It is increasingly common for social scientists to describe political processes as “path dependent.” The concept, however, is often employed without careful elaboration. This article conceptualizes path dependence as a social process grounded in a dynamic of “increasing returns.” Reviewing recent literature in economics and suggesting extensions to the world of politics, the article demonstrates that increasing returns processes are likely to be prevalent, and that good analytical foundations exist for exploring their causes and consequences. The investigation of increasing returns can provide a more rigorous framework for developing some of the key claims of recent scholarship in historical institutionalism: Specific patterns of timing and sequence matter; a wide range of social outcomes may be possible; large consequences may result from relatively small or contingent events; particular courses of action, once introduced, can be almost impossible to reverse; and consequently, political development is punctuated by critical moments or junctures that shape the basic contours of social life.

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Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics

Sensory information undergoes extensive associative elaboration and attentional modulation as it becomes incorporated into the texture of cognition. This process occurs along a core synaptic hierarchy which includes the primary sensory, upstream unimodal, downstream unimodal, heteromodal, paralimbic and limbic zones of the cerebral cortex. Connections from one zone to another are reciprocal and allow higher synaptic levels to exert a feedback (top-down) influence upon earlier levels of processing. Each cortical area provides a nexus for the convergence of afferents and divergence of efferents. The resultant synaptic organization supports parallel as well as serial processing, and allows each sensory event to initiate multiple cognitive and behavioural outcomes. Upstream sectors of unimodal association areas encode basic features of sensation such as colour, motion, form and pitch. More complex contents of sensory experience such as objects, faces, word-forms, spatial locations and sound sequences become encoded within downstream sectors of unimodal areas by groups of coarsely tuned neurons. The highest synaptic levels of sensory-fugal processing are occupied by heteromodal, paralimbic and limbic cortices, collectively known as transmodal areas. The unique role of these areas is to bind multiple unimodal and other transmodal areas into distributed but integrated multimodal representations. Transmodal areas in the midtemporal cortex, Wernicke's area, the hippocampal-entorhinal complex and the posterior parietal cortex provide critical gateways for transforming perception into recognition, word-forms into meaning, scenes and events into experiences, and spatial locations into targets for exploration. All cognitive processes arise from analogous associative transformations of similar sets of sensory inputs. The differences in the resultant cognitive operation are determined by the anatomical and physiological properties of the transmodal node that acts as the critical gateway for the dominant transformation. Interconnected sets of transmodal nodes provide anatomical and computational epicentres for large-scale neurocognitive networks. In keeping with the principles of selectively distributed processing, each epicentre of a large-scale network displays a relative specialization for a specific behavioural component of its principal neurospychological domain. The destruction of transmodal epicentres causes global impairments such as multimodal anomia, neglect and amnesia, whereas their selective disconnection from relevant unimodal areas elicits modality-specific impairments such as prosopagnosia, pure word blindness and category-specific anomias. The human brain contains at least five anatomically distinct networks. The network for spatial awareness is based on transmodal epicentres in the posterior parietal cortex and the frontal eye fields; the language network on epicentres in Wernicke's and Broca's areas; the explicit memory/emotion network on epicentres in the hippocampal-entorhinal complex and the amygdala; the face-object recognition network on epicentres in the midtemporal and temporopolar cortices; and the working memory-executive function network on epicentres in the lateral prefrontal cortex and perhaps the posterior parietal cortex. Individual sensory modalities give rise to streams of processing directed to transmodal nodes belonging to each of these networks. The fidelity of sensory channels is actively protected through approximately four synaptic levels of sensory-fugal processing. The modality-specific cortices at these four synaptic levels encode the most veridical representations of experience. Attentional, motivational and emotional modulations, including those related to working memory, novelty-seeking and mental imagery, become increasingly more pronounced within downstream components of unimodal areas, where they help to create a highly edited subjective version of the world. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED)

http://zielinskifam.com/lit/gumc_nsci_papers/Mesulam_98_Brain_cog_review.pdf

From sensation to cognition.

