolve around strongly centralized structures and, in particular, the absolutist leadership style of the party’s long-time Chair Jarosław Kaczyński. The analysis contributes to assessing the variety and functions of organisational features and appeals within the comparative study of PRR parties. Most particularly, it invites further research into the still relatively under-researched interactions between PRR party organisation and active party communication.

A complicated puzzle: spinsters, widows and credit in Sweden (1790–1910)

This article aims to retrace the extent of single women's engagement in the credit market. To this end, it relies on a series of more than 1,900 probate inventories drawn up between 1790 and 1910 in the two Swedish cities of Gävle and Uppsala. These two cities represent an ideal case study, because the process of industrialisation and economic development resulted in two differently structured credit markets. The research centres initially on the problem of studying women's agency from probate inventories. It analyses the main characteristics of spinsters and widows as they emerge from the sources and compares them with married women. Subsequently, the article analyses how marital status shaped women's economic lives, affecting how they participated in the credit market. For this purpose, it focuses specifically on banking and peer-to-peer exchanges (in particular, promissory notes). Spinsters favoured more conservative strategies relying more often on the services provided by banks, while widows seemed to have played an additional, and more significant, role as lenders in peer-to-peer networks. The study also confirms that unmarried women were only rarely active as borrowers.

Returning to the roots: resolution, reproducibility, and robusticity in the phylogenetic inference of Dissorophidae (Amphibia: Temnospondyli)

The phylogenetic relationships of most Paleozoic tetrapod clades remain poorly resolved, which is variably attributed to a lack of study, the limitations of inference from phenotypic data, and constant revision of best practices. While refinement of phylogenetic methods continues to be important, any phylogenetic analysis is inherently constrained by the underlying dataset that it analyzes. Therefore, it becomes equally important to assess the accuracy of these datasets, especially when a select few are repeatedly propagated. While repeat analyses of these datasets may appear to constitute a working consensus, they are not in fact independent, and it becomes especially important to evaluate the accuracy of these datasets in order to assess whether a seeming consensus is robust. Here I address the phylogeny of the Dissorophidae, a speciose clade of Paleozoic temnospondyls. This group is an ideal case study among temnospondyls for exploring phylogenetic methods and datasets because it has been extensively studied (eight phylogenetic studies to date) but with most (six studies) using a single matrix that has been propagated with very little modification. In spite of the conserved nature of the matrix, dissorophid studies have produced anything but a conserved topology. Therefore, I analyzed an independently designed matrix, which recovered less resolution and some disparate nodes compared to previous studies. In order to reconcile these differences, I carefully examined previous matrices and analyses. While some differences are a matter of personal preference (e.g., analytical software), others relate to discrepancies with respect to what are currently considered as best practices. The most concerning discovery was the identification of pervasive dubious scorings that extend back to the origins of the widely propagated matrix. These include scores for skeletal features that are entirely unknown in a given taxon (e.g., postcrania in Cacops woehri) and characters for which there appear to be unstated working assumptions to scoring that are incompatible with the character definitions (e.g., scoring of taxa with incomplete skulls for characters based on skull length). Correction of these scores and other pervasive errors recovered a distinctly less resolved topology than previous studies, more in agreement with my own matrix. This suggests that previous analyses may have been compromised, and that the only real consensus of dissorophid phylogeny is the lack of one.

Socratic Irony and Argumentation

Socratic irony can be understood independently of the immortal heroics of Plato’s Socrates. We need a systematic account and criticism of it both as a debate-winning strategy of argumentation and teaching method. The Speaker introduces an issue pretending to be at a lower intellectual level than her co-debaters, or Participants. An Audience looks over and evaluates the results. How is it possible that the Speaker like Socrates is, consistently, in the winning position? The situation is ironic because the Participants fight from a losing position but realize it too late. Socratic irony compares with divine irony: divine irony is a subtype of Socratic irony since you lose when you challenge gods. Socratic irony is also, prima facie, a subtype of dramatic irony when the Audience knows more than the Participants on the stage. We must distinguish between the ideal and realistic elements of Socratic Irony. The very idea of Socratic irony looks idealized, or it is an ideal case, which explains the Speaker’s consistently winning position. In real life, the debate must be rigged, or the Dutch Book argument applies to the Participants, if the Speaker is so successful.

