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Liberals and conservatives in the United States exhibit intergroup bias toward those on the other side. In three preregistered experiments (N = 1,389), we examined the bias-reducing benefits of individuating members of the political outgroup by providing people with individuating information--information that provides knowledge about them beyond their group membership, such as their social roles, emotions, and personality. Studies 1 and 2 extended work on individuating information into this domain by testing its impact on a novel political outgroup member. Study 3 broke new ground by testing whether the benefits of learning individuating information can extend to additional members of the outgroup. Each methodology revealed that, compared to those who read nonindividuating controls, participants who learned individuating information about a political outgroup member were less hostile and more empathic toward that outgroup member. The current studies thus identify a promising avenue for reducing interparty hostility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When people use language to communicate, their intended meanings are not always conveyed by words alone. Instead, speakers sometimes convey their meaning in a relatively subtle, or indirect, fashion, and this requires some interpretation on the part of the receiver. In this study we investigated differences between US liberals and conservatives in their interpretation of conversation utterances that have these types of potential indirect meanings. Past research demonstrating cognitive differences between conservatives and liberals suggests liberals should be more likely than conservatives to engage in cognitive processes designed to uncover potential indirect meanings. To test this, we created a conversation between two businessmen that contained five types of indirect utterances that were chosen from the pragmatics literature. Participants were asked to rate the likelihood of an indirect interpretation of each of these utterances, as well as two control utterances that did not convey an indirect meaning. In three studies (Total N = 664) liberals were significantly more likely to endorse the indirect interpretations of these utterances (but not the control utterances) than were conservatives. Several possible cognitive mediators (Empathy Quotient, Need for Cognition, and Cognitive Flexibility) were examined but did not account for the effect. The results demonstrate an important interactional implication of the cognitive processing differences between liberals and conservatives. Future research should attempt to extend these findings by using different utterances and contexts, as well as examining other potential mediators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Board appointments represent highly lucrative career opportunities for former politicians. We investigate how board service relates to the strength of ideological partisanship for former members of Congress. We find that strong ideological partisanship is associated with a lower likelihood of being appointed to a board after Congress and that this holds for both liberals and conservatives. In addition, we use a difference-in-differences design to show that when the supply of senators willing to accept a directorship increases, firms become less likely to appoint ideological extremist senators to their boards. The results show that extremist legislators are effectively shut out of one of the most lucrative postelective career paths, placing a cost on radical behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates migrant representation patterns according to media political orientation, analyzing the coverage of key-events by liberal/conservative online newspapers of France, Greece, Italy, UK. From our textual and visual analysis, it is possible to recognize slight specificities between liberals and conservatives, but not indicative of a deep change of narratives. In both, we registered a prevalence of the "acceptance frame", an infrequent use of negative tones in texts and aesthetic topic in images, among the "topics of suffering" by Boltanski. Moreover, a domesticity approach limiting the possibility of new narratives of Europe and the rest of the world emerges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following article examines the issue of the merger between the liberals with the people's liberals in one party in 1899, during the rule of D. Grekov. In historical literature, the opinion that this coalition was unprincipled, and was created because of the benefits of power, in which the Liberal Party made an attempt to “swallow” the Stambolovists, prevailed for a long time. The author of this work disputes the stated thesis and believes that there is no “unification” between the two parties, regardless of the signed official documents. The coalition is between organizations with similar political beliefs, and the reason for the split is the unequal positions of the weaker People's Liberal Party, the strained relationship between the Prime Minister and the Minister of the Interior, and some organizational problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How should ideology be understood, and should we be concerned if Americans lack it? Combining widely used survey questions with an incentivized coordination game, we separately measure individuals' own policy preferences and their knowledge of what other ideological group members expect them to believe. This allows us to distinguish knowledge of ideological norms—what liberals and conservatives believe ought to go with what—from adherence to those norms. We find that a nontrivial portion of those reporting ideologically inconsistent preferences do so knowingly, suggesting their lack of ideological constraint can be attributed to pragmatism rather than innocence. Additionally, a question order experiment reveals that priming ideological norms before measuring policy preferences promotes ideological adherence, suggesting ideological constraint is at least partially attributable to norm‐conformity pressure. Together, these findings raise the question whether ideology is actually desirable or if it instead allows elites to reverse the direction of accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We build a model of American presidential voting in which the cumulative impression left by political events determines the preferences of voters. The impression varies by voter, depending on their age at the time the events took place. We use the Gallup presidential approval‐rating time series to reflect the major events that influence voter preferences, with the most influential occurring during a voter's teenage and early adult years. Our fitted model is predictive, explaining more than 80% of the variation in voting trends over the last half‐century. It is also interpretable, dividing voters into five meaningful generations: New Deal Democrats, Eisenhower Republicans, 1960s Liberals, Reagan Conservatives, and Millennials. We present each generation in context of the political events that shaped its preferences, beginning in 1940 and ending with the 2016 election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Procesos: Revista Ecuatoriana de Historia is the property of Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar, Sede Ecuador and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Pasado y Memoria. Revista de Historia Contemporánea is the property of Pasado y Memoria and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Agriculture 4.0 creates a challenge for agricultural and forest enterprises in the form of changes in the processes and strategies set up to now. The ability for flexibility, personal development, and further education will be critical in transforming agriculture and forestry organisations. The transition to Agriculture 4.0 will also affect the need for human resource management in terms of their need and competence structure. This work aims to identify a group of employees in the environment of the Slovak Republic’s agricultural and forest enterprises with the prerequisites to acquire additional work competencies and the interest to develop flexibly. The mentioned group of employees, understood as progressive, will be examined from the point of view of motivational preferences and the level of satisfaction with them. The presented outputs follow searching the sample unit of 2 193 employees in agriculture and forestry organisations. Based on inferential statistics, it was confirmed that the progressive group of employees is identifiable in terms of their education and, compared to other groups, has a significantly higher perception of the importance of motivation factors with the highest difference in the case of factors related to career aspiration and social needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are those things on which Americans most disagree the same things that divide liberals and conservatives or Democrats and Republicans? How has this changed over time? To answer these questions, I use 350 subjective items from five decades of the General Social Survey. Estimating disagreement with ordinal dispersion and using a novel measure of sorting by party and ideological identification, I find an increasing positive association between the two phenomena. In the 1970s, the likelihood that opinion on contentious items divided partisans was low. Since then, this probability has increased. Disagreement has been more consistently associated with higher levels of ideological sorting, though this relationship has also strengthened since the 1980s. I then ask which items and substantive domains have propelled the politicization of disagreement. I decompose the estimated coefficients between disagreement and sorting by item to quantify their contribution in each decade. I find that opinions from two domains play a large role throughout the period: public spending, and sexuality and abortion. Nevertheless, there is a great deal of heterogeneity within domains and over time. Though disagreement between Americans has increasingly sorted, a relatively small number of items drive this relationship in any one decade. Even among voters, a good proportion of disagreement remains unrelated to ideological or partisan divisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate around "fake news" has raised the question of whether liberals and conservatives differ, first, in their ability to discern true from false information, and second, in their tendency to give more credit to information that is ideologically congruent. Typical designs to measure these asymmetries select, often arbitrarily, a small set of news items as experimental stimuli without clear reference to a "population of information." This pre-registered study takes an alternative approach by, first, conceptualizing estimands in relation to all political news. Second, to represent this target population, it uses a set of 80 randomly sampled items from a large collection of articles from Google News and three fact-checking sites. In a subsequent survey, a quota sample of US participants (n = 1,393) indicate whether they believe the news items to be true. Conservatives are less truth-discerning than liberals, but also less affected by the congruence of news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relying on feelings to guide thoughts and plans may be functional from the perspective of the individual but threaten the cohesion of social groups. Thus, liberals, who prioritize caring and fairness for individuals, may view emotion as more functional than do conservatives, who prioritize preserving social groups, hierarchies, and institutions. To test this, participants in three studies (total N = 1,355) rated political partisanship, beliefs about the functionality of emotion, and well-being. Study 3 also assessed how much participants prioritized "individualizing" versus "socially binding" values (Graham et al., 2011). Across all studies, the more liberal participants were, the more they viewed emotion as functional, despite reporting less emotional well-being. In Study 3, the link between liberalism and valuing emotion was mediated by more liberal participants' greater endorsement of individualizing than socially binding values. These results suggest that emotion is viewed as more functional by those who prioritize the needs of individuals, but as less functional by those who prioritize the cohesion of social groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soliciting charitable giving is a day-to-day challenge for nonprofit organizations (NPOs); thus, scholars and practitioners are increasingly looking for reliable and practical segmentation variables that NPOs can use to optimize their communication to potential donors. The present research examines how the sociocultural dimension of a political orientation may affect their donations according to the communication framing used by an NPO. Combining secondary field data and experiments, we highlight approach–avoidance motivations as a relevant framework for NPOs in adapting their communication to the political orientation of their audience. This research contributes to the existing literature by highlighting the conditions under which liberals and conservatives may donate more. We show the efficacy of approach-based framing for liberals and avoidance-based framing for conservatives. We also point out the influence of the perceived proximity of the beneficiaries and the degree of social justice associated with the cause according to the political orientation of donors. This article provides strong insight for NPOs to segment, adapt, and improve their communication with their audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides a reflection on the origins and transformation of Forza Italia from 1994 up to the 1998 Milan congress. First, I will explore the founding myths and rhetoric, then the ideological and organizational paths, and finally the causes of the following changes. Forza Italia was born as a movement with decidedly original characteristics: a light party – as opposed to the “heavy” organizations that had dominated the so-called First Republic – and with strong references to liberal ideals that had remained substantially marginal in the public debate of previous decades. Already after its first year, in 1995, a rather radical phase of organizational transformation and ideological readjustment begins in Forza Italia. This transformative phase will also be accompanied by major changes in the leadership of the party.

Previous research suggests that conservatives (right-wingers) tend to show more negativity bias than liberals (left-wingers) in several tasks. However, the majority of these studies are based on correlational findings and do not provide information on the cognitive underpinnings of this tendency. The current research investigated whether intuition promotes negativity bias and mitigates the ideological asymmetry in this domain in three underrepresented, non-western samples (Turkey). In line with the previous literature, we defined negativity bias as the tendency to interpret ambiguous faces as threatening. The results of the lab experiment revealed that negativity bias increases under high-cognitive load overall. In addition, this effect was moderated by the participants' political orientation (Experiment 1). In other words, when their cognitive resources were depleted, liberals became more like conservatives in terms of negativity bias. However, we failed to conceptually replicate this effect using time-limit manipulations in two online preregistered experiments during the COVID-19 pandemic, where the baseline negativity bias is thought to be already at peak. Thus, the findings provide no strong evidence for the idea that intuition promotes negativity bias and that liberals use cognitive effort to avoid this perceptual bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To successfully battle climate change, it is crucial to reach people across political camps and national borders. Research from dual-party systems indicates that climate change communication is most effective when it addresses how climate action promotes recipients' political values. Yet, to our knowledge, there is no such evidence from multi-party systems. To fill this gap, we conducted three studies in two Central European, German-speaking countries: Germany and Austria. In Study 1, we framed conservative and liberal climate protection messages using values from Schwartz's Theory of Basic Human Values. Liberals agreed more with the liberally framed than with the conservatively framed climate protection message. In Study 2, we framed the climate protection message based on moral foundations. Conservative participants agreed more with the conservatively framed climate protection message than with the liberally framed one. Study 3 integrated values from multiple frameworks, and ultimately conservatives as well as liberals agreed more to climate protection statements that touched on values reflecting their political ideology. Thus, empirical findings from dual-party systems hold for countries with more than two parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In five separate chapters Cherniss examines the work of Max Weber, Albert Camus, Raymond Aron, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Isaiah Berlin, all giants of liberal political thought because of their piercing theoretical analyses. In I Liberalism in Dark Times i , an important, impressive and well documented book, Joshua Cherniss, associate professor of government at Georgetown University, focuses on an aspect of liberal theory that tends to not get very much attention, a gap that he thoroughly and satisfactorily addresses. The problem is that modern, Hobbesian, capitalist, excessively self-regarding liberalism has made the nurture and development of a liberal character a most difficult goal to attain.[9] Contemporary liberal culture does not necessarily promote "the habits and ideals of civility, empathy, fortitude, self-restraint, solidarity, circumspection, respect for nuance and for others" (211) that the five featured tempered liberals (and, at heart, I all i liberals of whatever stripe) would really want. Cherniss then distinguishes tempered liberalism from other forms of liberalism such as the "justificatory or architectonic" liberal egalitarian theories of John Rawls, from those who prefer to achieve liberal ends through institutional restraint and balance of powers, or from the laissez-faire economic approach of the neo-liberals. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Historia is the property of Historical Association of South Africa and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Spanish civil war saw two different Liberal presidencies in Colombia. Contrary to common belief, they did not follow a unified policy towards Spain but instead faced different parameters for action which shaped their response. These policies, in turn, illuminate both the internal dynamics of the two administrations and how they conceived of Colombia's position on the world stage. By providing the national, international and wider structural contexts, this article will therefore use the Spanish conflict to shine a spotlight on the Santos and López governments and the development of Colombian foreign policy during the late 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Liberal party dominated nineteenth century Scottish political life, but the Irish Home Rule crisis of 1886 inflicted damage from which it would never fully recover. This article draws on the author's study of the hundreds of constituency meetings at which the Irish question was discussed in the spring of 1886, the volume and intensity of which heightened and maintained the sense of crisis outside parliament, raised awareness of the policy locally and helped identify its supporters and opponents. These meetings are indicative of the imperative Scottish Liberals felt to discuss Home Rule and declare opinion thereon, and of the conflicting interpretations which emerged of what such opinion meant, what it was worth and who it represented. The crisis arrived at a time of intense Liberal disagreement over the purpose of party organisation and its relationship to 'Scottish opinion', and revealed both a remarkable degree of division within local party associations and a lively debating