Support for the European Union and the Role of Inequality: A Cross-National Examination and the Case of the Republic of Ireland

Since the beginning of the economic and financial crisis of 2007/8 national-level contextual factors matter in different ways for individuals in EU member states when assessing support for the EU. Individuals hypothesise that EU member states economic affluence and quality of governance creates the salience of issues. This influences the criteria adopted by them when determining attitudinal factors towards the EU. When applied to individuals in less affluent EU member states individuals evaluate the EU on the basis of economic prospects, while in more affluent EU member states individuals rely on political criteria to evaluate the EU. In the least affluent EU member states individuals generalise their perceptions of national and personal economic conditions to the EU level believing that the EU does not represent their economic interests. In the most affluent EU member states individuals are equally critical of the EU but centre their judgements on the comparative quality of national governments and EU institutions. For individuals the assumption remains that further EU expansion implies continued market liberalisation. However since the beginning of the economic and financial crisis what individuals regard as excessive inequality may have little to do with inequality per se but whether the liberal-market economy as a whole provides high living standards and dynamic economic development. Inequality as a macro-political and economic determinant bridges the gap between economic and political systems at the national and EU level. Using data from European Election Study (EES) 2009 and Standard Eurobarometer data from 2009-2013 this inquiry examines individual-level effects on perceptions of inequality and how this plays a significant role when analysing mass public opinion support for the EU. By using a Binary Logit Regression model, Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) Multiple Regression analysis and Hierarchical Linear Modelling (HLM) the analysis demonstrates two predominant findings. Firstly, individuals believe that the EU has a positive role to play in addressing inequality since the onset of the economic crisis. Secondly, the role to be played by the EU in addressing inequality supersedes that of the EU member states’ governments and reinforces support for the European integration project. Overall, this demonstrates that individuals in the EU believe that the EU is best placed to address market-generated inequality since the onset of the economic and financial crisis of 2007/8 and as a result this produces increased support for the EU. These findings demonstrate a strong case for the inclusion of inequality as a determinant of mass public opinion support for the EU since the economic and financial crisis began in 2007/8

The Law and Economics of Habitat Conservation: Lessons from an Analysis of Easement Acquisitions

There is a growing interest in incentive-based policies to motivate conservation by landowners. These policies include full- and partial-interest land purchases, tax-based incentives, and tradable or bankable development rights. Using legal and economic analysis, this paper explores potential pitfalls associated with the use of such policies. Incentive-based policies promise to improve the cost effectiveness of habitat preservation, but only if long-run implementation issues are meaningfully addressed. While the paper compares conservation policies, particular attention is devoted to the use of conservation easements and in particular a set of easement contracts and transactions in the state of Florida. The easement analysis highlights the importance of conservation policies' interactions with property markets, land management practices, and bureaucratic incentives. Specific challenges include difficulties associated with the long-term enforcement and monitoring of land use restrictions, the lack of market prices as indicators of value for appraisal, and the way in which incentives target specific properties for protection.

Chthonic power versus synthetic power: Iconography and color symbolizing the female principle relative to the male principle

The images depict an exploration of an expressive, abstract aesthetic that delineates visual content with symbolism: depicted by color, iconography, and form. The artistic intention underlying the imagery is to evoke emotional awareness of the possibility that chthonic forces of nature—the mysterious life force generated by earth and the universe—in contrast to man-made synthetic powers—technology, science, machines, war, and ideas related to control over nature—are manifested as a dichotomy of experience between female and male; the forces of nature as the female principle and synthetic powers as the male principle. The imaginative elements in the imagery use colors and forms that are symbolic. I depict irrational spaces and biomorphic shapes, and rational spaces with mechanical shapes, comprised of colors that depict either dominant intensity, or dissolution, of the divergent or emergent entities. Included in this paper are historical and personal perspectives that delineate the emergence of control over nature by man, which corresponded to the subsumation of the female earth goddesses of fertility and life. With the rise of male sky gods, who controlled dominion over death, resurrection, the netherworld, human sacrifice and war, nature became a force to contain and conquer. Herein the male principle is equated with synthetic power that emerged as technological artifacture and modes of control over the chthonic and the unknown; to effect the predictability of the future; characterized as the antithesis of nature as fundamental to the female principle. Synthetic power consists in technology: tools, weapons, and machines; as the concomitant arbiter of order, science, the rational, the objective, and the universal. Chthonic force consists in nature, lifeforce, nurturance and growth; evoking mystery, danger, chaos, and is equated with the subjective, the intuitive, the irrational, and the personal. Understanding the ideas that have personally informed the paintings in this series is not necessary to appreciate the artistic sensibilities inherent in the work. The symbolic iconography and colors are subjective, and are not designed to illustrate in a realistic and evident manner the ideas that inform the work, but rather to evoke an emotional and ineffable communication that is expressed through abstract imagery