Human beings are described by many spiritual traditions as ‘blind’ or ‘asleep’ or ‘in a dream.’ These terms refers to the limited attenuated state of consciousness of most human beings caught up in patterns of conditioned thought, feeling and perception, which prevent the development of our latent, higher spiritual possibilities. In the words of Idries Shah: “Man, like a sleepwalker who suddenly ‘comes to’ on some lonely road has in general no correct idea as to his origins or his destiny.” In some religious traditions, such as Christianity and Islam, the myth of the ‘Fall from the Garden of Eden’ symbolizes the loss of the primordial state through the veiling of higher consciousness. Other traditions use similar metaphors to describe the spiritual condition of humanity:

The Human Condition.

/pdf/social-capital-a-theory-of-social-structure-and-action-4m7poq6byy.pdf

Social capital: a theory of social structure and action

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Applied Missing Data Analysis

The increased availability of the Internet has led to the emergence of new forms of political participation. Opinions differ, however, on whether this has led to a reinforcement of stratification patterns or to the political mobilization of new groups in society. To address this question, the authors conducted a latent class analysis of a U.S. representative sample that indicates that online activism is indeed a distinctive type of political participation. Analysis of the sociodemographic stratification of the identified participation types confirms the mobilization thesis regarding age and gender but finds that traditional socioeconomic status inequalities are reinforced in online political participation.

/pdf/is-online-participation-distinct-from-offline-participation-20rcz2rkb7.pdf

Is Online Participation Distinct from Offline Participation? A Latent Class Analysis of Participation Types and Their Stratification

Self-recognition has been explored in nonlinguistic organisms by recording whether individuals touch a dye-marked area on visually inaccessible parts of their face while looking in a mirror or inspect parts of their body while using the mirror's reflection. Only chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and humans over the age of approximately 2 years consistently evidence self-directed mirror-guided behavior without experimenter training. To evaluate the inferred phylogenetic gap between hominoids and other animals, a modified dye-mark test was conducted with cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus), a New World monkey species. The white hair on the tamarins' head was color-dyed, thereby significantly altering a visually distinctive species-typical feature. Only individuals with dyed hair and prior mirror exposure touched their head while looking in the mirror. They looked longer in the mirror than controls, and some individuals used the mirror to observe visually inaccessible body parts. Prior failures to pass the mirror test may have been due to methodological problems, rather than to phylogenetic differences in the capacity for self-recognition. Specifically, an individual's sensitivity to experimentally modified parts of its body may depend crucially on the relative saliency of the modified part (e.g., face versus hair). Moreover, and in contrast to previous claims, we suggest that the mirror test may not be sufficient for assessing the concept of self or mental state attribution in nonlinguistic organisms.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/92/23/10811.full.pdf

Self-recognition in primates : phylogeny and the salience of species-typical features

How Americans Became Civic

Various authors have claimed that citizenship norms have changed dramatically in contemporary societies. Recent research has studied the implications of Russell Dalton’s argument that duty-based citizenship norms (emphasizing voting and obeying the law) are being replaced by engaged citizenship norms (emphasizing self-expressive and non-institutionalized forms of participation). In this article we use the 2009 International Civic and Citizenship Education Survey (n=140,650) to ascertain the cross-national empirical validity of engaged and duty-based norms. By means of latent class analysis, we show that both of these citizenship norms are indeed adhered to by different groups of adolescents. We also show, however, that only half of the research population holds these two norms, while other more traditional norms are also identified. The findings confirm expectations that high-status respondents with low political trust are more likely to adhere to engaged norms, but the country-level findings contradict e...

/pdf/a-comparative-analysis-of-good-citizenship-a-latent-class-1ypqaz16ts.pdf

A comparative analysis of ‘good citizenship’: A latent class analysis of adolescents’ citizenship norms in 38 countries

Various authors claim that citizenship norms are changing rapidly in advanced democracies, leading to a stronger emphasis on self-expressive engagement and a decline of notions of civic duty. In th...

Jennifer Oser

Papers

Is Online Participation Distinct from Offline Participation? A Latent Class Analysis of Participation Types and Their Stratification

Self-recognition in primates : phylogeny and the salience of species-typical features

How Americans Became Civic

A comparative analysis of ‘good citizenship’: A latent class analysis of adolescents’ citizenship norms in 38 countries

The rise of engaged citizenship: The evolution of citizenship norms among adolescents in 21 countries between 1999 and 2009: