1,720,964 research outputs found
The Politics of Food Safety
No full textAdvances in science and technology have laid the foundation for unparalleled economic prosperity but such breakthroughs have also precipitated the proliferation of unprecedented societal risks. Though the threat of nuclear war and climate change represent the most globally catastrophic of these risks, arguably no other risk has had as intimate and as direct effect on the lives of most ordinary people than risks to their food safety. However, despite concerted political will, governments tasked with securing food safety face many challenges in doing so. Authoritarian governments in particular, often touted for their ability to spur economic development precisely because they ignore societal risks like food safety, face unique challenges in building the necessary regulatory regime to ensure it. Meanwhile, though public furor provides the fuel for regulatory reform, the ability of the public to translate that furor into effective regulation is stymied by existing political structures and their own cognitive biases. I investigate these issues with a special focus on China, where food safety problems have run rampant since the early 2000's. In so doing, I argue that the inherent challenge in ensuring food safety stems from its extreme opacity. Although people have long known that consuming unsafe food can lead to negative health outcomes, the detection of which items are unfit for consumption is generally neither easy nor self-evident without substantial expertise, resources and time. Meanwhile even if outside institutions, such as the government or the media, step in to fill this gap, the necessity of such intermediation means that the populace's evaluation of food safety is also necessarily filtered by what these institutions choose to reveal on the one hand and public perceptions of these institutions on the other hand.Building on this premise, I push forward our understanding of the general correlation between greater economic development and increasing risks to food safety by theorizing and testing a relationship between urban biased policies and food safety problems. In so doing, I argue that policies designed to increase food production may lead to the proliferation of food safety problems out of ignorance or indifference (Chapter 2). Meanwhile, I investigate the extent to which the politicization of food safety problems is sensitive to the existing political environment. To that end, I find that the extent to which people express grievances in response to food safety crises in authoritarian regimes is tempered by fears of potentially negative political repercussions (Chapter 3). Meanwwhile, given the importance of of ensuring food safety to political legitimacy, authoritarian leaders have every incentive to address the problem. However, enforcing food safety regulation is the responsibility of local government officials, not those in the central government. While I find that local officials are responsive to both bottom-up grievances and top-down monitoring, competing economic incentives seem to exercise far more sway over their governance decisions (Chapter 4). Finally food safety regulatory tools that manage to sidestep this central-local government conflict may still face challenges to ensuring food safety. That is, I find evidence to suggest that public trust in regulatory institutions forms an important component of regulatory buy-in and thus regulatory success (Chapter 5).I test my hypotheses using a range of evidence and methodological strategies. I assess the argument that urban biased policies can increase risks to food safety using a panel dataset of agricultural inputs and food safety metrics. Meanwhile, I test whether the political environment affects how grievances over food safety are expressed using originally collected data of Weibo posts and newspaper articles about food safety at the Chinese sub-provincial level. I also use this dataset to investigate the types of incentives the local government respond to with regards to food safety regulatory enforcement. Finally, I evaluate the extent to which trust in regulatory institutions affects regulatory buy-in using original Chinese survey data.</p
Leaders, Perceptions, and Reputations for Resolve
Full text linkFor scholars of international relations, reputation for resolve - the belief that an actor will stand firm in future disputes - has served as a seminal explanation for the outcome of interstate crises. Scholars studying state reputation remain divided as to which characteristics of the state determine reputation for resolve. Recent scholarship questions this traditional state-centric view of international relations, indicating leaders can be as influential as states in international affairs. My dissertation investigates whether individual leaders can develop reputations for resolve independently from the states they serve. In doing so, my dissertation bridges the state-centric and leader-centric literatures, contributing to our understanding of both reputations for resolve and the impact of individual leaders on international politics. My theory focuses on reputation development as I examine which information decision-makers use to make assessments of resolve. As leaders are the primary arbiters of foreign policy and interact substantially with each other during international crises and negotiations, I conclude that leaders should be able to develop independent reputations for resolve based on their behavior while in office. I further theorize that, due to the ways in which individuals access and process information, a leader's early actions while in office will matter more in assessments of his/her resolve, making initial reputations difficult to change. To test my theory against alternative hypotheses, I employ a multi-methods research design using experimental surveys, statistical duration analysis, and a historical case study. The experiments focus on the internal causal mechanisms by which individuals process information to make predictions of a leader's resolve. To test the external validity of my theory, I employ a duration analysis to examine how the resoluteness of a leader's response to a crisis helps prevent that leader from being a target of future crises. Finally, the case study uses process tracing methods to investigate the extent to which individual leaders develop reputations for resolve over time. Through these multiple methods, I find robust evidence that leaders do develop reputations for resolve independently from their state's reputation. The experiments indicate that leader behavior is influential on perceptions of resolve even when accounting for state-based characteristics. Furthermore, I find that participants are more likely to seek out and prioritize leader-based information. I also find that early perceptions of resolve have a significant impact on later perceptions. The duration analysis indicates that the resoluteness of a leader's behavior can affect his/her risk of future crisis onset. Finally, the case study shows that potential challenger leaders do take leader-based information into account when making assessments of resolve and that a leader's early behavior is particularly influential to the development of his/her reputation for resolve. Based on this evidence I conclude that leaders can develop reputations for resolve. These reputations are primarily based on a leader's statements and behavior, even when controlling for state-based variables, and are resistant to change once formed.</p
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
The Globalization of Health and Safety Standards: Delegation of Regulatory Authority in the SPS Agreement of the 1994 Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization
Full text linkButhe examines why states delegated regulatory authority in the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Measures, an integral part of the founding treaty of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Buthe argues that, to explain this case of international delegation, principal-agent theory must be complemented by an analysis of cost-benefit calculations of the relevant domestic interest groups. Given these domestic interests, governments decided to institutionalize international cooperation on SPS measures outside of the WTO because they believed that such delegation would minimize the political costs of the loss of policymaking autonomy. Buthe notes, however, that in retrospect it appears that the widespread positive association of international standards with multilateralism and international consensus led many countries to underestimate those autonomy losses. Material and ideational factors thus interacted to shape the definition of national interests and the outcome of international delegation
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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