Governments and regulatory agencies make policy through a range of instruments from soft-law guidelines and executive orders to executive rules with the force of law. Based on her book, Democracy and Executive Power, Susan Rose-Ackerman’s essay highlights the link between cross-country differences in rulemaking practices and underlying constitutional frameworks. Based on the US, the UK, Germany, and France, the chapter illustrates how these countries’ disparate constitutional structures help to explain their divergent rulemaking practices. She stresses the existence of policymaking accountability under the rulemaking provisions of the US APA and its absence from the other cases. Nevertheless, whatever the legal framework, the author argues that bureaucrats should take account of outside input as they implement statutory language to make policy choices. The organization of the executive branch should encourage public input and promote bureaucratic competence. Contemporary pressures may indeed be moving all of these countries toward more accountable procedures – not just to protect individual rights but also to enhance the democratic legitimacy of executive rulemaking.

Abolishing states would not be the end of the matter; the country’s leaders would have to make a number of fundamental secondary decisions. Someone would ultimately have to decide which of the essential functions currently performed by state government should be nationalized, which ones should be localized, and, as to the latter, how the various local functions are to be further distributed among the many different species of local governments – municipalities, counties, townships, special purpose districts, and unincorporated areas. Who should select the decision-maker? Decisions would also be needed as to the processes and responsibilities for replacing the states’ current roles in national elections, in supplying the bulk of the country’s judges, and in the constitutional amendment process. This chapter considers the options for filling those voids. In the process, it offers a portrait of what a unitary American republic might look like without state government.

Histories of international law more or less follow the epistemic position of the jurisdiction in which they arise. The parochial anglophone student of the comparative literature in the history of international law instantly sees a version of this phenomenon in action. With notable exceptions, even sophisticated work in the history of international law in the US is importantly different from English-language work in the same field that has begun to pour out from scholars based in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and elsewhere. In this chapter, I propose that this is because US scholars since at least the Second World War have taken up the history of international law through a set of questions and presuppositions structured by a standpoint inside the leviathan. The most powerful player on the international stage – the United States – has exerted a gravitational pull on scholars writing the history of international law and on the functions that such histories serve.  In recent years, however, the cross-border professionalisation of the field is helping produce histories increasingly further afield from, or at least in a newly complex relationship with, the epistemic domination of the hegemon.

From Brexit to the rise of China, the deterioration of the special relationship with the United States and the return of war to Europe in Ukraine, this chapter will explore how the UK’s position in the world has faced both challenges and opportunities over the last fourteen years. The analysis will focus on how different Conservative premierships used or wasted these global changes, and how it has affected UK foreign policy and Britain as a whole (particularly Brexit’s influence on domestic policy and politics).

This chapter discusses the challenge for entrepreneurs brought about by value conflicts. Value conflicts bring about a major challenge for entrepreneurs, both within a country and between countries. This type of challenge might come from the government or the public. The failure of the airship industry is a typical example where the entrepreneur was caught between the United States and Nazi Germany. This chapter emphasizes that serious value conflicts have always existed between China and the United States but were obscured by the good wishes of both sides in the past. As opposing values have manifested themselves, entrepreneurs of both China and the West face bigger challenges than they have over the past 40 years. The entrepreneur may fail not because their products are not accepted by consumers but instead blocked by the government and nationalism.

Early language exposure is crucial for acquiring native mastery of phonology, and multilingual exposure results in enhanced phonetic/phonological learning ability in adulthood. It remains unclear, however, whether early language exposure has lasting benefits when the quantity and quality of speaking drop dramatically after childhood. We investigate the production and perception of Arabic in fifteen early-interrupted exposure (i.e., childhood) speakers and fifteen late-exposure (i.e., novice) speakers. We compare the production of both groups to that of a control group of fifteen early uninterrupted exposure (i.e., native monolingual) speakers. The experiment included tasks addressing language proficiency, word production, and speech perception. Early-interrupted exposure speakers outperformed late-exposure speakers on all tasks of the language proficiency diagnostic, while also displaying more native-like perception and production. Our study adds further support to the body of work on the measurable long-term benefits of early language experience for an individual’s phonetic and phonological skills, even when language experience diminishes over time.

This study investigates the effect of changes in voice onset time (VOT) on heritage speakers’ perception of Korean intervocalic stops (i.e., /p, t, k/), and compares their results to those of Korean monolinguals and second language (L2) learners of Korean who are L1 speakers of American English or Mandarin Chinese. A discrimination task using five synthetic /C1V1C2V2/ stimuli that differed in VOT of C2 was created to test inter-group differences. While the L2 learners display categorical awareness of VOT variation, Korean and heritage speakers perceive the two consonants to be the same for most stimuli regardless of VOT values. This unexpected lack of attention to VOT variation among heritage speakers suggests that they may switch their language mode to Korean and activate Korean phonology in discriminating non-phonemic VOT differences. However, their responses are not uniform or robust, with some showing a pattern similar to that of L2 learners, revealing strong individual differences among heritage speakers.