culture within the constituencies. Examining the relationship between Home Rule and party organisation prompts questions about the cohesion and coherence of 'Liberal Scotland' at both local and national levels. This article reveals the conditional character of party loyalty on Home Rule and the depth and breadth of the split in Scotland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges the existing scholarship's characterisation of Chinese liberal intellectuals as Trumpian intellectuals. By conducting a close reading of Chinese academic publications, lectures and opinions aired on social media, this article finds that besides Trump's Chinese liberal fans, many leading Chinese liberal intellectuals harshly criticised Trump. However, they do not align themselves with American liberals in making all-out partisan criticisms of Trump and American right-wing politics. Instead, their criticisms are mostly centrist. This article argues that Chinese liberal intellectuals' centrist criticisms of Trump reflect their Confucian, egalitarian and moderate nationalist sympathies, dimensions of their thoughts which have been ignored by existing scholarship regarding them. By exploring Chinese centrist liberal critics of Trump, this article brings to light the ideological heterogeneity within the Chinese liberal camp previously lumped together under the umbrella of "anti-authoritarianism." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major broadcaster on both radio and television, Eric Sevareid published a memoir of his youth and wartime experiences in 1946. Not So Wild a Dream devoted considerable attention to the complicated emotional registers of male identity. The tensions between physical and mental labour, the revelation or concealment of personal feelings and the relationship between individual autonomy and community responsibility suffused Sevareid's recollections of youth and early manhood. The situational quality of his masculinity and the confessional imperative of his life writing contributes to the complex hermeneutics and intersectionalities of gender and history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the limited impact of the American Civil War on British Liberal policy makers, focusing on the challenges faced by the Liberal Party during the period of 1855-1885. It examines topics such as the Crimean War, debates over electoral reform, the Irish Question, and the settling of the Alabama claims, suggesting that the American Civil War had minimal influence on British thinking and policymaking.

This article asserts that the main polarity that structures the controversy around Islam and its followers in France is the one that opposes the proponents of the liberal motive—that is to say, of a strictly individualistic perspective that does not consider the historical links constituted within the society—to those of the conservative motive—which postulate the strong thesis of the existence of a coordinated conspiracy of the Muslims. The main point of contention is thus the qualification of the main point of contention is the characterization of collective experiences in modern society, denied by some and reified by others. The shift from the fight against radicalization to the anti-separatism apparatus can be understood as the passage from a liberal moment—discursively based on the repression of deviant individuals—to an ongoing conservative one where the Muslim community is explicitly incriminated as an inadequacy within the liberal and secular society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article makes a first approximation to the electoral participation of liberals in Spain. Using the CIS monthly barometers and covering the period of a decade from 2010 to 2020, we analyze whether liberal ideology has influenced electoral participation. The logistic regression analyses employed include ideology in addition to other socioeconomic, attitudinal and conjunctural aspects as control variables. The results show that liberal voters have a lower electoral participation that is directly attributed to their ideological affiliation. For the elections studied, the differential behavior associated with liberal ideology is robustly maintained even after the self-placement on the left-right axis --namely, the metric traditionally used to approximate the effect of ideology-- is included in the model. This greater abstentionism associated with liberal ideology does not seem to be entirely explained by the greater distrust in political institutions that these voters tend to show. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical works written during The Reform and the Second Mexican Empire, as well as their discussion in the press are significant for the construction of the modern Mexican State. This text analyses the reception in the newspapers of a corpus of representative historical works published between 1856 and 1874 by liberals and conservatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mass attitudes in a monarchy context are understudied relative to those in advanced and new democracies. By employing the case of a monarchy enclave in Yogyakarta province, Indonesia, this article tries to uncover mass attitudes towards democracy in such a setting. It is based on public opinion surveys conducted by PolGov Universitas Gadjah Mada with 2181 respondents. The study finds a strong existence of obedient liberals, i.e. people who believe in liberal views and embrace values of self-expression but are proud of having a non-democratic political system. While this distinguished attitude revisits Almond and Verba's allegiant citizens, this article aligns with the revisionists of the civic culture model by arguing that a political regime, i.e. the monarchy enclave, helps pave the way for the presence and persistence of obedient-liberal mass attitudes. This distinct mass attitude in