Historical Roots of Social Assistance: An Inadequate Response to the Colonial Destruction of Mi’kmaw Livelihood in Nova Scotia

Social assistance and related programs are an important part of life in the 13 Mi’kmaq communities of Nova Scotia. Given the substantive importance of social assistance and related programs in Mi’kmaq communities, it is surprising how little research has been conducted on the subject. This research aims to understand the origins of economic dependence and the related emergence of social assistance among the Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia. We identify key historical periods and processes that have shaped the current policy landscape. A defining characteristic of social policy on reserve has been the fact that First Nations themselves have had very little say in how programs such as social assistance are designed and delivered. There is hope that a more self-determined and holistic approach may emerge.

The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century

This Handbook provides a forum for consolidated interdisciplinary discussion on intellectual culture in the “long” nineteenth century highlights and focuses its innovative methodological potential for the areas of musicology, literary and historical studies. In particular, the collection challenges the work-centred focus of Western music history by treating writings about music as cultural artefacts of substantive importance—rather than mere supplements to musical understanding—and will thereby historicize and problematize current conceptions of periodization and national narratives of music history.

Punitive damages

Punitive or exemplary damages are damages whose purpose is to punish the defendant for his or her wrongful conduct. In Broome v Cassell Lord Hailsham said that he preferred the term ‘exemplary damages’ to ‘punitive damages’ as better expressing the policy of the law. English courts have subsequently followed Lord Hailsham’s preference. But in its Report on this area in 1997, the Law Commission recommended that the pre-Broome v Cassell terminology of ‘punitive damages’ was clearer and more straightforward and did not accept that this label deflected attention from the deterrence and disapproval aims of such damages. As the Law Commission said, ‘When one uses the term “punishment” in the criminal law, one does not thereby indicate that deterrence is not an important aim.’ Although nothing of substantive importance should turn on which label is adopted, the Law Commission’s approach is persuasive and the term ‘punitive damages’ is therefore preferred in this chapter and book.

The Effects of Polarization on Ideological Certainty: An Application to Executive Order Issuance

Many standard models of political institutions frame outcomes as a function of the preferences of key decision makers. However, these models, and the empirical analyses they inspire, typically assume decision makers can infer the identities and ideological locations of other decision makers without error. Here, we reveal the substantive importance of this assumption. We show that partisan sorting, a common cause of polarization, can result in reduced uncertainty about the ideologies of key decision makers and the identities of key pivots. When we incorporate estimates of pivot uncertainty into empirical models of executive order issuance, we find lower levels of uncertainty are associated with higher rates of policy-relevant executive order issuance. These results have implications for the study of polarization and the use of models of institutions in political science.

Improving the Interpretation of Fixed Effects Regression Results

Fixed effects estimators are frequently used to limit selection bias. For example, it is well known that with panel data, fixed effects models eliminate time-invariant confounding, estimating an independent variable’s effect using only within-unit variation. When researchers interpret the results of fixed effects models, they should therefore consider hypothetical changes in the independent variable (counterfactuals) that could plausibly occur within units to avoid overstating the substantive importance of the variable’s effect. In this article, we replicate several recent studies which used fixed effects estimators to show how descriptions of the substantive significance of results can be improved by precisely characterizing the variation being studied and presenting plausible counterfactuals. We provide a checklist for the interpretation of fixed effects regression results to help avoid these interpretative pitfalls.

Leveraging Lotteries for School Value-Added: Testing and Estimation*

Conventional value-added models (VAMs) compare average test scores across schools after regression-adjusting for students’ demographic characteristics and previous scores. This article tests for VAM bias using a procedure that asks whether VAM estimates accurately predict the achievement consequences of random assignment to specific schools. Test results from admissions lotteries in Boston suggest conventional VAM estimates are biased, a finding that motivates the development of a hierarchical model describing the joint distribution of school value-added, bias, and lottery compliance. We use this model to assess the substantive importance of bias in conventional VAM estimates and to construct hybrid value-added estimates that optimally combine ordinary least squares and lottery-based estimates of VAM parameters. The hybrid estimation strategy provides a general recipe for combining nonexperimental and quasi-experimental estimates. While still biased, hybrid school value-added estimates have lower mean squared error than conventional VAM estimates. Simulations calibrated to the Boston data show that, bias notwithstanding, policy decisions based on conventional VAMs that control for lagged achievement are likely to generate substantial achievement gains. Hybrid estimates that incorporate lotteries yield further gains.

