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Protecting Rights

Alec Stone Sweet

in Governing with Judges: Constitutional Politics in Europe

Conceptualizing human rights protection as an extended social process highlights the centrality of constitutional decision‐making as a general mode of governance. Thus, a great range of outcomes can ... More

Conceptualizing human rights protection as an extended social process highlights the centrality of constitutional decision‐making as a general mode of governance. Thus, a great range of outcomes can only be understood by taking into account constitutional decision‐making by actors outside constitutional courts. At the same time, an increasing judicial capacity to reconstruct the meaning of legislative authority is revealed.Less

Offspring Size and Number

Frank J. Messina and Charles W. Fox

in Evolutionary Ecology: Concepts and Case Studies

If we look across all organisms, we find that some species produce only one or a few large offspring per reproductive bout (e.g., most birds and mammals), ... More

If we look across all organisms, we find that some species produce only one or a few large offspring per reproductive bout (e.g., most birds and mammals), others produce 10s or 100s of intermediatesize offspring (e.g., most plants and insects), and yet others produce many 1000s of offspring (e.g., some marine invertebrates). How can we account for such broad variation? In this chapter, we review many of the environmental and demographic variables that influence the evolution of offspring size and number. In the first section, we discuss how the trade-off between offspring size and number is an important determinant of offspring size. An individual’s resources can be allocated to three basic functions— growth, somatic maintenance, or reproduction. Resources directed toward reproduction can in turn be used to produce either many small offspring or a few large offspring. Thus, for a fixed amount of resources available for reproduction, it necessarily follows that there is a trade-off between the number and size of offspring during a given bout of reproduction. Trade-offs between offspring size and number during a single reproductive bout are a primary determinant of offspring size for most semelparous organisms, which reproduce once in their lifetime (e.g., salmon and century plants). For iteroparous organisms, however, lifetime reproduction is divided into many discrete bouts, with intervening periods of no reproduction. Evolutionary explanations for the number and size of offspring in these organisms must also consider how reproductive effort during any one period affects future survival and reproduction. The second part of our chapter considers the evolution of offspring number among long-lived, iteroparous organisms, especially vertebrates. We focus on the clutch sizes of birds that produce altricial (nidicolous) young. Because each nestling requires much parental care, we expect strong selection toward producing the most appropriate number of offspring for a given environment. The trade-off between current and future reproduction can also affect semelparous animals if offspring must be distributed among scattered resources. Many insects, for example, lay eggs on small, discrete hosts, and their sedentary offspring often cannot move between hosts. A female that places too many eggs on a host faces the same diminishing returns as a bird that produces more nestlings than it can provision. Less

Using Special Skills

Siu Wang-Ngai and Peter Lovrick

in Chinese Opera: The Actor's Craft

This chapter discusses the use of special skills found in particular regional operas. It includes face-changing skills found in the Sichuan opera, techniques used by the clown and other skills.

The American Grand Strategy Debate in International Relations

Georg Löfflmann

in American Grand Strategy under Obama: Competing Discourses

This chapter engages in a comprehensive analysis of the grand strategy debate contained in the pages of Foreign Affairs, which represents a leading elite publication that bridges scholarly debate and ... More

This chapter engages in a comprehensive analysis of the grand strategy debate contained in the pages of Foreign Affairs, which represents a leading elite publication that bridges scholarly debate and the policy oriented writing of experts and political practitioners. The chapter also examines how the main theoretical perspectives of mainstream IR have informed competing grand strategy visions, further detailing the concept of hybrid discourses of American grand strategy: hegemonic engagement and hegemonic restraint. These expert visions reproduced the dominant representation of American exceptionalism and military supremacy, while advocating political practices that partially reformulated and negated this hegemonic role, such as the liberal-institutionalist concept of ‘deep engagement’, or neorealist ideas of ‘offshore balancing’.Less