Conclusion

Chapter 7 discusses the broader implications of the argument for the world’s two billion informal workers. The chapter advances the theoretical claim that when individuals break the law, they can paradoxically get help from officials to organize. It elaborates implications for effective formalization policies, using the mixed success example of a tax reform in Bolivia. It also draw parallels to policing and enforcement trends in the United States. The chapter carefully summarizes the material covered in the preceding chapters. The chapter concludes the book with implications for state intervention in civil society, as well as contentious politics, enforcement, and state building.

Deontological Feeling: The Tranquil, the Familiar and the Body

This paper contributes to filling a lacuna in recent research on common normative backgrounds. On the one hand, discussions of common normative backgrounds tend to underexpose the role the feeling body plays in relation to the agent’s recognition of deontic powers (obligations, compelling reasons or rights). On the other hand, discussions of bodily background orientations and their role in the agent’s sensitivity to practical significance tend to underexpose the recognition of deontic power. In this paper, I argue that bodily background orientations can contribute to an agent’s sensitivity to deontic power. Developing further on Ratcliffe’s conceptualization of existential feelings, I propose that a person’s bodily background orientation implies responsiveness to an ethically significant kind of affordance. In order to flesh out this theoretical claim, I draw on empirical material concerning a specific existential orientation labelled as “quietism.” Reconstructing its central patterns, I explicate the bodily dimension involved in the quietist orientation as well as the way in which it shapes the responsiveness to felt demands in terms of preserving tranquillity and protecting the familiar. Finally, I discuss the broader theoretical implications of my claim and suggest to categorize ethically relevant bodily background orientations such as the one implicated in the quietist orientation as deontological feelings.

“Clocks Must Always Be Turned Back”: Brown v. Board of Education and the Racial Origins of Constitutional Originalism

The Republican Party has adopted constitutional “originalism” as its touchstone. Existing accounts of this development tell either a teleological story, with legal academics as the progenitors, or deracialized accounts of conservatives arguing first principles. Exploiting untapped archival data, this paper argues otherwise. Empirically, the paper shows that the realigning GOP’s originalism grew directly out of political resistance to Brown v. Board of Education by conservative governing elites, intellectuals, and activists in the 1950s and 1960s. Building on this updated empirical understanding, the theoretical claim is that ideologically charged elite legal academics and attorneys in Departments of Justice serve more of a legitimating rather than an originating role for American constitutional politics upon a long coalition’s electoral success. Finally, by showing the importance of race to constitutional conservatism’s development, this article posits that the received understanding of a “three-corner stool” of social, economic, and foreign policy conservatism needs revision.

Cross-categorial gradability in Logoori

The central empirical observation of this paper is that there are polysemous lexical items in a number of unrelated languages that have similar, not intuitively related, meanings. These meanings are 'to arrive'/'to reach,' 'to be enough,' and 'must.' The central theoretical claim of this paper is based on a case study of one such polysemous lexical item in Logoori (Bantu, JE 41; Kenya). We argue that these three meanings all arise from a single semantic denotation that is sensitive to a shared gradable component in the semantics of linguistic expressions referring to spatial paths, gradable predicates, measures of plural count nouns/mass nouns, and modals. The main theoretical issue addressed in this paper is the application of ordered, abstract scales in a model of grammar. This paper is an abridged version of Bowler & Gluckman, to appear.

Deference and decision-making in science and society: How deference to scientific authority goes beyond confidence in science and scientists to become authoritarianism

Deference to scientific authority theoretically captures the belief that scientists and not publics should make decisions on science in society. Few studies examine deference, however, and none test this central theoretical claim. The result is deference is often conflated with concepts such as trust in scientists and belief in the authority of science. This study examines two claims key to conceptualizing deference: that deference (1) predicts anti-democratic views of decision-making and (2) relates to but is distinct from beliefs of science as authoritative knowledge. Analyzing US nationally representative data, we find deference to scientific authority does predict anti-democratic views, and this is its distinct conceptual value: trust in scientists and belief in science as authoritative knowledge strongly relate to deference, but both predict pro-democratic views, unlike deference. We discuss how these findings highlight deference as vital for understanding perceptions of science and societal decision-making and how we can better develop the concept.

