The 2022 and 2024 General Social Survey (GSS) were fielded as multimode studies in which respondents completed the survey via face-to-face interview (FTF), telephone, or self-administered web questionnaire. We motivate and describe the construction of mode-specific post-stratification weights for the FTF/Phone and web subsamples of these two survey years. These weights reproduce, within each mode subsample, the same weighted population totals on demographic raking variables as the full GSS sample. Using these weights, we show that across 143 subjective attitudinal items spanning eight substantive domains, FTF/Phone estimates are substantially closer to the 2016–2018 historical baseline on 70% of variables, while web estimates are closer on the remaining 30%. This pattern is domain-specific and persists after demographic adjustment, indicating that mode differences are not fully attributable to compositional differences between mode subsamples. The mode-specific weights and all R code used to construct them are made publicly available at https://github.com/restyfufunan/gss-mode-weights.

Este capítulo analiza el conflicto por el agua en la provincia de Petorca, Chile, a partir de la expansión de la frontera agrícola del cultivo de palta y su impacto sobre el acceso hídrico de campesinos y obreros rurales. Se argumenta que la alianza entre estos sujetos —con intereses estructuralmente contrapuestos— se explica por el proceso de conversión del campesinado en sobrepoblación obrera relativa, producto de la competencia capitalista y el avance tecnológico en la rama agrícola. Bajo la consigna "No es sequía, es saqueo", esta confluencia dio origen al Movimiento de Defensa por el Acceso al Agua, la Tierra y la Protección del Medioambiente (Modatima), que logró proyección nacional e internacional. El capítulo examina además la participación del movimiento en el proceso constituyente de 2021-2022 y las razones del rechazo a la nueva Constitución en el propio territorio. Se sostiene que la lucha por el agua como bien común no puede reducirse a una "desposesión hídrica", sino que expresa la disputa más amplia por la apropiación de renta de la tierra en economías sudamericanas históricamente especializadas en la producción de materias primas.

We present an original interpretation of the justice cascade theory developed by Kathryn Sikkink and her coauthors as it pertains to the icc’s engagements with African states since 2004. In doing so, we challenge a prominent and acclaimed critique of this theory: Oumar Ba’s States of Justice. Ba presents four qualitative case studies informed by fieldwork, focused on the admissibility challenges, selective cooperation, and obstructionism involving Uganda, Libya, Kenya, and Côte d’Ivoire. We closely examine the key publications in which the justice cascade theory is introduced, refined, and critiqued, identifying misinterpretations of this theory in Ba’s work and elucidating its empirical implications. Furthermore, we perform a citation analysis of States of Justice, demonstrating that the book, by virtually omitting primary sources of any type, misimplements its own empirical strategy. We introduce fresh legal analyses of compliance with the Rome Statute of the icc in the four relevant cases, revealing the dearth of evidence of noncompliance in all but the Kenyan case. Finally, we discuss legal analysis as a means of testing theories of international law and courts, and we illustrate the relevance of the justice cascade theory to current debates on the establishment of new international tribunals.

The meaning of the fair and equitable treatment standard in international investment law remains unsettled. One interpretation ties it to the customary minimum standard of treatment, familiar from the Neer case; another treats it as a more demanding standard deriving from autonomous treaty or customary obligations. State practice, scholarly commentary, and arbitral decisions can be marshaled for both views. In recent decades, however, tribunals have gravitated toward the autonomous interpretation, over the objections of certain writers and the sustained resistance of many states—most notably the U.S., a principal architect of international investment law and a major capital exporter. This article asks why. It surveys and synthesizes leading theories from international political economy, sociology, and law, identifying the contributions and limits of the resulting accounts. It then advances a new theory of jurisprudential drift as coordinated equilibrium maintenance, drawing on insider accounts of arbitration practice and game-theoretic models of cooperation. Senior arbitrators and elite counsel use general principles of arbitration and treaty interpretation to entrench broader interpretations of investment treaties. This equilibrium is sustained by reputational discipline within networks of specialists and practitioners, coupled with interrelated mechanisms of secrecy, judicial economy, and peer review. The article then traces the minimum standard’s doctrinal development, the rise of the modern investment treaty regime, and the evolution of fair and equitable treatment in arbitral practice, state practice, and academic commentary. It argues that prevailing legal explanations cannot account for the observed trajectory of arbitral decisions and that the proposed theory better explains the shift toward broader interpretations of the fair and equitable treatment standard in the case law.

Why does democracy lose credibility under chronic insecurity? Existing accounts of democratic backsliding emphasise authoritarian attitudes, institutional weakness, or elite manipulation. This article advances the Hierarchical Fear Theory (HFT), arguing that democratic legitimacy depends on the ordering of competing political fears. Political fear is conceptualised not as an irrational emotion but as a structured anticipation of harm that becomes hierarchically ranked in specific contexts. When insecurity intensifies, fears of physical survival, state collapse, and symbolic disappearance can displace fear of arbitrariness—the liberal concern with unchecked power. Using Burkina Faso as a critical case and drawing on theory-driven analysis and Afrobarometer trends, the article shows how chronic violence reordered the hierarchy of fears, shifting legitimacy from procedural constraint to protective effectiveness. Democratic institutions are consequently evaluated instrumentally rather than intrinsically, generating conditional support for concentrated authority. The findings offer a non-moralising, context-sensitive explanation of democratic erosion with implications for other conflict-affected and fragile democracies.

Young refugees are at-risk for human trafficking throughout their migration journey. UMRs experience trauma in their home country, during their smuggling experience and in host countries. Additionally, governments’ refugee and asylum laws and interconnected policies create slow violence, that is, gradual and cannot be traced to a single entity. We explored how prior trauma coupled with Swedish policies and laws exacted a slow violence on UMRs. We analyzed UMRs' narratives (n=7) and surveys (n=18) and accounts from the helping network (n=19) for trauma at each phase. Our results indicated that some UMRs experience trauma similar to the risk factors for child trafficking along with other trauma and experience new risks created by asylum policies and laws. We provided suggestions to governments to mitigate trafficking risk for newly arrived UMR groups, especially those with cumulative trauma and high risk for human trafficking.

Climate justice has emerged as one of the most critical ethical, legal, and political frameworks in global climate governance. It is no longer sufficient to treat climate change as a purely scientific or environmental matter, as the crisis increasingly reveals structural inequalities, historical injustice, and uneven global vulnerability. Climate change affects communities differently based on wealth, geographic exposure, political representation, and access to adaptation resources. These unequal impacts reinforce existing social injustices and deepen poverty, displacement, health insecurity, and conflict. This paper, developed by the United Nations Human Rights Educational Project (UNHREP), examines climate justice as a human rights-based framework that connects environmental protection with global equity and sustainable peace. It argues that climate policy must not only aim for emission reduction and technological transition, but also uphold human dignity through accountability mechanisms, inclusive decision-making, and fair distribution of resources. Using a qualitative policy-based approach, this paper integrates human rights principles with climate governance instruments, including the Paris Agreement, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and evolving norms recognizing the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. The paper highlights that the climate crisis is fundamentally linked to rights such as the right to life, health, food, water, housing, and cultural identity. It also addresses the importance of intergenerational justice and the ethical responsibilities of high-emission states and corporate actors. The paper concludes with the position that climate justice must be operationalized through transparent financing, legally binding accountability, protection of Indigenous and marginalized communities, and climate education that empowers global citizenship. UNHREP recommends stronger mechanisms for loss and damage support, inclusive adaptation governance, and global partnerships rooted in human rights obligations.

