Nature,Capital and Neighborhoods: “Dispossession without Accumulation”?

Abstract: The ongoing economic crisis, which originated in the USA and has since spread rapidly to capital markets worldwide, is massive, complex, and many times contradictory. One could say the same for responses to the crisis as governments, firms and multi‐national institutions struggle to grasp the full magnitude of the event. This article interrogates the key commodities involved—land, labor and money—and the always‐uneasy relations between spaces of social reproduction and capital. Such ambivalence is critical to understanding how new economic realities are formed in light of retreating neoliberalism as markets become destabilized. The analysis provided suggests the commodities involved in the housing crisis are the basis for a countermovement against dispossession.     

Setting the Table: Majority Party Effects in the United States Senate

This article joins the growing tide of research that studies party effects in the United States Senate. Previous work has shown that certain procedural tools disproportionately advantage the majority party at the expense of the minority. We build on this research by exploiting a new dataset that allows us to study motions to table amendments from the 91st to the 111th Congress. By examining the success of these motions, analyzing the voting calculus of individual senators on procedural and substantive votes, and simulating the aggregate impact of this tool, we provide some of the strongest evidence to date that political parties (and the majority party in particular) influence the legislative process and policy outcomes in the Senate. Our findings stand in stark contrast to the traditional vision of the Senate as an individualistic body.     

Policy of Delay: Evidence from a Bayesian Analysis of Metropolitan Land‐Use Choices

Do local policymakers strategically use delay in permitting development to forestall the growth machine? The mantras of smart growth and sustainable development assume local governments can balance the competing values of economic development, ecology, and equity interests in a community. We employ a political market framework to explain differences in local government land use decisions. This framework conceptualizes policy choices as resulting from the interplay between the aggregate policy demand by residents, developers, and environmental interests and the aggregate supply by government authorities. Delays can be imposed strategically through processes of development approval by city governments where industry strength and form of government vary within county‐level service‐delivery fragmentation. We utilize novel Bayesian multilevel modelling of data collected from 2007 and 2015 surveys of Florida city planners and find strong institutional effects and multilevel relationships.     

Toward More Continuous and Practical Artifact Analyses: Defining and Learning From Key Dimensions of Fort Ancient Triangular Projectile Points in the Miami Valleys

Artifact typologies are routinely created, debated, and modified, but too rarely is the goal to focus on small geographic regions and to define key axes of variation. Our goal is to further this practice by examining the utility of a long-standing artifact typology from the U.S. Midwest, one associated with discerning temporal changes in triangular projectile-point forms. Our samples are derived from nine well-dated Fort Ancient villages along the Great and Little Miami Rivers of southwest Ohio and southeast Indiana. Our approach statistically explores numeric and nominal measurements of projectile-point morphology. Findings reveal significant differences among formal variables that are consistent with most of the typology as recently amended by other researchers. However, by focusing on numeric variables, we also have found that there are a series of additional significant temporal changes. Collectively, we identify a series of distinctions in temporal, morphological, and geographical variation among triangular projectile points. Various hypotheses are discussed regarding cultural transmission of the observed changes in projectile points.