Narratives and expert information in agenda-setting: Experimental evidence on state legislator engagement with artificial intelligence policy

Are narratives as influential in gaining the attention of policymakers as expert information, including for complex, technical policy domains such as artificial intelligence (AI) policy? This pre-registered study uses a field experiment to evaluate legislator responsiveness to policy entrepreneur outreach. In partnership with a leading AI think tank, we send more than 7300 U.S. state legislative offices emails about AI policy containing an influence strategy (providing a narrative, expert information, or the organization's background), along with a prominent issue frame about AI (emphasizing technological competition or ethical implications). To assess engagement, we measure link clicks to further resources and webinar registration and attendance. Although AI policy is a highly technical domain, we find that narratives are just as effective as expert information in engaging legislators. Compared to control, expert information and narratives led to 28 and 34 percent increases in policymaker engagement, respectively. Furthermore, higher legislature professionalism and lower state-level prior AI experience are associated with greater engagement with both narratives and expert information. Finally, we find that policymakers are equally engaged by an ethical framing of AI policy as they are with an economic one. The findings advance efforts to bridge scholarship on policy narratives, policy entrepreneurship, and agenda-setting.     

The adoption of culturally contentious innovations: The case of citizen oversight of police

Cultural contentiousness is defined as an attribute of innovation due to which it encounters resistance because of its incompatibility with hegemonic cultural assumptions. I argue that culturally contentious innovations are likely to be adopted when antecedents have productive symbolic force, i.e., they reveal contradictions between dominant cultural assumptions and the material outcomes of existing institutions or empower social actors to resolve such contradictions. However, antecedents with incapacitative symbolic force tend to obfuscate the above contradictions or decrease social actors’ capacity to resolve them, encouraging the adoption of less contentious innovation. Applying these arguments to citizen oversight agencies (COAs) for the police, I examine the antecedents of contentious (i.e., investigative) as opposed to less contentious (non-investigative) COAs. In support of the above argument, I find that productive antecedents (e.g., a consent decree, an increase in civil rights nonprofits) are associated with adopting investigative COAs. In contrast, incapacitative antecedents (e.g., a Law Enforcement Officer Bill of Rights, an increase in the violent crime rate) are associated with adopting non-investigative COAs. The findings broadly demonstrate that policy adoption scholars ought to distinguish policies in terms of cultural contentiousness and account for the symbolic force of antecedents. Further theoretical contributions are discussed.     

Ecological livelihoods of farmers and pollinators in the Himalayas: Doing critical physical geography using citizen science

In farming communities dependent on the cultivation of pollinator-dependent crops, the livelihoods of farmers are inextricably linked with pollinator health. A global pollination crisis interlinked with a crisis of food production and farmer livelihoods, exacerbated by processes of socio-environmental change, is emblematic of the Anthropocene and of the kinds of ecosocial problems with which critical physical geography (CPG) engages. We propose examining the farmer-pollinator system in the Indian Himalayas through an ecological livelihoods approach using a range of collaborative citizen science methods including bloom observations to document pollinator visits, plant phenological observations to document year-round floral resource availability, and farm diaries to document orchard management practices. An ecological livelihoods approach draws on posthumanist theory, which has remained largely disengaged with methodological questions that are of concern to CPG. Citizen science, although widely used across a range of disciplines, has seen limited engagement in CPG. After elaborating some of the opportunities and challenges that an engagement between CPG, posthumanist theory, and citizen science opens up, we propose a methodology that would be simultaneously epistemological (understanding interdependence between livelihoods of farmers and pollinators) and ontological (imagining and building worlds where farmer and pollinator habitats are recomposed).     

