Nations in black: charting the national thanatopolitics of mourning across European countries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Periods of national mourning have been on the rise in the last decades in European societies as part of a wider process of democratization, whereby ordinary citizens have been increasingly granted the honors of state condolences. However, despite their growing incidence, periods of national mourning have not received the due attention in social science scholarship. This study examines the patterns and politics of national mourning observed in European countries between 1989 and 2018, based on an exhaustive dataset compiled for this analytical purpose (N = 415). Periods of national mourning are understood here as instituting states of social exception during which state authorities enact ritual actions consisting in a sequence of choreographically staged performative acts meant to create a national community of grief in the face of what is framed as a socially meaningful loss. Against these considerations, the paper argues that there are two main political cultures of public mourning in Europe. Data analysis reveals that the continent is split diagonally between a sober, Northwestern and Protestant political culture of public mourning and a lavish, Southeastern one informed by the traditions of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".