Suchergebnisse

A natural approach to understanding the tendencies of nations to enter or avoid wars is through the study of national decision making in international crises. Recent game-theoretic models of national crisis behavior can be used to generate research hypotheses about how specific features of national political structures and political culture are related to war-proneness. To illustrate, propositions about the relationships of several national characteristics to crisis involvement and war initiation are derived from two such models. Empirical testing of these hypotheses can help shed new light on Kant's thesis that democracies are less war-prone than other states.

Neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism are unable to account for the variability states exhibit when it comes to the subject of collective security systems because neither approach controls for the impact domestic politics can have on a state's ability to participate in this type of multilateral institution. A domestic structures perspective can address this shortcoming by highlighting the influence domestic political norms and institutions can exert in regard to a state's ability to make international security commitments and its ability to contribute to multilateral enforcement efforts. This essay provides evidence in support of these claims and outlines a research agenda for investigating the consequences domestic politics may hold for the viability and efficacy of collective security institutions.

The traditional conception of watertight compartmentalization between "domestic" and "international" policy issues is simply no longer realistic. The advent of globalization has fundamentally altered how we perceive of policy-making. as Sidney Tarrow put it, "[i]n today's world, we can no more draw a sharp line between domestic and international politics than we can understand national politics in the United states apart from its local roots" (Tarrow, 2005: 2). The rise of the international importance of the climate change issue is perhaps the most prominent example of the breakdown of the traditional local versus global policy distinction.

Why do some states embark on risky policies that appear certain to lead to disastrous outcomes while others seem more cautious as they interact with others in the international system? This is a central question that faces policymakers and one that has remained largely unexplored by scholars of international relations. This article argues that democratic peace theory speaks to the central factors that affect the risk preferences of states. Countries involved in Europe from 1816 to 1992 are analyzed to determine if levels of democracy and its constitutive elements affect risk-taking. Since critics argue that the strategic context affects the mechanisms underpinning explanations of the democratic peace, the effects of strategic variables on the relationships between regime type and risk-taking propensity are evaluated. Competing propositions are evaluated empirically using Bueno de Mesquita's indicator of risk with the EUGene dataset, which combines the Correlates of War and the Polity III data regarding regime type developed by Jaggers & Gurr. The results support the central hypothesis of the article - democracy is indeed associated with risk aversion regardless of the strategic context. However, the findings also suggest that states undergoing the transition to democracy from autocracy are more willing to take risks than are states with more stable forms of government. Further, the constitutive components of democracy have divergent effects on risk preferences.

Effective communication crucially depends on the ability to produce and recognize structured signals, as apparent in language and birdsong. Although it is not clear to what extent similar syntactic-like abilities can be identified in other animals, recently we reported that domestic chicks can learn abstract visual patterns and the statistical structure defined by a temporal sequence of visual shapes. However, little is known about chicks' ability to process spatial/positional information from visual configurations. Here, we used filial imprinting as an unsupervised learning mechanism to study spontaneous encoding of the structure of a configuration of different shapes. After being exposed to a triplet of shapes (ABC or CAB), chicks could discriminate those triplets from a permutation of the same shapes in different order (CAB or ABC), revealing a sensitivity to the spatial arrangement of the elements. When tested with a fragment taken from the imprinting triplet that followed the familiar adjacency-relationships (AB or BC) vs. one in which the shapes maintained their position with respect to the stimulus edges (AC), chicks revealed a preference for the configuration with familiar edge elements, showing an edge bias previously found only with temporal sequences. ; This work was supported by the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/Advanced Grant ERC PREMESOR G.A. [nr. 295517], from Fondazione Caritro Grant Biomarker DSA [40102839] and PRIN 2015 (Neural bases of animacy detection, and their relevance to the typical and atypical development of the brain) to G.V.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether we can find, behind the richness of energy-saving behavior, more general behavioral patterns. Specifically, this study compares the one-factor confirmatory model, the two-factor confirmatory model, and the Rasch model, which embody alternative assumptions about the dimensionality of energy-saving behavior. Unlike previous studies, this study uses a confirmatory approach to the testing of alternative models, and covers 10 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries ( N = 10,251). This makes our tests rigorous and generalizable beyond a country-specific context. Our results indicate that energy saving is a one-dimensional class of behavior that is a function of individual's propensity to engage in energy saving and the difficulty of energy-saving behavior. The Rasch model provides a valid and parsimonious representation of energy-saving behavior that outperforms the one- and two-factor models. We also show that the curtailment–efficiency dichotomy is not empirically valid.