Bull's political vision

Although Bull is often identified as a theorist of international society, this volume has shown that there is more to The Anarchical Society than international society, narrowly construed. The contemporary relevance of Bull’s work is clearest when we recognize the flexibility of his conceptual framework and, in particular, the often overlooked potential of his concept of the ‘world political system’ of which modern international society is only a part. It is also helpful to recognize the provisional nature of Bull’s intellectual priorities and of his empirical and evaluative judgements. Bull’s argument that international society provides the surest route to world order reflected his judgement at ‘present’ and we can revise it today without doing violence to his intellectual project. This concluding chapter highlights the flexibility of Bull’s approach and the provisional nature of his judgements while also reviewing the limits of this flexibility and identifying possible future directions of inquiry

Category-length and category-strength effects using images of scenes

Global matching models have provided an important theoretical framework for recognition memory. Key predictions of this class of models are that (1) increasing the number of occurrences in a study list of some items affects the performance on other items (list-strength effect) and that (2) adding new items results in a deterioration of performance on the other items (list-length effect). Experimental confirmation of these predictions has been difficult, and the results have been inconsistent. A review of the existing literature, however, suggests that robust length and strength effects do occur when sufficiently similar hard-to-label items are used. In an effort to investigate this further, we had participants study lists containing one or more members of visual scene categories (bathrooms, beaches, etc.). Experiments 1 and 2 replicated and extended previous findings showing that the study of additional category members decreased accuracy, providing confirmation of the category-length effect. Experiment 3 showed that repeating some category members decreased the accuracy of nonrepeated members, providing evidence for a category-strength effect. Experiment 4 eliminated a potential challenge to these results. Taken together, these findings provide robust support for global matching models of recognition memory. The overall list lengths, the category sizes, and the number of repetitions used demonstrated that scene categories are well-suited to testing the fundamental assumptions of global matching models. These include (A) interference from memories for similar items and contexts, (B) nondestructive interference, and (C) that conjunctive information is made available through a matching operation

Chinese Superstition and Real Estate Prices: Transaction-level Evidence from the US Housing Market

We investigate the impact of Chinese superstition on prices paid by Chinese home buyers in Seattle, Washington. Chinese consider 8 lucky and 4 unlucky. Empirical results indicate Chinese buyers pay a 1-2% premium for addresses including an 8 and a 1% discount for addresses including a 4. These results are unrelated to unobserved property quality: no premium exists when Chinese sell to non-Chinese. Absent explicit identfiers for Chinese individuals, we develop a binomial name classifier using methods from the biomedical and document classification literature, allowing for falsification tests using other ethnic groups and mitigating ambiguity attributable to transliteration of Chinese characters into the Latin alphabet

Sports Arenas, Teams and Property Values: Temporary and Permanent Shocks to Local Amenity Flows

Professional sports facilities and teams generate local amenity flows in cities that may affect property values. Previous research shows evidence of important positive and negative local amenity flows based on case studies of changes in residential property values in specific cities. We analyze changes in residential property values in Oklahoma City over a period, 2000 to 2016, where both temporary and permanent exogenous shocks to local sports-related amenities occurred. Results from hedonic price models and repeat sales regression models show that nearby residential property prices increased after the opening of a new arena and the arrival of a new, permanent NBA team in the city. The presence of a temporary NBA team visiting the city had a weaker impact

Realism, empiricism, and causal inquiry in International Relations: what's at stake?

Discussions of causal inquiry in IR are increasingly framed in terms of a contrast between rival philosophical positions, each with a putative methodological corollary – empiricism is associated with a search for patterns of covariation, while scientific realism is associated with a search for causal mechanisms. Scientific realism is, on this basis, claimed to open up avenues of causal inquiry that are unavailable to empiricists. This is misleading. Empiricism appears inferior only if its reformulation by contemporary philosophers of science such as Bas van Fraassen is ignored. I therefore develop a fuller account than has previously been provided in IR of Van Fraassen’s ‘constructive empiricism’ and how it differs from scientific realism. In light of that, I consider what is at stake in calls for the reconstitution of causal inquiry along scientific realist, rather than empiricist, lines. I argue that scientific realists have failed to make a compelling case that what matters is whether researchers are realists. Constructive empiricism and scientific realism differ only on narrow epistemological and metaphysical grounds which carry no clear implications for the conduct of causal inquiry. Yet insofar as Van Fraassen has reformed empiricism to meet the scientific realist challenge, this has created a striking disjunction between mainstream practices of causal inquiry in IR and the vision of scientific practice which scientific realists and contemporary empiricists share, especially regarding the significance of regularities observed in everyday world politics. Although scientific realist calls for a philosophical revolution in IR are overstated, this disjunction demands further consideration

Articulating Britishness : cultural mediators and the development of the British Institute of Florence

Published online: 6 September 2022Throughout the early twentieth century, the perpetuated mythologisation of a “golden ring” of Anglo-Florence encouraged residents and visitors, native and foreign, to respectively internalise or impose the imagined idea of a cohesive Anglo-Florentine community (Artom Treves 1956). This chapter focuses upon the establishment of the British Institute of Florence (henceforth, BRI) as a site that was, and remains, a product of and contributor towards a physical and conceptual manifestation of localised attempts to articulate a coherent British identity. Previous scholarship relating to the BRI has presented British residents in Florence as uniformly affected by the toils of war and later fascism in Italy, and as homogenous in their attitude towards cultural activities (Loong 2012; Richet 2018, 40). However, this oversimplification of attitudes and relations has served to blur the lines of difference between the variously patriotic, belligerent, and imperialist motivations of Britons towards the BRI. Furthermore, following from Whitling’s (2019) reassessment of foreign academies’ trivial and often hagiographical histories, analysis of the BRI in this chapter counters Loong’s claim that war had shattered the internationalist ideal among Britons in Florence. Instead, it serves to highlight the presence of progressive internationalism among key local figures, female and male, who stood in opposition to imperialist and chauvinist influences. Moreover, the development of the BRI between the years 1917–1922 represents a period accented by local and individual competition rather than a rigid institutional framework. Although political ideologies and personal rivalries bubbled thinly under the surface and could be viewed as inhibitive, a deeper examination nonetheless reveals how conflict and negotiation during those years instead helped to shape and test the constitutional structure of the BRI, crucial during subsequent periods of radical political and cultural polarisation (Colacicco 2018, 7)

Professional Sports Events, Concerts, and Urban Place Based Policy: Evidence from the Staples Center

Abstract We analyze the relationship between sports events and concerts, important hospitality demand drivers and key components of many urban renewal projects, in the Staples Center in Los Angeles, an arena home to three pro teams, and nearby hotel performance, exploiting exogenous daily variation in the timing of games and concerts from 2002 to 2017. Results show a small positive impact on revenue per available room at hotels within one mile of the arena and an offsetting decrease at hotels located one to four miles away. Granting nearby hotels exemptions from Los Angeles hotel taxes reduces potential tourism-generated hotel tax revenue increases