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This article sketches the development of Jean-François Lyotard's musical thinking through the lens of the composer with whom he was most often associated, John Cage. I contend that the affinity Lyotard felt for Cage's work came about on the basis of two shared concerns: first, an interest in creative strategies hinging on passivity and indifference and, second, a related desire to approach singular events free from the interference incurred by human cognition. In Lyotard's "libidinal" phase, as well as his later Kant-centered work, his investigations indicate that Cage's artistic practice is founded upon a series of logical paradoxes. However, it can be argued that Lyotard's revision of Cage's aesthetic theories in post-Freudian terms more openly faces up to these paradoxes than Cage's own sunny Jungianism does.

Though much has already been written on the relationship between Iannis Xenakis and John Cage, in this paper I contribute to this discussion by arguing that their parallel adoptions of chance—whether Zen-cum-"anarchical" as in Cage, or mediated and controlled through the scientific method as in Xenakis—represent a response to a common intellectual phenomenon. This is the apparent exhaustion of humanistic ethics and all of its attendant notions: subject-object dualism, the primacy of the ego and dialectics, and anthropocentrism. A fundamental dissatisfaction with humanistic subjectivity was also the essential preoccupation of philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, a thinker noted for producing some of the most incisive commentaries on contemporary music in recent years. Particularly pertinent in this context is Lyotard's longstanding focus on the ethical realm, which he saw as more important than ever given recent anti-humanistic philosophy's rejection of foundationalism. I demonstrate that Cage and Xenakis were unique among composers of their generation in also refusing to lose sight of this same concern. Yet while both composers go very far in dissolving subjectivity and the self-propriety of reason by following what is akin to a Lyotardian aesthetics/ethics of the sublime, each also makes compromises on the extent to which they ask their listeners to passively submit to an Other of reason. From a humanistic perspective, such a move appears little more than "enslavement" to an amorphous, ungovernable "nature". Lyotard, however, follows Emmanuel Levinas by arguing that this is actually a fundamentally ethical act insofar as it requires an obligation prior to any post facto rationalization. Though Xenakis and Cage both reject traditional political praxis, they remain partially unsatisfied with this extreme "ethical" alternative and its apparent dangers, and in spite of themselves, they ultimately admit of some of the reflective politics which they appear to disdain .

Is bias in responsiveness to constituents conditional on the policy preferences of elected officials? The scholarly conventional wisdom is that constituency groups who do not receive policy representation still obtain some level of responsiveness by legislators outside of the policy realm. In contrast, we present a theory of preference‐induced responsiveness bias where constituency responsiveness by legislators is associated with legislator policy preferences. Elected officials who favor laws that could disproportionately impact minority groups are also less likely to engage in nonpolicy responsiveness to minority groups. We conducted a field experiment in 28 US legislative chambers. Legislators were randomly assigned to receive messages from Latino and white constituents. If legislators supported voter identification laws, Latino constituents were less likely to receive constituency communications from their legislators. There are significant implications regarding fairness in the democratic process when elected officials fail to represent disadvantaged constituency groups in both policy and nonpolicy realms.

In October 2012 the Danish Socialist People's Party chose Annette Vilhelmsen as its leader. With her ascension to power, women simultaneously headed all three of Denmark's governing parties for the first time. Though an exclusively female-led coalition government remains exceptional, in developed democracies the number of female prime ministers and party leaders has grown in recent years. Since 2000, women have governed in Denmark, Germany, Finland, Iceland, New Zealand, and Australia and have commanded coalition partner parties in Austria, Ireland, and Sweden. Just as there are now more female leaders, governments are also nominating more women to cabinets than ever before. Women recently held half of all ministerial posts in Finland, Iceland, Sweden, and Spain. Female ministers are also serving in high-prestige portfolios from which they were traditionally excluded, including finance and foreign affairs.