Legal Construct Validation: Expanding Empirical Legal Scholarship to Unobservable Concepts

This article contends that many of the fundamental concepts of law (such as justice, incentives, and deterrence) are not directly measurable, and have, therefore, been largely ignored by empirical legal scholarship. Fortunately, other social sciences have confronted this same obstacle and have developed methods with which to empirically assess these intangible concepts. I propose that the concept of construct validation, which has been developed in the psychology subfield of psychometrics, can be adapted to law to measure these unobservable traits. To adapt construct validation to law, empirical legal scholars must 1) develop generalized theories, 2) infer multiple hypotheses from these theories, 3) use appropriate research designs to test the hypotheses, and 4) the modify existing theories to reflect the empirical results of the studies. But this process is iterative and continuous, and the generalized theories should constantly be modified to reflect the newest information derived from empirical analyses. These modified theories, which are based on quantitative observations, can be used to better inform policymakers’ qualitative decisions

Social policy, state legitimacy and strategic actors: governmentality and counter-conduct in authoritarian regime

Far from acting defensively to preserve the social relations and red ideologies that originally gave it power, the Chinese Communist Party is leading a social and economic transformation that could be expected to lead to direct challenges to its authority. The surprising degree of change in the Chinese socio-economic transformation and the fact that this transformation has been going on for forty years now and has not yet resulted in fundamental challenges subverting its rule have inspired my study. The overarching theoretical enquiry in my dissertation resonates with one of the most important theoretical questions in political sociology: how does the state maintain compliance from the governed in periods of rapid social and economic transformation, and how does the logic of its governmentality change along with its priorities? My work is built on the Weberian and Gramscian tradition of understanding state rule and highlights the individual’s rationale of “believing” and “consent”, but also takes account of the Foucaudian “governmentality” the state uses to maintain its rule and investigates the underlined rationality. Empirically, I take advantage of the pension changes among China’s social welfare reforms, decipher a two-way story of statecraft in authoritarian regimes and explore whether there may be room for cognitional counter-conduct from the public. My work demonstrates that the Chinese state works through benefit allocation, propaganda, experimentation with policy and many other approaches, in order to shape public expectations and justify its rule. However, the state’s well-designed statecraft needs to enable individuals to make sense of their experience and must resonate with their “common sense”. Individuals can update their knowledge from personal interest, information from government policies, signals from current society (their peers) to decide whether to stay loyal or choose non-compliance. In a situation when active counter-conduct such as resistance is not possible, individuals may choose cognitional rebellion and falsify their public compliance

"Ideas" in Development from George Soros: Power and Influence through Philanthropy?

This paper mainly examines the economic ideas and models brought forward by the always controversial global financier George Soros. The aim is to first explore whether in fact Soros has developed over time a well- articulated model for development based on a coherent system of beliefs and (economic, social, political, and philosophical) ideas, and second examine the notion that the world's wealthiest (including Soros) wield enough power and influence (through philanthropy and other means) to shape the economic landscape of countries. The latter point poses a more problematic question: if indeed the world's wealthiest wield unlimited powers in shaping the global development landscape, it could then be assumed that the quality of their "ideas" does not matter much. How do the resources they control ultimately facilitate the transformation of their beliefs and practices into valid economic "ideas"? Do wealth, power and influence validate ideas? The flip side to this coin is that time (hopefully) eventually weeds out the bad ideas, and only the good ones prevail and propagate in the world, and that the Soros's of the world do not matter much in the long run. A lot has been said and written about Soros's controversial financial dealings but very few attempted to systematically explore his system of ideas and evalua te their cohesiveness. He is too often dismissed as a philosophe manqué. The paper will briefly review the written works of Soros and his publicly stated positions on some of the more significant issues in development and economics today, and at times offer a light critique or praise) where due. A parallel with Keynes on some of the issues is also drawn. The paper will also offer insight on the question of whether philanthropy is conducive to the germination (and, most importantly, diffusion) of ideas.economic development; philanthropy; Soros

Towards a Greater Diversity of Replication Studies

The replication of existing knowledge (e.g., previous study results) stands as an essential research practice across all science disciplines. Despite the importance of replication, the scarcity of replication studies is commonly criticized in business, management, and information system (IS) research. Therefore, efforts have already been made to facilitate replication research in the IS community, such as establishing conference tracks and journals focusing on publishing replication studies and providing guidelines on how and why to conduct replication research. Nonetheless, the perception of replication research remains unchanged, describing it as mundane. Therefore, in this issues and opinions article, we will explore how replication research could be made more appealing by diversifying the categories of replication studies. In this regard, we looked at replication in neuroscience, eliciting two new replication study categories: ‘transfer’ and ‘method.’ Additionally, through extensive discussion with other IS scholars, we added one more replication category, ‘comparison.’ We hope that this diversification will attract more researchers and also show the potential replication research holds

Conceptual Challenges on the Road to the Multiverse

The current debate about a possible change of paradigm from a single universe to a multiverse scenario could have deep implications on our view of cosmology and of science in general. These implications therefore deserve to be analyzed from a fundamental conceptual level. We briefly review the different multiverse ideas, both historically and within contemporary physics. We then discuss several positions within philosophy of science with regard to scientific progress, and apply these to the multiverse debate. Finally, we construct some key concepts for a physical multiverse scenario and discuss the challenges this scenario has to deal with in order to provide a solid, testable theory

Propositional models of evaluative conditioning.

Although propositional models of associative learning are often referred to in the literature on evaluative conditioning (EC), it has not yet been clearly stipulated what propositional models of EC entail. The aim of this paper is to describe in more detail the assumptions of propositional models of EC. This includes a discussion of the core assumption that EC is mediated by propositions about stimulus relations, as well as assumptions about the processes via which those propositions are formed and influence liking. Based on this discussion, I put forward the Integrated Propositional Model that combines a number of these assumptions and discuss some of the predictions that can be derived from this model. The paper ends with a reflection on the limitations and strengths of propositional models of EC