Implicit Consensus Research Articles

Does Aid Induce Foreign Direct Investment: Updated Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment

Abstract While the catalytic effect of aid on foreign direct investment (FDI) has long been an implicit consensus among many policymakers and practitioners, assessments of this causal relationship remain limited and are not always reliable. To mitigate this evidence gap, this study applies an instrumental variable approach that leverages the graduation of the International Development Association (IDA) income threshold as a quasi-experiment to identify the causal linkage between foreign aid and FDI. The analysis reveals that a 1 percent drop in the ratio of aid to gross national income leads to a decline in FDI relative to gross domestic product by 0.9 percent in 42 developing countries from 1987 to 2019. In face of the aid shock induced by IDA graduation, governments in recipient countries restrict their financial policy openness, through which aid could significantly impact subsequent foreign private investment. Results emphasize the necessity of concerted policy interventions to mitigate this negative aid shock.

Modelling the mind: Nietzsche’s epistemic ends in his account of drive interaction

ABSTRACT Nietzsche offers us an account of how different drives interact with one another; it is rich but also appears to risk the homunculus fallacy. Competing attempts to deflect this charge on his behalf share an implicit consensus about the ‘epistemic ends’ of the account: they assume Nietzsche is trying to provide true explanations of psychological phenomena. I argue against this consensus. I claim that Nietzsche's characterisations of drive interaction are to be taken as fictive and are not intended to have explanatory value. They nevertheless facilitate genuine epistemic achievement. Drawing on Catherine Elgin's account of the epistemic role of idealised models in science, I argue that Nietzsche's account of drive interaction is a ‘model of the mind’ that, despite relying on falsehoods, can exemplify features of our psychology that aid us in making novel predictions. We then see that Nietzsche neatly sidesteps the homunculus fallacy; we can further understand more fully what Nietzsche hopes his drive psychology will teach us. We can now resolve, for example, outstanding interpretative puzzles about the relationship between psychic integration and Nietzsche’s distinctive notion of spiritual health.

Eventualities in Nominalisation Semantics: The Case of Denominal -ment Formations

Many English nominalising suffixes give rise to derivatives that usually denote either eventualities or participants of eventualities (e.g. confirm → confirmation; train → trainee). The implicit consensus in the literature is that their eventuality-related semantics derives from base structures encoding eventualities, and that pertinent suffixes prefer verbs as bases given the natural concurrence of verbs and eventualities. Unsurprisingly, then, previous studies of nominalisation semantics deal nearly exclusively with deverbal formations. However, we also find denominal nouns with the same suffixes and similar semantics (e.g. sediment → sedimentation; debt → debtee), which poses questions on how such readings arise and how they should be modelled.
 In this paper, we report on eventuality-related denominal -ment formations. We employ a framesemantic approach to derivation that models nominalisation semantics as the potential to induce referential shifts on base structures. We make use of corpus attestations and show that denominal forms, just like deverbal ones, allow for referential shifts, but that the location of the eventuality within the semantic structure of the base differs depending on the base noun. We focus on two classes of nominal base nouns with different properties, namely, eventuality-denoting psych nouns and person-denoting attitudinal nouns, and formally model one representative of each class. Employing frame-based deep decomposition, we show that the input to -ment nominalisations systematically encodes eventualities, irrespective of the base’s part-of-speech, and therefore allows for extending the reference shifting approach to the denominal domain.

Epistemic Emotions Justified

The view that emotions can provide defeasible justification for evaluative beliefs is widespread in the emotion literature. Despite this, the question of whether epistemic emotions can provide defeasible justification for theoretical beliefs has been almost entirely ignored. There seems to be an implicit consensus that while emotions may have justificatory roles to play in the former case, they have no such roles to play in the latter case. Here, I argue against this consensus by sketching a proposal for securing epistemic emotions justificatory roles.

The revolution that did not happen: Telematics and car insurance in the 2010s

Attempts to use Big Data to transform car insurance pricing in France have failed. Why? Three possible explanations are discussed: organisational and cognitive inertia, normative preventions, and deliberate strategy. This article finds that moral or political reluctance has played only a secondary role in the failure of telematics devices. More important has been the deployment of an experimental strategy that has resulted in the conclusion that in the short and medium term at least, the use of big data to rate car insurance is not profitable. There are too many organisational and cognitive barriers to the smooth adoption of innovation. All insurers note they all arrived at this conclusion. An implicit consensus therefore remains to retain the old business model.

