Across the third world, the discourse on civil society has remained a key feature of democracy promotion initiatives. Scholars evaluating the potential for democracy in these developing states and activists seeking to effect democratic reforms have focused much of their attention on civic associations. They argue that civil societies help to hold states account­ able, represent citizen interest...

Conjoint action is possible just in proportion as human beings can rely on each other. There are countries in Europe, of first-rate industrial capabilities, where the most serious impediment to conducting business concerns on a large scale, is the rarity of persons who are supposed fit to be trusted with the receipt and expenditure of large sums of money. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Politic...

social capital has received considerable attention in all branches of social sciences, and has recently been the focus in the field to explain about procreator elements. trust is one of the social capital elements and plays an important role in specifying consequences incidental to social capital. nearly two decades ago, robert putnam proposed an explanation of trust relying on associational li...

Effects of neighboring plants on herbivore damage to a focal plant (associational effects) have been documented in many systems and can lead to either increased or decreased herbivore attack. Mechanistic models that explain the observed variety of herbivore responses to local plant community composition have, however, been lacking. We present a model of herbivore responses to patches that consi...

When CA3 commissural afferents received low-frequency (weak) stimuli synchronized with a train of mossy fiber bursts (strong), associative long-term potentiation (LTP) was induced at mixed commissural and associational synapses on hippocampal CA3 pyramidal cells in vitro. In contrast, a weak mossy fiber input did not potentiate when given in phase with commissural/associational bursts. Furtherm...

focuses mostly on democracy (Arato 1981; Paxton 2002; Putnam 1993; Wuthnow 1991). This analysis investigates instead the relationship between associationism and authoritarianism. I explore how the strength of the associational sphere influenced the degree of regime hegemony in two cases of interwar European authoritarianism: the Italian fascist regime and the Spanish dictatorship of Miguel Prim...

Associational effects, that is, the influence of neighboring plants on herbivory suffered by a plant, are an outcome of forage selection. Although forage selection is a hierarchical process, few studies have investigated associational effects at multiple spatial scales. Because the nutritional quality of plants can be spatially structured, it might differently influence associational effects ac...