turn explains how the monarchy enclave has survived for decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research Summary: CEOs increasingly engage in activism on controversial social and political issues that do not directly affect their core business. Simultaneously, the general public is increasingly politically polarized. We examine how CEOs' support for gun control after two mass shootings differentially affected the behavior of liberal and conservative consumers and the persistence of these effects. Using mobile phone location data to measure store‐level visits, we find (a) consumer visits to stores decreased by 3%; (b) this decrease was asymmetric: visits in the most conservative counties decreased by about 5% but did not change in the most liberal counties; and (c) these effects dissipated within 10 weeks after activism. Our results highlight the strategic implications for executives pressured to take stances on controversial issues. Managerial Summary: We study how consumers respond to CEO support for gun control, and how consumers' partisan views influence their behavior. Visits to the stores of several major retailers declined about 3% in the 4 weeks after their CEOs supported expanding background checks for gun purchases. In the most liberal counties, visits did not change following CEO support for gun control, while in the most conservative counties visits declined about 5%. Hence, the reaction of liberal consumers did not counteract the reaction of conservative consumers. We find, however, that these effects dissipated within 10 weeks; as a result, retailers whose CEOs supported gun control did not experience any long‐term, net decrease in sales despite the short‐term sales decrease in conservative counties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the historical context of economic determinism and its impact on the global spread of liberal democracy. Topics include the disappointments in China's political trajectory, the historical roots of placing economics at the center of individual and collective lives in liberal traditions, and the unintended consequences of rapid industrialization and globalization on the economy's disembedding from societal structures.

Though organizations are increasingly active participants in the political realm, little research has investigated how an organization's heightened focus on political ideology impacts employees. We address this gap by exploring how an individual's political ideological misfit with an organization's prevailing ideology impacts departure. By tracking the movements of over 40,000 investment professionals in the U.S. private equity industry over 10 years, we investigate the consequences of the ideological misfit that arises when individuals' political ideologies diverge substantially from the prevailing ideology of their firms. We hypothesize that ideological misfit increases the likelihood of departure, though the effects vary with liberal or conservative ideological orientation. Polynomial regression analyses reveal that the fit relationship between individual and organizational political ideology deviates from the idealized congruence relationship that underlies prevailing theory. Specifically, we find that departure is more likely for employees experiencing conservative misfit (a personal ideology more conservative than the firm's) versus liberal misfit (a personal ideology more liberal than the firm's). Conservatives are more likely to depart than liberals regardless of fit, and departing misfits tend to join new organizations that are closer to their own ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our article describes how users' decisions to share content alter the frequencies of the frame elements observed by social media peers. Changes in the frequency of distinct frame elements shape how individuals interpret, classify and define situations and events. We label this process Network Activated Frames (NAFs). We test the mechanisms behind NAF with an original image-based conjoint design that replicates network activation in three surveys. Results show that partisans share more content than nonpartisans and that their preferences differ from those of nonpartisans. Our findings show that a network of peers with cross-cutting ideological preferences may be perceived as a bubble if partisans amplify content they like at higher rates. Beginning with fully randomized probabilities, the output from our experiments is more extreme than the preferences of the median users, as partisans activate more and different frame elements than nonpartisans. We implement the experiments in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Singapore has been called a state that has "disavowed" liberalism. However, a number of liberals have emerged who see political freedoms as essential to achieve accountable government that acts in the general interest. They draw on an institutional foundation that has been deeply shaped by liberalism while the rejection of liberalism is not based on an ideological alternative. Instead, it is portrayed as a necessity because citizens are told they need to sacrifice freedoms in exchange for economic growth and political stability due to the many vulnerabilities of a small, multi-ethnic country. Over the years, as the city-state became more developed and more secure, the government has liberalized some aspects, although often followed by greater restrictions. Two types of liberals have emerged, one seeking to change the system from the outside, the other advocating for political reform from within. However, both have been unsuccessful as the ruling party has sidelined liberal voices within the party and increasingly insists on the need for illiberal authoritarian rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research suggests that, compared to regular news, satirical news has its