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Why Kurds in Syria are unlikely to follow the Iraqi Kurdistan path to autonomy
No full textAn intriguing aspect of the aftermath of the collapse of the Assad regime is the future the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Given the conflicts between the SDF and Turkish-sponsored Syrian armed groups, what possible role could the SDF have under the country’s new rulers? Could they follow a path similar to that of their fellow Kurds in Iraq, and administer a federal entity
The 2024 elections: emotional appeals through diversity and victimhood helped the reactionary right use TikTok to reshape its image
No full textThe social media platform TikTok has become an important channel for news and information for many Americans and played an important role in the 2024 presidential election. Gil Sharon looks at how those on the reactionary right in the US were able to use TikTok to reshape their image away from the alt-right to a more diverse community based around a shared Christian identity and sense of victimhood
The ‘misogyny trap' is the first step on the road to radicalisation
No full textMany men who commit ISIS-inspired terrorism have a history of misogyny. Understanding this is key to preventing radicalisation, writes Sajjan M. Gohel
The US reciprocal tariff plan is anything but reciprocal
No full textStephen Woolcock writes that the Trump administration’s recently issued Reciprocal Trade and Tariffs memorandum is a unilateral plan that would damage international trade and economy more than the other tariffs proposed by the US
Women who quit: media and policy discourse about gender and work
No full textThe article examines dominant media and policy discourse about women who leave paid employment in the context of motherhood and menopause. It shows that this discourse frames women’s decision to leave the workforce as a personal choice, minimising the role of workplace and societal structures; centres on women in professional jobs and leadership roles, overlooking women in low-paid, informal or insecure jobs; links women’s employment patterns and experiences to their reproductive bodies, thus ignoring women’s unequal load of caring responsibilities; and prioritises keeping women in the workforce over the state’s and employers’ responsibility for supporting workers’ health, wellbeing and job satisfaction
Chunk-based incremental processing and learning: an integrated theory of word discovery, implicit statistical learning, and speed of lexical processing
No full textAccording to chunking theories, children discover their first words by extracting subsequences embedded in their continuous input. However, the mechanisms proposed in these accounts are often incompatible with data from other areas of language development. We present a new theory to connect the chunking accounts of word discovery with the broader developmental literature. We argue that (a) children build a diverse collection of chunks, including words, multiword phrases, and sublexical units; (b) these chunks have different processing times determined by how often each chunk is used to recode the input; and (c) these processing times interact with short-term memory limitations and incremental processing to constrain learning. We implemented this theory as a computational modeling architecture called Chunk-Based Incremental Processing and Learning (CIPAL). Across nine studies, we demonstrate that CIPAL can model word discovery in different contexts. First, we trained the model with 70 child-directed speech corpora from 15 languages. CIPAL gradually discovered words in each language, with cross-linguistic variation in performance. The model’s average processing time also improved with experience, resembling the developmental changes observed in children’s speed of processing. Second, we showed that CIPAL could simulate seven influential effects reported in statistical learning experiments with artificial languages. This included a preference for words over nonwords, part words, frequency-matched part words, phantom words, and sublexical units. On this basis, we argue that incremental chunking is an effective implicit statistical learning mechanism that may be central to children’s vocabulary development
The value of pets: the quantifiable impact of pets on life satisfaction
No full textThere is substantial evidence from psychology and medicine that pets are associated with better health and higher life satisfaction of their human companions. Yet whether this relationship is causal or purely a correlation remains largely unknown. We use an instrumental variable approach to overcome this, specifically exploiting relationships in which neighbours ask individuals to look over their property when traveling, which is correlated with pet companionship. We control for baseline relationships with neighbours as well as various other potential sources of bias. Using the Innovation Panel as part of the UK Household Longitudinal Survey, we find that a pet companion increases life satisfaction by 3 to 4 points on a scale of 1 to 7. Moreover, we estimate the size of the impact of pets on human life satisfaction and wellbeing in monetary units. We find that having a pet companion is worth up to £70,000 a year in terms of life satisfaction, similar to values obtained in the literature for meeting with friends and relatives on a regular basis
Fiscal redistribution cycles: four decades of social assistance in the UK
No full textThis paper describes the evolution of fiscal redistribution (FR) in the UK through social assistance transfers over the last four decades and the contribution of each of its determinants: budget effort (the share of national income devoted to redistributive transfers) and transfer progressivity (the extent to which these transfers are concentrated on lower-income households). Trends in FR have been driven by a combination of economic and political cycles. Over the 1980s and 1990s, the heavy reliance on means-tested transfers indexed to prices resulted in FR fluctuating over the ‘economic cycle’. Over recent decades, FR has been driven primarily by ‘political cycles’. Under a Labour government (1997–2010), a large expansion of coverage of in-work benefits resulted in an unprecedented, sustained increase in effort which, despite decreasing progressivity, was large enough to ensure a continuous rise in FR. This increase was reversed under a Conservative-led government from 2010 in the context of fiscal austerity, which decreased effort and increased progressivity as remaining transfers were concentrated more on lower-income households. A striking feature over the last four decades has been the sharp decline in FR to the poorest income decile under different political leadership as emphasis has shifted to reducing in-work rather than out-of-work poverty and ‘making work pay’
Prosecutors as rule of law gatekeepers in contemporary Latin America: A survey
No full textThis chapter surveys and evaluates the prosecutors’ offices of Latin America, a crucial but neglected component of the region's justice systems. From the practical standpoint of development policy analysis, what most matters is not abstract “rule of law” provisions, but the tangible procedures determining which legal violations are subject to prompt and reliable corrective enforcement (and which are not). Enforcement requires prosecutorial action, but these prosecutors are typically overburdened and cross-pressured. As the gatekeepers of the justice system, they possess considerable discretionality, and serve as the filter for deciding the urgency and priority of items on the prosecutorial agenda. The chapter provides an original and up-to-date overview of the highly diverse practices on display across the region. It documents the structural capacities and limitations of these institutions and their pivotal roles in the overall provision of justice. Some policy areas are relatively well served, but delivery is typically patchy and erratic, subject to distortions and perhaps even capture by vested interests. When most citizens have little access and their justice needs are sidelined, the consequence can be a reduction in trust in the rule of law as a whole and to incentivize resort to extra-legal alternative remedies
The transition to the knowledge economy in advanced capitalist democracies: a new index for comparative research
No full textThis article sets out to develop a new index capturing advanced capitalist democracies’ transition to the knowledge economy. Reviewing how the notion has evolved in the literature, the article proposes a definition of the knowledge economy based upon two key elements—technology and (high) skills. These are operationalized in six indicators and combined through Bayesian latent variable analysis to produce a new Knowledge Economy Index, covering twenty-two countries from 1995 to 2019. A descriptive exploration of the index provides important insights for the emerging body of work on the knowledge economy in comparative political economy. The index is the first to provide a comprehensive measure of the knowledge economy that accounts for both technology and skills across space and time. As such, it paves the way for future research examining the causes and consequences of the transition to the knowledge economy in advanced capitalist democracies