A Copula Approach to the Problem of Selection Bias in Models of Government Survival

Theories of coalition politics in parliamentary democracies have suggested that government formation and survival are jointly determined outcomes. An important empirical implication of these theories is that the sample of observed governments analyzed in studies of government survival may be nonrandomly selected from the population of potential governments. This can lead to serious inferential problems. Unfortunately, current empirical models of government survival are unable to account for the possible biases arising from nonrandom selection. In this study, we use a copula-based framework to assess, and correct for, the dependence between the processes of government formation and survival. Our results suggest that existing studies of government survival, by ignoring the selection problem, overstate the substantive importance of several covariates commonly included in empirical models.

Substantive Importance and the Veil of Statistical Significance

Political science is gradually moving away from an exclusive focus on statistical significance and toward an emphasis on the magnitude and importance of effects. While we welcome this change, we argue that the current practice of “magnitude-and-significance,” in which researchers only interpret the magnitude of a statistically significant point estimate, barely improves the much-maligned “sign-and-significance” approach, in which researchers focus only on the statistical significance of an estimate. This exclusive focus on the point estimate hides the uncertainty behind a veil of statistical significance. Instead, we encourage researchers to explicitly account for uncertainty by interpreting the range of values contained in the confidence interval. Especially when making judgments about the importance of estimated effects, we advise researchers to make empirical claims if and only if those claims hold for the entire confidence interval.

Penerapan Cultural Studies dan Aliran Filsafat dalam Desain Komunikasi Visual

Cultural studies is a diversity knowledge from different variety of perspectives, through the production of theory trying to intervene in political culture. Cultural studies explores culture as a practice purport in the context of social force. In this case, cultural studies is not only based on one point only, but also cultural studies tries to compose a variety of theoretical studies of other disciplines developed wider, so that covers a wide range of academic theories that already existed, including Marxism, Structuralism, Post-structuralism, and feminism. By eclectic method, cultural studies puts the positioning to all knowledges, including on its knowledge which integrates with culture, practice of signification, representation, discourse, authority, articulation, text, read, and consumption. Cultural studies could be described as a language game or formation of discourse associated with relation to power in signification practice of human life. In addition to cultural studies, there is also feminism theory participated in the concept of feminist cultural studies that reconstructs and transforms view of misperception between feminism and cultural studies. Feminism affects cultural studies, but not all feminism can be viewed as cultural studies, and not all cultural studies talks about gender. Both of cultural studies and feminism have substantive importance in relation to power, representation, pop-culture, subjectivity, identity and consumption. The theory of social construction is also has connectivity with cultural studies. Construction of reality is inseparable from mark, symbol, and language. Media are full of reality constructed for people to affect people as ethics persuasion in media do.

Cabinet Formation and Portfolio Distribution in European Multiparty Systems

Government formation in multiparty systems is of self-evident substantive importance, and the subject of an enormous theoretical literature. Empirical evaluations of models of government formation tend to separate government formation per se from the distribution of key government pay-offs, such as cabinet portfolios, between members of the resulting government. Models of government formation are necessarily specified ex ante, absent any knowledge of the government that forms. Models of the distribution of cabinet portfolios are typically, though not necessarily, specified ex post, taking into account knowledge of the identity of some government ‘formateur’ or even of the composition of the eventual cabinet. This disjunction lies at the heart of a notorious contradiction between predictions of the distribution of cabinet portfolios made by canonical models of legislative bargaining and the robust empirical regularity of proportional portfolio allocations – Gamson’s Law. This article resolves this contradiction by specifying and estimating a joint model of cabinet formation and portfolio distribution that, for example, predicts ex ante which parties will receive zero portfolios rather than taking this as given ex post. It concludes that canonical models of legislative bargaining do increase the ability to predict government membership, but that portfolio distribution between government members conforms robustly to a proportionality norm because portfolio distribution follows the much more difficult process of policy bargaining in the typical government formation process.