Resilience research in disaster studies has advanced rapidly but faces a fundamental methodological problem: the absence of historical context. Criteria for judging resilience "success" vary across periods and regions, yet the risk of anachronism inherent in applying universal resilience models has been consistently overlooked. This paper presents the "Three-Layer Temporal Structure Theory of Disaster Social History," drawing on Fernand Braudel's tripartite conception of historical time. The framework analyzes disaster phenomena through the mutually interpenetrating dynamics of geographic time (millennia), structural time (decades to centuries), and event-historical time (days to years), redefining "resilience" not as recovery capacity but as a process of "historical reconstruction" shaped by historical context. Through analysis of flood response history from the seventeenth century to the present in the Igu region of Miyagi Prefecture, three theoretical findings are derived. First, transitions in the structural time layer produce "transitional vulnerability," in which existing resilience forms are dismantled before new ones emerge. Second, interactions among the three layers are bidirectional: events in lower layers can transform upper layers. Third, the recurrent invocation of "beyond all expectation" constitutes critical evidence that normative criteria for "normality" are historically constructed within the structural time layer. The framework provides an interdisciplinary analytical axis bridging the natural sciences and the humanities, while offering a critical historical perspective for contemporary disaster risk reduction policy.

Η δημόσια διοίκηση συχνά εγκλωβίζεται σε αυτό που θα μπορούσαμε να ονομάσουμε «παγίδες ισότητας». Πρόκειται για συστημικές παθογένειες όπου οι ίδιοι οι διοικητικοί μηχανισμοί, χωρίς πρόθεση, καταλήγουν να αναπαράγουν τις ανισότητες που υποτίθεται ότι έχουν σχεδιαστεί για να αντιμετωπίσουν. Ενώ η ακαδημαϊκή βιβλιογραφία έχει διαγνώσει εκτενώς το φαινόμενο και έχει αναλύσει τους μηχανισμούς που το προκαλούν, παραμένει προσκολλημένη σε στατικά, περιγραφικά μοντέλα. Δηλαδή, σε μοντέλα που απλώς φωτογραφίζουν την κατάσταση χωρίς να προσφέρουν ένα συνεκτικό πλαίσιο για την ενεργό αποφυγή και την εξάρθρωση αυτών των παγίδων. Το παρόν άρθρο, μέσα από μια συστηματική βιβλιογραφική ανασκόπηση, αξιοποιεί συνθετικά τη θεωρία της Οργανωσιακής Δικαιοσύνης για να καλύψει αυτό το γνωστικό κενό. Η θεωρία αυτή εστιάζει στο πώς οι άνθρωποι αντιλαμβάνονται τη δικαιοσύνη μέσα σε έναν οργανισμό, όχι μόνο ως προς τα αποτελέσματα αλλά και ως προς τις διαδικασίες και την ανθρώπινη μεταχείριση. Βάσει αυτής, προτείνεται ένα συνθετικό και δυναμικό εννοιολογικό πλαίσιο που μετατοπίζει το κέντρο βάρους από την παθητική διάγνωση του προβλήματος στην ενεργητική πλοήγηση των λύσεων. Το πλαίσιο αυτό εξοπλίζει τους δημόσιους λειτουργούς με διαδικαστικά εργαλεία για να χαρτογραφούν τις εγγενείς διοικητικές εντάσεις, όπως η σύγκρουση μεταξύ ταχύτητας και δικαιοσύνης, και να ασκούν τη διακριτική τους ευχέρεια καθοδηγούμενοι από αρχές. Με αυτόν τον τρόπο, η ισότητα παύει να είναι ένας αφηρημένος στόχος και μετατρέπεται σε συνειδητή, καθημερινή διοικητική πρακτική.

Digital entertainment behavior is increasingly trans-platform, role-fluid, and socially embedded — yet no existing framework treats these tendencies as one connected formation. This paper proposes Gen-Entertainment (Gen-E) as a provisional conceptual framework for a cross-category behavioral formation organized through three linked dimensions: trans-platform discovery, hybrid audience–creator roles, and socially embedded participation across streaming, social, and gaming environments. Drawing on structured literature synthesis, it argues that entertainment discovery increasingly begins outside the environment of eventual consumption, that a growing share of users inhabit a hybrid zone between stable audiencehood and legible creatorhood, and that entertainment increasingly functions as infrastructure for social coordination and belonging. Critically, the synthesis suggests that within the Gen-E formation, behavioral type is a more analytically coherent predictor of entertainment practice than age cohort: a high-engagement older user may cluster behaviorally with younger peers more than with their own generational cohort, a pattern consistent with substantial evidence from adjacent domains showing that behavioral variables outperform age in explaining digital media behavior. Gen-E is not proposed as a validated segment or confirmed typology, but as a theoretically grounded construct for a behavioral object that participatory-culture theory, platform-logics scholarship, media-repertoire research, and generational frameworks currently illuminate only in parts.

What determines whether oral traditions maintain empirical accuracy over centuries or drift toward chance? We propose that the observability of environmental outcomes — the degree to which a tradition's claims can be verified against physical reality — governs accuracy in cultural transmission. Parameterising the cultural Price equation by an observability function, we derive a steep nonlinear inflection below which environmental feedback cannot maintain accuracy against transmission degradation. Across 41 independent knowledge domains from 39 cultural systems spanning six continents, the observability–accuracy relationship is steeply nonlinear (beta regression p = 3.3 × 10⁻⁵; Spearman r = 0.527, p = 0.0004), robust to model specification (OLS, beta, nonparametric, permutation), and confirmed by seven blind-scored domains (r = 0.893, p = 0.007). Convergent solutions evidence shows independent cultures arriving at equivalent knowledge where environmental feedback is strong: ethnobotanical convergence across three continents (p < 0.001), fire management convergence across four traditions (Fisher's p = 0.007), and navigation convergence tracking observability within domains (CI = 0.85 vs. 0.17). Deep-time case studies are consistent with the prediction that high-observability traditions survive millennia of transmission and demographic bottlenecks while low-observability traditions degrade. Five boundary conditions where the model fails are identified. These results suggest that observability formalises a dimension implicit in prior cultural evolution theory, modulating when environmental selection dominates transmission dynamics and when conformist or prestige biases prevail.

