Global diffusion of three road safety policies, 1964–2015

Global convergence of public policies has been regarded as a defining feature of the late twentieth century. This study explores the generalizability of this thesis for three road safety measures: (i) road safety agencies; (ii) child restraint laws; and (iii) mandatory use of daytime running lights. This study analyzes cross-national longitudinal data using survival analysis for the years 1964–2015 in 181 countries. The first main finding is that only child restraint laws have globally converged; in contrast, the other two policies exhibit a fractured global convergence process, likely as the result of competing international and national forces. This finding may reflect the lack of necessary conditions, at the regional and national levels, required to accelerate the spread of policies globally, adding further nuance to the global convergence thesis. A second finding is that mechanisms of policy adoption, such as imitation/learning and competition, rather than coercion, explain more consistently global and regional convergence outcomes in the road safety realm. This finding reinforces the idea of specific elective affinities, when explaining why the diffusion of policies may or not result in convergence. Lastly, by recognizing fractured convergence processes, these results call for revisiting the global convergence thesis and reintegrating more consistently regional analyses into policy diffusion and convergence studies.

Elective Affinities in the Anthropocene: Christianity and the Natural Environment Reconsidered

To reach a deeper understanding of the complex relationship between religion and the natural environment, it is important to move beyond essentializing any religious tradition as having a pro-environmental or anti-environmental ethic. Rather, prior work has shown that the canonical, scholarly, and popular literatures and discourse of a number of religious traditions can and have been socially and rhetorically constructed as supporting an array of positions, from preservation to profligacy, and much in between those two ideal types. In this paper, we develop Max Weber’s theory of “elective affinities” and adapt it to the Anthropocene, to make the case that in a fragmented society, people and communities of convenience tend to choose the tropes and framing from the dominant culture to justify self-interested action. That often can take the form of religious discourse. In the sense of finding a wide array of practical interpretations relative to the environment, the theory is largely supported, although we do find important nuances. It is instructive to look at how the language and legitimacy of one institution (e.g. religion) has been used to justify and legitimate that of others (e.g. the polity). While these processes of institutional co-optation can be effective in the short run, they may have corrosive longer-term effects. Key rhetorical, and in fact political, battles in the Third Millennium, will likely be organized around how to adapt pre-industrial religion to late industrial and perhaps post-industrial times, and it remains to see how central the natural environment will be in what communities hold sacred.

Maß (Moderation, Measure)

This entry on Maß (moderation, measure) explores a concept that has not received much attention in Goethe scholarship and makes a case for its usefulness and versatility in tracking how Goethe addresses a philosophical issue with a history stretching at least back to Aristotle’s conception of “the golden mean.” It shows how Goethe’s writings respond to numerous issues connected with the concept of moderation, ranging from the problem of self-moderation, when an individual’s own internal calibration comes in conflict with societal norms, to the more theoretical question of how to define the correct standard of measure (Maßstab). The discussion of moderation in Goethe’s work is, to be sure, coupled with its opposite, namely the potentially deadly threat of immoderation and excess, such as one finds in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; The Sorrows of Young Werther), Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), and Torquato Tasso (1790). Such potential conflicts, which also raise questions of where to position the standard of measure (Maßstab) of behavior, lead naturally into contexts of scientific experimentation, as in Goethe’s essay “Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt” (1792; The Experiment as Mediator of Object and Subject), where such standards take on a different valence from their role in mathematically based natural sciences. In addition, Goethe’s novel, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809; Elective Affinities), provides a poetic model where conflicts between individually and socially calibrated notions of measure and moderation play out with major ethical consequences. The entry concludes with a reflection on different kinds of aesthetic experience, each with its particular understanding of Maß: the individual’s appreciation of the sublime, the theatrical performance, and the embodiment of the self through poetic meter. Throughout these examples, the entry will underscore the role of narrative constraints: regardless of whether the medium is prose or poetry, one finds that questions of Maß as moderation in Goethe’s writings are often accompanied by questions of narrative control and excess. The following overview and analysis of Maß in Goethe’s writing will show that this term is a nodal point of ethical, epistemological, and aesthetic concerns.

Examining Diffusion and Convergence Processes of Three Road Safety Policies, 1964-2015

Global convergence of public policies has been regarded as a defining feature of the late twentieth century. This study explores the generalizability of this thesis for three road safety measures: i) road safety agencies; ii) child restraint laws; and iii) mandatory use of daytime running lights. We analyze cross-national longitudinal data using survival analysis for the years 1964-2015 in 181 countries. Our first main finding is that only child restraint laws have globally converged; in contrast, the other two policies exhibit a fractured global convergence process, likely as the result of competing international and national forces. This finding may reflect the lack of necessary conditions, at the regional and national levels, required to accelerate the spread of policies globally, adding further nuance to the global convergence thesis. A second finding is that mechanisms of policy adoption, such as imitation/learning and competition, rather than coercion, explain more consistently global and regional convergence outcomes in the road safety realm. This finding reinforces the idea of specific elective affinities, when explaining why the diffusion of policies may or not result in convergence. Lastly, by recognizing fractured convergence processes, our results call for revisiting the global convergence thesis and reintegrating more consistently regional analyses into policy diffusion and convergence studies.

Increasing Motivation and Engagement in Advanced Literature Courses: Visions of Home: Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809; Elective Affinities)

Goethe’s complex novel, Die Wahlverwandtschaften, with its focus on enhancing the home and its landscape, an activity that ends in chaos and destruction, allows for a problematization of the Enlightenment credo of perfectibility of humanity and its environment. To increase student motivation, I prefer thematic courses instead of relying on survey courses. In particular, I favor topics that lend themselves to comparing and contrasting the students’ contemporary experience with the historical context. Creating a link between the past and the present, thus offering both familiarity and alterity, facilitates access to the respective theme. At the same time, employing typical pedagogies used in the beginning language courses (images, activities beyond questions, worksheets, games) also in the advanced language, literature, and culture courses like the one described here, fosters stronger engagement with the literary text. This fourth-year course, taught in German, meets our “Learning Goals”, emphasizes transferable skills, and contributes to project-based learning.

The Blood in the Feud

This chapter focuses on the staple form of violence in the sagas: feud. Feud was medieval Iceland’s most important organizing metaphor, at whose core lay individuated enforcement of the social contract through tit-for-tat reciprocity. The chapter examines two paradigmatic feuding episodes, one from the Family Sagas (Þorsteins þáttr stangarhǫggs), the other from the Contemporary Sagas (Íslendinga saga’s account of events centred around Sæmundr Jónsson, c.1215–22). Interlacing these case studies sheds light on how textual strategies converge and diverge across the two genres (and in other, related genres, such as Iceland’s law code, Grágás). Accident is central to both episodes, as is the violent response to it, underscoring the intimate involvement of violence with risk. When misfortune struck, Icelanders faced, first, uncertainty about how to understand what had just happened. Their choices tended to read the past as violent. Second, they needed to decide what do to next. Again, their inclination was towards responding violently. Finally, hard times provided opportunities for social engineering: costs and burdens had to be shared, avoided, or redirected among allies and onto adversaries. Feud, whose logic was well established and widely embraced, proved a versatile solution for channelling such social risks and opportunities, whether through opting into elective affinities (redefining one’s own group boundaries) or by enforcing passive solidarity on others. Icelanders distinguished drengir, ‘gentlemen’, from ójafnaðarmenn, ‘bullies’, by the skill with which they did or did not make their feuding claims seem plausible