Comparative party finance reform

In Britain, the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act has revolutionized the regulation of party finance after several half-hearted failures at attempted reform. In France, a series of high-profile corruption scandals in the 1980s and 1990s provoked a bout of ‘legislative incontinence’ – resulting in over eight laws in seven years, which profoundly transformed the regime regulating party finance. The comparative analysis of reforms in each country presented here questions the utility of crude ‘constitutional engineering’ theories, and the notion of party system ‘cartelization’ by major parties, neither of which offers a wholly convincing account of the paths of reform in Britain and France. It explores the use of new institutionalist theories as a comparative framework and concludes that these provide a cogent explanation for the alternative paths taken by each country with party finance regulation

Investigating the Relationship between Implicit Theories about Intelligence and Teacher-Student Relationship Quality

This study investigates the influence of teacher held implicit theories about intelligence on the quality of their relationships with students within the context of a school co-located in a secure juvenile justice setting serving adjudicated adolescent boys. In Massachusetts, adjudicated youth attending schools co-located in juvenile justice residential settings have significant gaps in their formal schooling, are culturally diverse, come from impoverished communities, and have high rates of learning disabilities. Their teachers, on the other hand, are mostly middle class, white, and well educated. As such, an immense social and cultural relational divide inherently exists between the teachers and their students working in these settings. And yet, the importance of forming quality teacher-student relationships is widely regarded as essential to achieving a wide range of outcome measures, including engagement, motivation, and achievement (Goodenow, 1993; Midgley, Feldaufer, & Eccles, 1989; Hamre & Pianta, 2005; Stewart, 2008; Hughes & Kwok, 2007). Given these realities, and in order to improve the outcomes for adjudicated youth, improving our understanding about the factors that influence the quality of teacher-student relationships is paramount. This study explores how teacher held implicit theories about intelligence as either fixed or malleable may mediate efforts to form quality teacher-student relationships in service to student learning. Surveys, classroom observation, and teacher interview data were used to increase understanding about the influence of implicit theories of intelligence on teacher-student relationship quality

The Dynamics of Emotion-Related Impulsivity: An Analysis of Emotional Control and Daily Emotion-Driven Urges and Actions via Ecological Momentary Assessment

Emotion-related impulsivity, or the engagement in impulsive reactions specifically in response to emotions, has been identified as a crucial transdiagnostic factor. Mixed evidence from ecological momentary assessments (EMA) underscores a potential discrepancy between the existing measurements of emotion-related impulsivity at trait and state levels. Unlike previous EMA studies examining emotion-related impulsivity through measures of urgency, the current study tested Carver and colleagues’ (2008) reflexive responding to emotion framework by investigating the relationship between emotional control and emotion-related impulsivity. Participants (N = 197) with varying levels of emotional control completed one week of EMA to investigate two central questions. First, we investigated whether varying trait levels of emotional control predicted momentary self-efficacy for managing emotion as measured by distress intolerance and willpower when people were experiencing stronger emotions than typical, where we predicted that those with less emotional control would exhibit decreased momentary self-efficacy for managing emotion in comparison to those with greater emotional control. Second, we tested whether trait levels of emotional control would impact momentary urges and actions in response to elevated emotions among those with varying sensitivities toward reward and threat. Specifically, we predicted that, among those with low emotional control, 1.) decreased reward sensitivity and increased threat sensitivity would be associated with rash inaction in response to higher negative and lower positive affect, and 2.) increased reward sensitivity and decreased threat sensitivity would be associated with rash action. Findings support the notion that perception of emotional control is associated with momentary self-efficacy for managing emotion and provide partial support for the reflexive responding to emotion framework

The Dynamics of Emotion-Related Impulsivity: An Analysis of Emotional Control and Daily Emotion-Driven Urges and Actions via Ecological Momentary Assessment

Emotion-related impulsivity, or the engagement in impulsive reactions specifically in response to emotions, has been identified as a crucial transdiagnostic factor. Mixed evidence from ecological momentary assessments (EMA) underscores a potential discrepancy between the existing measurements of emotion-related impulsivity at trait and state levels. Unlike previous EMA studies examining emotion-related impulsivity through measures of urgency, the current study tested Carver and colleagues’ (2008) reflexive responding to emotion framework by investigating the relationship between emotional control and emotion-related impulsivity. Participants (N = 197) with varying levels of emotional control completed one week of EMA to investigate two central questions. First, we investigated whether varying trait levels of emotional control predicted momentary self-efficacy for managing emotion as measured by distress intolerance and willpower when people were experiencing stronger emotions than typical, where we predicted that those with less emotional control would exhibit decreased momentary self-efficacy for managing emotion in comparison to those with greater emotional control. Second, we tested whether trait levels of emotional control would impact momentary urges and actions in response to elevated emotions among those with varying sensitivities toward reward and threat. Specifically, we predicted that, among those with low emotional control, 1.) decreased reward sensitivity and increased threat sensitivity would be associated with rash inaction in response to higher negative and lower positive affect, and 2.) increased reward sensitivity and decreased threat sensitivity would be associated with rash action. Findings support the notion that perception of emotional control is associated with momentary self-efficacy for managing emotion and provide partial support for the reflexive responding to emotion framework

