Political theory often relies on a definite vision of the lack of consensus, which does not necessarily exclude the possibility of some modus vivendi. It turns out however that a mere modus vivendi is widely felt to be insufficient to warrant political stability and a well-ordered society. Starting from distributive-justice issues and problems of ethical conflict in democratic society, it is ar...

Scientific interest in “local” or “traditional” marine knowledge and its applications in fishery and resource management have fostered linkages between the fields of marine biology and cultural anthropology. Ethnographic techniques are useful for investigating local knowledge structures, but these methods are time-consuming. In partial remedy, this paper promotes the technique of cultural conse...

BACKGROUND Periodic assessment is one of the recommendations for improving health-care waste management worldwide. This study aimed at translating and adapting the Health-Care Waste Management - Rapid Assessment Tool (HCWM-RAT), proposed by the World Health Organization, to a Brazilian Portuguese version, and resolving its cultural and legal issues. The work focused on the evaluation of the con...

Recent analyses of the cultural dimensions of protest have gone some distance in correcting the structuralist and instrumentalist biases of early resource mobilization and political process models. They remain limited, however, by their retention of dichotomous conceptions of culture and structure in the emergence of protest, of cultural and instrumental orientations in ongoing collective actio...

Aggregate turnout rates are among the central indicators of democratic performance in the American polity. Despite the considerable implications of macro turnout, however, most studies of turnout focus instead on the micro level. As a consequence, we know little about how local, political, and historical influences have impacted turnout over the course of American political development. The res...

Humans are a coalitional, parochial species. Yet, extreme actions of solidarity are sometimes taken for distant or unrelated groups. What motivates people to become solidary with groups to which they do not belong originally? Here, we demonstrate that such distant solidarity can occur when the perceived treatment of an out-group clashes with one's political beliefs (e.g., for Leftists, oppressi...

Recent work by political sociologists and social movement theorists extend our understanding of how religious institutions contribute to expanding democracy, but nearly all analyze religious institutions as institutions; few focus directly on what religion qua religion might contribute. This article strives to illuminate the impact of religious culture per se, extending recent work on religion ...

Executive Overview This paper presents two competing views on China’s growth experience over the past three decades. For the sake of illustrative ease and brevity I label these two opposing views as the Beijing Consensus and the Washington Consensus. The Beijing Consensus interprets China’s economic growth as a function of innovations in the state sector, including close financial controls, sta...

The present paper addresses a timely topic by exploring the contribution of cultural, ethnic, and contextual attributes to close relationships within particular armed-political conflict. It is based on a series of studies to examine the daily lives of Jews and Arabs with different cultural orientations within the context of armed political conflict. In Study 1, we surveyed 697 Jewish and 300 Ar...

We examine whether individual differences in needs for security and certainty predict conservative (vs. liberal) position on both cultural and economic political issues and whether these effects are conditional on nation-level characteristics and individual-level political engagement. Analyses with cross-national data from 51 nations reveal that valuing conformity, security, and tradition over ...