Rethinking police procedural justice

While procedural justice theory has become the dominant paradigm in thinking about police legitimacy, it has several important weaknesses. First, procedural justice's conceptually essential distinction between ‘process’ and ‘outcome’ is blurred in reality, which is visible both in empirical operationalizations and in researchers’ understanding of police work. Second, procedural justice theory views society through an implicit consensus lens, making it poorly equipped to address police–citizen conflicts and structural societal inequalities. This is evident in the theory's inability to unpack the dynamics of police–citizen interactions and its reluctance to problematize the police role in contemporary plural societies. To advance our understanding of police legitimacy and police–citizen relations, particularly among marginalized groups, we strongly recommend working toward theoretical renewal and empirical diversification.

Implicit consensus clustering from multiple graphs

Dealing with relational learning generally relies on tools modeling relational data. An undirected graph can represent these data with vertices depicting entities and edges describing the relationships between the entities. These relationships can be well represented by multiple undirected graphs over the same set of vertices with edges arising from different graphs catching heterogeneous relations. The vertices of those networks are often structured in unknown clusters with varying properties of connectivity. These multiple graphs can be structured as a three-way tensor, where each slice of tensor depicts a graph which is represented by a count data matrix. To extract relevant clusters, we propose an appropriate model-based co-clustering capable of dealing with multiple graphs. The proposed model can be seen as a suitable tensor extension of mixture models of graphs, while the obtained co-clustering can be treated as a consensus clustering of nodes from multiple graphs. Applications on real datasets and comparisons with multi-view clustering and tensor decomposition methods show the interest of our contribution.

Differences that Make No Difference and Ambiguities that Do

Differences that Make No Difference and Ambiguities that Do

Decoding the crisis of the legitimate circle of coalition building in Israel: a critical analysis of the puzzling election trio of 2019–20

Israel has been governed by coalitions since its independence. The act of coalition building not only forms governments but also serves as reaffirming the ideological and societal bounds of the state as well as reflecting implicit consensus on the identity of the state. The governance and institutionalization of ethnic and religious cleavages in either form of exclusion or accommodation have historically constructed particular coalition patterns, which this paper critically coins as the ‘legitimate circle of coalition building’. The functionality of this circle has declined to the point of being narrowed and destabilised in recent decades and it has become a potential stumbling block to the formation of consistent governments. This article claims that Israel’s recent political deadlock is the latest indicator of such dysfunctionality. To support this claim, this article first provides an historical account of governing contending variants of non-Zionism by putting Arab and Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) parties in its centre to decode the traditional limitations and Achilles heel of the coalition building activity. Second, the puzzling election trio of 2019-20 is analysed as an affirmative case by examining the campaign discourse of the political parties, the election results and the allocation of parliamentary seats, as well as inconclusive negotiation talks.

Rejecting the “implicit consensus”: A reply to Jenkins

Rejecting the “implicit consensus”: A reply to Jenkins

Imagined ideologies: Populist figures, liberalist projections, and the horizons of constitutionalism

AbstractMost contemporary constitutionalists exhibit a highly critical attitude toward populism, seeing it as one of the main reasons for the “erosion” of liberal democratic institutions in a growing number of countries around the world. Other constitutional theorists, who are less hostile to the populist phenomenon, remain open to the prospect of a genuinely populist constitution. Irrespective of their differences, both camps take the existence of populism—itself a highly contested concept—for granted. In challenging this implicit consensus in constitutional theory about the actual existence of some observer-independent “populism,” this essay proceeds from two assumptions. One: like all political concepts, populism is a concept which, irrespective of the intentions of those who articulate it, has polemical implications. Two: like all polemical concepts, populism is a concept that must be “staged”. What that means are, again, two things. First, populism is staged because its meaning emerges against the backdrop of dramatized scenes that confront us with concrete political actors, impersonal technological tendencies, important historical events, elusive cultural atmospheres and broader socioeconomic landscapes. In most constitutionally relevant depictions of those scenes, populism emerges as a grave, if not yet existential, threat to liberal democracy. Which brings us to the second sense in which populism ought to be understood as “staged”: not just as an abstract concept propped up by concrete imaginings of protagonists, events, tendencies, and challeneges, but as a stage-prop: a polemical device whose function is itself dramatizing. Portrayed as a “regime,” painted in dark colours, and situated in opposition to liberal democracy, populism is a figure whose role is to make the face of liberal democracy look more appealing. If so, there is no reason not to look at populism as a rhetorical distraction from other, potentially more fruitful questions such as: What are the actual institutional features of liberal democracy—not as some abstract template of legitimate government —but as a specific, historically mutable, socio-economic and psycho-social regulatory regime? In what sense do such regimes have a “constitution”? In whose interest are constitutional theories that remain indifferent to those regimes’ realities? Offering a fresh look at how liberalist critics of populism project this “ideology” or “regime” on a stage on which it appears as a threat to liberal democracy, this article offers a vantage point from which to begin systematically confronting these questions.