Improving Characteristic Parameters of Memristor Based on HfO2 Active Layer

The improvement of the characteristic parameters of the memristor depends on the factors such as thickness and surface area of the active layer. These parameters define leakage currents, which is the main disatvantige of the memory storage device and to improve the electrical features the leakage currents must be dropped to the zero in ideal case. In the presented work is described the electrical isolation of the active layer from the substrate by the thin layer of photoresist, which is an electrical insulator. For reducing area was used the new fotomask, which is able to reduce area 100 times. The memristor structures are designed in the form of “crossbars”, which allows us to individually investigate each memristor and create a database with the possibility of incorporating it into the microchip in the future. In this work is presented also research outcomes regarding to selection memristor’s contacts and active layers. As contacts are overviewed tungsten (W), titanium nitride (TiN) and aluminum (Al). Is considered metal and transition metal oxides as active layers WOx, HfO2, WOx +HfO2, HfO2 + HfOx. The oxide electrical and structural properties is defined from I-V, C-V, XRD and XPS characteristics.

A structure-preserving finite element method for compressible ideal and resistive magnetohydrodynamics

We construct a structure-preserving finite element method and time-stepping scheme for compressible barotropic magnetohydrodynamics both in the ideal and resistive cases, and in the presence of viscosity. The method is deduced from the geometric variational formulation of the equations. It preserves the balance laws governing the evolution of total energy and magnetic helicity, and preserves mass and the constraint $\text {div}B = 0$ to machine precision, both at the spatially and temporally discrete levels. In particular, conservation of energy and magnetic helicity hold at the discrete levels in the ideal case. It is observed that cross-helicity is well conserved in our simulation in the ideal case.

MUSLIM PERSONAL LAW IN SOUTH AFRICA: “UNTIL TWO LEGAL SYSTEMS DO US PART OR MEET?”

South Africa is one of the most prominent examples of pluralism providing recognition to traditional customary and religious law. South Africa’s commitment to legal pluralism is an important development because it reflects not only constitutional dedication tomulticulturalism but also a political and functional need for incorporating traditional and religious legal systems. The legal recognition of Muslim Personal Law in South Africa provides an ideal case study on legal pluralism supported by a multicultural constitutional process. Over 15 years of democracy have passed and the draft Muslim Marriages Act has not yet been introduced into legislation. The issue of legal recognition of Muslim Personal Law in South Africa has highlighted the difficulties that arise when balancing the commitment to individual human rights and religious rights. This paper explores the question: What is the future of Muslim Personal Law in South Africa? Since the draft Muslim Marriages Act has not yet been enacted into legislation, it presents an opportunity to re-examine and rethink how to implement religious law effectively in a secular state. This is discussed in the paper by presentingvarious multicultural and pluralistic jurisdictional family law models, which look at the key relationship between civil and religious authorities.

The ruin(s) of Chiloé?: An ethnography of buildings de/reterritorializing

Studying buildings can be a rich entry point into emerging cultural geographies. The archipelago of Chiloé in southern Chile is experiencing rapid change since the country’s extreme turn toward neoliberal governance in the 1970s. Once a rural, communal, and sea-faring region, it has been transformed by industrial aquaculture in recent decades which has driven a new urban landscapes and consumer-oriented lifestyles. This paper offers findings from an ethnographic study of changing consumption geographies, from iconic tourist sites linked to the region’s rich heritage geographies, to the new corporate retailers and shopping malls. Specifically, the new shopping mall clashes with the heritage and tourist landscape of colonial era churches and other unique heritage architectures that have captured the attention of tourists and investors. We glimpse a dynamic architectural geography in flux, as an array of buildings pulls the population in multiple directions at once, making it an ideal case study of the competing forces of what Deleuze and Guattari called de- and re-territorialization, an appropriate analytic for understanding the powerful forces of commodification.

From Constitutionalism to War—and Back Again

This chapter presents Arthur Ripstein’s responses to the authors of the preceding chapters. The chapter follows the order of the contributions, and are divided broadly into responses to the papers in Part I concerning the ways in which facts matter to right, and the relation between the flawed world in which we find ourselves and the ideal case that Kant contemplates, and to those in Part II dealing with more specific issues in the Kantian theory of war and peace.