Wang’s Picnic
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Weekly issue

Wang's Picnic (2026/09/05)

Updated journals
46
Articles
106

This week, 46 journals published 106 new articles.
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Journals Updated This Week

AI & Society Journal of Experimental Political Science Political Studies
American Journal of Political Science Journal of Information Technology & Politics Political Studies Review
American Politics Research Journal of Political Economy Politics & Gender
Big Data & Society Journal of Political Science Education Politics & Society
British Journal of Political Science Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology Quarterly Journal of Political Science
British Journal of Sociology Journal of Theoretical Politics Research & Politics
Comparative Political Studies Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (Statistics in Society) Social Forces
Democratization Latin American Politics and Society Social Problems
Discourse & Society Minds and Machines Social Science Computer Review
Electoral Studies Nations and Nationalism Social Science Quarterly
European Sociological Review Nature Reviews Psychology The Quarterly Journal of Economics
International Political Science Review Party Politics Theory and Society
Journal of Asian and African Studies Political Analysis West European Politics
Journal of Conflict Resolution Political Communication 人文及社會科學集刊
Journal of Contemporary China Political Research Quarterly
Journal of Elections Public Opinion and Parties Political Science Research in PNAS

📚 AI & Society

📄 The Tachikoma effect: aggregation of independent agents, not information sharing, aligns LLM collectives with majority human moral judgment

No abstract was provided by the RSS feed or Crossref API.please use the Read the article link above.

📄 Responsibility and planning amid growing urban complexity and AI proliferation: many hands, many things, many tasks

This paper focuses on issues pertaining to the risks and responsibilities associated with growing complexity and the spread of AI technologies in the urban context. Arguing that such risks are often systemic, it analyses three structural responsibility problems, each linked to a distinct form of dispersion. The problem of many hands concerns the difficulty of attributing responsibility due to the dispersion of agency among the multiple actors involved in the design, deployment, and use of technological systems. The problem of many things concerns the dispersion of causality because technological risks in the urban context emerge from complex interactions among technical, social, and material factors. We then introduce a novel responsibility-related problem, the problem of many tasks , which concerns the dispersion of scope associated with the multiple tasks performed by general-purpose AI systems. Taken together, these forms of dispersion complicate the allocation of responsibility for urban AI risks and motivate the adoption of specific planning strategies. Such strategies require a systemic, participatory, and trajectory-based approach to planning that clarifies responsibilities, ensures meaningful human control over AI, and proactively addresses urban risks rather than merely reacting to isolated hazards.

📄 Literature review on large language models (LLMs) for cross-cultural project management

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly embedded in global project environments, they are reshaping how people execute tasks, communicate, and collaborate. Although multilingual advances and established translation and interpreting practices can reduce linguistic barriers, semantic accuracy alone does not ensure culturally or pragmatically appropriate interaction in cross-cultural project teams. Misalignment may still arise from implicit norms, values, and context-sensitive expectations that current LLMs do not consistently represent. Using a scoping review methodology, this study synthesises 69 interdisciplinary studies and examines what is currently known about the capacity of culturally adaptive LLMs to support communication processes and collaboration outcomes in cross-cultural project management contexts. The findings are organised into four thematic domains: human–AI collaboration, cross-cultural project communication, LLM cultural and multilingual optimisation strategies, and challenges in evaluating cultural–pragmatic performance. The review indicates that LLMs can contribute to selected efficiency and coordination outcomes, but may also reproduce dominant cultural norms. Moreover, the reviewed technical studies predominantly use semantic or task-oriented metrics, which provide limited evidence about pragmatic alignment and relational effects. The article identifies research gaps in AI-mediated communication, cultural evaluation, and governance-oriented assessment and situates culturally adaptive LLMs within an established socio-technical debate about responsible and inclusive global collaboration.

📄 Explaining the AI–journalist credibility gap: generalized and source-specific judgments of news credibility

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📄 The limits of technological progress: effort, uncertainty, and meaningful activities

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📄 Toward an ethical framework for affective AI in education: challenging affective injustice and emotional imperialism

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📄 Beyond efficiency: epistemic well-being at work under algorithmic governance

  • Author(s): Mario Alberto Salazar-Altamirano, Rafael Ravina-Ripoll
  • Link: Read the article
Workplace well-being research has generated extensive evidence on subjective experience and on organisational antecedents, such as leadership, climate, justice, and work design. Yet, these conditions are usually theorised as predictors of affective, evaluative, or functioning outcomes rather than as constitutive arrangements that determine whether workers can exercise professional judgement with practical consequence. In parallel, debates on artificial intelligence (AI) often frame intelligent technologies as instruments of efficiency, optimisation, or control. Focusing on systems whose outputs enter consequential organisational evaluation and decision-making (including algorithmic management, predictive analytics, automated decision-making, decision-support systems, workplace surveillance, and generative AI) this article asks whether organisational arrangements preserve or erode the capacity for judgement, contestation, and epistemic responsibility. It introduces Epistemic Well-being at Work (EWW) as an organisational condition in which individuals and collectives can exercise responsible judgement within socio-technical structures of authority. Drawing on the view of intelligent technologies as emergent epistemic regimes, this paper develops the Human Sustainability and Epistemic Well-being Framework (HSEW-F), linking AI-mediated governance, human dignity at work, and sustainable organisational well-being. The contribution is conceptual: it extends, rather than displaces, established well-being approaches by making the effective exercise of epistemic agency visible as a structural condition of human sustainability.

📚 American Journal of Political Science

📄 The territorial rights of wild animals: Justification

Territorial rights (TR) have become foundational in normative political theory, addressing pressing questions about boundary drawing, governance, and resource use. Influential TR theorists Cara Nine and Margaret Moore justify humans’ TR based on the functional, social, and identity‐anchored normative significance of non‐substitutable places. However, these arguments treat animals as resources, excluding them from normative consideration and political standing. This article analyzes Nine and Moore's arguments to assess whether their justificatory logic applies to wild animals. Using mule deers as a case study, I test whether they have sufficiently weighty interests in occupancy, residency, resource use, and control to ground duties on humans and whether TR theories should continue to treat animals as mere natural resources.

📚 American Politics Research

📄 Inducing Motivated Reasoning: Confirmation Bias and Attitude Polarization Among Liberals and Conservatives

  • Author(s): Davide Morisi, Jakob Bøggild Johannsen, John T. Jost
  • Link: Read the article
What types of motives trigger politically motivated reasoning? In two large-scale experiments (total N = 5,403) involving four contentious political issues, we investigated two psychological mechanisms that could trigger biased reasoning and attitude polarization: (1) epistemic motives to reduce uncertainty, manipulated by raising uncertainty about politically relevant evidence; and (2) relational motives to establish within-group homogeneity, manipulated through social cueing. We also investigated ideological symmetries and asymmetries in these processes. In the presence of uncertainty cues, results revealed that liberals moderated their attitudes, whereas conservatives maintained pre-existing opinions. Social cues, on the other hand, increased attitude polarization in liberals and conservatives alike. These findings highlight psychological similarities and dissimilarities between liberals and conservatives and show that multiple motives, when temporarily activated, are capable of contributing to biased reasoning.

📄 Opening the Gates or Guarding the Guardrails? An Access-Integrity Continuum Predicts Voting Rules Preferences

  • Author(s): Soren Jordan, Ryan D. Williamson, Bridgett A. King, Spencer Goidel, Mitchell Brown
  • Link: Read the article
Election administration is under intense scrutiny, including scrutiny of the design of electoral systems. But why do voters prefer some voting rules over others? We introduce a new construct we refer to as the Access-Integrity Continuum. At its core, the Access-Integrity Continuum represents a voter’s weighting of the relative importance of ease of voter access in an election versus the integrity of an election. Utilizing data from a unique dataset of over 5,000 respondents from the 2022 election season, we measure the effects of the Access-Integrity Continuum versus partisanship on respondent preferences for different voting rules. We show that the Access-Integrity Continuum explains considerable variance in those preferences beyond partisanship.

📚 Big Data & Society

📄 ‘Digital Public Infrastructure’: Cultural hegemony and states’ technological dependence

I present a critical analysis of ‘Digital Public Infrastructure’ (DPI). Through the example of India's DPI, also called the India Stack, I argue that the promotion of DPI contributes to the expansion of technological dependence on Big Tech companies’ digital infrastructure, transforming not only citizens but also states into their customers. To understand why such a contradictory policy has become so popular, I trace the origin of the term to Bill Gates and illustrate how his foundation, the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme and other related institutions describe DPI as foundational digital systems that play a key role in the fulfilment of the UN sustainable development goals and, ultimately, development itself. I situate this discourse within broader narratives that promote technological solutions to structural economic and political hardships, particularly underdevelopment. I then build on Gramsci's notion of cultural hegemony and the literature on philanthro-capitalism to deconstruct the meanings of ‘public’ and ‘infrastructure’ promoted by the Gates Foundations and its partnering international organizations. This commentary concludes by underscoring the consequences of the DPI rhetoric for peripheral and semi-peripheral states’ governance.

📄 Rebooting artificial intelligence: Insurgent Afrofuturism and speculative design

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is hegemonically framed through the language of efficiency and scale, conditioning futures through trajectories of profit and control. This framing obscures that AI is inscribed by regimes of power, rooted in extractive colonial and racialized histories. This article explores an alternative trajectory: approaching AI not as an inevitable technology of progress driven by corporate actors, but as a political formation whose groundings and sociotechnical imaginaries are open to challenge. We invoke Afrofuturism in conjunction with speculative design as a critical methodology to unsettle dominant techno-futures. This is based on a collaborative project involving university researchers and BLAST Fest, a Black-led community organisation in the UK. Through a series of co-designed group activities and participatory workshops, AI was interrogated with speculative tools to activate other possibilities. Moving away from common tropes of inclusion and fairness in existing systems of AI, the project developed four critical orientations: equity; epistemic justice; re-purposing technology and alternative timelines for reimagining AI. These orientations trace how project collaborators questioned AI's assumptions, contested its dominant imaginaries and explored what might be refused or rebuilt from minoritised standpoints. We propose that Rebooting AI is a collective counter-imaginary practice: a way of developing critical AI literacy as collective agency, opening space for imagining technological futures otherwise.