Recent advances in generative AI have made a broader AI-mediated reorganization of knowledge work newly visible. In software and adjacent white-collar domains, AI systems increasingly participate in producing artifacts—code, tests, documents, specifications, analyses—while oversight, judgment, and accountability remain assigned to human and organizational actors. This paper argues that the resulting mismatch between who produces, who is recognized as expert, and who remains accountable destabilizes established professional boundaries, especially between those who execute work and those who coordinate it. The paper’s central claim is that AI redistributes production without equivalently redistributing accountable agency. In human organizations, execution may be delegated while accountability remains shared across recognized persons and roles. With AI systems, by contrast, execution can be displaced into nonhuman agents without creating another socially recognized bearer of judgment, answerability, or obligation. The result is a widening gap between distributed production and distributed accountable agency. This also produces an occupational rupture for workers whose expertise was tied to direct craft. Drawing on work on technological delegation, infrastructure, boundary objects, and professional jurisdiction, and using a small set of public empirical materials from software work, the paper shows how organizations respond to this instability. It argues that AI does not eliminate people management, but destabilizes the older bundling of people management, coordination, and production oversight within managerial roles. Organizations respond by building new sociotechnical arrangements—prompts, specifications, review routines, evaluation artifacts, and governance procedures—to restore legitimacy, coordination, and meaning. Using software as a leading case, the paper shows how AI reshapes not only productivity, but the politics of recognition, accountability, and control. Keywords: AI-mediated work; generative AI; large language models; delegation; expertise; professions; infrastructure; accountability; software; STS

Hiott (2025) argues that remembering and navigating are different assessments of the same living process—way-making—and calls for new methods that do not define the mind through locatable representations. This commentary responds constructively: if the body makes its way without a map, it does not make its way without geometry. I propose that navigation presupposes topology, not just time. Drawing on empirical evidence that even spatial navigation operates on graph structure rather than metric coordinates (Warren et al., 2017) and on convergent developments within the same special issue (Hölken, 2025; Favela, 2025; Gastelum-Vargas, 2025), I sketch a navigational topology—a space with positions, distances, barriers, asymmetric costs, and multi-rate ensembles—that converts way-making from philosophical reorientation into operable formalism. This geometric substrate also addresses the worry about trivialization (Segundo-Ortín & Heras-Escribano, 2024): extending affordances beyond motor action is not metaphorical inflation when the medium itself has a perceivable topological structure. The sketch is offered as an invitation, not a completed system.

Wellbeing science has mistaken the measurement of outcomes for the study of life itself, excising the moral, relational, and practical dimensions of the good life, eudaimonia, actually lived. Wellness culture—the practices, traditions, and communities through which people enact rather than measure the good life—now represents a $6.8 trillion global economy and one of the defining cultural formations of contemporary life. This paper is a theoretical intervention in cultural sociology, informed by long-term immersion in UK wellness cultures and consumption archetypes derived from systematic analysis of global wellness economy data. It develops three interlocking arguments. Building on Heelas and Woodhead's (2005) subjectivisation thesis to show that wellness culture constitutes a reorientation of moral selfhood and situating that reorientation within Taylor's (2007) nova effect—the proliferation of moral and spiritual options in late modern disenchantment, it extends Swidler's (1986) toolkit theory into moral life, arguing that wellness culture functions as a repertoire through which practitioners enact strategies of living well. These arguments converge in the paper's central contribution: the Double Helix of Relational Wellbeing. Across five analytically distinct types of wellness engagement, practitioners share a consistent moral orientation toward the good life—not as a state to be achieved but as an ongoing practice of directing oneself toward higher goods within a shared moral horizon (Taylor, 1989, 1991). This operates through two entangled strands—self and sangha, inner life and community—generative rather than oppositional. In naming eudaimonia as praxis, this paper brings wellbeing science into conversation with practical theology.

Η βιβλιογραφία της δημόσιας διοίκησης παρουσιάζει έναν θεωρητικό δυϊσμό αναφορικά με τους βρόχους θετικής ανατροφοδότησης, αντιμετωπίζοντάς τους είτε ως οιονεί ντετερμινιστικές παγίδες (όπως η εξάρτηση από τη διαδρομή) είτε ως εύπλαστα στρατηγικά εργαλεία. Προκειμένου να επιλυθεί αυτή η εκκρεμής ένταση το παρόν άρθρο διεξάγει μια Συστηματική Βιβλιογραφική Ανασκόπηση 98 μελετών. Προτείνουμε τον «συστημικό εγγραμματισμό στην ανατροφοδότηση», ένα νέο εννοιολογικό πλαίσιο που ορίζει τη διοικητική ικανότητα αναγνώρισης, διάγνωσης και παρέμβασης στη δυναμική της ανατροφοδότησης. Η ανάπτυξη αυτής της ικανότητας καθορίζει εάν οι δημόσιοι οργανισμοί υπόκεινται παθητικά σε αυτούς τους βρόχους ή εάν μπορούν να τους αξιοποιήσουν ενεργά. Συνεπώς το πλαίσιο προσφέρει μια θεωρητική επίλυση στην κυρίαρχη διχοτομία, θέτοντας τις εννοιολογικές βάσεις για τη μετατροπή των βρόχων ανατροφοδότησης από συστημικές παγίδες σε ισχυρά στρατηγικά εργαλεία.

This paper estimates the impacts of protected area downsizing and degazettement (PADD) on land-use dynamics in the Brazilian Amazon. Analyzing PADD events implemented between 2009 and 2015, we compare estimates from standard difference-in-differences methods to synthetic difference-in-differences, which addresses violations of parallel trends arising from selective treatment assignment. We show that conventional difference-in-differences estimates yield null effects, consistent with prior literature. Synthetic difference-in-differences estimates, however, show that PADD increases deforestation by approximately 23% relative to pre-treatment baselines, driven by a 40% increase in pastureland expansion and a 3,471% increase in mining area growth. The divergence in results suggests that earlier null findings reflect methodological limitations rather than the absence of actual effects. Our findings underscore the importance of legal protection for environmental outcomes, especially in politically or economically contested areas.

The global copper market is experiencing a period of fundamental structural volatility, guided by supply chain realignments, geopolitical friend-shoring, and an increasing reliance on the circular economy. To accurately diagnose the current state of this critical mineral, this paper presents a strictly empirical, data-driven algorithmic pipeline, the Apex Empirical Model, applied to recent UN Comtrade transaction ledgers (2020-2025). By utilizing robust machine learning architectures, this research systematically identifies a phenomenon we term Stage-Specific Starvation (SSS) across the upstream, midstream, circular, and downstream stages of the value chain. Integrating Deep Autoencoders, Network Graph Analysis, Holt-Winters Time-Series Forecasting, and Risk-Parity Optimization, the model successfully isolates targeted capital flight via transfer mispricing and maps the exact flow-through volumes of global transshipment hubs. Furthermore, the framework applies network topology to assess systemic vulnerabilities, empirically confirming the existence of a geopolitical price premium, and engineers a continuous mass-balance metric to predict projected smelter capacity adjustments six months into the future. Finally, our resilience metrics mathematically prove the financial arbitrage and stability advantages of secondary scrap integration. Ultimately, this research leverages Causal Inference to introduce Circular Risk Parity (CRP), providing a prescriptive, optimized portfolio allocation that balances risk equally across the supply chain, allowing stakeholders to navigate exogenous supply shocks in the modern copper market.