Energy Efficient Selected Mapping Schemes Based on Antenna Grouping for Industrial Massive MIMO-OFDM Antenna Systems

Energy efficient massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) antenna systems have received a great deal of attention for use in industrial network applications due to the possibility of reducing operation costs and carbon footprint. One of the difficulties in realizing high energy efficiency (EE) massive MIMO-OFDM antenna systems is the high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of the signal, which seriously limits the efficiency of power amplifiers (PA). Selected mapping (SLM) is a powerful PAPR reduction scheme for OFDM related systems, however, there is implicit consensus that SLM could not be applied to massive MIMO-OFDM antenna systems due to its high computational complexity and side information (SI) burden. In this paper, we propose an SLM-based PAPR reduction scheme that can be applied to massive MIMO-OFDM antenna systems based on antenna grouping. Using the antenna grouping based suboptimal scheme, we show that an SLM-based PAPR reduction scheme can be successfully applied to massive MIMO-OFDM antenna systems with significant increase of EE. The proposed scheme has very high flexibility with various adjustable parameters, so one can easily choose the settings they desire between performance-complexity tradeoff. Numerical analysis shows that the propose scheme can increase EE by $18.69\%$ compared with the conventional system.

A Strange Alchemy: Embedding Human Rights in Tax Policy Spillover Assessments

In the face of growing concern over the fiscal, distributive and governance consequences of cross-border tax abuse, an unintentional and uneasy collection of international financial institutions, United Nations experts, development practitioners, tax justice advocates, and human rights activists have called on governments to analyze the impact of their tax systems overseas. In no time, this seemingly simple idea of conducting tax ‘spillover’ assessments has risen up on the international tax agenda – advocated by civil society, supported by the G-20, the IMF, the OECD, the UN and the WB, implemented in the Netherlands and Ireland, and finding implicit consensus amongst governments worldwide in the recent Addis Ababa Action Agenda on financing for development. In parallel, the idea of a tax spillover tool has drawn interest from international human rights lawyers and scholars interested in better delineating the respective state responsibilities of financial secrecy jurisdictions largely based in the global North for cross-border tax avoidance largely in the global South. Yet, what effect has this tool for uncovering adverse impacts of tax policy had in practice? And how might embedding human rights guiding principles into its purposes, processes and methods better recognize responsibilities, engender responsiveness and instill a measure of accountability over the unequally distributed power of states to tax the global economy? The article explores how the current tax spillover methodologies may unintentionally cover up, rather than un-cover, wrongs, re-affirming rather than unsettling the distribution of taxing rights between countries. Drawing on lessons from recent practice conducting policy-oriented social, environmental and human rights impact assessments, the article explores the limitations—both technical and political—of those spillover studies carried out to date. The article concludes with a series of ongoing methodological and political challenges to ensuring the right balance between empirical and normative objectives of tax spillover assessments, and identifies various gaps for future research.

El modelo de acreditación del sistema sanitario público en Andalucía

La implantación del modelo de calidad propuesto por la Administración andaluza para gestionar su sistema sanitario se encuentra con múltiples resistencias que dificultan su asunción como herramienta de gestión. En este artículo, abordamos esta problemática partiendo de un análisis del discurso donde, apoyándonos en el concepto de repertorio interpretativo propuesto por Potter y Wetherell (1987). A continuación, presentamos los resultados de dicho análisis en cuanto a las características de los objetos más relevantes que hemos identificado. Estos objetos-organizacionales nos explican la naturaleza poliédrica de la realidad del sistema sanitario destacando, no obstante, la existencia de ciertos consensos parciales (aceptación generalizada del sistema sanitario como servicio público, ineficacia de los incentivos económicos como motivadores, o lo negativo de la intromisión de la política tradicional en la gestión pública) que podrían hacer posible la adopción de un modelo dialógico de gestión que incluya los distintos intereses presentes en el sistema hacia una misma dirección estratégica.

Revisiting the violence of Machiavelli

In this essay I focus on the conceptualization of political violence in Machiavelli’s The Prince and explore the extent to which the appropriation of his ideas on the role of violence by the discipline of International Relations (IR) does justice to the complexities, nuances of his discussion on the theme. Despite deep ontological, epistemological schisms among various approaches in IR, I suggest, one can discern an implicit consensus among scholars concerning Machiavelli’s political language on violence, in that, they remain wedded to an instrumental ontology of violence. Taking as my starting point this implicit consensus and probing its limits, I draw on the works of scholars who explore the rhetorical dimension of Machiavelli’s political theory and argue that his theorization of political violence both complicates and remains in excess of such an ontology: a surplus constituted by the symbolic, affective dimension of violence. On such a reading, Machiavelli emerges not only as a political theorist who grasps the violent foundations of modern political authority, but also as a thinker, whose perceptive account figures political violence as a discursive medium.

