Partisan Identity and Affective Polarization in Presidential Debates

This study presents the results of a quasi-experiment to assess the effects of viewing the live televised general election presidential and vice-presidential campaign debates. We contribute to a growing empirical record on the polarizing effects of campaign debates by testing some contextual variables that have confounded past researchers. Specifically, we use Trump’s aggressive first debate performance as a test-case of polarizing content and compare it with Trump’s second debate performance along with the other 2020 debates. We also test whether, as some have hypothesized, vice-presidential debates are more polarizing. Finally, we consider Biden—a candidate who has been polarizing and depolarizing in his vice-presidential debates, as a candidate-specific source of uncertainty in existing findings. We find further evidence that campaign debates increase ingroup affection—or the extent to which co-partisans reward the ingroup candidate. Conversely, outgroup hostility did not increase even after Trump’s first debate. We conclude that debates may contribute to polarization, but only through ingroup affection, not outgroup animosity.

Alliances, signals of support, and military effort

Do alliances allow states to share defense burdens and reduce military spending? Despite expectations that alliances should lead to decreased military spending, the empirical record offers mixed findings. We argue that not all alliances are reliable; thus, only allies that receive signals of reassurance will rely on the external security of allies and subsequently reduce their military spending. Compared to states that do not receive additional signals, these reassured allies will have greater confidence that an ally will come to their aid. As a result, third-party aggressors are deterred and the demand for military spending will decrease. We test this argument with an analysis of US signals of support, alliance commitments, and military spending. We find that American alliances without additional signals of support have a negligible effect on military spending. Yet, we observe that alliances are negatively associated with military spending when signals of support are present. Additional tests indicate that alliance commitments, coupled with strong US signals, are also associated with lower military spending in the rivals of US allies. Our results potentially help explain the mixed evidence in the arms-versus-allies and burden-sharing literatures and further demonstrate that extra-alliance signals play an important role in the practice of International Relations.

Dominance is necessary to explain human status hierarchies [exposition of three concerns]

Durkee et al. (2020) conducted a cross-cultural investigation of people’s beliefs about how traits, behaviors, and practices that enhance an individual’s perceived ability to generate benefits (prestige) or inflict costs (dominance) promote perceived social status in humans. In this document, we (a) identify multicollinearity in the authors’ statistical analyses and explain how this statistical problem renders their results inconclusive as to how benefit-delivery and cost-infliction contribute to status allocation; (b) outline flaws in the authors’ operationalization and measures of social status, and discuss how they bias results toward benefit-delivery and underestimate any effect of cost-infliction; and (c) discuss a broader problem with the critical assumption underlying Durkee et al.’s approach: people’s subjective beliefs about what determines status do not serve as sufficient evidence for determining how status asymmetries are actually established in real life. Together, these three major issues severely undermine the authors’ conclusion that there is little evidence for dominance. In closing, we briefly survey the broader empirical record on actual status relations among real people (rather than people’s beliefs about what leads to status), conducted both in the lab and in naturalistic settings; these studies consistently yield opposite conclusions to Durkee et al. and demonstrate that both prestige and dominance govern human status hierarchies.

Dominance is necessary to explain human status hierarchies - Extended online version and supplemental

Durkee et al. (2020) conducted a cross-cultural investigation of people’s beliefs about how traits, behaviors, and practices that enhance an individual’s perceived ability to generate benefits (prestige) or inflict costs (dominance) promote perceived social status in humans. In this online extended version of our letter, we identify multicollinearity in the authors’ statistical analyses and explain how this statistical problem renders their results inconclusive as to how benefit-delivery and cost-infliction contribute to status allocation. Moreover, we briefly survey the broader empirical record on actual status relations among real people (rather than people’s beliefs about what leads to status), conducted both in the lab and in naturalistic settings; these studies consistently yield opposite conclusions to Durkee et al. and demonstrate that both prestige and dominance govern human status hierarchies.

Dominance is necessary to explain human status hierarchies - Extended online version and supplemental

Durkee et al. (2020) conducted a cross-cultural investigation of people’s beliefs about how traits, behaviors, and practices that enhance an individual’s perceived ability to generate benefits (prestige) or inflict costs (dominance) promote perceived social status in humans. In this online extended version of our letter, we (a) identify multicollinearity in the authors’ statistical analyses and explain how this statistical problem renders their results inconclusive as to how benefit-delivery and cost-infliction contribute to status allocation; (b) outline flaws in the authors’ operationalization and measures of social status, and discuss how they bias results toward benefit-delivery and underestimate any effect of cost-infliction; and (c) discuss a broader problem with the critical assumption underlying Durkee et al.’s approach: people’s subjective beliefs about what determines status do not serve as sufficient evidence for determining how status asymmetries are actually established in real life. Together, these three major issues severely undermine the authors’ conclusion that there is little evidence for dominance. In closing, we briefly survey the broader empirical record on actual status relations among real people (rather than people’s beliefs about what leads to status), conducted both in the lab and in naturalistic settings; these studies consistently yield opposite conclusions to Durkee et al. and demonstrate that both prestige and dominance govern human status hierarchies.

