Explore the vast range of titles available.

\"Using human skeletal remains, this volume traces health, workload and violence in the European population over the past 2,000 years. Health was surprisingly good for people who lived during the early Medieval Period. The Plague of Justinian of the 6th century was ultimately beneficial for health because the smaller population had relatively more resources that contributed to better living conditions. Increasing population density and inequality in the following centuries imposed an unhealthy diet - poor in protein - on the European population. With the onset of the Little Ice Age in the late Middle Ages, a further health decline ensued, which was not reversed until the nineteenth century. While some aspects of health declined, other attributes improved. During the early modern period, interpersonal violence (outside of warfare) declined possibly because stronger states and institutions were able to enforce compromise and cooperation. European health over the past two millennia was hence multifaceted in nature\"-- Provided by publisher.

Capitalism, Not Globalism shows that, while much has been made of recent changes in the international economy, the mechanisms by which politicians control the economy have not changed throughout the postwar period. Challenging both traditional and revisionist globalization theorists, William Roberts Clark argues that increased financial integration has led to neither a widening nor a narrowing of partisan differences in macroeconomic polices or outcomes. Rather, he shows that the absence of partisan differences in macroeconomic policy is a long-standing feature of democratic capitalist societies that can be traced to politicians' attempts to use the economy to help them survive in office. Changes in the structural landscape such as increased capital mobility and central bank independence do not necessarily diminish the ability of politicians to control the economy, but they do shape the strategies they use to do so. In a world of highly mobile capital, politicians manipulate monetary policy to create macroeconomic expansions prior to elections only if the exchange rate is flexible and the central bank is subservient. But they use fiscal policy to induce political business cycles when the exchange rate is fixed or the central bank is independent. William Roberts Clark is Assistant Professor, Department of Politics, New York University.

Functional impairments in cognition are frequently thought to be a feature of individuals with depression or anxiety. However, documented impairments are both broad and inconsistent, with little known about when they emerge, whether they are causes or effects of affective symptoms, or whether specific cognitive systems are implicated. Here, we show, in the adolescent ABCD cohort (N = 11,876), that attention dysregulation is a robust factor underlying wide-ranging cognitive task impairments seen in adolescents with moderate to severe anxiety or low mood. We stratified individuals high in DSM-oriented depression or anxiety symptomology, and low in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), as well as vice versa – demonstrating that those high in depression or anxiety dimensions but low in ADHD symptoms not only exhibited normal task performance across several commonly studied cognitive paradigms, but out-performed controls in several domains, as well as in those low in both dimensions. Similarly, we showed that there were no associations between psychopathological dimensions and performance on an extensive cognitive battery after controlling for attention dysregulation. Further, corroborating previous research, the co-occurrence of attention dysregulation was associated with a wide range of other adverse outcomes, psychopathological features, and executive functioning (EF) impairments. To assess how attention dysregulation relates to and generates diverse psychopathology, we performed confirmatory and exploratory network analysis with different analytic approaches using Gaussian Graphical Models and Directed Acyclic Graphs to examine interactions between ADHD, anxiety, low mood, oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), social relationships, and cognition. Confirmatory centrality analysis indicated that features of attention dysregulation were indeed central and robustly connected to a wide range of psychopathological traits across different categories, scales, and time points. Exploratory network analysis indicated potentially important bridging traits and socioenvironmental influences in the relationships between ADHD symptoms and mood/anxiety disorders. Trait perfectionism was uniquely associated with both better cognitive performance and broad psychopathological dimensions. This work suggests that attentional dysregulation may moderate the breadth of EF, fluid, and crystalized cognitive task outcomes seen in adolescents with anxiety and low mood, and may be central to disparate pathological features, and thus a target for attenuating wide-ranging negative developmental outcomes.

Multiplicative interaction models are common in the quantitative political science literature. This is so for good reason. Institutional arguments frequently imply that the relationship between political inputs and outcomes varies depending on the institutional context. Models of strategic interaction typically produce conditional hypotheses as well. Although conditional hypotheses are ubiquitous in political science and multiplicative interaction models have been found to capture their intuition quite well, a survey of the top three political science journals from 1998 to 2002 suggests that the execution of these models is often flawed and inferential errors are common. We believe that considerable progress in our understanding of the political world can occur if scholars follow the simple checklist of dos and don'ts for using multiplicative interaction models presented in this article. Only 10% of the articles in our survey followed the checklist.

Political scientists typically develop different models to examine distinct political phenomena such as lobbying, protests, elections and conflict. These specific models can provide important insights into a particular event, process or outcome of interest. This article takes a different tack. Rather than focus on the specificities of a given political phenomenon, this study constructs a model that captures the key elements common to most political situations. This model represents a reformulation and extension of Albert Hirschman’s famous Exit, Voice and Loyalty framework. To highlight the value that comes from focusing on the commonalities that exist across apparently disparate political phenomena, the article applies the model to several issues in the democratization literature related to modernization theory, the political resource curse, inequality, foreign aid and economic performance.