In search of coopetition consensus: shaping the collective identity of a relevant strategic management community

While research on coopetition has lately experienced a flourishing chapter, it has developed in rather disjointed and bewildering fashion. This paper aims to explore the various definitions of coopetition and how such variety of definitions might hamper the knowledge accumulation about the concept. We organise the paper in two key steps. First, by means of a survey analysis involving participants to a relevant international strategy conference, we explore the status of implicit consensus on coopetition. Second, drawing on a systematic review of extant coopetition literature, we investigate the explicit consensus of coopetition as it emerges from previous studies. Finally, we juxtapose the two consensus building segments and clarify how from a remote corner of the strategy domain, coopetition has recently turned into a relevant area of strategic management for theorising multifaceted strategic relationships that is developing a sense of collective identity.

Judgment aggregation and agenda manipulation

When individual judgments (‘yes’ or ‘no’) on some propositions are aggregated into collective judgments, outcomes may be sensitive to the choice of propositions under consideration (the agenda). Such agenda-sensitivity opens the door to manipulation by agenda setters. I define three types of agenda-insensitivity (‘basic’, ‘full’, and ‘focal’) and for each type axiomatically characterize the aggregation procedures satisfying it. Two axioms turn out to be central for agenda-insensitivity: the familiar independence axiom, requiring propositionwise aggregation, and the axiom of implicit consensus preservation, requiring the respect of any (possibly implicit) consensus. As the paper's second contribution, I prove a new impossibility theorem whereby these two axioms imply dictatorial aggregation for almost all agendas.

Singing for the dead, on and off line: Diversity, migration, and scale in Mexican Muertos music

This article examines the recent emergence of online debates about Day of the Dead music, one of countless sites worldwide where conversations about diversity take place in the shadow of state policies. There, people engage diversity not through the state-centric “managerial discourse” of “diversity talk” but through localized interpretations of sameness and difference. I discuss the social effects of semiotic processes through which people consider sameness and difference: the emergence of a regional venue for debating contentious issues and the consolidation of an implicit consensus of linguistic practice. Attending to local understandings of difference can reduce the risk of taking state-sponsored views of (linguistic) diversity as natural kinds while recovering diversity and surrounding ideologies as ethnographic objects.

Semantic Stability and Implicit Consensus in Social Tagging Streams

One potential disadvantage of social tagging systems is that due to the lack of a centralized vocabulary, a crowd of users may never manage to reach a consensus on the description of resources (e.g., books, images, users, or songs) on the Web. Yet, previous research has provided interesting evidence that the tag distributions of resources in social tagging systems may become semantically stable over time, as more and more users tag them and implicitly agree on the relative importance of tags for a resource. At the same time, previous work has raised an array of new questions such as: 1) how can we assess semantic stability in a robust and methodical way? 2) does the semantic stabilization varies across different social tagging systems and ultimately, and 3) what are the factors that can explain semantic stabilization in such systems? In this work, we tackle these questions by: 1) presenting a novel and robust method, which overcomes a number of limitations in existing methods; 2) empirically investigating semantic stabilization in different social tagging systems with distinct domains and properties; and 3) detecting potential causes of stabilization and implicit consensus, specifically imitation behavior, shared background knowledge and intrinsic properties of natural language. Our results show that tagging streams that are generated by a combination of imitation dynamics and shared background knowledge exhibit faster and higher semantic stability than tagging streams that are generated via imitation dynamics or natural language phenomena alone.

El ejercicio de la Democracia en las organizaciones de participación de producción: la Administración de Justicia

It has been known that democracy has been disrupted, distorted, amputated. There is evidence that conventional political systems are only apparently democratic. And, by the way of the availability to participate in the flows of information in the field of society can be glimpsed the institutions collapse that have been revealed as power abusers, democracy thieves. It envisions the establishment of other systems better adapted to the latest situation. In economic life, there are also abuses of authority, of power and no misrepresentations. Democracy is circumscribed and, with many limitations, the establishment of objectives. Additionally, as there is an objective on which there is an implicit consensus by all participants, regardless of the type of organization: increasing the value of the organization which is achieved to meet the objectives of all involved, the application of one person one vote rule is not necessary. It may even be counterproductive, at least circumstantially, while both are aware of that pleasure. So until you get to that situation, so induced, conflicts can occur that turn into a negative-sum game involving one or the other. Still little room for democratic decision making and still required the restoration of rights, organizations can provide themselves justice systems outside of conventional ones, with appropriate safeguards, to restore the broad sense of democracy also reaching justice, and are particularly relevant in the field of production organizations, and even more in the participation ones.