All Ages

Low levels of social trust are widely seen as an impediment to economic development and social cohesion. Trust is measured mainly via surveys: metrics are used extensively in cross-national studies and percolate back to inform societal debates. However, the way in which trust is empirically approached is subject to two problems: measurement bias and the relation between attitudes and behavior. We address both problems focusing on Greece, currently ranked as one of Europe’s least trusting societies.

Mention of Greek religious music more often than not conjures up liturgical music–singing to be precise, chanting, monophonic or in unison, neumes, modes, an archaic idiom and, its raison d’être, the Word of God. Parallel to liturgical music but independent from it, flourished for centuries an equally rich and long tradition of popular religious songs. Their composition, transmission, orchestration, musical and poetics meters, linguistic idiom as well as the lyrics themselves, are consonant with the Cypriot oral tradition of music and singing.

Populism has a complicated relationship with power and democratic institutions. Conventional wisdom assumes that populists cannot last in power; they either become mainstream or turn authoritarian. Such hypotheses are arguably rooted in systematic, anti-populist theorizations, which view populism always as a threat to democracy, connecting it with demagogy and irresponsibility and understanding it as a force that belongs to the opposition.

Constantina Theofanopoulou is the Herbert and Neil Singer Senior Research Associate at Rockefeller University and Visiting Scholar at New York University. She is the Director of the Neurobiology of Social Communication laboratory. Her research aim is to understand the neural circuits of complex sensory motor behaviors that serve social communication, specifically, speech and dance, and to identify possible therapies for speech and motor disorders.

In the past few years there has been a revived interest in how international Communism affected politics and society in the Balkan region during the Cold War. Most importantly, new research has convincingly shown that Soviet control was not uniform in the region and that the cracks that appeared on the surface of the Soviet bloc merit investigation as they expose significant differences at the societal, political, and cultural level.