This chapter takes an individual-differences perspective on the dual sound systems of American heritage speakers (HSs) of Mandarin Chinese. Based on detailed socio-demographic data and production data on segmentals and suprasegmentals, we build holistic demographic and phonetic profiles for HSs, as well as native speakers and late learners, to explore how different aspects of their two languages (i.e., Mandarin, English) may develop in relation to each other and how individual variation in production may be related to socio-demographic factors. Using multiple factor analysis (MFA), we describe the range of these profiles, identify clusters of variation defined by different socio-demographic factors, and argue that some factors (e.g., age of arrival, language(s) spoken at home) have more predictive power for phonetic profiles than others. Overall, our results suggest a significant, if limited, link between socio-demographic factors and production, but only in Mandarin. We conclude by discussing the advantages and disadvantages of group-based and individual-centered approaches.

Chapter 6 investigates the manifestations of the politicization and securitization of immigration over time in Spain, the UK, and the US, each of which experienced acts of terrorism between 2001 and 2005. The chapter’s objectives are to illuminate the trajectory of inter-political party competition regarding immigration and the propensity of the major parties to securitize and politicize immigration. It plots the interaction of the key variables of our immigration threat politics paradigm as these are illuminated in each country’s political context. Among these are the predominant threat frames, attitudinal influences, popular policy preferences, and patterns of inter-party politics regarding immigration. The evidence reveals that the shift from a predominant economic and/or cultural threat frame to a public safety one precipitates depolitization and a popular and an inter- party consensus regarding immigration in the near term. However, once restrictive policies are embedded and the salience of immigration recedes, familiar patterns of inter-party competition resume.

This chapter discusses the enormous variety of Shakespeare Tercentenary celebrations in the US, examining events in diverse American locations. It considers how Americans used Shakespeare to build their national identity in the dual context of Britain’s attempts to establish an alliance with the still neutral US and of the uncertainties caused by the ‘new immigration’ from eastern and southern Europe. It uncovers Americans’ ambivalent attitudes towards their Anglo-Saxon heritage and conflicting views on the place of new immigrants within the nation. It demonstrates that the US Tercentenary celebrations promoted a more composite and diverse forms of American identity than a homogenising, Anglo-Saxonist model would allow. In 1916, Americans used Shakespeare to redefine their Anglo-Saxon heritage in order to accommodate new eastern and southern European immigrants. While this process appeared inclusive and liberal, it was often predicated on a systematic marginalisation of other ethnic and racial groups, particularly Native and African Americans. Thus, the US Tercentenary commemorations reflected the heterogeneous composition of the nation and exposed its deep-seated ethnic and racial divisions.

Chapter 6 provides a second empirical example of the Benford agreement procedure: here we analyze new daily COVID-19 cases at the US state level and at the global level across nations. Both the state-level and the global analyses consider time as a variable. Specifically we examine, (1) for the United States, new reports of COVID-19 between January 22, 2020 and November 16, 2021 at the state level, and (2) for the cross-national data, new reports of COVID-19 between February 24, 2020 and January 13, 2022. At the state level, we report Benford agreement analyses for (1) the full dataset, (2) cases grouped alphabetically, (3) cases grouped regionally, (4) cases grouped by days of the week, and (5) cases grouped by their governor’s party (Republican or Democratic). We then turn our Benford agreement analysis to global cross-national COVID-19 data to assess whether Benford agreement of COVID-19 varies across countries.

This chapter tracks the ways in which migration has shaped the South Asian novel. It provides an overview of key writers and novels from South Asia and the "new" diaspora to understand the possibilities and limitations inherent in diaspora as a critical category. Diaspora, as a paradigm, often risks anti-historical or de-historicized readings of literary texts and their deep engagements with history. One may often risk attention to form when diaspora becomes the analytic rubric for the study of the vast body of anglophone South Asian literature. The chapter concentrates on novels that circulate among scholars and readers in the United States, United Kingdom, and to some extent Canada, and concludes by gesturing to what gets left out when diaspora becomes the reigning paradigm for understanding the long and deep history of South Asian literature in English.

Some scholars may have little difficulty in seeing the present as a shatterspace of empires and a palimpsest of past ones. For others, seeing the world through the filter of colonialism and imperialism requires a kind of Gestalt switch. Empire seems to be as invisible in the US as in Europe and even its former colonies. The copious evidence that empires existed in the hearts and minds of European populations even after 1945 has been vigorously denied. Conversely, a cloud of colonial amnesia descended in the former metropoles almost immediately after colonial independence. In the end, only those on the receiving end of imperial violence seem to readily frame the world in terms of empire. The social sciences remain doggedly focused on ‘domestic’ questions framed by theories devoid of any reference to time and place. This chapter examines the afterlives of colonialism.