📄 Algorithmically curated lies: How search engines handle misinformation about U.S. biolabs in Ukraine

  • Author(s): Elizaveta Kuznetsova, Mykola Makhortykh, Maryna Sydorova, Aleksandra Urman, Ilaria Vitulano, Martha Stolze
  • Link: Read the article
The growing volume of online content prompts the need for adopting algorithmic systems for curating information. These systems range from web search engines to recommender systems and are integral for helping users stay informed about important societal developments. However, the algorithmic information curation systems (AICSs) are known to be subject to different forms of malperformance which make them vulnerable to possible manipulation, especially in the context of online news distribution. The risk of manipulation is particularly prominent when AICSs have to deal with information about false claims that underpin propaganda campaigns of authoritarian regimes. Using as a case study the Russian disinformation campaign concerning U.S. biolabs in Ukraine, we investigate how one of the most commonly used forms of AICSs—i.e. web search engines—curate misinformation-related content. For this aim, we conduct virtual agent-based algorithm audits of Google, Bing, and Yandex search outputs. Our findings highlight the troubling performance of search engines. Even though some search engines, like Google, were less likely to return false claims, across all languages and locations, the three search engines still mentioned or promoted a considerable share of false content (33% on Google, 44% on Bing, and 70% on Yandex). We also find significant disparities in misinformation exposure based on the language of search, with all search engines presenting a higher number of false stories in Russian. Location matters as well, with users from Germany being more likely to be exposed to search results promoting false information. These observations show that AICSs may be vulnerable to manipulation, in particular in the case of unfolding propaganda campaigns, and we stress the importance of monitoring these systems’ performance to prevent it.

📚 British Journal of Political Science

📄 Calculation and Conscience: Motivations for the Substantive Representation of Ethnic Minorities

  • Author(s): Stephanie Zonszein, Apurav Bhatiya, William Dinneen, Guy Grossman
  • Link: Read the article
Existing work shows that minority legislators are more likely to represent their group’s interests compared to dominant group legislators. However, it is unclear whether this is due to intrinsic motivations or electoral incentives. We use a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to analyze ethnic minority representation in the UK Parliament. By comparing white MPs who narrowly beat minority candidates to minority MPs who narrowly beat white candidates, the RDD controls for electoral incentives since it holds constant constituency factors correlated with a minority parliamentary win. Analyzing over 1 million parliamentary questions and speeches, we find that minority MPs are more likely than white MPs to discuss issues important to ethnic minorities. Additional evidence suggests that narrowly elected MPs face similar electoral incentives and that minority MPs representing minorities face re-election penalties. Our findings are consistent with the idea that minority substantive representation is driven at least in part by intrinsic motivations.

📚 British Journal of Sociology

📄 Unkept Promises, Unequal Worlds: A Sociological Study of Intimate Abuse in Promise‐to‐Marry Cases in India

The article presents a sociological study of promise‐to‐marry ‘rape’ cases in India to illuminate the inner lives of intimacies. It argues that promise‐to‐marry cases cannot be understood merely as instances of deceptive sex, wherein the consent of the victim is vitiated by a false promise of marriage as a pretext for sexual intercourse. Rather, through an ethnographic study of promise‐to‐marry cases in Delhi, it explicates the myriad forms of harms including explicit physical and sexual violence, infringement of reproductive autonomy, economic fraud, emotional manipulation and abandonment experienced by women in intimate and acquaintance contexts. In doing this, it presents a methodological insight in terms of studying intimacy through sites of violence complaints. It also foregrounds victim narratives from the field to highlight how caste‐endogamous marriage, intimacy and sexuality remain intertwined in the socio‐cultural context of India, even as youth forge romantic ties across kinship and community boundaries, more than before. It is argued that promise‐to‐marry cases provide an unexplored but useful avenue for understanding women's experiences of romance and coercive control in pre‐marital relationships in India. The article thereby contributes to the fields of sociology of law, feminist literature on domestic and intimate partner violence, and sociological studies on intimacy and marriage.

📄 From Margins to Privilege: Revisiting the Sociology of Youth Subcultures Through Omnivorousness

Advantaged young people may engage in transgressive or non‐conformist subcultural practices usually associated with disadvantaged youth. When undertaken from privileged positions, however, these practices can carry markedly different meanings, costs and rewards. Sociological research on youth subcultures has illuminated the marginalised side of this dynamic, analysing deviant and oppositional practices as collective responses to blocked opportunities and exclusion from mainstream recognition. However, why young people with more secure and legitimate routes to recognition and success may nonetheless be drawn to risk‐bearing subcultural practices remains under‐theorised. This article addresses this asymmetry by reframing advantaged youths' subcultural participation as a specific, transgressive form of boundary‐crossing cultural omnivorousness, and by analysing advantaged and disadvantaged youth within a field‐oriented framework. Extending Bourdieu's logic of condescension into the domain of risk‐bearing participation, it proposes the concept of transgressive condescension , to capture how privileged actors can convert visible transgression into recognition and advantage. This reveals a double misrecognition: the visibility of privileged transgression obscures the capital buffers that make such risk‐taking manageable, while the absence of such buffers, which renders similar practices acutely costly for disadvantaged youth, is also obscured. The article thus develops the Bourdieusian turn in subcultural studies towards a more symmetrical analysis of participation across social positions, and extends cultural omnivore research beyond taste and consumption by treating transgressive boundary‐crossing as a risk‐bearing practice, whose authenticity effects, costs and convertibility are unequally structured by class position and capital configuration.

📚 Comparative Political Studies

📄 Collective Victimhood Beliefs and Conflict-Related Attitudes: A Meta-Analysis

  • Author(s): Marko Kljajić, Nadav Shelef, Ethan vanderWilden
  • Link: Read the article
This study conducts a meta-analysis of the impact of collective victimhood beliefs on conflict-related attitudes. Examining 745 estimates from 103 articles, we assess the relationship between collective victimhood beliefs and hawkishness, reconciliation, out-group exclusion, and in-group attachment. While we find an aggregate positive association between collective victimhood beliefs and conflict-enhancing attitudes, there is an important distinction between non-inclusive and inclusive forms of collective victimhood: non-inclusive collective victimhood beliefs are associated with greater conflict-enhancing attitudes, whereas inclusive collective victimhood beliefs generally have opposing effects. These results are consistent across a wide range of geographic contexts, types of conflict experiences, and identities. They also extend to the association between collective victimhood beliefs and the emotions and cognitive perspectives that are often identified as mediators. Methodologically, observational and experimental studies reach similar conclusions about the direction of collective victimhood beliefs' impact, but experimental studies find consistently smaller effect sizes.

📚 Democratization

📄 Youth movements and opposition parties in times of autocratization: Turkey and Serbia

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📄 Post-crisis adaptation in communist regimes

  • Author(s): Michael Bernhard, Martin K. Dimitrov, Petra Guasti
  • Link: Read the article
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📄 When leaders eclipse institutions: the leader–institution trust gap and anti-democratic attitudes in South Korea and the United States

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📚 Discourse & Society

📄 ‘Please don’t insult Dog. He is a loyal friend!’ The use of animal metaphors for evaluation and positioning on a Chinese Political Web Forum

This study focuses on how animal metaphors are deployed by Chinese social media users to evaluate others and negotiate social positioning in online grassroots political discourse. Animal metaphors are important devices for expressing judgement of human behaviour. This is due, first, to perceived similarities and differences between humans and (other) animals and, second, due to the ‘Great Chain’ idea of human superiority and dominance over animals. Animal metaphors are commonly deployed in communication that is interpersonally volatile, such as on social media, regardless of what language this occurs in. Through an analysis of the interpersonal systems of appraisal and involvement , we found that contributors often adopt highly charged animal metaphors to negatively evaluate each other and to create and maintain a left-right political division.

📄 Toward integrative triangulation in discourse-historical approach

This paper proposes a novel mode of Discourse-Historical Approach that features integrative triangulation of quantitative and qualitative analyses. The integrative triangulation is achieved by following a rule-bound and systematic discourse analytic procedure with rules derived from a diachronic discourse model that is constructed by explicating premises in the Discourse-Historical Approach, and by using data-driven inductive inference with three supra-lexical quantifiable components – propositions, sinsign topics, and discursive strategies. The case study with American identity construction as the macro-topic and the U.S. presidential inaugural addresses as the discourse corpus shows that the integrative mode produces explicit and sufficient evidence that not only complements, validates, and expands existent findings, but also reveals novel insights on the macro-topic, proving that integrative triangulation of quantitative and qualitative analyses promotes credibility, explicitness, transparency, and replicability in the Discourse-Historical Approach.

📄 “Foreigners who come to live in Monaco are rich, but normal Monegasques are normal people”: Exploring how Monegasque citizens are constructed in entertainment documentaries about the super-rich in Monaco

The Principality of Monaco presents an interesting case given its policies as a tax haven and limited access to citizenship. Discursive psychologists have found that citizenship discourse involves talk about effortfulness and good behaviour. Exploring the positioning of Monegasque people provides an opportunity to examine how citizenship is negotiated in an environment with high levels of wealth inequality. The data was comprised of a documentary series, Inside Monaco: Playground of the rich , broadcast in the UK. Discursive Psychology, a social constructionist approach, explored how psychological concepts such as identity were constructed. The analysis found a dilemmatic positioning of Monegasque people as both productive citizens and subjugated within an elitist hierarchy. Citizenship is warranted as a birth right that entitles people to state support to protect them from extreme inequality. The positioning of Monegasque people as ordinary in an extraordinary environment minimises the impact of super-rich migration and wealth inequality.