Making Monsters: Ugliness, Hatred, and Self-Representation in Viennese Modernity

ABSTRACT Making Monsters: Ugliness, Hatred, and Self-Representation in Viennese Modernity Kathryn Simpson, PhD Concordia University, 2016 This dissertation explores self-representation in early-twentieth-century Vienna, for example in local practices of self-portraiture. Visual artists discussed include Richard Gerstl, the composer Arnold Schönberg (who also painted), Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele. Nevertheless this project is interdisciplinary, and as such other forms of self-representation are also considered – for example rhetorical self-representational strategies by Viennese figures such as the satirical writer Karl Kraus, architect and theorist Adolf Loos, and the young philosopher-psychologist Otto Weininger. The primary phenomenon under investigation in this discussion is the extensive use of ugliness as a strategy for self-representation in Viennese modernity, an ugliness that was connected specifically – and, as I detail, pervasively – to an affect of hate. My argument is first and foremost that obsessive self-representation was a crucial component of Viennese modernity, and secondly that this obsession with self-fashioning and display must be understood at least in part in terms of a related cultural preoccupation with ugliness and hatred. I analyze these cultural currents of hate and ugliness as they played out in philosophy, medicine (especially psychology and psychoanalysis), politics, and of course art history. I consider the significance of the scholars of the Vienna School of Art History – such as Franz Wickhoff, who argued in defence of ugliness. I also consider the role of ugliness in contemporaneous aesthetic philosophy, for example in the theory of negative empathy popularized first by Theodor Lipps and later by Wilhelm Worringer. Sigmund Freud’s comments on ugliness and hate further illuminate a cultural milieu known both for its alienation and antagonism and for its artistic achievements. I demonstrate that at the beginning of the twentieth century Viennese artists and thinkers fashioned oppositional personae and represented themselves as ugly for a variety of reasons: to emphasize the vanguard quality of their art, to grapple with Vienna’s virulent antisemitism, to work through other identity issues, to express a sense of martyrdom, to “tell the truth,” to create notoriety in a competitive local scene, and, ultimately, to affirm the totality of existence as that which includes the negative

‘We treat them all the same’: the attitudes, knowledge and practices of staff concerning old/er lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans residents in care homes

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Paul Simpson, Kathrynn Almack, and Pierre Walthery, ‘ “We treat them all the same”: the attitudes, knowledge and practices of staff concerning old/er lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans residents in care homes’, Ageing and Society, first published online 29 December 2016, available online at DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0144686X1600132X Copyright: © Cambridge University Press 2016. Content in the UH Research Archive is made available for personal research, educational, and non-commercial purposes only. Unless otherwise stated, all content is protected by copyright, and in the absence of an open license, permissions for further re-use should be sought from the publisher, the author, or other copyright holder.The distinct needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) residents in care homes accommodating older people have been neglected in scholarship. On the basis of a survey of 187 individuals, including service managers and direct care staff, we propose three related arguments. First, whilst employees’ attitudes generally indicate a positive disposition towards LGBT residents, this appears unmatched by the ability to recognise such individuals and knowledge of the issues and policies affecting LGBT people. Statements such as, ‘We don’t have any [LGBT residents] at the moment’ and ‘I/we treat them all the same’ were common refrains in responses to open-ended questions. They suggest the working of heteronormativity which could deny sexual and identity difference. Second, failure to recognise the distinct health and social care needs of LGBT residents means that they could be subject to a uniform service, which presumes a heterosexual past and cisgender status (compliance with ascribed gender), which risks compounding inequality and invisibility. Third, LGBT residents could be obliged to depend largely on the goodwill, knowledge and reflexivity of individual staff (including people of faith) to meet care and personal needs, though such qualities were necessary but not sufficient conditions for inclusion and no substitute for collective practices (involving commitment to learn about LGBT issues) that become integral to care homes’ everyday functioning. A collective approach is key to advancing inclusion, implementation of legal rights to self-expression and securing equality through differentiated provision.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Editing to avoid exclusion

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