Dominance is necessary to explain human status hierarchies

Durkee et al. (2020) conducted a cross-cultural investigation of people’s beliefs about how traits, behaviors, and practices that enhance an individual’s perceived ability to generate benefits (prestige) or inflict costs (dominance) promote perceived social status in humans. In this letter (also see online extended version), we (a) identify multicollinearity in the authors’ statistical analyses and explain how this statistical problem renders their results inconclusive as to how benefit-delivery and cost-infliction contribute to status allocation; (b) outline flaws in the authors’ operationalization and measures of social status, and discuss how they bias results toward benefit-delivery and underestimate any effect of cost-infliction; and (c) discuss a broader problem with the critical assumption underlying Durkee et al.’s approach: people’s subjective beliefs about what determines status do not serve as sufficient evidence for determining how status asymmetries are actually established in real life. Together, these three major issues severely undermine the authors’ conclusion that there is little evidence for dominance. In closing, we briefly survey the broader empirical record on actual status relations among real people (rather than people’s beliefs about what leads to status), conducted both in the lab and in naturalistic settings; these studies consistently yield opposite conclusions to Durkee et al. and demonstrate that both prestige and dominance govern human status hierarchies.

Environmental degradation: The urgency of socio-historical contextualisation and the contribution of non-hegemonic perspectives

This article aims to discuss the issue of environmental degradation based on understanding the material foundation of modern socialisation, which in capitalism is centred on the production of surplus value. This topic is justified by the hegemonic way in which the environmental issue is currently addressed: the inevitability of environmental degradation considering a supposed historical march towards the progress of humanity, to the detriment of natural resources. The argument put forth is that effective environmental education depends on proper contextualisation of the capitalist process. Central to this discussion is an ideological understanding of the neutrality of science and the assumption of the inevitable ongoing environmental degradation considering a presumed population explosion and pursuit of human well-being. Thus, alternative historical-cultural forms are sought to address the tensions that emerge between humanity and nature, or culture and nature, divided into the origin of the hegemonic cultural form consolidated in late modernity. Levi-Strauss’ work is taken here as an accurate historical-empirical record, namely the Nambikwara people of the Brazilian Midwest in the context of the 1930s. The referential used in this article seeks to articulate science education and environmental education with the critical theory.

Alliances, Signals of Support, and Military Effort

Do alliances allow states to share defense burdens and reduce their military spending? Despite expectations that alliances should lead to decreased military spending, the empirical record offers mixed findings. We argue that not all alliances are reliable, thus only allies that receive signals of reassurance will rely on allies and subsequently reduce their military spending. Compared to states that do not receive additional signals, these reassured allies will have greater confidence that an ally will come to their aid. As a result, third party aggressors are deterred and the demand for military spending will decrease. We test this argument with an analysis of U.S. signals of support, alliance commitments, and military spending. We find that alliances without additional signals of support have a negligible effect on military spending. Yet, we observe that signals of support are negatively associated with military spending among U.S. allies. Additional tests indicate that strong U.S. signals, coupled with alliance commitments, are also associated with lower military spending in the rivals of U.S. allies. Our results potentially help explain the mixed evidence in the arms-versus-allies and burden-sharing literatures and further demonstrate that signals play an important role in the practice of international relations.

Introduction

Fisheries provide critical contributions to global food security and are important in the fabric of human societies throughout the world. This chapter provides a brief history of fishery development and the evolution of scientific understanding and approaches so critical to effective fisheries management. It shows how processes at the population, community, and ecosystem levels are manifest in complex ways in even simple descriptors such as catch histories. Although many aspects of conventional fisheries management center on equilibrium concepts, the empirical record suggests a much more complex reality with the possibility of alternate stable states and non-linear dynamics. This chapter provides the motivation for exploring alternative models of fishery dynamics in a broader ecological context. Confronting complexity is essential if we are to move toward operational Ecosystem-based Fishery Management on a global basis.

Do political donations buy reputation in an elite gift-exchange game?

One way to view the entrenchment of favoured elites in political processes is as a repeated gift-exchange game in which reputations sustain beneficial favour exchanges at the expense of others. Within such a game, pragmatists seeking political favours will optimally invest in costly signals, such as gifts or political donations, to improve their reputation and maximise their political returns to that reputation. This view may have merit if simulations of a reputation-signalling gift-exchange game generates patterns of donations that closely match the empirical record. This paper presents agent-based simulations of such a game amongst a heterogeneous population. The aggregate simulated outcomes show a clustering of signalling strategies consistent with patterns of political donations in the UK, Germany and Australia, and also suggests a process by which entrenchment of interests occurs through exclusive access to a ‘social ladder’.