📚 Electoral Studies

📄 Divided beyond politics: How perceptions of non-political differentness are linked to affective polarization among citizens

  • Author(s): Ine Goovaerts, Artemis Tsoulou-Malakoudi, Gaetano Scaduto, Fernando Feitosa, Jonas Lefevere
  • Link: Read the article
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📄 Does gender enter the ballot box? Uncovering gender dynamics in Spanish voting patterns

  • Author(s): Alejandro Tirado Castro, Marta Fraile, Susan Banducci
  • Link: Read the article
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📄 Educational contexts and the gender gap in party support – an analysis of young voters in Germany

  • Author(s): Sigrid Roßteutscher, Susanne Garritzmann, Birgit Becker, Max P. Jansen
  • Link: Read the article
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📚 European Sociological Review

📄 Estimating the influence of learning disabilities on educational attainment: a sibling comparison analysis with a gender perspective

This study investigated the longitudinal relationship between learning disabilities (LD) in adolescence and educational attainment, as well as the underlying mechanisms behind this relationship. Using a sibling sample from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (N = 1,710), this study employed sibling fixed effects models to account for unobserved family-level characteristics such as genes and early childhood family and social context. Sobel mediation analyses were performed on a gender-stratified sample to investigate the following mechanisms: educational aspirations and expectations, educational effort, and school-based relationships. Sibling fixed effects estimates revealed that LD in adolescence was negatively associated with years of schooling completed in adulthood (b = −0.494, P < 0.01). Gender-stratified models showed that only the association for girls was statistically significant (b = −0.689, P < 0.05). Among girls, this association was partially explained by a combination of educational aspirations and expectations, educational effort, and school-based relationships, with educational aspirations and expectations being the most salient mechanism. These findings highlight that LD is not only an individual cognitive designation but also a socially mediated experience with long-term educational consequences, especially for girls. Policymakers and practitioners may consider developing and implementing interventions that address both educational and social challenges faced by girls with LD.

📚 International Political Science Review

📄 Autocratization and citizens’ understanding of eemocracy: Evidence from Turkey

This article examines how citizens’ understandings of democracy change during autocratization. It argues that democratic learning shifts through two linked pathways: lived experience of democratic institutions; and exposure to elite discourse. Turkey under the Justice and Development Party offers a most-likely case, combining prolonged autocratization, intensive democratic reframing and repeated survey data. The study first traces changes in learning conditions through narrowing opposition space, civil society erosion, media capture and shifts in regime discourse. It then analyses World Values Survey data from 2007, 2011 and 2018 using an age−period−cohort-informed design. Liberal−procedural understandings decline across waves, with a sharper early drop in the liberal dimension and a steeper late decline among government supporters. Social understandings follow a nonlinear pattern, rising first and then falling, especially on equality. The findings suggest that autocratization may coincide with shifts in citizens’ democratic benchmarks.

📄 Political cultural roots of assertive foreign policy roles: A cross-country speech analysis (2000–2024)

This study explores the political cultural foundations of assertive foreign policy roles. By utilizing cultural dimensions widely used in comparative behavioral research, it shows how leaders’ emphasis on different cultural frames influences their choice of assertive foreign policy roles differently. For this purpose, the study uses a novel, longitudinal dataset comprising 2000 speech texts delivered between 2000 and 2024 by leaders in Germany, Russia, Türkiye, the UK, and the US. The findings provide evidence of a positive and significant influence of survival values, and a negative and significant influence of self-expressive values and rational-secular values on the use of assertive roles. The present study bridges comparative behavioral research and foreign policy analysis within a single analytical framework, and, by doing so, it contributes to the systematic, comparative study of culture in foreign policy analysis.

📚 Journal of Asian and African Studies

📄 Meta-analysis of irrigation in Ethiopia: A comprehensive systematic review

Only 3% of the irrigated land is in Ethiopia, which has 5.3 million hectares of potential irrigated land. Schemes are only 25%-30% efficient, while traditional surface irrigation systems lose more than half of diverted water to seepage and evaporation, and drip irrigation has much higher productivity. The small-scale irrigation and climate-smart practices resulted in a 69.9% decrease in household food insecurity and a 90.5% increase in dietary diversity. Expansion is constrained by technical, institutional, and socioeconomic barriers. Targeted investments in irrigation infrastructure, capacity building, and enabling policies are needed to realize Ethiopia’s irrigation potential.

📄 WITHDRAWAL – Administrative Duplicate Publication: Navigating AI in Digital Leisure: A Qualitative Study on Motives, Engagement Challenges, and Psychological Consequences Among Urban Youth

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📄 Legal pluralism, perceived tenure security, and distress diversification: Tribal land and livelihoods in Jharkhand, India

The study examines the relationship between legal pluralism, perceived tenure security, and distress-driven livelihood diversification among tribal households in Jharkhand, India. It develops tenure security indices to show the gap between de jure and de facto tenure and to assess how the coexistence of legal and customary tenure affects land tenure and perceptions of security. An ordinal logistic regression model is used to identify the determinants of perceived tenure security. A multinomial logistic regression model is used to examine how perceived tenure security and livelihood assets influence livelihood activity choices. Using primary data from 435 tribal households from nine districts, the study finds a clear gap between de jure and de facto tenure and, at the de facto level, between legal and customary tenure, with legal tenure showing greater variability than customary tenure. Perceived tenure security is strongly influenced by legal tenure conditions and land accessibility, while higher customary tenure variability is associated with lower perceived tenure security. The livelihood clustering reveals three main configurations: daily wage and forest-based income, livestock-based income, and agriculture-based income. The analysis shows that diversification into wage and forest-based activities is largely distress-driven rather than opportunity-led.

📄 Migration from Ghana to the Gulf States: A scoping review

Evidence shows that Gulf States have become key destinations for Ghanaian migrants, mainly driven by expanding economic prospects and restrictive migration policies in Western countries. However, this increasing trend remains underexplored. Guided by Arksey and O’Malley’s methodological framework, this study conducted a scoping review of the existing literature on the Ghana–Gulf migration corridor using databases such as Scopus, Google Scholar, Science Direct, and Web of Science. The thematic analysis found that while migration to the Gulf offers economic opportunities, it also exposes migrants to significant vulnerabilities, including exploitation, food insecurity, and limited institutional protections. Gender inequalities are particularly evident, with women, especially domestic workers, facing higher risks of abuse and marginalization. Although Ghana–Gulf migration continues to be an important livelihood strategy, it is embedded within systems of opportunity, precarity, and inequality. Addressing these issues through research and policy actions is crucial to promoting fair and sustainable migration outcomes.

📚 Journal of Conflict Resolution

📄 Getting Religion Wrong A Response to Toft’s “Getting Religion Right”

  • Author(s): Nils-Christian Bormann, Lars-Erik Cederman, Manuel Vogt
  • Link: Read the article
In a recent contribution to the Journal of Conflict Resolution , Monica Toft presents new data and analysis that suggest a rise in religious civil war, and question our findings on linguistic and religious cleavages' effect on armed conflict onset. We welcome Toft’s contribution, in particular her replication of our results, and the very well documented new dataset on civil wars. Yet we disagree with several of Toft’s specific claims and raise three larger questions about the study of religion and armed conflict. First, what is the relevant counterfactual when analyzing the religion-conflict link? Second, how useful is it to classify entire conflicts as religious? Third, what is the mechanism that links religion and conflict? Revisiting her analysis and adding new empirical evidence, we show that Toft fails to undermine our earlier results and does not find support for her own theoretical mechanism of religious outbidding in the Muslim world.

📚 Journal of Contemporary China

📄 How Does Integrated Ethnic Education Policy Affect Tibetan Students’ National Identity?

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📄 From Securitization to Desecuritization: The Dynamics of China’s COVID-19 Control Policy Change

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📄 The Political Logic of the Developmental State: Causes of Hits and Misses in China’s Industrial Policies

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📄 Reputational Governance and Party-State Capitalism: A Tale of Two Chinese-Sponsored Railways in Africa

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📄 From Crisis Management to Infrastructural Power: How China Selectively Institutionalized COVID-19 Governance

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📄 Beyond the Belt and Road: China’s Competitive Statecraft and Free Trade Agreement Push

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📄 Marketization, Authoritarian Government, and Nonprofit Scaling-Up in China: A Case of Adolescent Sexuality Education

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📄 Peaceful Reunification or Else: Untangling the China-Taiwan Gordian Knot

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📄 The Power of Extended Contact: The Attitudes of National Quemoy University Students Towards China

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📄 How Taiwanese Media Reinforces China’s Domestic Propaganda

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📄 Masculine Repertories: Family and Articulations of Masculinities Among Chinese Migrant Young Gay Men

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📚 Journal of Elections Public Opinion and Parties

📄 Trust, ideology, and vaccine conspiracy beliefs during the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain

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📚 Journal of Experimental Political Science

📄 Shared Discrimination’s Effect on Solidarity between People of Color Is Uniform Across Major Racial, Political, and Social Differences

Solidarity between people of color (PoC) is key to understanding multiracial coalition-building in the United States. However, limited statistical power has constrained research on whether shared discrimination’s effect on solidarity is reliably moderated by differences in race, political orientation, and social background, which structure the internal diversity of racially stigmatized subgroups within the mega-category, PoC. We report a preregistered meta-analysis of eight published experiments ( N = 5,813), which used a common design to test shared discrimination’s effects among Black Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and Middle Eastern and North African individuals. Despite known heterogeneity in these group’s social and political attitudes, we find that shared discrimination’s effect on solidarity is statistically uniform across race/ethnicity, partisanship, ideology, nativity, education, gender, and age. These results indicate that shared discrimination appeals broadly and reliably activate solidarity across diverse PoC subgroups, further affirming this psychological mechanism’s crucial role in fostering robust multiracial coalitions.

📚 Journal of Information Technology & Politics

📄 Defining political influencers: a scoping review and young adults’ perspectives

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📚 Journal of Political Economy

📄 Environmental Consequences of Hydrocarbon Infrastructure Policy

Journal of Political Economy, Ahead of Print.

📄 Peer Effects and Rank Concerns in the Classroom

Journal of Political Economy, Ahead of Print.

📄 Mis(sed) Diagnosis: Physician Decision-Making and ADHD

Journal of Political Economy, Ahead of Print.

📚 Journal of Political Science Education

📄 Balance of Power Tug-of-War: Teaching Polarity and Stability Through Embodied, Problem-Based Play

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📚 Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology

📄 A Statewide Experiment on the Use of University Branding on Survey Mail Recruitment Envelopes

University branding is often included on envelopes used for mail recruitment materials for university-sponsored or administered surveys based on the assumption that signaling the university sponsorship improves the response rate. This postulation was experimentally tested by randomizing whether or not the university name and logo were included above the return address on the envelopes used to send recruitment materials for a statewide mixed-mode survey fielded with both an address-based sample (ABS) and an address-appended random digit dial (RDD) sample. For both samples, the statewide response rate was marginally lower when the university affiliation was included on the recruitment envelopes by 1.4 (ABS) and 1.7 (RDD) percentage points. Consistent across samples, the use of the university branding had significant negative effects on response rates in counties not geographically connected to the university. Closer to the university, however, the results were mixed, with the university branding significantly improving participation in the university’s home county by 7.9 percentage points for the ABS sample and having an insignificant effect in surrounding counties for both samples and in the university’s home county for the RDD sample.