El artículo caracteriza las condiciones de reproducción de la población de la provincia de Petorca (Chile) durante la expansión del cultivo de palto (aguacate) desde la década de 1990. Mediante un análisis estadístico descriptivo basado en censos, encuestas socioeconómicas y registros administrativos, se examinan las transformaciones productivas y en el acceso al agua asociadas tanto al ingreso de capitales agroindustriales orientados a la exportación como a la prolongada megasequía que afecta a la zona central del país desde 2010. Petorca se consolidó como un caso emblemático de crisis hídrica, caracterizado por la reducción del consumo domiciliario de agua y el deterioro del acceso al recurso para actividades agrícolas, ganaderas y mineras de baja escala. Estas dinámicas derivaron en un conflicto por la apropiación del agua y su defensa como un bien público. El artículo aporta evidencia empírica actualizada sobre los cambios productivos y sociales experimentados por su población durante estas décadas.

We studied the regulation of emerging technologies through the European Union’s General-Purpose AI Code of Practice drafting process, asking when and why do actors prefer greater legal certainty or greater legal uncertainty. Consistent with economic theories of regulation, we found that smaller firms preferred legal certainty, whereas larger and influential AI developers often preferred greater legal uncertainty. Information asymmetry also explained differences in preferences. However, economic theories assume the availability of information, whereas emerging technologies entail Knightian factual uncertainty. To account for this, we put forward a complementary sociological explanation for actors’ regulatory preferences, which we term asymmetric legal uncertainty: a situation in which all actors are equally ill-informed, but some, due to a perceived expertise, are given a de facto degree of control over the factual narrative on which legal consequences hinge. We argue that, in such a situation, legal uncertainty allows actors to speculate about future legal outcomes.

Neste artigo argumentamos que a teoria democrática deliberativa, embora tenha sofisticado os critérios normativos da legitimidade política ao enfatizar a troca pública de razões, negligenciou a tematização explícita das condições epistêmicas do ambiente informacional no qual a deliberação ocorre. A partir de uma reconstrução crítica das formulações de Habermas e Rawls, mostramos que ambas pressupõem um pano de fundo informacional minimamente íntegro, no qual afirmações factuais possam ser contestadas e corrigidas. Em contextos contemporâneos marcados por desinformação sistemática, fragmentação de públicos e manipulação da visibilidade, esse pressuposto torna-se insustentável. Sustentamos que a ausência de integridade informacional compromete diretamente os critérios centrais da deliberação — publicidade, reciprocidade, justificabilidade e orientação ao melhor argumento —, levando a um colapso de sua função normativa, ainda que práticas deliberativas persistam empiricamente. Propomos, então, uma definição mínima e negativa de integridade da informação, entendida como ausência de distorções estruturais que tornem a falsidade sistematicamente vantajosa e a correção inviável. Nosso intuito é mostrar que a integridade informacional deve ser concebida como condição constitutiva da deliberação democrática, e não como fator meramente instrumental.

The 1975 Asilomar Conference established safety principles for synthetic DNA technologies. Today, lipid-nanoparticle-encapsulated nucleic acids globally circumvent those principles. This stems not from emergency measures, but from misapplying outdated vaccine classifications to gene-transfer technologies. Classifying infectious-disease-targeted gene-transfer technologies as vaccines exempts them from mandatory pharmacokinetic and genotoxicity studies. This unjustified exemption now standardizes routine use in healthy populations, relying on assumptions lacking mechanism-informed data on distribution, persistence, and genomic interactions. We propose “Asilomar 2027”—a global summit establishing: (i) regulatory classification based on biological mechanisms, not intended-use labels; (ii) preclinical verification aligned with biological reality; (iii) shifting the evidentiary burden to manufacturers to prospectively prove safety via auditable data before deployment; and (iv) independent international oversight. This framework couples innovation with biology, restoring the rigorous safety standards essential for sustainable medical progress.

This study explores the perceptions of 213 Filipino teachers toward AI detection tools in academic settings. It focuses on the factors that influence teachers’ trust, concerns, and decision-making regarding these tools. The research investigates how teachers’ trust in AI detection tools affects their perceptions of fairness and decision-making in evaluating student outputs. It also explores how concerns about AI tools and social norms influence the relationship between trust and decision-making. Ridge Regression analysis was used to examine the relationships between the predictors and the dependent variable. The results revealed that trust in AI detection tools is the most significant predictor of perceived fairness and decision-making among teachers. Concerns about AI tools and social norms have weaker effects on teachers’ perceptions. The study emphasized critical role of trust in shaping teachers’ perceptions of AI detection tools. Teachers who trust these tools are more likely to view them as fair and effective. In contrast, concerns and social norms have a limited influence on perceptions and decision-making. For recommendations, training and institutional guidelines should emphasize how these tools work, their limitations, and best practices for their use. Striking a balance between policy enforcement and educator support is essential for fostering trust in AI detection technologies. Encouraging experienced users to share insights through communities of practice could enhance the adoption and effective use of AI detection tools in educational settings.

Synthetic control methods are widely used for causal inference in case studies and panel data settings, often applied to model counterfactuals for proportional outcomes. However, conventional synthetic control methods are designed for univariate outcomes, leading researchers to model counterfactuals for each proportion separately. We make the case for jointly estimating synthetic controls across multiple compositional outcomes. Using the same weights for each proportion establishes a constant control comparison, improving comparability while adhering to compositional constraints on treatment effects. We illustrate the benefits of the method through a simulation and two applications to recent empirical studies. This implementation integrates naturally with a wide range of synthetic control approaches, providing interpretable estimates for compositional panel data common in political science.

The ‘Unexpected Event During Survey' design (UESD) leverages quasi-random timing of interviews relative to external events for causal identification. In this research note, we empirically evaluate the UESD's Type I (false positive) error rate using large-scale survey data covering 40 countries between 2002 and 2024. Based on over 42 million placebo tests, our analysis reveals that standard inferential approaches yield false positives at rates more than double the conventional 5% threshold, indicating miscalibrated p-values and potentially erroneous conclusions. We further document significant heterogeneity in this error inflation across countries, surveys, outcome variables, and model specifications. To address this, we propose a randomization-based adjustment procedure tailored to context-specific false positive rates and provide open-source software for its implementation. We illustrate our approach by replicating the two most highly cited UESD articles published in the APSR.

Censorship is defined as the restriction of public expression or access to information by an authority when the information may undermine the authority by making it accountable to the public. In this entry, I highlight that censorship has two objectives: to restrict freedom of expression and to prevent individuals or organizations from accessing specific information. After providing a definition for censorship and illustrating how it differs from other concepts, namely repression and propaganda, I give an overview of different forms of traditional and digital censorship tools. Next, I introduce prominent theories and empirical evidence that explore why governments censor. Then, I turn attention to studies that explore the consequences of censorship. I conclude by highlighting current areas of inquiry.

