Organizational overlap and bureaucratic actors : how EU–NATO relations empower the European Commission

Published online: 22 January 2024 (OnlineFirst)Organizational overlap is a ubiquitous feature in regional governance. Most studies have focused on member states, demonstrating that overlap enables states differently. We still know little about whether and how overlapping organizations impact international bureaucracies and how this shapes the relationship between bureaucratic actors within organizations. We argue that overlap can empower international bureaucrats, but not equally. Those with autonomous resources from member states are the most attractive interlocuters for bureaucrats from other organizations and, hence, likely to become most empowered. Substantive expertise and formal competence are less consequential in this context. We unpack this argument by looking at a policy domain understood to be heavily guarded by member states, security and defence policy. Based on primary documents and interviews, we show that the European Union (EU)–North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) overlap has enabled the European Commission to leverage its position within the EU to its advantage and further encroach on the EU's security and defence activities.This research benefited from the support of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies ‘Europe in the World’ research area and the Swiss National Science Foundation Research Grant 100017_172667

The polycrisis and EU security and defence competences

Published online: 10 June 2024From the 2009 sovereign debt crisis to the 2022 Russian full-scale war in Ukraine, the EU has experienced a succession of intersecting crises, or a ‘polycrisis’. We examine how this polycrisis has impacted the EU's role in security and defence. While the EU's competences in security and defence have long suffered from disagreements among member states, they have shown notable developments since Brexit, and most importantly, since the 2022 war in Ukraine. We make a two-step argument to shed light on why the polycrisis has had these differentiated effects over time. The first move we make is to unpack the polycrisis to explain why and when an increase in competences may take place. We single out two crises that offer pathways for positive politicisation, leading to increased cooperation and competences: an external military threat and an internal crisis in the form of the loss of a major veto player. In a second step, we argue that the existence of an alternative organisation, NATO, helps us explain where and what cooperation can take place. Shared military threats can lead to complementary rather than substitutive empowerment at least during the duration of the crisis

Modeling Ideological Salience and Framing in Polarized Online Groups with Graph Neural Networks and Structured Sparsity

The increasing polarization of online political discourse calls for computational tools that automatically detect and monitor ideological divides in social media. We introduce a minimally supervised method that leverages the network structure of online discussion forums, specifically Reddit, to detect polarized concepts. We model polarization along the dimensions of salience and framing, drawing upon insights from moral psychology. Our architecture combines graph neural networks with structured sparsity learning and results in representations for concepts and subreddits that capture temporal ideological dynamics such as right-wing and left-wing radicalization

Is humor temperament associated with being creative, original, and funny? : a tale of three studies

Although humor production and creativity may be interrelated, no study has examined whether the temperamental basis of humor promotes creativity. The present study investigates whether humor temperament is associated with creativity. Study 1 (N = 620) investigates the associations between humor temperament (i.e., cheerfulness, seriousness, bad mood), self-report creativity, and judges’ ratings of verbal creativity (i.e., wit, originality, humor). Self-report findings revealed cheerfulness (r = .49, Bayes factor [BF]10 . 100) and seriousness (r = .24, BF10 . 100) were positively associated with self/everyday creativity, whereas bad mood (r = –.36, BF10 . 100) was negatively associated with self/everyday creativity. Cheerfulness, seriousness, and bad mood were not associated with judges’ ratings of originality, wit, and humor in verbal creativity. Study 2 (N = 439) evaluated the associations between humor temperament and judges’ ratings of how well individuals coped with daily stressors. Cheerfulness was associated with judges’ ratings of effective stress management (r = .23, BF10 . 100) and conflict management (r = .19, BF10 .100), whereas bad mood was negatively associated with effective stress management (r = –.29, BF10 .100). Study 3 (N = 234) examined the associations between humor temperament, comic styles (e.g., fun, nonsense, satire), and judges’ ratings of creativity (i.e., originality, wit, humor) in a humor production task. Whereas humor temperament traits were not associated with creativity, comic styles “humor” and “nonsense” were associated with creativity. Results inform the impact of cheerfulness on increasing cognitive flexibility in generating innovation in everyday creativity

Forum : Populism, Identity Politics, and the Archaeology of Europe

SSR gratefully acknowledges M.J. Walsh, J.-L. Renaud, and another anonymous col- league for comments on this manuscript. MB would like to thank P. Pavúk, N. Vlhová, and M. Havlíková for reading and commenting on his paper. KK grate- fully acknowledges the editorial help of his friend Sappho Haralambous-Howe. Naturally, the views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of other agencies.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Transcriptomic effects of adenosine 2A receptor deletion in healthy and endotoxemic murine myocardium

Influences of adenosine 2A receptor (A2AR) activity on the cardiac transcriptome and genesis of endotoxemic myocarditis are unclear. We applied transcriptomic profiling (39 K Affymetrix arrays) to identify A2AR-sensitive molecules, revealed by receptor knockout (KO), in healthy and endotoxemic hearts. Baseline cardiac function was unaltered and only 37 A2AR-sensitive genes modified by A2AR KO (≥1.2-fold change, \u3c5 \u3e% FDR); the five most induced are Mtr, Ppbp, Chac1, Ctsk and Cnpy2 and the five most repressed are Hp, Yipf4, Acta1, Cidec and Map3k2. Few canonical paths were impacted, with altered Gnb1, Prkar2b, Pde3b and Map3k2 (among others) implicating modified G protein/cAMP/PKA and cGMP/NOS signalling. Lipopolysaccharide (LPS; 20 mg/kg) challenge for 24 h modified \u3e4100 transcripts in wild-type (WT) myocardium (≥1.5-fold change, FDR \u3c 1 %); the most induced are Lcn2 (+590); Saa3 (+516); Serpina3n (+122); Cxcl9 (+101) and Cxcl1 (+89) and the most repressed are Car3 (−38); Adipoq (−17); Atgrl1/Aplnr (−14); H19 (−11) and Itga8 (−8). Canonical responses centred on inflammation, immunity, cell death and remodelling, with pronounced amplification of toll-like receptor (TLR) and underlying JAK-STAT, NFκB and MAPK pathways, and a ‘cardio-depressant’ profile encompassing suppressed ß-adrenergic, PKA and Ca2+ signalling, electromechanical and mitochondrial function (and major shifts in transcripts impacting function/injury including Lcn2, S100a8/S100a9, Icam1/Vcam and Nox2 induction, and Adipoq, Igf1 and Aplnr repression). Endotoxemic responses were selectively modified by A2AR KO, supporting inflammatory suppression via A2AR sensitive shifts in regulators of NFκB and JAK-STAT signalling (IκBζ, IκBα, STAT1, CDKN1a and RRAS2) without impacting the cardio-depressant gene profile. Data indicate A2ARs exert minor effects in un-stressed myocardium and selectively suppress NFκB and JAK-STAT signalling and cardiac injury without influencing cardiac depression in endotoxemia

Towards a 21st-century roadmap for biomedical research and drug discovery:consensus report and recommendations

Decades of costly failures in translating drug candidates from preclinical disease models to human therapeutic use warrant reconsideration of the priority placed on animal models in biomedical research. Following an international workshop attended by experts from academia, government institutions, research funding bodies, and the corporate and nongovernmental organisation (NGO) sectors, in this consensus report, we analyse, as case studies, five disease areas with major unmet needs for new treatments. In view of the scientifically driven transition towards a human pathway-based paradigm in toxicology, a similar paradigm shift appears to be justified in biomedical research. There is a pressing need for an approach that strategically implements advanced, human biology-based models and tools to understand disease pathways at multiple biological scales. We present recommendations to help achieve this