📄 Willingness to Participate in Respondent-Driven Sampling: Findings from the German Social Cohesion Panel

  • Author(s): Julian B Axenfeld, Carina Cornesse, Mariel McKone Leonard, Jean-Yves Gerlitz, Julia Witton, Sabine Zinn
  • Link: Read the article
Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) has been shown to be a promising network sampling strategy. However, it has also been shown to fail in some applications. Basing an RDS procedure on an existing panel study may, therefore, contain the risk of failure and might even alienate non-compliant seeds. This study therefore investigates the hypothetical willingness of general population panel participants to recruit their social network members using RDS. The study reveals that nearly half of the online participants of the panel survey selected for the study are willing to recruit. Reasons for unwillingness include discomfort in inviting others and the belief that they are already contributing sufficiently. Proportional odds ordinal logistic regression analyses reveal that most of the anticipated predictor variables for willingness have no effect. However, an increased willingness to recruit is observed among respondents of younger age, with an immigration background, and with politically extreme opinions. The findings suggest a substantial potential for RDS in online surveys but highlight the need for further empirical studies to evaluate actual recruitment behaviors and refine RDS strategies.

📄 Remind Me! the Effect of Last-Minute Reminders in Online Business Surveys

  • Author(s): Dominik Boddin, Mona Dörner, Lucy Hong, Florian Keusch
  • Link: Read the article
This paper provides evidence for the response-enhancing effect of a second, last-minute reminder near the end of an online business survey. Sending reminders to prospective respondents of an online business survey in Germany two days before the end of the field period increased the likelihood of them taking part by 8.9 percentage points compared with prospective respondents who were not reminded again. This effect persists to a certain extent, since the participation rate of firms that received a reminder in a given wave is also higher in the subsequent wave. Reminding the firms does not affect nonresponse bias or data quality.

📄 Nonresponse in Web Surveys: A Deeper Look into Education Bias

  • Author(s): Christine Distler, Mustafa Coban, Mark Trappmann
  • Link: Read the article
The transition to online data collection in general population surveys has accelerated in recent years. Although high-quality web surveys now achieve response rates comparable to those of telephone surveys, they frequently display greater educational bias. This study analyzes complete employment biographies of both respondents and non-respondents to address three key questions: (1) How do different stages of the online panel recruitment process contribute to educational bias? (2) Are specific subgroups within the lower-educated population underrepresented in online surveys? (3) Are there interaction effects between education and other predictors of nonresponse, such as age, nationality, or employment status? In 2023, the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) in Germany launched the IAB-OPAL online panel survey using a push-to-web approach. The sample was drawn from a comprehensive administrative database containing social security, unemployment insurance, and basic income records, allowing for detailed analyses of employment histories. Leveraging detailed employment histories enables a granular assessment of how educational bias emerges across recruitment stages and whether response tendencies within educational groups vary due to typically unobserved factors such as benefit receipt, occupational history, or wages. The results indicate that educational bias increases at each stage of the recruitment process. Nonresponse is particularly common among individuals with lower educational attainment, especially those aged 50 and above. Although response probabilities for foreigners and Germans without an educational degree are similar, the disparity between these groups increases by at least a factor of four among individuals with a university degree. Additionally, men are less likely to participate unless they possess advanced degrees or lack formal qualifications.

📄 Estimating Total Acres of Rangeland for Specific Geographies Using Cropland Data Layer (CDL)

The Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP) evaluates the environmental impact of the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) conservation programs. This project aims to develop estimates of the total rangeland acreage in arbitrarily specified regions, which also have improved accuracy at the county level compared to traditional design-based estimators. To achieve this, we developed a novel model-based estimator that integrates information from both the National Resources Inventory (NRI) survey data and the satellite-derived Cropland Data Layer (CDL) data. A fine grid of square tiles was designed to capture the information of the CDL pixel near the NRI samples. Lasso, fused Lasso, and K-means clustering were employed for feature engineering and variable selection to identify optimal models for rangeland acreage estimation. Empirical results indicate that the new model-based estimator provides a reliable and effective alternative to the traditional design-based estimator.

📄 Changes in Response Quality Over Repeated Measurement in Ecological Momentary Assessment—A Three-Week Observational Study

  • Author(s): Minglei Wang, Shuaiying Cao, Chan Zhang, Marc S Tibber
  • Link: Read the article
Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) is an intensive longitudinal data collection method to capture in-the-moment experiences through frequent assessments. With the advent of mobile technologies, EMA’s applications have expanded across a number of disciplines. Despite its growing popularity, methodological issues, particularly regarding response quality, have yet to be explored. This study systematically evaluates how response quality changes over time in a 21-day EMA study with five daily assessments. Data were analyzed from 100 university students who completed surveys via a mobile application. Response quality was measured using a variety of satisficing behaviors, including speeding, nondifferentiation in grids, extreme rounding (i.e., reporting 0 or 60) on questions that asked the duration of a given activity during the past hour, and anchoring (i.e., providing the same answer to a question as in the previous assessment). The findings revealed a significant increase in speeding over the three weeks, suggesting a possible decrease in response quality. There were also increases in extreme rounding and anchoring responses in weeks 2 and 3. The nondifferentiation in grids mainly stayed the same across the weeks, which might be because the grids in this study only contained a few simple items to rate. The findings also showed variation between participants regarding their satisficing behaviors across the weeks. However, such variation could not be explained by participants’ demographic characteristics or motives for participation. Compared to the changes in satisficing behaviors across the weeks, the response quality differences across the five daily assessments were less systematic and inconsistent. These findings highlight the need for effective strategies to motivate participants to provide thoughtful answers as EMA data collection proceeds, and careful consideration of EMA design parameters to ensure high-quality data collection.

📄 Conditions for Uncertainty Reduction in an Estimated Ranking using Differences

We introduce a new simple novel method to measure uncertainty in an estimated ranking of K populations. First, form a family of joint confidence intervals for differences of population parameters, with familywise coverage 100 (1−α) percent. Then construct a 100 (1−α) percent joint confidence region for the overall true ranking of the K populations. With the assumption of normality for the estimators, we only need K estimates and their associated standard errors to produce the new joint confidence region, and we assume these are given (published). A theoretically based visual shows at once: (1) joint confidence region revealing uncertainty in the estimated ranking; (2) possible true rankings, beyond the estimated ranking; (3) a marginal confidence set for population k true rank; and (4) a marginal confidence set for each rank r.

📄 Paradata Versus Self-Reports for the Collection of Technical Data About Smartphones: Trade-Offs Between Completeness and Accuracy of Data on Smartphone Operating System Versions

  • Author(s): Jim Vine, Jonathan Burton, Mick P Couper, Annette Jäckle
  • Link: Read the article
Smartphones play a central role in everyday life and offer significant potential for survey data collection. However, their usefulness may be constrained by the smartphone’s operating system (OS) and its version, which determine app compatibility. This article investigates methods for accurately determining smartphone OS version, an important factor when evaluating device compatibility for data collection tools. We compare three approaches: (1) passive collection of paradata (user agent strings; UASs) from web respondents, (2) self-reported smartphone make and model matched to OS version information from an online database, and (3) direct self-reporting of OS version by respondents following step-by-step instructions. Using data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study COVID-19 web survey, a probability sample of UK households, we assess the completeness and accuracy of each method. Our findings suggest the paradata were in some respects inferior to the methods based on self-reports. First, the UAS data only provided valid smartphone OS version data for about 50 percent of respondents; the other 50 percent did not use a smartphone to complete the web survey (compared to 90 percent and 71 percent of valid cases based on methods (2) and (3)). Second, the subset of respondents who completed the survey using their smartphone was not representative of the full set of respondents, while the respondents for whom OS version data were obtained from self-report methods were broadly representative. Third, the UAS data under-represented older OS versions. Respondents with older smartphones seem unlikely to use them to complete the survey. Our findings also show differences between OSes, suggesting it was easier for iPhone users to provide relevant and valid information than for Android users: they were more likely to report a valid make and model that could be linked to technical data, to report the OS version, and to use their smartphone to complete the survey.

📄 The Effects of Alternative Mixed-Mode Household Screening Protocols and Invitation Letter Envelope Types on Participant Recruitment

  • Author(s): Chendi Zhao, Brady T West, Heather M Schroeder, Paul Burton, Eva Leissou, Andrew L Hupp
  • Link: Read the article
With declining survey response rates, researchers have been exploring effective strategies for participant recruitment. This study considered the household screening stage of recruitment in the 2022 Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a national panel study. The study investigates the effects of different contact protocols and invitation letter envelope types on completion outcomes and contact attempts, specifically focusing on the variation in effects among race/ethnicity and HRS cohorts. A total of 16,452 sampled households were divided randomly into two groups. One received a web-field protocol, where sampled individuals were invited to complete the questionnaire online and nonrespondents were eventually followed up FTF (face-to-face), and the other received a field-only (FTF) protocol. Within the former group, two random subgroups were created. One group received a standard HRS mailing envelope containing the invitation letter and a prepaid $2 bill cash incentive. The other received a visible cash envelope with a window showing the incentive. Logistic regression models were employed to analyze completion outcomes by screening protocol and envelope type. Interaction terms were subsequently included to explore differences in these effects among race/ethnicity and HRS cohorts. Linear regression and Poisson models were used to assess predictors of the number of contact attempts needed among completed cases. Findings show that the web-field protocol improved completion rates and reduced contact attempts among the youngest cohort, but had a negative effect among Hispanic households. The type of envelope also significantly influenced screener completion. Receiving a standard envelope increased response likelihood among non-Hispanic Black households. The youngest cohort also exhibited a higher likelihood of response with a standard envelope and generally received fewer contact attempts with both types before completion. However, visible cash did not present strong effectiveness. Overall, the findings highlight the effectiveness of employing different contact methods to enhance survey participation, specifically among different socio-demographic subgroups.

📚 Journal of Theoretical Politics

📄 Issue selection, inequality, and polarization of social ideologies

In electoral competitions, political parties attempt to address key political issues, such as economic distribution problems and social issues (e.g., abortion and same-sex marriage). What factors prompt political parties to choose which issues to emphasize, and how does the strategy interact with their policy platforms? To answer this question, I develop an issue selection model between liberal and conservative parties with fixed social ideological positions and explore how issue selection strategies affect tax proposals. The findings reveal that the polarization of social ideologies motivates both parties to manipulate low-income/conservative voters’ salience weights during the campaign stage. This pattern makes conservative parties emphasize the importance of social issues, while liberal parties emphasize economic distribution problems. Furthermore, in this equilibrium, if social issues are more newsworthy than economic issues, both parties advocate for tax reductions, contributing to an escalation in income inequality.

📄 Why constitutional conventions fail to change the constitutional status quo

Why do voters reject constitutional proposals drafted by conventions they themselves elected? We study a two-stage constitutional process in which voters first elect a legislator to draft a new constitution and subsequently approve or reject it in a referendum. The model highlights how imperfect electoral signals generate asymmetric information between voters and legislators. Its principal novelty lies in reversing the conventional direction of asymmetric information—placing uncertainty on the side of legislators rather than voters. We show that informational distortions are most severe at intermediate levels of voter polarization: when polarization is high, electoral separation allows legislators to infer voter preferences accurately, whereas moderate polarization increases misinterpretation and rejection risk. Moreover, learning from noisy electoral signals can backfire. Legislators who rationally update their beliefs may be less likely to secure approval than those who strategically ignore electoral information. Surprisingly, referenda may fail to improve voter welfare even when all actors prefer reform. These findings offer a new perspective on recent constitutional failures by emphasizing interactions between polarization, information, and strategic learning.

📚 Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (Statistics in Society)

📄 A decay-adjusted spatio-temporal model to account for the impact of mass drug administration on neglected tropical disease prevalence

Prevalence surveys are routinely used to monitor the effectiveness of mass drug administration (MDA) programmes for controlling Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs). We propose a decay-adjusted spatio-temporal (DAST) model that explicitly accounts for the time-varying impact of MDA on NTD prevalence, providing a flexible and interpretable framework for estimating intervention effects from sparse survey data. Using case studies on soil-transmitted helminths and lymphatic filariasis, we show that DAST offers a practical alternative to standard geostatistical models when the objective includes quantifying MDA impact and supporting short-term programmatic forecasting. We also discuss extensions and identifiability challenges, advocating for data-driven parsimony over complexity in settings where the available data are too sparse to support the estimation of highly parameterized models.

📄 Principles of Psychological Assessment: With Applied Examples in R

Principles of Psychological Assessment: With Applied Examples in R, by PetersenIsaac T. Chapman & Hall. 2024. ePub, ISBN 9781003861171, £154.69.

📚 Latin American Politics and Society

📄 Disentangling the Incumbent’s Advantage: New Estimates of Partisan and Candidate Separate Effects – RETRACTION

No abstract was provided by the RSS feed or Crossref API.please use the Read the article link above.

📚 Minds and Machines

📄 Bayesian Descriptions are not Mechanisms: Predictive Processing and the Realisation Gap in Embodied Neural Dynamics

Predictive processing casts perception, action, and learning as probabilistic inference. This paper asks when a Bayesian description identifies a mechanism. I distinguish computational description, algorithm, and physical implementation. Mechanism requires a causal mapping from physical transitions to inferential roles; behavioural fit cannot establish it. Priors range over model-supplied alternatives; observation does not reveal the organism’s individuation. Bayesian algorithms may be high-dimensional, continuous, nonparametric, and representation-growing. Every specified model has a fixed reachable closure; neither closure nor size decides mechanism. The question is which differences a proposed controller state treats as irrelevant. If histories assigned to that state respond differently to intervention because of timing, phase, contact, or field structure, the mapping omits part of the mechanism. A prospectively richer Bayesian or hybrid account may include those differences. High-dimensional systems and flexible model families often resist binary falsification when an experiment’s projection loses distinctions required by the claim. I therefore propose convergent tests of specified internal, coupled, and hybrid mappings. Results reject only a mapping within a declared task, scale, horizon, and margin; post-hoc revision creates a new hypothesis. The resource-bounded coupling hypothesis predicts that human-level transfer on contact-rich tasks depends on distinctions retained in organism–environment relations. An adaptive internal controller counts against it when transfer has no preregistered resource disadvantage, relational-history effects vanish in state-collision tests, the relational block adds no meaningful intervention-predictive value, and internal-realiser interventions have distinctive predicted effects. Existing evidence has not established a Bayesian mechanism for unconstrained embodied behaviour.

📚 Nations and Nationalism

📄 Why Liberalism Might Last

In ‘Can Liberalism Last?’ Anomaly and Faria (2023) argue that liberal societies tend to undermine their own long‐term survival, chiefly by fostering conditions—urbanization, mass migration from culturally distant regions and sub‐replacement fertility—that erode social trust and grant a demographic advantage to illiberal groups, whereas liberalism's philosophical commitments bar the corrective measures (immigration restriction, pronatalism, nation‐building) that non‐liberal states can freely deploy. In this commentary we grant that these challenges are real, but argue that the inference from demographic trends to liberalism's collapse is too pessimistic. We identify five mechanisms that could counteract these trends. First, the fertility advantage of illiberal groups assumes high intergenerational retention, yet defection is pervasive and can accelerate suddenly once preference falsification and pluralistic ignorance give way. Second, liberal states are increasingly willing to adopt migration restrictions and pronatalist policies and—contrary to what Anomaly and Faria contend—such measures need not violate core liberal principles. Third, the economic and technological superiority of open societies allows them to exert outsized global influence. Fourth, because illiberal groups tend to be more resistant to change, some of their traits may become maladaptive as conditions change. Fifth, low fertility afflicts illiberal progressives as well, diminishing one significant source of contemporary illiberalism. The upshot is that, even if liberalism's survival is not guaranteed, its prospects in many societies are better than Anomaly and Faria suggest.

📚 Nature Reviews Psychology

📄 An appraisal–coping framework of collective victimization beliefs and their consequences

  • Author(s): Johanna Ray Vollhardt, Hu Young Jeong, Zsolt P. Szabó, Khaled Elazab
  • Link: Read the article
No abstract was provided by the RSS feed or Crossref API.please use the Read the article link above.

📄 What clinicians should know about how large language models reason

Clinicians must have a practical understanding of how these systems work, where they fail and why verification must remain central to safe use.

📚 Party Politics

📄 How preferential voting and party ideology shape campaign-focus in proportional electoral systems

  • Author(s): Julius Lehtinen, Mikko Mattila, Åsa von Schoultz
  • Link: Read the article
While electoral systems shape candidates’ incentives to cultivate personal reputations, institutional rules do not translate mechanically into campaign behaviour. We argue that both electoral institutions and ideological traditions shape campaign strategies: ideological traditions influence both the attractiveness of candidate-centred appeals and how strongly candidates respond to institutional incentives. We present the first large cross-national test of their joint influence, using data from 37 elections in 16 countries under proportional representation. We show that candidate-centred campaigning is more prevalent in open list systems, but that this institutional effect is not uniform. Candidates from leftleaning parties are more party-centred, and the personalising effect of open lists is weaker among them than among candidates from right leaning parties. These findings show that the consequences of electoral reform depend on the normative and strategic contexts in which parties operate.

📄 Re-electing the party leader: The 2024 PASOK contest

This article examines leadership contests in European mainstream parties confronting electoral decline and attempting to restore competitiveness. Focusing on this broader phenomenon, it analyses incumbent leaders seeking renewed mandates through open primary elections in such contexts. The article applies Stark’s (1996) selection criteria (‘acceptability’, ‘electability’ and ‘competence’) to the 2024 Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) leadership contest in Greece as a demanding empirical and methodological setting: an incumbent leader seeking re-election through a competitive open primary within a recovery major party after only limited electoral improvement. Drawing on candidates’ speeches, press reports, official results and polling indicators mapped onto Stark’s criteria, the study evaluates party members’ and supporters’ perceptions of the main contenders. The findings show that the incumbent leader, Nikos Androulakis, led his opponents on all three criteria and suggest that incumbent re-election in recovery major parties is broadly consistent with Stark’s model when electability is interpreted as credible electoral recovery and unity concerns stem from strategic rather than ideological conflict.

📚 Political Analysis

📄 Correcting for Nonignorable Nonresponse Bias in Ordinal Observational Survey Data

  • Author(s): Lukáš Lafférs, Jozef Michal Mintal, Ivan Sutóris
  • Link: Read the article
Many political surveys rely on post-stratification, raking or related weighting adjustments to align respondents with the target population. But when respondents differ from nonrespondents on the outcome itself (nonignorable nonresponse), these adjustments can fail, introducing bias even into basic descriptives. We provide a practical method that corrects for nonignorable nonresponse by leveraging response-propensity proxies (e.g., a respondent’s rating of the interview or interviewer-coded cooperativeness) observed among respondents to extrapolate toward nonrespondents, while directly integrating observable covariates and retaining the benefits of post-stratification with known population shares. The method generalizes the variable-response-propensity framework of Peress (2010) from binary to ordinal outcomes, which are widely used to measure trust, satisfaction and policy attitudes. The resulting estimator is computed by maximum likelihood and implemented in a compact R routine that handles both ordinal and binary outcomes. Using the 2024 American National Election Study, we show that accounting for nonignorable nonresponse produces substantively meaningful shifts for life satisfaction (estimated latent correlation ρ ≈ 0.47 $\rho \approx 0.47$ rho almost equals 0.47 ), while yielding only modest changes for retrospective economic evaluations ( ρ ≈ 0.14 $\rho \approx 0.14$ rho almost equals 0.14 ), highlighting when nonignorable nonresponse substantively affects survey estimates.