Propaganda plays a key role in maintaining power in authoritarian regimes. Previous research finds that overt, crude, and heavy-handed messaging, so-called hard propaganda, can be used to effectively convey government strength and deter citizens from joining anti-regime protests in relatively stable autocratic regimes like China. Yet, it is unclear if this is also true in more contested and unstable autocratic contexts. In these settings, citizens are more likely to question such messaging and prior beliefs of government strength vary more widely. We explore the perception of hard propaganda in one such difficult test case for hard propaganda: the crisis-ridden Maduro regime in Venezuela. We measure perceptions of hard propaganda among the public using an online survey that featured a choice experiment in which respondents chose between and rated different propaganda images against more neutral political communication. Our results show that respondents perceived hard propaganda images as stronger compared to neutral political communication. This holds true---contrary to our pre-registered expectations---regardless of whether respondents overall perceived the government as strong or weak. Moreover, respondents reported a lower willingness to join anti-government protests but, at the same time, had a greater motivation to challenge the regime. These results support and extend prior findings on the effectiveness of hard propaganda in deterring anti-regime activities to the case of contested and unstable autocracies. But they also suggest that this kind of messaging erodes regime legitimacy providing the first evidence outside of the Chinese case of the pathology of hard propaganda.

This short report introduces the Political Denial-of-Service Attacks Database (PDOSD), a media-based dataset on politically motivated DoS attacks using English-language newspaper articles retrieved from LexisNexis, manually coded by two human coders for the period 2008--2016. This period covers a historically important era of hacktivist and state-sponsored DDoS attacks, including the Arab Spring, the rise of Anonymous, and early Russian cyber operations. The database records news reports on politically motivated DoS attacks and can be downloaded at both the news article and aggregated event level.

Η παρούσα μελέτη ανατέμνει το αποκαλούμενο «πρόβλημα των πολλών χεριών» (problem of many hands) στη σύγχρονη δημόσια διοίκηση μέσα από μια θεωρητική ανασκόπηση. Το θεμελιώδες πλαίσιο του προβλήματος εδράζεται στην εντεινόμενη σύγκρουση μεταξύ της δημοκρατικής απαίτησης για σαφή απόδοση ευθυνών και της αυξανόμενης δομικής πολυπλοκότητας της διακυβέρνησης. Η πολυπλοκότητα αυτή χαρακτηρίζεται από δικτυακές δομές, ιδιωτικοποιήσεις και αλγοριθμική λήψη αποφάσεων που καθιστούν τον εντοπισμό ενός υπεύθυνου δράστη σχεδόν αδύνατο. Σκοπός της εργασίας είναι να συνθέσει την κατακερματισμένη και διεπιστημονική βιβλιογραφία προκειμένου να αμφισβητήσει την παραδοσιακή προσέγγιση της απόδοσης ευθύνης η οποία εστιάζει στον εντοπισμό του υπαίτιου αποκλειστικά μετά από μια αποτυχία. Υιοθετώντας μια εννοιολογική μετατόπιση ως θεωρητικό φακό, η μελέτη αντιμετωπίζει την ευθύνη όχι ως μια ατομική ιδιότητα που ανακαλύπτεται εκ των υστέρων αλλά ως μια συστημική ικανότητα που σχεδιάζεται εξ αρχής. Τα κύρια ευρήματα, τα οποία προκύπτουν από τη συστηματική ανάλυση 98 μελετών οργανωμένων μέσω του πλαισίου εντοπισμού προηγούμενων αιτιών, αποφάσεων και αποτελεσμάτων (ADO), αποκαλύπτουν ότι η δομική και τεχνολογική πολυπλοκότητα δημιουργεί γνωστικά και ηθικά κενά. Αυτά τα κενά τα εκμεταλλεύονται στρατηγικά οι πολιτικοί και διοικητικοί δρώντες μέσω «παιχνιδιών επίρριψης ευθυνών» οδηγώντας σε διάχυση της ευθύνης, υποβάθμιση της δημοκρατικής λογοδοσίας και αδυναμία συστημικής μάθησης. Ως θεωρητική συμβολή το άρθρο προτείνει ένα νέο εννοιολογικό μοντέλο γνωστό ως «Προοπτικό Σχεδιασμό της Ευθύνης» (Prospective Design Responsibility). Το μοντέλο αυτό μετατοπίζει το επίκεντρο από την αναζήτηση υπαιτίων στην προληπτική θεσμική αρχιτεκτονική πλουραλιστικών δικτύων λογοδοσίας όπου η συλλογική ευθύνη καθίσταται αναπόδραστη μέσω του σχεδιασμού σαφών ρόλων, μηχανισμών συντονισμού και κοινών πληροφοριακών υποδομών.

Private goods and common goods coexist in tourism. However, the nature of the latter means that self-interest alone cannot guarantee their optimal provision. Hence, coordination emerges as a necessary strategy to reconcile both. The analysis shows that, with coordination, a virtuous circle emerges between common goods (public incentive) and tourism (private incentive), becoming more intense and important with tourism-driven economic development. Coordination also allows a transition toward high-quality tourism (crowding out low-quality tourism), which is necessary to compensate for the lack of productivity in this sector. Without coordination, there is room for a tourism development trap or economic growth reversal. Finally, we identify a “Quality Paradox”: quality improvements might jeopardize economic growth by triggering a price hike, reducing overall competitiveness.

The Late Bronze Age (1500-1200BCE) saw an unprecedented expansion of Sea-borne Commerce. A Maritime Trade Network developed which interconnected every kingdom of Ancient Near East and Aegeans(Mycenaeans, Minoans) to Ancient Egypt. Subordinates of Great Kings engaging in International Diplomacy to maintain and establish World Peace. This paper analyzes the extent to which Maritime trading flourished, and the first ever attempt of humans to maintain and establish International peace. Drawing on the Amarna Letters, the Ugaritic royal archives, the remarkable cargo of the Uluburun shipwreck, Linear B palatial records, and a wealth of archaeological evidence from shipwrecks, frescoes, and cosmopolitan port sites, this paper reconstructs the structure of Late Bronze Age maritime networks, the diplomatic protocols that governed them, and the catastrophic systemic collapse that dissolved them around 1200 BCE. It argues that maritime connectivity was not merely an economic phenomenon but the constitutive infrastructure of Bronze Age international relations — the medium through which political "brotherhood," strategic resources, and cultural koiné were simultaneously maintained.

A sample of 52 sources were analyzed to investigate how libraries are portrayed in the general media as spaces for remote workers. Features highlighted as advantageous included meeting rooms, booths, quiet zones, and on-site cafes; Wi-Fi, computers, reprographic services, and suitable desks; the quiet, yet social, comfortable, safe and aesthetically pleasing environment; and libraries’ free access and convenient locations. Disadvantages included crowding and noise levels, insecure belongings, inadequate resources, and limited opening hours. The wide range of positive features suggests that remote workers’ needs are varied and complex, as are the ways in which libraries can meet these needs.

This article argues that Iceland's wartime 'Situation' (Ástandið), the expansive moral and administrative apparatus erected to govern relationships between Icelandic women and Allied soldiers during and after the Second World War, was a foundational project of pacification through which Iceland consolidated itself as a white security state. Approaching security as social war (Neocleous, 2025) alongside Veblen's analysis of pecuniary culture and trained incapacity (Veblen, 2008), the article demonstrates how eugenic anxieties about a fragile Icelandic 'racial stock' (kynstofn) underpinned gendered surveillance, emergency legislation, forced medical examination, and carceral confinement targeting working-class young women. A state-negotiated colour bar, rooted in Prime Minister Jónasson's 1941 demand for 'white troops only' and institutionalised in secret provisions of the 1951 US–Iceland Defence Agreement, inserted Iceland into a militarised global apartheid (Besteman, 2019; 2020). Children born of these relationships, ástandsbörn, were marked as racially liminal through naming practices and community ostracism, extending pacification across generations as a form of necropolitical governance over kinship and futurity (Mbembe, 2003). Connecting these histories to contemporary moral panics over 'migrant predators', DNA collection proposals targeting non-EEA residents, and violent protest policing, the article argues that governing rationalities forged during Ástandið persist in a spectral pacification of racialised migrants and dissenting citizens. Mobilising critical conversations on culture, security, and white supremacy, the article positions Iceland as a formative site for critical race inquiry.