Tawney and the third way

From the 1920s to the 1950s R. H. Tawney was the most influential socialist thinker in Britain. He articulated an ethical socialism at odds with powerful statist and mechanistic traditions in British socialist thinking. Tawney's work is thus an important antecedent to third way thinking. Tawney's religiously-based critique of the morality of capitalism was combined with a concern for detailed institutional reform, challenging simple dichotomies between public and private ownership. He began a debate about democratizing the enterprise and corporate governance though his efforts fell on stony ground. Conversely, Tawney's moralism informed a whole-hearted condemnation of market forces in tension with both his concern with institutional reform and modern third way thought. Unfortunately, he refused to engage seriously with emergent welfare economics which for many social democrats promised a more nuanced understanding of the limits of market forces. Tawney's legacy is a complex one, whose various elements form a vital part of the intellectual background to current third way thinking

Slip-velocity of large neutrally-buoyant particles in turbulent flows

We discuss possible definitions for a stochastic slip velocity that describes the relative motion between large particles and a turbulent flow. This definition is necessary because the slip velocity used in the standard drag model fails when particle size falls within the inertial subrange of ambient turbulence. We propose two definitions, selected in part due to their simplicity: they do not require filtration of the fluid phase velocity field, nor do they require the construction of conditional averages on particle locations. A key benefit of this simplicity is that the stochastic slip velocity proposed here can be calculated equally well for laboratory, field, and numerical experiments. The stochastic slip velocity allows the definition of a Reynolds number that should indicate whether large particles in turbulent flow behave (a) as passive tracers; (b) as a linear filter of the velocity field; or (c) as a nonlinear filter to the velocity field. We calculate the value of stochastic slip for ellipsoidal and spherical particles (the size of the Taylor microscale) measured in laboratory homogeneous isotropic turbulence. The resulting Reynolds number is significantly higher than 1 for both particle shapes, and velocity statistics show that particle motion is a complex non-linear function of the fluid velocity. We further investigate the nonlinear relationship by comparing the probability distribution of fluctuating velocities for particle and fluid phases

Party finance reform as constitutional engineering? The effectiveness and unintended consequences of party finance reform in France and Britain

In both Britain and France, party funding was traditionally characterized by a laissez faire approach and a conspicuous lack of regulation. In France, this was tantamount to a 'legislative vacuum'. In the last two decades, however, both countries have sought to fundamentally reform their political finance regulation regimes. This prompted, in Britain, the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000, and in France a bout of 'legislative incontinence' — profoundly transforming the political finance regime between 1988 and 1995. This article seeks to explore and compare the impacts of the reforms in each country in a bid to explain the unintended consequences of the alternative paths taken and the effectiveness of the new party finance regime in each country. It finds that constitutional engineering through party finance reform is a singularly inexact science, largely due to the imperfect nature of information, the limited predictability of cause and effect, and the constraining influence of non-party actors, such as the Constitutional Council in France, and the Electoral Commission in Britain

Lagrangian filtered density function for LES-based stochastic modelling of turbulent dispersed flows

The Eulerian-Lagrangian approach based on Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) is one of the most promising and viable numerical tools to study turbulent dispersed flows when the computational cost of Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) becomes too expensive. The applicability of this approach is however limited if the effects of the Sub-Grid Scales (SGS) of the flow on particle dynamics are neglected. In this paper, we propose to take these effects into account by means of a Lagrangian stochastic SGS model for the equations of particle motion. The model extends to particle-laden flows the velocity-filtered density function method originally developed for reactive flows. The underlying filtered density function is simulated through a Lagrangian Monte Carlo procedure that solves for a set of Stochastic Differential Equations (SDEs) along individual particle trajectories. The resulting model is tested for the reference case of turbulent channel flow, using a hybrid algorithm in which the fluid velocity field is provided by LES and then used to advance the SDEs in time. The model consistency is assessed in the limit of particles with zero inertia, when "duplicate fields" are available from both the Eulerian LES and the Lagrangian tracking. Tests with inertial particles were performed to examine the capability of the model to capture particle preferential concentration and near-wall segregation. Upon comparison with DNS-based statistics, our results show improved accuracy and considerably reduced errors with respect to the case in which no SGS model is used in the equations of particle motion

The IMF, tackling inequality, and post-neoliberal ‘reglobalization': the paradoxes of political legitimation within economistic parameters

FGW – Publications without University Leiden contrac

Mister unpopular: François hollande and the exercise of presidential leadership, 2012-14

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Modern and Contemporary France on 10/2014, available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09639489.2014.957960© 2014 Association for the Study of Modern & Contemporary France. This article examines the first two years of François Hollande's presidential term from a leadership perspective. The central argument is that while Hollande has sometimes been unlucky in the face of unanticipated events and severely constrained by contextual factors outside of his control, notably France's low levels of economic growth, he has also displayed a lack of certain essential leadership qualities. He failed to grasp the scale of the economic situation in the early months of his tenure and so lost precious time in fully addressing the need for structural reforms and engaging in a persuasive pedagogic narrative. In addition, his public communication - an essential leadership quality in the era of mediatised politics - has been poor. Hollande's attempt to relaunch his presidential leadership following the disastrous set of mid-term election results in 2014 marks the start of a new phase in his tenure of the office