The dynamics of buffered and triggered selection from RSVP streams

From an incoming stream of visual information, only a limited number of stimuli can be selected for extensive processing. Much of the literature assumes that selection of cued items in RSVP streams is a result of attentional sampling being triggered by the cue. We provide evidence for another process - selection from a buffer of stimulus representations. This can yield selection of stimuli presented before the cue, despite the common theoretical claim that such stimuli should be unavailable. Our novel statistical method provides quantitative evidence that stimuli presented before the cue are sometimes selected. This phenomenon occured when two RSVP streams were presented simultaneously and one was cued at a random time. When the number of streams was increased, evidence for pre-cue reports diminished and selection was delayed. These results indicated that stimuli in RSVP evoke representations that persist long enough to be selected, provided attention is fast enough. The speed and variability of temporal selection of items is affected by endogenous attention and possibly by competition among stimulus representations. In conditions with fewer streams, faster selection and buffering may occur thanks to participants applying endogenous attention before the cue is presented, speeding the response to the cue and leading to more reports of the item before the cue.

R2P in Syria and Myanmar: Norm Violation and Advancement

Attempts to intervene in the Syrian and Myanmar crises have been hampered by political deadlock, leading even supporters of R2P to question its continued salience. Yet, upon closer consideration, Member States and other members of the international community have, by and large, upheld their protection responsibilities, via the creation of innovative mechanisms that have been used to bypass Security Council deadlock. Not only have these mechanisms served to uphold R2P in these two cases, they have created alternate pathways to operationalise R2P, thus serving to further advance the norm. The theoretical claim put forth is that norm violations have served as an alternate vehicle for norm advancement, as flagrant norm violations committed by the Syrian and Myanmar governments, as well as by the Security Council, have reminded members of the international community of the costs of failing to protect.

Conclusion

The concluding chapter brings together the implications and insights from the four empirical chapters, reconsidering the theoretical claim in the light of this evidence. It also discusses the generalizability of the findings, both for Africa as a whole and for new democracies throughout the world. Finally, it attempts to situate the argument and findings in the context of an ever-changing Africa. In doing so, it considers the impact of urban–rural linkages, and the implications of rapid demographic changes taking place across the continent. In a continent that has been experiencing historically unprecedented rates of urbanization, how should we expect political incentives, and subsequent policies, to evolve? How might pro-rural development affect the nature of urban–rural relations across Africa? How in turn might this influence the nature of electoral competition? And finally, how much reason do we have to be optimistic about democracy in Africa?

Urban Incumbent Hostility

This chapter is the first of two that provide quantitative cross-national evidence to support the book’s central theoretical claim. Responding directly to the puzzle of urban incumbent hostility discussed in Chapter 2, this chapter evaluates the expectation that the lower proclivity of urbanites to support incumbents and express satisfaction with democracy should be conditional on levels of urbanization. More specifically, analysis of public opinion data from twenty-eight countries across Africa shows that urban hostility towards incumbents and dissatisfaction with democracy are not only robust to a variety of potentially confounding factors but are decreasing with urbanization. The data come from multiple rounds of the Afrobarometer Survey Series, enabling the use of fixed effects models to estimate robust within-country effects by leveraging changes to urbanization over time. These findings are important because, as highlighted in Chapter 2, the expectation that urban incumbent hostility should be conditional on urbanization is a unique observable implication of the book’s argument. Although scholars have put forward a variety of reasons for why urbanites across Africa should be less likely than rural residents to support incumbents, none of these alternative explanations account for the conditional effects demonstrated in this chapter. As such, this evidence supports the theoretical claim that electoral competition leads African governments to pursue pro-rural development policies.

Introduction

The introductory chapter introduces readers to black aesthetic emplacement, the book’s central theoretical claim about the value and representation of blackness in the contemporary urban landscape. The chapter further highlights a theoretical shift in African American, sociological, geographical, and visual studies of how blackness is thought and deployed—where blackness does not always signal abjection—to situate how blackness has contributed to the redevelopment of the H Street NE corridor. The remaining space of the chapter introduces additional key terms: gentrification, authenticity, neoliberalism, and diversity and situate the book within scholarly debates in geography, sociology and urban studies literature.