Our study focuses on research representation and societal alignment as two facets of research evaluation. We investigated how Tanzanian forest research is represented in bibliographic databases and the extent to which these representations align with national societal demands. To address the former, we conducted a representation analysis of forestry research publications by Tanzanian-affiliated authors in the period 2005–2021. We used four databases: two commercial (Scopus and Web of Science), one semi-commercial (Dimensions), and one fully open (OpenAlex). We also added a manually curated dataset of articles from local Tanzanian journals, resulting in a total of 1,496 unique articles. While both OpenAlex and the local journal dataset posed challenges, both were necessary to provide the most comprehensive representation of forest research in Tanzania. Together, they account for 90% of the ‘total’ set of publications. For the second question, we selected articles from 2017 to 2021 only, downloading their full texts. We conducted a quantitative content analysis by coding these 728 articles in terms of four Tanzanian socio-ecological elements that we identified as potential markers of societal demand: national research priorities in forestry, forest tenure arrangements, forest types, and forest regions. Our findings suggest that the issue of alignment is not simply binary (with publications in local journals being better aligned with national interests and those in mainstream databases being less aligned), but rather one of convergence and divergence depending on the context and measures used.

This paper re-considers social status in contemporary Britain by initially duplicating and further improving upon prior analysis from Chan and Goldthorpe (2004, 2007). This paper analyses the occupational structure of marriage, cultural consumption, friendship closeness, and monopolistic acquisition to construct an original measure of social status that is termed ‘Stände’. This Stände measure is directly compared with the Chan-Goldthorpe scale and the Cambridge scale to make theoretical and empirical arguments in favour of using this newly constructed measure as an appropriate Weberian determinant of social status. This paper examines the relationship between social status and the epiphenomenal role it has with education, income and social class to provide an evidence base for its construct validity. This paper also identifies multiple models based on authoritarian/libertarian social and left/right economic scales across three waves of the British Social Attitudes Survey to directly compare status-based measures. Evidence suggests that this newly created Stände measure is more sensitive compared to alternatives and more adequately captures the status/class relationship evidenced in British society and outlined in Weberian social theory. This new Stände measure captures a more accurate Weberian distinction of social status and builds upon important empirical literature set out in the work of Chan and Goldthorpe (2004, 2007).

The United Kingdom–Nigeria migration corridor has expanded substantially since 2021, generating significant public and policy debate in both countries. Existing scholarship tends to evaluate the economic impact of this migration at a single point in time, focusing either on labour market contributions, tuition fee income, or remittance outflows without integrating these flows into a coherent temporal account. This article addresses that gap by proposing and applying a migration lifecycle framework to Nigerian entrants to the United Kingdom via study and work routes between 2021 and 2025. Drawing on human capital theory, the New Economics of Labour Migration, and balance of payments analysis, the framework identifies three analytically distinct stages: an entry stage characterised by substantial upfront inflows to the UK through tuition fees, visa charges, and the Immigration Health Surcharge; a transition stage in which migrants move from study to employment via the Graduate and Skilled Worker routes; and a settlement stage characterised by sustained remittance outflows to Nigeria. Integrating quantitative data from HESA, the Home Office, the ONS, the OECD, and the World Bank with published secondary sources, the article demonstrates that the UK is a net fiscal beneficiary of this corridor across the full lifecycle, while Nigeria bears formation costs that remittances only partially and indirectly compensate. The article further identifies a recursive dynamic in which settlement-stage remittances finance the education of subsequent migrant cohorts, rendering the corridor self-reproducing. Policy implications are drawn for both the United Kingdom's immigration framework and Nigeria's diaspora engagement strategy.

Education budget cuts in the Netherlands are causing significant unrest both within and outside universities. There are concerns, for example, about the academic competitiveness of our institutions and a potential “brain drain.” The impact of these cuts on diversity and inclusion at our universities is rarely discussed. In this essay, I describe this impact and call for action.

Topinkova & Diviak (2025, PLOS ONE) analyze directed contact networks from a Czech dating app and conclude that women express interest in men of similar desirability--a finding widely interpreted as evidence of lateral or homophilic mate selection. We re-analyze their published replication data and show this conclusion is an artifact of comparing standardized indegree across genders without accounting for the radically different distribution shapes produced by the 76-80% male user ratio. After converting indegree to within-gender percentile ranks, women's contacts land overwhelmingly on top-quintile men, not on percentile-matched men. Two-thirds of female-to-male ties go to top-20% men, and the median tie lands on a man at the 88th male percentile.

Dieses Working Paper präsentiert fünf Vignetten zu Diskriminierung im Konsumalltag in Deutschland. Die Vignetten basieren auf 30 Interviews mit Verbraucher:innen, die im Rahmen des Projekts DEVGAV geführt wurden, und wurden aus dem Interviewmaterial verdichtet, anonymisiert und für die Verbraucher:innenarbeit aufbereitet. Ziel ist es, typische Konstellationen von Diskriminierung in unterschiedlichen Konsumbereichen sichtbar zu machen, darunter Dienstleistungen, Mobilität, Einzelhandel, Kulturangebote und digitale Buchungssysteme. Die Vignetten zeigen, dass Diskriminierung im Konsumalltag häufig nicht als offene Zurückweisung auftritt, sondern in Routinen, institutionellen Regeln, technischen Vorgaben und fehlenden Zugängen wirksam wird. Zugleich machen sie deutlich, dass solche Erfahrungen mit Emotionen wie Unsicherheit, Scham, Unbehagen oder Verunsicherung verbunden sind und das zukünftige Verhalten von Verbraucher:innen prägen. Das Working Paper versteht Vignetten damit nicht nur als Darstellungsform, sondern als analytisches und praxisbezogenes Instrument, um Diskriminierung im Konsumalltag zu erfassen, zu diskutieren und für die Verbraucher:innenarbeit nutzbar zu machen. Ergänzend werden Leitfragen vorgestellt, die eine reflexive Auseinandersetzung in Beratung, Workshops und Bildungsformaten unterstützen.