📚 Political Communication

📄 From #StayWoke to “Culture Wars”: How Social Justice Discourse is Separately and Synergistically Politicized on Twitter and YouTube

  • Author(s): Sara Holland Levin, Rui Wang, Junwan Seo, Yi Yin Leong, Emma Bennett, Dongdong Yang, Zhuohui Yang, Matt Chen, Yini Zhang, Jiyoun Suk
  • Link: Read the article
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📄 Democratic Accountability in East Asia: A Comparative Experimental Study of Voter Responses to Norm Violations

  • Author(s): Woo Chang Kang, Sunkyoung Park, Osbern Huang, Koh Iwabuchi, Tetsuro Kobayashi
  • Link: Read the article
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📚 Political Research Quarterly

📄 Electoral Systems and Electoral Integrity: A Cross-National and Cross-Temporal Analysis With Policy Implications

This study examines the relationship between electoral systems and electoral integrity across a panel of 1,641 elections held in 141 countries over the period 1832–2024. Employing a correlated random-effects framework, which simultaneously recovers within-country estimates equivalent to fixed effects and between-country estimates capturing stable structural differences, the analysis reveals that proportional representation is associated with short-run reductions in electoral integrity within countries over time, reflecting administrative complexity, diffuse accountability costs, and the institutional turbulence that typically accompanies electoral system transitions. Yet countries with persistently proportional electoral systems exhibit substantially higher electoral integrity in cross-national comparison, reflecting the long-run co-evolution between proportional representation institutions and integrity-sustaining democratic infrastructure. These divergent effects cannot be recovered by cross-sectional or pooled analyses, which conflate two opposing mechanisms. The study shows that while proportional representation ultimately benefits electoral integrity when its full range of benefits is materialized in the process of co-evolution with democracy, the short-term transitional effects should not be overlooked.

📄 Delegating Away Democracy? Martial Law Support in South Korea

Why do citizens sometimes accept undemocratic actions by political leaders? Building on growing debates about citizens’ democratic attitudes, we examine whether support for executive power grabs is associated not only with citizens’ partisan alignment but also with their perceptions of government performance and animosity toward political opponents. South Korea’s sudden declaration of martial law in December 2024 offers a unique real-world case for examining this question. Using original survey data collected 1 month after the incident from 1,500 respondents, we find that individuals with positive views of the economy, particularly incumbent supporters, are more likely to endorse the stated justifications for martial law. Hostility toward the opposition is also associated with higher endorsement among incumbent supporters and with a weaker observed relationship between economic evaluations and democratic accountability. Our findings suggest that even in established democracies, public support for democratic norms may be fragile in times of crisis—especially under deep polarization and when citizens view the executive as effective.

📚 Political Science Research in PNAS

📄 State-sponsored agenda setting: Measuring the impact of narrative laundering

  • Author(s): Patrick L. Warren, Darren L. Linvill, Camille J. Saucier
  • Link: Read the article
Foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) is an important part of the digital information ecosystem, yet its effects are poorly understood. Most research analyzing FIMI to date is descriptive, exposing efforts to erode trust, promote favorable narratives, and target specific communities. Existing work evaluating the impacts of FIMI contrasts those directly exposed to FIMI messaging (by viewing the original messages) with those who were not, finding little evidence of changes in beliefs or behavior. Rather than persuading individuals directly, we argue FIMI often operates through agenda-setting processes that shape which issues and narratives dominate public discourse. A key component of this process is narrative laundering, whereby misleading content is scrubbed of its origins and circulated into mainstream channels. This study examines the Russian-aligned Storm-1516 campaign, which uses state media, fabricated sites, and paid influencers to elevate false narratives, especially those that implicate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in corrupt acts. By analyzing the dissemination of these narratives, we assess how Storm-1516 shifts the public agenda, illustrating how foreign influence can exert substantial effects on information environments even when individual-level persuasive effects may be limited.

📚 Political Studies

📄 Class of origin and voting: The activating role of volunteering during youth

Differences in political participation between social classes are well documented, yet less is known about the mechanisms that may reduce these gaps. This article adopts a life-course perspective to investigate whether youth volunteering can mitigate class-based inequalities in electoral participation. Using longitudinal data from Germany, we analyse how class of origin affects voting for the newly enfranchised, how volunteering influences turnout, and how both factors interact. Our findings show that, while individuals from working-class backgrounds are less likely to vote and youth volunteering increases electoral participation for all, volunteering during youth nearly closes the participation gap linked to social origin and uplifts specifically blue-collar working-class children’s electoral participation. These results suggest that voluntary engagement in youth can serve as a “school of democracy,” reducing class-based inequalities in political participation starting at an early age, which remain persistent otherwise.

📚 Political Studies Review

📄 Do more young candidacies increase youth voter turnout?

  • Author(s): Daniel Stockemer, Kamila Kolodziejczyk, Marika Barbieri-Antonoglou, Remi Royer, Angélique Busanga
  • Link: Read the article
Young people today are trapped in a vicious cycle of political alienation characterized by their low interest and knowledge of politics, their declining participation in elections, and their lack of representation. How can we break this cycle? One possibility would be to increase the number of young candidates, which through symbolic representation and affinity voting, could increase youth voter turnout. We test this hypothesis using data from 47 elections in 28 countries. Through bivariate and multivariate statistics, our hypothesis is not confirmed. Instead, we find that rather than increasing youth turnout, increasing the number of young candidates has a reverse effect, and decreases youth turnout. We also find more young candidates do not lead to more young representatives. While we can only speculate about this null/ negative finding, we assume that just adding token youth candidates is not enough to increase youth voter turnout, therefore future research should focus on other potential solutions.

📄 Bridging the polarization/administration dichotomy: American School Boards in the 21st century

Reflecting on his experiences as a school board member in New York State before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic, Scott R. Levy argues persuasively in Why School Boards Matter: Reclaiming the Heart of American Education and Democracy (MIT Press, 2025) that scholars, political observers, and citizens should pay closer attention to how school boards operate. He urges education stakeholders to confront policy and political challenges through reason, civil dialogue, and best administrative practices, not by ideology and extreme partisanship. Levy argues for greater local autonomy, provided school boards adopt simple business planning and performance review techniques, attend to student and employee mental health, and engage with the community. Elected officials should stay in the governance lane, he says, managing resources, setting priorities, holding the leadership team accountable, and thinking about long-term risks and consequences. Unfortunately, many school boards are overwhelmed by federal and state mandates and culture war politics, Levy says. Citizen involvement is low, and many board members serve part-time and are unpaid. Conditions are ripe for board takeover by ideological extremists with little commitment to public schools. Nevertheless, the impetus for change should be locally based, he asserts. Reforms imposed from outside, especially those calling for greater centralization, will not work. Levy’s account is a living demonstration of the conflict between politics and administration, making the book a useful addition to courses on public policy, public administration, and subnational government. Furthermore, Why School Boards Matter reveals the many opportunities for civically-engaged political science programs and students to make a difference.

📚 Politics & Gender

📄 Explaining Violence Against Feminist Activists and Women Human Rights Defenders

On March 2, 2026, Iraqi feminist activist Yanar Mohammed was assassinated by armed militants at her home in Baghdad. Since founding the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) in 2004, Mohammed had been repeatedly targeted by anti-rights and fundamentalist forces seeking to repress her advocacy for women’s rights. She was a pioneer in building feminist infrastructure to support women and girls fleeing violence, while also publicly challenging the U.S.-led war, militarization, and patriarchal governance.

📄 Triadic Victimization in Violence Against Women in Politics: Repairing Justice and Restoring Democracy in Japan

Violence against women in politics (VAWIP) is a widespread phenomenon that deters women from fully engaging with political activities, particularly from running for office. Not only office seekers but also a broader range of women actors, such as journalists, human rights defenders, and civil servants, experience sexual harassment and assault perpetrated by political actors (Krook 2020). While much of the literature on violence against women in politics focuses on the incidence of such violence and policy solutions, this article broadens the analytical scope to theorize how institutional responses to redress harms may not resolve but instead exacerbate violence through further layers of victimization.

📚 Politics & Society

📄 Separating the Militants from the Moderates: Brazilian Industry and the Far-Right <i>Bolsonarista</i> Movement

Why do some capitalists in the Global South come to firmly support far-right movements while others do not? This article explores this question by examining divisions among Brazilian industry leaders over the right-wing government of Jair Bolsonaro, from 2019 to 2023. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with leaders in Brazil's main industrial association, the Federation of Industries of the State of São Paulo (FIESP), this article argues that distinct relations to the state and varying degrees of economic precarity led FIESP leaders to either remain staunch supporters of Bolsonaro's government or grow critical. Leaders in medium-sized firms from shrinking domestic manufacturing sectors decried their exclusion from policymaking under previous administrations and became some of Bolsonaro's most ardent backers. In contrast, while initially supportive of Bolsonarismo , many leaders from more competitive, internationalized sectors dominated by large firms grew critical of Bolsonaro, particularly following his chaotic response to the COVID-19 pandemic. These moderate leaders recognized the structural power they leverage over state actors, while prioritizing gradual reform and a stable political environment. In this way, different relations to state actors led to a politics of moderation or militance. The article concludes by arguing how the political rationalities tying capital to the state shape intraclass cleavages and business’ response to emergent far-right movements.

📚 Quarterly Journal of Political Science

📄 Discretionary disclosure and electoral accountability

Politicians often have discretion over what policy information to reveal to the public. This paper develops a formal model comparing electoral accountability under mandatory and discretionary disclosure. I identify a fundamental trade-off between detection − where voters directly observe wrongdoing − and inference − where voters penalize the suspicious absence of information. Mandates facilitate detection but eliminate the strategic signal embedded in discretionary disclosure. Mandates weaken the connection between silence and possible wrongdoing, effectively exonerating the incumbent in voters’ inferences. The model demonstrates that when the baseline probability of information transmission is high, the inference-based mechanism constrains rent-seeking more effectively than the detection-based mechanism. Consequently, disclosure mandates can paradoxically weaken electoral discipline: by making silence less informative, they undermine voters’ ability to draw inferences from silence, even while increasing the overall probability that voters observe policy outcomes.

📚 Research & Politics

📄 What does the public know about their State’s abortion laws in the post-Dobbs era?

  • Author(s): Marisa Abrajano, Marianna Garcia, Aaron Pope, Robert Vidigal, Jonathan Nagler
  • Link: Read the article
Following the Dobbs decision in the U.S., there were widespread reports of misinformation regarding the ruling. Many Americans may therefore have faced uncertainty about abortion laws in their state, and Latinos—approximately 40% of whom are foreign-born—may be particularly vulnerable due to limited familiarity with the U.S. political system. To better understand awareness of state abortion policies, we fielded a national online panel survey containing large samples of Latinos ( N = 2326) and non-Hispanic whites ( N = 769). We find that Latinos were 6 percentage points less likely to correctly identify their state’s abortion law relative to white Americans and were 10.7 percentage points more likely to overestimate the strictness of those laws, even when controlling for demographic, religious, and political covariates. Foreign-born Latinos were also 19.5 percentage points more likely to overestimate the strictness of their state’s abortion law compared to their U.S.-born counterparts. These findings contribute to our understanding of differential learning following sudden policy change and highlight significant knowledge gaps that may affect whether individuals seek abortion care if they misunderstand the legal status in their state. Such gaps may have downstream consequences for health care access and economic inequality.

