Search

Does war enhance or impede the long-term community-level development of social capital? While wartime mobilization and collective-action efforts might strengthen social ties, extreme destruction can potentially erase these effects. We use historical aerial photographs taken after the indiscriminate firebombing of Tokyo during World War II to measure conditionally independent microvariation in neighborhood-level damage and investigate the relationship between the amount of damage sustained and the present-day strength of neighborhood associations, a key indicator of geographically rooted social capital. Even after decades of population recovery, economic growth, and transformations of the urban space, the most heavily damaged neighborhoods continue to have less organized neighborhood associations and also exhibit lower socioeconomic well-being in terms of education, occupation, and residential stability. These findings are consistent with the idea that the social capital of survivors is a crucial ingredient for postwar recovery: when fewer survivors remain, communities can potentially be set on a path of persistent disadvantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key feature of parliamentary democracy is government accountability vis‐à‐vis the legislature, but the important question of who speaks for the government—cabinet ministers or unelected bureaucrats, and the institutional underpinnings of this behavior—receives scant attention in the existing literature. We investigate this question using the case of Japan, and data on more than four million committee speeches spanning distinct electoral and legislative institutional environments. We document how a party‐strengthening electoral system reform in 1994 facilitated a dramatic shift in the nature of government accountability to parliamentary committees: speeches by ministers increased, speeches by bureaucrats decreased, and discursive accountability between ministers and opposition legislators increased. Subsequent legislative reforms expanding junior ministerial roles and placing explicit limits on bureaucratic participation further reinforced the effects. These findings shed new light on the institutional foundations of responsible party government in general as well as its progressive development in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In sport and exercise research, examining both within- and between-individual variation is crucial. The ability to investigate change both within competitive events and across a competitive season is a priority for many sport researchers. The aim of this article is to demonstrate an approach to analyzing intensive longitudinal data collected through time-scale-dependent longitudinal designs. Following didactic presentation of the approach, two illustrations from secondary data analysis are used to describe the modeling process in detail. Illustration 1 includes affective response data from an exercise intervention randomized pilot study. Illustration 2 uses referee and player distance data collected during professional soccer games in the English Premier League. Each illustration describes a process for testing and comparing multiple time scale models based on the three-level multilevel model, and results are interpreted. In the discussion, advantages and limitations of the approach are highlighted.