Large language models now routinely annotate text in computational social science, but they do not hold up at corpus sizes of several million sentences. Proprietary LLMs are financially prohibitive, local open-weight LLMs take days or weeks of computation, and both remain opaque and hard to reproduce. Using LLMs to train dedicated classifiers solves these problems, yet the approach itself remains sparsely tested in the social sciences and largely inaccessible to researchers without engineering support. We present LLMTool, an open-source Python package that runs the full hybrid workflow from a command line. On a bilingual corpus of 38,451 Canadian parliamentary debates and news media texts coded across four dimensions, classifiers trained on the best LLM labels reach amean Micro F1 of 68.9%. Open-weight models such as GPT-OSS match one of the best proprietary models available, GPT-5, and deliver a 109–395× inference speedup over directLLM annotation on standard workstations

Household microdata combining socio-demographic, housing, income and expenditure attributes are a core resource for many studies in quantitative social science, such as modelling the household-level impacts of the energy transition. Yet no such data are openly available for Germany's full population. SynPop-DE provides a synthetic population of 40,235,916 households and their 82,039,613 members in all 400 German districts, calibrated to the 2022 census, with 34 attributes per household. Synthetic households are generated by estimating the joint attribute distribution of the German Household Budget Survey through a two-stage machine learning architecture. While an autoencoder first compresses high-dimensional categorical data into a continuous latent space, a generative adversarial network subsequently learns to sample new records from this representation. These records are then aligned with census marginals for all German districts using iterative proportional updating to ensure spatial representativeness. Validation along three dimensions confirms that the model learns attribute relationships and generates synthetic households that reproduce the statistical properties of the survey data (fidelity), supports downstream analyses with accuracy comparable to the original survey (utility), and prevents disclosure of individual respondents (privacy). The dataset is openly available at https://synpop.de.

When researchers study semantic phenomena using probabilistic modeling, they must validate these models to ensure they accurately formalize the underlying theory and predictions. Probabilistic models have gained increasing popularity in semantics and pragmatics in recent years, yet the question of how to validate these models has not been addressed in the literature. Here, we present R and Stan-based tutorials on (a) five model validation methods based on the principled Bayesian workflow in cognitive science (Betancourt, 2018; Gelman et al., 2020; Schad et al., 2021) and (b) on model comparisons in a Bayesian hypothesis testing framework by means of the Bayes factor (Jeffreys, 1939; Kass & Raftery, 1995). We apply these methods to two models from the RSA family from the influential article by van Tiel et al., 2021. In tutorial I, we demonstrate how to implement and interpret (1) prior predictive checks, (2) computational faithfulness, (3) model sensitivity, (4) parameter recovery, and (5) posterior predictive checks. In tutorial II, we demonstrate how to implement and interpret a Bayes factor model comparison to quantify evidence for the competing probabilistic models. The tutorial includes path diagrams for an easier understanding of the methods, troubleshooting checklists to address undesired outcomes, and R and Stan code to make it easier to apply the methods.

States may use ideological exclusion to prevent radical movements and new party competitors from emerging. We examine whether such policies can instead backfire by politicizing opposition and creating openings for new challengers. Empirically, we study the Anti-Radical Decree in West Germany, which excluded individuals associated with radical organizations, mainly on the left, from public employment. We combine an original dataset of banned individuals with survey data and official electoral returns. At the individual level, we find that opposition to the bans is associated with stronger support for the emerging Green party. At the aggregate level, counties that experienced bans were more likely to protest the decree and subsequently recorded higher Green vote shares. We interpret these patterns as consistent with a mechanism in which employment bans increased local politicization and created opportunities for a new challenger. More broadly, the findings suggest that ideological exclusion can sometimes backfire politically.

The literature on occupational classes' political attitudes largely assumes socialisation effects. While self-selection into occupations and general tendencies towards attitudinal stability challenge this view, an emerging literature using panel data still finds small, but existent effects of class mobility. However, we argue that their framework does not correspond fully to socialisation. We propose a more appropriate one and study whether occupational socialisation affects socioeconomic and sociocultural attitudes through a two-way fixed-effects model with dummy impact functions. We use Swiss (SHP) and British (BHPS) panels, covering the periods 1999-2023 and 1991-2008 respectively, to unpack the evolution of these attitudes after vertical or horizontal mobility. We find that, despite clear between-class differences in socioeconomic and sociocultural attitudes, neither vertical nor horizontal class mobility is consistently associated with immediate or late-onset attitudinal changes. The lack of evidence for socialisation shows that this implicit assumption present in most research on classes' political attitudes should be reconsidered. Our results also show why using models that are well suited to socialisation is crucial.

Drawing on the latest interdisciplinary insights on human-technology interaction, this chapter explains key perspectives and frameworks of how people adopt, interact with, and experience technology. After introducing core ethical aspects of technology, the chapter takes a critical stance on the promises and pitfalls of disruptive technological advancement—including but not limited to AI. Combining organizational, socio-psychological, and ethical perspectives on human-technology interaction, fundamental challenges of human control over digital technologies—which are not only tools but also agents and infrastructures—are explained. The chapter explains important blind spots within the most commonly used models of human-technology interaction and discusses unresolved issues of user-technology value alignment, accountability, and control.

Comprehensive and reliable funding information is essential for evaluating public research investment, yet funding metadata remain fragmented across heterogeneous data sources maintained by funders and bibliographic platforms. This study examines the interoperability between a national funder database, the National Science and Technology Information Service (NTIS) of South Korea, and two bibliographic sources, Web of Science (WoS) and OpenAlex, in order to assess the quality and coverage of funded publication data. Using a multi-step metadata matching procedure, more than 99% of NTIS records were successfully linked to corresponding documents in WoS and OpenAlex, demonstrating that bibliographic metadata in NTIS records are generally complete and accurate despite incomplete coverage of persistent identifiers such as DOIs. However, limitations are identified in funding-specific metadata, particularly in the centrally assigned contribution rate, which does not account for non-Korean or non-governmental funding and may bias national statistics. Comparison across data sources reveals substantial overlap but also notable differences in coverage and granularity. These differences reflect the distinct collection mechanisms of funders’ databases and bibliographic sources and give rise to complementarities that can be exploited to obtain a more comprehensive picture of funded research outputs and their associated funding sources. The findings carry broader implications for funding agencies seeking to improve interoperability, metadata standardisation, and the analytical utility of research information systems.

Political economy scholarship has documented how incumbent polluting business interests obstruct the green transition. While important, this focus misses a vital point: how can polluting firms become climate policy supporters? The auto sector is a paradigmatic case, with some legacy car manufacturers supporting the phaseout of the internal combustion engine. I demonstrate that firms' ability to repurpose existing assets for electric vehicle production explains intra- and inter-industry variation in the auto sector's political preferences on the European Union’s phaseout of the internal combustion engine by 2035. Emissions-intensive firms with low asset specificity can respond to the threat of asset stranding by repurposing assets for low(er)-emissions activities. However, only firms that divest become reliable climate policy supporters, while diversifiers remain wary of policies that undermine their flexibility. I contribute to political economy literature by introducing asset specificity as a second dimension, alongside emissions intensity, to explain firms' economic and political behavior.