King Stephen,the English church,and a female mystic: Christina of Markyate's Vita as a neglected source for the council of Winchester (August 1139) and its aftermath

One of the central reasons for the disintegration of royal authority (sometimes called ‘the Anarchy’) during the reign of King Stephen of England is generally thought to have been his troubled relationship with the English church. The king was summoned to appear before the legate in England, Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester (who was also Stephen's brother), at a church council called for Winchester on 29 August 1139, in order to show cause for his conduct in arresting several prominent bishops and in confiscating their property. Several major chroniclers discuss the events leading up to and occurring at the council of Winchester, especially William of Malmesbury in his Historia novella and the anonymous Gesta Stephani. The versions of events contained in these sources are not entirely consistent. The present paper examines yet another recounting of the events of the council, seldom appreciated by historians of twelfth-century England, presented in the Vita of Christina of Markyate (c.1096/98–c.1155/66), composed by an anonymous monk of St Albans between 1140 and 1146. Christina was close to the abbot of St Albans, Geoffrey de Gorham, who was probably the patron of the Vita and who quite likely attended the Winchester council and apparently became involved in its aftermath. These events are recorded in some detail in the Vita, presenting us with a vivid recounting of the council and the immediate consequences thereof. The narrative of the Vita contains a somewhat different picture of the personalities and occurrences surrounding the Winchester council than we encounter in the chronicles. The current essay compares the Vita to the standard accounts. We argue that the Vita may be the earliest and possibly most reliable source for the events of the council. Moreover, if we privilege the report of the Vita, the council becomes an especially significant moment in the breakdown of relations between Stephen and the English church.     

Notice to contributors

In 1400 Guillaume l’Archevêque, the lord of Parthenay, commissioned the Roman de Parthenay (RP), a poetic ancestral romance affirming his family’s descent from Mélusine, the mythic fairy-serpentine matriarch of the Poitevin Lusignan dynasty. Prevailing scholarship holds that Guillaume’s commission was a political response to the earlier patronage of a prose Mélusine romance by Jean, duke of Berry, c. 1392. According to this view, Guillaume was an English partisan who sought to counter the French claims to Poitevin territories embedded in Berry’s romance with a text that proclaimed his own (and therefore English) rights to lands in central France. After exploring textual and historical evidence for this conventional view, the paper argues that clues to understanding Guillaume’s patronage lie in an analytical comparison of passages in the RP with the specific dynastic circumstances confronting l’Archevêque at the end of the fourteenth century. Examination of the romance in conjunction with evidence provided by feudal, financial, and legal sources suggests that Guillaume’s literary patronage was motivated not by contemporary affairs of state but by his anxieties about the imminent extinction of the Parthenay dynasty.     

A “Southern interference in the North's affairs”: the prospect of Fianna Fáil as an all-Ireland party, 1926–2011

This article demonstrates that Fianna Fáil's efforts in 2007 and thereafter to reconfigure as an all-Ireland party represented a volte-face in policy. From an historical perspective, since Fianna Fáil's establishment in 1926, consecutive leaders from Éamon de Valera to Albert Reynolds in the 1990s consistently refused to remodel the party on an all-Ireland basis. Rather than participating in Northern Ireland mainstream politics, Fianna Fáil was fixated with firstly securing, and then maintaining, a republican government in the south of Ireland. Accordingly, in the words of Lemass speaking in 1964, any “Southern interference in the North's affairs” was habitually ruled out by the Fianna Fáil leadership.     

从汪柏与索萨议和看早期中葡关系的转变

1554年,广东海道副使汪柏与葡萄牙船队司令索萨达成一项口头协议,葡萄牙人以纳税20%为条件获准在中国港口贸易.此次和解虽为临时性安排,却构成了早期中葡关系史上的转折点:中葡两国结束了武装冲突,葡人获得了公开贸易的资格,他们在华活动的临时据点由上川岛转移到了距离广州更近的浪白澳.从此,中葡贸易关系开始在稳定的基础上得到持续性发展.然而,此次和解并未决定葡人入居澳门之事.     

Southern Irish Protestants: an example of de‐ethnicisation?

ABSTRACT. The study of minorities is central to research in ethnicity and nationalism. But there are cases where the precise nature of the minority is not easy to determine. One view of Southern Irish Protestants is that in the decades after independence they transformed themselves (or were transformed) from British nationals to Irish nationals or, alternatively, from a British ethnic to an Irish religious minority. This paper argues that treating the (past) British dimension of Irish Protestant identity as ethnic or national misconceives it and overlooks the historically deep Irish context of Protestant identity. One consequence of this is the neglect of the specifically Irish roots of residual tensions in Catholic–Protestant relationships. The themes of the paper are exemplified with case material drawn from research on Protestants and Catholics in rural West Cork.