Doing statistics,enacting the nation: The performative powers of categories

It has been widely acknowledged in debates about nationalism and ethnicity that identity categories used for classifying people along the lines of culture, race, and ethnicity help to enact, that is, bring into being, the collective identities they name. However, we know little about how categories acquire their performative powers. The contribution of this paper is twofold: first, it proposes a conceptual framework based on concepts and insights from science and technology studies for investigating the performative powers of statistical identity categories and possibly also other domains. Second, it demonstrates, through an empirical study of two examples from Estonian and Dutch official population statistics, that statistical identity categories enact more than the groups to which they refer. We argue that they also enact national identities and notions of national belonging of majoritarian groups in the host countries. Therefore, statistical identity categories can be used as analytical lenses to study nationalism and processes of nation‐building.     

Explaining Advocacy Coalition Change with Policy Feedback

Despite the prominence of exogenous factors in theories of policy change, the precise mechanisms that link such factors to policy change remain elusive: The effects of exogenous factors on the politics underlying policy change are not sufficiently conceptualized and empirically analyzed. To address this gap, we propose to distinguish between truly exogenous factors and policy outcomes to better understand policy change. Specifically, we combine the Advocacy Coalition Framework with policy feedback theory to conceptualize a complete feedback loop among policy, policy outcomes, and subsequent politics. Aiming at theory-building, we use policy feedback mechanisms to explain why advocacy coalitions change over time. Empirically, we conduct a longitudinal single case study on policy-induced technological change in the German energy subsystem, an extreme case of policy outcomes, from 1983 to 2013. First, using discourse network analysis, we identify four patterns of actor movements, explaining coalition decline and growth. Second, using process tracing, we detect four policy feedback mechanisms explaining these four actor movements. With this inductive mixed-methods approach, we build a conceptual framework in which policy outcomes affect subsequent politics through feedback mechanisms. We develop propositions on how coalition change and feedback mechanisms explain four ideal-typical trajectories of policy change.     

Infancy and childhood in the pre‐Columbian North American Southwest–first results of the palaeopathological investigation of the skeletons from the Grasshopper Pueblo,Arizona

Infant and child skeletons (n = 369) from the pre‐Columbian Grasshopper Pueblo site in east‐central Arizona (US) dating from the 14^th century AD were examined macroscopically and with low‐power microscopy. They were studied as a representative example of a typical Mogollon community with respect to frequencies of deficiency and inflammatory diseases. First results revealed very poor living conditions, which are characteristic for this time period in the North American Southwest because of lack of food due to climatic and political changes. Thus, non‐specific stress indicators were frequently observed. In the group of deficiency diseases, anaemia was found in more than 50% of individuals, and in the group of inflammatory diseases, meningeal irritations were diagnosed in more than 70%. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.