📚 Social Forces

📄 Do caring fathers earn less? Earnings consequences of fathers’ parental leave use

  • Author(s): Corinna Frodermann, Ann-Christin Bächmann, Andreas Filser
  • Link: Read the article
In many Western societies, policy efforts seek to increase fathers’ involvement in parental leave, yet many fathers remain reluctant due to concerns about earnings consequences. Despite these concerns, the consequences of parental leave and their underlying mechanisms remain understudied. Using novel German administrative data on 109,735 married fathers who became first-time parents between 2007 and 2013, we analyze their earnings trajectories following parental leave. The large sample allows for investigating potential differences in earnings trajectories between fathers who took no parental leave and fathers who took leave of different durations. To improve comparability between the different groups of fathers, we apply two-way fixed-effects models weighted by coarsened exact matching. Moreover, the data enables us to consider differences in post-birth work volume as potential confounder for differences in earnings trajectories. We find that fathers who take parental leave experience lower earnings trajectories compared with those without leave. This difference increases with leave duration: 7 years after the birth of their first child, fathers who took up to 2 months of leave see their annual earnings increase 2.2 percentage points less relative to their pre-birth baseline than fathers who took no leave—for those who took longer leave, the gap is 12.8 percentage points. While these gaps initially appear disproportionately larger for longer leave durations, the disparity diminishes once we account for differences in active employment and part-time transitions. Moreover, the differences in work volume explain a large share of the observed earnings gaps, reducing them to 1 and 4.6 percentage points.

📄 Working from home among older adults in the UK: examining its link to labor market exit intentions and expected retirement age

  • Author(s): Yanan Zhang, Sarah Harper, Senhu Wang, Bing Gong
  • Link: Read the article
Prolonging work life has been widely discussed in countries facing population aging. We examine the association between working from home (WFH) and both the labor market exit intentions and expected retirement age among the older workforce in the UK, utilizing data from the harmonized British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and the UK Household Longitudinal Survey (UKHLS), covering the period from September 1998 to May 2020. Findings indicate that WFH is linked to reduced labor market exit intentions and a later expected retirement age, through improved subjective well-being. The association between WFH and expected retirement age is significantly stronger among women than among men. The estimated associations for the labor market exit intentions are also larger among women, although the corresponding gender interaction terms are not statistically significant. Additionally, the specific domains of subjective well-being that mediate the link between WFH and the labor market exit intentions differ between men and women. These insights support enhancing WFH policies to keep older adults economically active, which improves their well-being and advances gender equality by prolonging older women’s careers.

📄 One overworking breadwinner or two earners? Family economic standard of living by breadwinner arrangement, 1960 to 2018–2022

Has the rise of rewards to long and inflexible work schedules altered the household-level economic viability of gendered divisions of paid work within marriage? This paper examines whether household arrangements centered on an overworking single breadwinner have become increasingly competitive, in terms of family economic standard of living, with non-overworking dual-breadwinner households. As prior research documents increasing rewards to overwork, particularly in professional and managerial occupations, overworking single-breadwinner families may have become economically competitive with dual-breadwinner households in which neither partner overworks. Using decennial Census and American Community Survey data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series covering 1960 to 2018–2022, we compare breadwinner arrangements across the income distribution and decompose changes in family income into changes in men’s earnings, women’s earnings, and non-labor income. Results show that overworking male- and female-breadwinner families experienced substantial relative gains at the top of the income distribution. Decomposition analyses indicate that these gains were driven primarily by accelerated earnings growth among overworking single breadwinners rather than earnings stagnation among dual earners. Although dual-breadwinner families with overworking breadwinners remain the most advantaged group, the gap between them and overworking single-breadwinner families narrowed substantially by 2018–2022. These findings suggest that labor market reward structures associated with long and inflexible work schedules may reshape family-level economic incentives in ways that reinforce gendered divisions of paid work, particularly among affluent families.

📚 Social Problems

📄 Intersecting inequalities: blackness, immigrant status, and the prevalence of Neighborhood amenities

Black immigrants constitute a growing segment of both the U.S. Black and immigrant populations, yet scholarship on neighborhood inequality has largely treated race and nativity as separate. Prior research shows Black neighborhoods face persistent amenity disadvantages, while immigrant neighborhoods may benefit from co-ethnic clustering that attracts resources and institutions. This article examines how these processes intersect by exploring the neighborhood amenities of native-born Black residents, Black immigrants, and non-Black immigrants across 15 U.S. cities. I find that neighborhoods with higher shares of Black residents, regardless of nativity, face disadvantages in access to amenities. Native-born Black neighborhoods experience the most pronounced disadvantages, while Black immigrant neighborhoods fare somewhat better but still lag behind comparable non-Black immigrant neighborhoods. Furthermore, both native-born Black residents and Black immigrants live in neighborhoods with substantially lower amenity levels than the average tract in their cities, with minimal difference between the two groups. These results emphasize the foundational role of anti-Blackness in constraining all Black neighborhoods regardless of nativity.

📚 Social Science Computer Review

📄 Wild, Thick, and Wicked: Situated Evidence on AI-In-Use for Decisions About Deploying AI Systems

Organizations are adopting generative AI faster than the evidence base needed to govern it. Existing evaluation tools such as benchmarks, alignment scores, and safety tests were built for model development, not for judging whether systems will create value, introduce friction, or shift risk in specific real-world settings. As a result, there is little systematic evidence about how AI behaves once it is embedded in everyday work. This paper proposes a real-world AI evaluation framework focused on AI-in-use: how people actually appropriate, adapt, and work around AI systems in context, and what consequences follow over time. Instead of treating variability across users, tasks, and settings as noise to be controlled away, the framework treats that variation as the central source of deployment-relevant evidence. It sets out four design principles for producing decision-ready evidence at scale and proposes a shared evaluation architecture combining a structured observation environment, a metrics hub, and reusable consortium models that summarize system behavior across contexts. Rather than replacing traditional benchmarks, this framework adds a sociotechnical evidence layer that connects model capabilities to the organizational and practitioner level outcomes where deployment decisions are actually made.

📄 Don’t Look up: Evaluating the Tradeoff Between Performance and Sustainability of Text Classification Using Open LLMs

  • Author(s): Sean Hamilton-Palicki, Isaac Bravo, Clint Claessen
  • Link: Read the article
The increasing adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) as a text analysis method in social science presents a critical yet under-examined trade-off between model performance and environmental sustainability. This research provides a systematic evaluation comparing the performance, energy consumption, processing time, and CO 2 emissions of various computational text analysis methods (CTAM), including dictionaries, trained classifiers, and self-hosted open LLMs when performing sentiment analysis of parliamentary speeches, classification of open-ended survey responses, and named entity recognition of newspapers. The analysis is limited to self-hosted deployment in local and server environments where per-task energy consumption is directly measurable. Although self-hosted LLMs demonstrate strong performance in sentiment analysis, closely aligning with human judgment, they require significantly more energy and time than non-LLM approaches. For classification and named entity recognition, pretrained task-specific models achieve better F1 scores with a lower carbon footprint, challenging the primacy of larger models. To navigate this trade-off, we propose a CO 2 -Adjusted F1 Score that penalizes emissions while rewarding performance. Applying this metric, we show that smaller, task-specific models may be preferred over larger general-purpose LLMs for efficient text analysis. We highlight the necessity for thoughtful and responsible model selection, promoting a “right-fit” approach for CTAM.

📚 Social Science Quarterly

📄 Political Ideology and Perceived Racial Discrimination Across Race Groups

Introduction Relationships between political ideology and perceptions of racial discrimination likely vary by race group because of each group's unique history and racialization in US society. Prior work has considered associations between political ideology and perceived racial discrimination primarily among White Americans or has focused on perceptions of more general, group‐level discrimination. Perceptions of personal racial discrimination have received far less attention. Methods Using data from a YouGov survey of 4000 US residents, equally divided among White, Asian, Hispanic, and Black groups, we investigate whether and how political ideology relates to perceived personal racial discrimination in each race group. Results We find White conservatives more likely, and Asian and Hispanic conservatives less likely, than their liberal counterparts to perceive themselves as personally victimized by racial discrimination. We find no association between political ideology and such perceptions among Black participants. Conclusion These findings illustrate the relevance of political ideology to perceived racial discrimination with differences across the US racial hierarchy, laying a foundation for future work to consider how race conditions the connection between personal ideological commitments and perceptions of racial discrimination.

📄 Assimilation or Ethnic Revival? Immigration Attitudes, Immigrant Generation, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States

Introduction This study examines how immigration attitudes vary across immigrant generations and racial and ethnic groups in the United States, evaluating competing expectations derived from assimilation theory, segmented assimilation theory, and the third‐generation return (ethnic revival) hypothesis. Methods Using nationally representative data from the 2004–2024 General Social Survey (GSS), we estimate generalized ordered logit models and predicted probabilities to analyze ordinal measures of immigration attitudes across immigrant generations and racial and ethnic groups. Results First‐generation immigrants exhibit significantly more favorable immigration attitudes than later‐generation individuals. Contrary to the third‐generation return hypothesis, third‐generation or higher individuals do not exhibit more favorable attitudes than second‐generation individuals. Instead, immigration attitudes become less favorable across successive generations, consistent with assimilation theory. These generational patterns vary across racial and ethnic groups: Non‐Hispanic White respondents show the largest shift toward less favorable attitudes across generations, while non‐Hispanic Black and Hispanic respondents maintain more favorable attitudes even in later generations. Conclusion Immigration attitudes reflect racially stratified processes of intergenerational assimilation consistent with segmented assimilation theory, rather than symbolic ethnic revival, underscoring the importance of examining immigrant generation and race jointly in studies of public opinion.

