Nomen Est Omen: The Selection of First Names as an Indicator for Public Opinion in the Past

Entrenched time delays versus accelerating opinion dynamics: are advanced democracies inherently unstable?

“…In our model the sensitivity β of the electorate leads to typical reaction times 2T V /β, as evident form the linearized evolution equation (9), where T V is the time scale for the long-term evolution of basic political values. In order to obtain estimates for real-world political communication we considered the case of exponentially discounted time delays, for which the instability occurs at β c ≈ 24.1 for T = 4 and at β c ≈ 50.7 for T = 1 (compare Fig.…”

“…It has been noticed in particular that the temporalities of economy and culture are driven by every faster cycles of innovation, change and replacement [5], with political time remaining on the other side high [6]. There is hence an evolving mismatch of the speed of formal democracy [7] with regard to the accelerating speed of capital [8], of economic a e-mail: gros07@itp.uni-frankfurt.de decision making, opinion dynamics [9] and of modern life in general [10].…”

Things Can Only Get Better for Socrates and His Crocodile: How Onomastics Can Benefit From Digital Humanities

“…Such a classification will therefore need to be dynamic, taking into account all significant connotations of a name, since it is precisely this aspect that reflects changing values in society. 87 Updating TM People with the new material and the corrections that have been published these past ten years, and then processing roughly half a million attestations of people and their names to arrive at a well-structured prosopography and onomastic lexicon that will allow a systematic study of naming practices may seem like an impossible task. Thanks to recent technological advances, however, it is no longer a utopian dream.…”

Don't Call Me Ishmael: Religious Naming Among Protestants and Catholics in the United States

“…The beliefs and norms of these two groups provide a basis for expecting naming differences. Limited evidence from France, Germany, and Poland suggests that naming differences have indeed existed between Protestants and Catholics in Europe for some time (Lieberson 2000:208-10;Wolffsohn and Brechenmacher 2001). However, previous research has not drawn such comparisons in the U.S. context, where naming in general is highly secularized.…”

“…However, previous research has not drawn such comparisons in the U.S. context, where naming in general is highly secularized. Additionally, aside from Lieberson (2000), virtually all research that has attempted to infer a relationship between religious commitment and naming has examined aggregate changes in name popularity over time and not individual-level data on parental commitment (Weitman 1987;Beit-Hallahmi 1998;Gerhards and Hackenbroch 2000;Wolffsohn and Brechenmacher 2001). Using Lieberson's 1994 GSS data, we build on his work by separately analyzing Protestants and Catholics 2 and by expanding classification of names beyond biblical categories to match more fully the differing beliefs and norms of the groups.…”