Avoidance and heightened responses to perceived threats are key features of anxiety disorders. These disorders are characterised by inflexibility in dynamically updating behavioural and physiological responses to aversively conditioned cues or environmental contexts which are no longer objectively threatening, often manifesting in perseverative avoidance. However, less is known about how anxiety disorders might differ in adjusting to threat and safety shifts in the environment or how idiosyncratic avoidance responses are learned and persist. Twenty-eight patients with generalised anxiety disorder (GAD), without DSM co-morbidities, and 27 matched healthy controls were administered two previously established paradigms: Pavlovian threat reversal and shock avoidance habits through overtraining (assessed following devaluation with measures of perseverative responding). For both tasks we used subjective report scales and skin conductance responses (SCR). In the Pavlovian threat reversal task, patients with GAD showed a significantly overall higher SCR as well as a reduced differential SCR response compared to controls in the early but not late reversal phase. During the test of habitual avoidance responding, GAD patients did not differ from controls in task performance, habitual active avoidance responses during devaluation, or corresponding SCR during trials, but showed a trend toward more abstract confirmatory subjective justifications for continued avoidance following the task. GAD patients exhibited significantly greater skin conductance responses to signals of threat than controls, but did not exhibit the major deficits in reversal and safety signal learning shown previously by patients with OCD. Moreover, this patient group, again unlike OCD patients, did not show evidence of altered active avoidance learning or enhanced instrumental avoidance habits. Overall, these findings indicate no deficits in instrumental active avoidance or persistent avoidance habits, despite enhanced responses to Pavlovian threat cues in GAD. They suggest that GAD is characterised by passive, and not excessively rigid, avoidance styles.

The literature on global integration and national policy autonomy often ignores a central result from open economy macroeconomics: Capital mobility constrains monetary policy when the exchange rate is fixed and fiscal policy when the exchange rate is flexible. Similarly, examinations of the electoral determinants of monetary and fiscal policy typically ignore international pressures altogether. We develop a formal model to analyze the interaction between fiscal and monetary policymakers under various exchange rate regimes and the degrees of central bank independence. We test the model using data from OECD countries. We find evidence that preelectoral monetary expansions occur only when the exchange rate is flexible and central bank independence is low; preelectoral fiscal expansions occur when the exchange rate is fixed. We then explore the implications of our model for arguments that emphasize the partisan sources of macroeconomic policy and for the conduct of fiscal policy after economic and monetary union in Europe.

In recent decades, countries have experimented with a variety of monetary institutions, including alternative exchange-rate arrangements and different levels of central bank independence. Political economists have analyzed the choice of these institutions, emphasizing their role in resolving both the time-inconsistency problem and dilemmas created by an open economy. This “first-generation” work, however, suffers from a central limitation: it studies exchange-rate regimes and central bank institutions in isolation from one another without investigating how one monetary institution affects the costs and benefits of the other. By contrast, the contributors to this volume analyze the choice of exchange-rate regime and central bank independence together and, in so doing, present a “second generation” of research on the determinants of monetary institutions. The articles incorporate both economic and political factors in explaining the choice of monetary institutions, investigating how political institutions, democratic processes, political party competition, and interest group pressures affect the balance between economic and distributional policy objectives.

In this paper, we argue that claims of necessity and sufficiency involve a type of asymmetric causal claim that is useful in many social scientific contexts. Contrary to some qualitative researchers, we maintain that there is nothing about such asymmetries that should lead scholars to depart from standard social science practice. We take as given that deterministic and monocausal tests are inappropriate in the social world and demonstrate that standard multiplicative interaction models are up to the task of handling asymmetric causal claims in a multivariate, probabilistic manner. We illustrate our argument with examples from the empirical literature linking electoral institutions and party system size.

Two analytically distinct approaches to the study of domestic politics have been referred to as the \"new institutionalism.\" The fundamental difference between the two brands of institutionalism can be seen in the way they handle the relationship between \"agents\" and \"structures.\" \"Structure-based\" approaches to institutions give ontological primacy to structures and view agents as being constituted by them. \"Agency-centered\" approaches view human agents as ontologically primitive and view institutions as structures that are created by goal-maximizing individuals. The two approaches are compared, with special attention given to the way they treat the preferences that actors hold. I argue that contrary to arguments made by many structure-based theorists, the agency-centered approach is capable of contributing to discussions regarding the sources of actor preferences. A limited-information model of the strategic interaction between workers and capitalists is used to demonstrate ways in which the agency-centered approach can begin to make preferences endogenous.