📄 State Child Tax Credits and Family Well‐Being: Early Evidence From Minnesota

Objective Minnesota's 2023 Child Tax Credit is among the most generous permanent state child credits enacted in the wake of the temporary 2021 federal expansion. This paper provides early quasi‐experimental evidence on whether Minnesota.s 2023 family tax‐credit package, which is a fully refundable Child Tax Credit of up to $1,750 per qualifying child bundled with a redesigned Working Family Credit improved material hardship and mental health outcomes among households most likely to have received it. Methods The analysis uses repeated cross‐sectional data from the Census Household Pulse Survey (HPS) spanning March 2023 through July 2024, restricted to households with incomes below $75,000 and observed work status across Minnesota and 35 comparison states. The main specification is a triple‐difference design exploiting variation across state, parental status, and time with state‐by‐wave, state‐by‐child, wave‐by‐child fixed effects. Identification is assessed using event‐study diagnostics, Rambachan‐Roth sensitivity, and Benjamini‐Hochberg false discovery rate corrections across the outcomes. Results The preferred estimates show a 1.7 percentage point reduction in food insecurity, a 2.7 percentage point reduction in rent hardship, a 2.9 percentage point reduction in housing hardship, and a 7.2 percentage point reduction in mental health indicator among Minnesota households with children following benefits onset. Estimates are directionally stable across comparison pool restrictions and treatment timing variations. Income restriction heterogeneity confirms a dose‐response pattern for housing hardship and mental health, with effects largest among households below $25,000. Finally, sensitivity analysis indicates the estimates are sensitive to moderate violations of parallel trends. Conclusions Minnesota.s 2023 family tax‐credit package is associated with early improvements in food security, housing stability, and mental health among households most likely to receive it, with effects concentrated where the credit was most generous. The findings offer the first quasi‐experimental evidence on permanent, non‐emergency state child credit and provide a methodological template for evaluating the expanding landscape of state child credits.

📄 Constraint Push or Motivational Pull? Number of Children and Willingness to Bear Environmental Costs in the United States and South Korea

Objective Parenthood can deepen concern for children's future but also tighten household resources. This study examines how these competing pressures shape the association between the number of children and willingness to bear environmental costs in the United States and South Korea. Methods Using 2021 US and Korean GSS data from the shared ISSP Environment module, we estimate country‐specific logistic regressions and pooled models of willingness to pay higher prices and taxes for environmental protection. Results In the main binary models, willingness declines with each additional child in the United States but increases in South Korea. The Korea–US difference is statistically significant for both outcomes and remains so under age restrictions, controls for the number of co‐residents, ordered‐logit coding, and survey weights. In categorical models, the gap widens across parity categories and is largest at three or more children. The difference is more stable than either country‐specific estimate, and education, perceived environmental impact, and age group do not systematically moderate it. Conclusion The association between the number of children and environmental cost‐bearing differs across institutional settings. The findings are consistent with childrearing costs operating more as immediate constraints in one context and more as future‐oriented investments in the other.

📄 Balancing Growth and Impact: A Conjoint Analysis of Public Preferences for Data Center Policy

  • Author(s): Fengxiu Zhang, Shuping Wang, Saba Siddiki, David W. S. Wong, Jie Xu
  • Link: Read the article
Objective This study examines public preferences for policy provisions governing the siting, construction, and operation of data centers. Method Drawing directly on Virginia's 2024–2025 legislative portfolio on data centers, we employ a conjoint experimental design to examine public preferences for alternative policy provisions on data centers. Data were collected through a 2025 survey of 1004 Virginia residents. Results We find broad public support for regulatory oversight of data centers, but the magnitude of support varies across policy provisions. Respondents show the strongest preferences for policy provisions addressing direct, immediate, and visible issues related to data centers, including undergrounding new transmission lines near homes, restricting data center development in sensitive areas, mandating report of water and energy usage, and requiring public review prior to project approval. Support is comparatively weaker for policy provisions addressing less visible or more technically complex issues, including electricity rate setting and environmental impact assessments. Subgroup analyses further reveal that heterogeneity in policy preferences is associated more strongly with individual characteristics—including education, race, age, and political ideology—than with regional context.

📄 Vote, Pray, and Fear: Politics, Religion, and Fear of Crime in Today's United States

  • Author(s): Madeline Brock, Nicole E. Rader, Margaret Ralston
  • Link: Read the article
Objectives Despite decades of research identifying demographic and contextual predictors of fear of crime, the role of ideological belief systems remains understudied. Given the changing landscape of American politics and religion, this study investigates political conservatism and religious service attendance as predictors of fear of crime. Methods We use the 2024 cross‐sectional General Social Survey (GSS) data and weighted logistic regression models predicting fear of walking alone at night among a nationally representative sample of 1840 US adults. Results Religious attendance and political conservatism are important predictors of fear of crime. Frequent religious service attendance and political conservatism decrease the odds of fearing to walk alone at night, controlling for demographic variables. However, religious service attendance loses statistical significance when political leaning is introduced. Political conservatism remains a significant, consistent predictor of lower fear of crime across all models. Gender is the strongest predictor of fear of crime overall. Conclusions Deeply held beliefs like political leaning and religiosity are linked to fear of crime, and this relationship operates differently for men and women. In the contemporary United States, political identity has become the dominant ideological lens through which individuals think about safety and crime, more so than religious participation.

📄 The Price of Denial: Admission Status, Race, and Punishment Severity in Federal Supervision Revocation Hearings

Objective Federal supervision revocation is a consequential back‐end punishment stage where admission, denial, and judicial discretion converge after conviction. This study examines whether admission status predicts punishment severity in federal probation and supervised release violation hearings, and whether the relationship between admission status and punishment differs across White, Black, Hispanic, and Other defendants. Methods The study uses 108,115 federal probation and supervised release violation hearings from the United States Sentencing Commission. Logistic regression models estimate above‐guideline sentencing and prison‐only sentencing, while ordinary least squares models estimate logged revocation sentence length. The models account for violation grade, criminal history, offense group, demographics, supervision type, time served, district, fiscal year, weapon involvement, and statutory exposure. Results Denial is associated with higher odds of above‐guideline punishment compared with admission, net of legal, demographic, supervision, district, year, and statutory controls. Race does not significantly moderate the admission effect for above‐guideline punishment. However, race moderates admission effects for prison‐only sentencing and logged revocation sentence length. Conclusion The findings shift attention from original sentencing to revocation hearings, where responsibility signals may affect punishment after release. Policy reforms should improve transparency, standardize admission‐status documentation, and examine whether revocation courts impose a hidden trial penalty at the back end of federal supervision.

📚 The Quarterly Journal of Economics

📄 Wealth and Property Taxation in the United States*

We study the history and geography of wealth accumulation in the United States using newly collected historical property tax records from the early 1800s onward. These records come from the administration of the General Property Tax–a tax that aspired to cover all types of property. We construct wealth series at the state, county, and national levels. At the state level, we use annual assessed values of wealth from state-level reports drawn from multiple sources. Because assessed values may differ from market values, we also require assessment ratios, defined as the ratio of assessed to market wealth. We obtain state-level assessment ratios from decadal U.S. Census wealth data (drawn from various Census reports, including those on “Wealth, Debt, and Taxation”), in which the Census carried out detailed valuation work, complemented with information on changes in assessment practices from the state reports, to build higher-frequency series of assessment ratios. The result is long-run annual wealth series for states from 1850 (or earlier, depending on the state) to 1935. We obtain national wealth series by aggregating these state series. At the county level, we use assessed values (or market values where available) from the U.S. Census wealth data for each decade, and apply either state-level or county-level assessment ratios, where available, to obtain market values of wealth for each decade from 1850 to 1930. We use these data to show, first, that the United States experienced extraordinary wealth accumulation after the Civil War and until the Great Depression. Second, spatial inequality in the United States has been large and highly persistent since the mid-1800s. We also examine the determinants of long-term wealth growth and find, among other results, that counties with a higher share of enslaved property before the Civil War or with higher wealth inequality experienced lower subsequent long-run wealth growth.

📚 Theory and Society

📄 The diversity hypothesis: A rapid scoping review of diversity and scientific output and impact in the natural and social sciences

  • Author(s): Jordan P. Beck, Zachary Patterson, Samuel Wilson
  • Link: Read the article
Recent years have witnessed many strong claims that ‘diversity’ leads to more original and impactful science, which is a science-focused form of what we call “The Diversity Hypothesis.” However, what evidence supports the claim that diversity enhances scientific output or impact? This pre-registered rapid scoping review seeks to collate and evaluate the scientific evidence for the Diversity Hypothesis as a foundation for future, methodologically rigorous studies that address the Diversity Hypothesis. Guided by the Joanna Briggs Institute approach and Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR), a systematic search of three electronic databases (Web of Science, Scopus, and Ovid PsycInfo) was performed. The Mixed Methods Assessment Tool was used for quality appraisal of included articles. Studies were included if they were peer-reviewed, empirical studies that satisfied the population (‘scientists or scientific teams/labs’), concept (‘diversity of scientists or scientific teams/labs’), context (‘scientific productivity or impact’) as well as other inclusion criteria. In total, 104 articles were included and their findings pertaining to the relationship between diversity and scientific productivity and impact analysed. We estimate that only between 15% and 28% of results reported in these articles are unambiguously consistent with the Diversity Hypothesis, with the balance not being so. Overall, the results indicate that there is little empirical evidence that diversity, as defined narrowly by demographic or identity diversity, improves scientific output and impact. Despite claims that evidence for the Diversity Hypothesis is unambiguous, the results of this scoping review suggest that, presently, this broad conclusion is unsubstantiated and that more nuanced propositions pertaining to the types and effects of diversity be advanced and enacted in the context of scientific claims, funding, and policy-making.

📚 West European Politics

📄 An overlooked revolution? Party system denationalisation in Western European multilevel election systems

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📄 Personality, populism and party: support for ‘dark triad’ leaders in the UK

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📄 Broken promises? Voters prefer intraparty democracy, not window dressing

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📄 The 2026 Maltese general election: Labour’s staying power

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📚 人文及社會科學集刊

📄 【預刊】（39卷）Endogenizing Active and Passive Behaviors under Cross-Ownership

  • Author(s): Ayu Sasni Munte Ayu Sasni Munte, 裴燈龍 Dang-Long Bui, 林燕淑 Yan-Shu Lin
  • Link: Read the article
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