own frame repertoire, which differs by outlet characteristics (e.g. medium type, political leaning). We analyzed two large corpora of satirical and regular news: television show episodes (8,925,180 words) and online written articles (64,301,669 words) of liberal and conservative outlets for character, emotional, and moral framing. Contrary to expectations, findings revealed consistent framing differences between the satirical and regular news genres, which were not moderated by medium type or political leaning. Thereby, this study shows how genre-level frame repertoires can offer deeper insights into cross-genre differences in news coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are living in a time when conspiracy theories have never been more maligned by those who occupy the centre ground of politics. Liberal critics and journalists accuse conspiracy theorists to their left and right of paranoia, irresponsibly excessive rhetoric, and fallacies such as strawtargeting, 'anomaly hunting' and 'determined flexibility'. At the same time, major liberal institutions from the BBC to CNN emphasise the risks that such conspiracy theories pose to public order, safety and trust - and to the very future of what they call 'our democracy'. However, we argue that many of the same threats, flaws and fallacies have characterised hegemonic liberal analyses of contentious recent political events in the West from Trumpgate to the British Labour Party's anti-Semitism 'crisis'. With a proclivity for ad hominems, deliberate misrepresentations of evidence and other dubious methods, liberal conspiracy theories have had harmful societal impacts such as discrediting progressive political movements and fanning the flames of war. These are arguably consequences of greater magnitude than those resulting from right-wing conspiracism. Moreover, we show that centrist conspiracy theories often involve the implementation of genuine conspiracies against anti-establishment figures such as Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn. Despite the empirical existence of such conspiracies, we conclude by suggesting that the historical materialist critique of social reality has considerably more explanatory power than the conspiracist analytic. To demonstrate this we point to an epistemological weakness at the heart of liberal thought dating back at least to Thomas Carlyle's 'Great Man Theory of History' that, much like the marginal conspiracy theories liberals condemn, involves a vast exaggeration of the role of individual agency and intentionality - and covert interpersonal relationships particularly - in determining social, economic and political affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author explains the influence of the biography former U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Byron R. White, titled "The Man That Once Was Whizzer White," on the shaping of her research, scholarship and teaching career. She explains how the destruction of White's papers propelled her into archival research and the lessons she learned about the judicial appointment process. She discusses the problem associated with labeling White as liberal and/or conservative and his political values.

Political liberals hold that the exercise of state power is legitimate only if it can be publicly justified—justified on the basis of public reasons. Many find this requirement too demanding and propose instead that there are just pro tanto reasons for laws and policies to be publicly justified. Here I argue that this alternative proposal fails to recognize that there are also distinct pro tanto reasons to have institutional requirements that laws and policies are publicly justified. This suggests an intermediate position between political liberals and their critics, which holds that states have reasons to adopt the kinds of institutions that political liberals favor—institutions that require public justification—but whether they should do so will depend on the costs and benefits of those institutions. This allows for a more practical approach to public justification by focusing on its application in particular political contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current orthodoxy takes representation to be essential to computation. However, a philosophical account of computation that does not appeal to representation would be useful, given the difficulties involved in successfully theorizing representation. Piccinini's recent mechanistic account of computation proposes to do just that: it couches computation in terms of what certain mechanisms do without requiring the manipulation or processing of representations whatsoever (Piccinini 2015). Most crucially, mechanisms must process medium-independent vehicles. There are two ways to understand what "medium-independence" means on this account; however, on either understanding, the account fails. Either too many things end up being counted as computational, or purportedly natural computations (e.g., neural computations) cannot be counted at all. In the end, illustrating this failure sheds some light on the way to revise the orthodoxy in the hope of a better account of computation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the intense controversy generated by the coup d'etat given by President Ignacio Comonfort and his closest collaborators, on December 17, 1857. The objective is to review some of the interpretative lines of this failed political movement, which began the so-called War of Reform, facing "liberals" against "conservatives" for 3 years. Particularly, through archival sources, press and pamphlets, elements are proposed that respond to some of the reasons that protagonists of the event had, specifically Juan José Baz, to convince the President to promote the movement and abandon it once initiated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]