Individuals often consume tasty, calorically dense foods in response to negative emotions, a phenomenon exemplified by notions of “stress eating” and “comfort food.” While this link between food and mood can become pathological in binge eating, the decision-making processes underlying this link are poorly understood. Here, we investigated the impact of acute increases in negative affect on when and how strongly the perceived tastiness and healthiness of foods influence food choices in healthy adults and individuals with bulimia nervosa (BN), an eating disorder characterized by cycles of over- and under-consumption of food. In a randomized crossover design, 25 women with BN and 21 healthy controls completed two sessions where they received either a neutral or negative affect induction and then completed a food choice task. Using a time-varying diffusion decision model, we assessed how negative affect influences food choice dynamics for high- and low-fat foods. In the neutral affect condition, individuals with BN considered tastiness relative to healthiness of high-fat foods sooner than healthy controls but maintained a restrictive food choice policy by reducing the weight on tastiness. After a negative affect induction, both groups showed a stronger bias towards considering tastiness before healthiness, but this bias was exaggerated in individuals with BN. This affect-induced bias for high-fat foods was associated with more frequent subjective binge episodes over three months. These results provide insights into how negative emotion influences food choices and may explain why binge eating in BN is more likely during high negative affect, while dietary restriction is more likely during low negative affect.

Can deliberative mini-publics strengthen democratic attitudes? We study this question using a pre-registered field intervention conducted by a non-partisan NGO in collaboration with Members of the German Bundestag. Across 17 full-day events in six constituencies, randomly sampled citizens participated in structured face-to-face deliberation with elected representatives. To estimate effects, we use a placebo design comparing participants to individuals from the same districts who report they would participate if invited. Participation increases internal and external political efficacy, willingness to engage beyond voting, and political trust, with effects of 0.26-0.53 standard deviations. Participation also reduces conspiracy thinking, though this finding is less robust. Results are consistent across different identification strategies. Exploratory analyses suggest larger effects when representatives from multiple parties are present. These findings provide causal field evidence that deliberative mini-publics can strengthen key democratic attitudes and highlight their potential to reinforce democratic foundations.

On the basis of a combination of linear ballistic accumulation (LBA) and item response theory (IRT), this paper proposes a new class of item response models, namely LBA IRT, which incorporates the observed response time by means of LBA. Our main objective is to develop a simple yet effective alternative to the diffusion IRT model, which is one of best-known response time (RT)-incorporating IRT models that explicitly models the underlying psychological process of the elicited item response. Through a simulation study, we show that the proposed model enables us to obtain the corresponding parameter estimates compared with the diffusion IRT model while achieving a much faster convergence speed. Furthermore, the application of the proposed model to real personality measurement data indicates that it fits the data better than the diffusion IRT model in terms of its predictive performance. Thus, the proposed model exhibits good performance and promising modeling capabilities in terms of capturing the cognitive and psychometric processes underlying the observed data.

Recent scholarship proposes that East Asians commonly hold multiple religious beliefs simultaneously, even when they report a single religious identity or none at all. This note argues that this claim is substantially exaggerated due to a measurement mismatch: what GES-based studies operationalize as religious belief is better understood as ambient cultural familiarity. Using probability sample data from the 2023 Pew Research Center Survey of Religion and Spirituality in East Asian Societies across Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan, I test whether the multiple religious belief pattern holds under more precise operationalization. When replicating the GES approach using cultural attachment items, the familiar pattern reproduces. When instead examining active devotion to specific deities, prevalence drops substantially, most sharply among Christians and religious nones, though the extent varies across societies. Comparing cultural attachment to religious belief is comparing apples to oranges.

This study addresses a fundamental challenge in the empirical application of the Capability Approach: the measurement of the “capability set” as an opportunity set. Unlike standard utility-based measures that focus solely on achieved outcomes, measuring capability requires assessing the welfare of potential activities—including those not chosen (counterfactuals). We propose a novel methodology that bridges normative social choice theory and econometric causal inference. Specifically, we interpret the Average Treatment Effect (ATE) derived from panel data fixed-effects models as capturing marginal counterfactual welfare differences between alternative actions, rather than level comparisons of chieved outcomes. Using a unique panel dataset of elderly individuals in Japan, focusing on “going-out” versus “staying-home” behavior, we evaluate the size of capability sets and the degree of “unfreedom” (the welfare gap between options). Furthermore, we propose and apply several aggregation rules—ranging from Utilitarian to Rawlsian—to construct group-level capability measures. Our empirical results demonstrate that the ranking of social groups varies significantly depending on the normative aggregation rule employed, highlighting the importance of explicitly defining the informational basis of social evaluation.

Les élections municipales des 15 et 22 mars 2026 constituent le premier scrutin local français où l'intelligence artificielle générative s'invite massivement dans les pratiques de campagne. Cette note de recherche propose une analyse équilibrée des usages documentés, distinguant les applications légitimes (génération d'affiches, chatbots programmatiques, synthèse de contenu) des dérives avérées (deepfakes diffamatoires, images trompeuses, astroturfing). Si ces nouvelles capacités technologiques soulèvent des préoccupations légitimes pour l'intégrité du débat démocratique, nous argumentons que leur impact doit être mis en perspective au regard de la littérature sur les effets limités de la communication politique de masse et sur les déterminants réels de la consommation de désinformation. Plutôt qu'un catastrophisme qui risquerait d'alimenter la défiance généralisée, nous plaidons pour une approche fondée sur l'éducation aux médias, la transparence algorithmique et le renforcement du journalisme professionnel.

The positive gradient between socioeconomic status (SES) and health is well established, yet the mechanisms through which SES translates into health advantages remain underexplored in the Taiwanese context. Drawing on Fundamental Cause Theory (FCT), Health Lifestyle Theory (HLT), and Social Capital Theory, this study proposes and tests a serial mediation model in which SES promotes social participation, which in turn shapes regular exercise behavior, ultimately affecting physical and mental health. Using data from the 2021 Taiwan Social Change Survey Health Module (N = 1,465), we employ path analysis with bias-corrected and accelerated (BCa) bootstrapping (3,000 resamples) to estimate serial indirect effects, and multigroup path analysis to examine gender moderation. Results show that: (1) SES exerts significant positive indirect effects on both physical health (PCS) and mental health (MCS) through the sequential pathway of social participation to regular exercise (BCa 95% CIs exclude zero); (2) social participation's direct effect on health is nonsignificant, functioning primarily as an upstream enabler of health behavior rather than an independent protective factor; and (3) the direct effect of SES on exercise differs significantly by gender—significant among men but nonsignificant among women, suggesting gender-differentiated pathways through which SES translates into health behavior. This study provides the first SEM-based test of the sequential mediation mechanism linking social capital and health lifestyles in a nationally representative Taiwanese adult sample, with implications for health promotion policies that prioritize building social participation environments over individual behavior change alone.

Migrants and increasingly migrant women have become subject to a highly politicized public debate on migration. However, we know little about the role they play in this politicization. To address this gap, this article examines to which extent women and members of ethnic minorities have a voice and appear as claims-makers on immigration and integration. Newspapers in 10 Western European countries (1990-2018) were systematically coded to identify public claims on these issues, together with coding of first names of claims-makers to identify gender and ethnic membership (N=11,164 claims). Results show that women appear less often as claims-makers than men, with even lower visibility among ethnic minority women. Hierarchical regression analyses reveal systematic differences in framing, tone, topic, and the addressees of the claims. This indicates that the voices of women and ethnic minorities are not visible, and these debates would be different if women and minorities had an equitable voice.

Reducing inequalities is a core objective of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and a longstanding commitment of European welfare states. Parenting leave policies constitute a central policy instrument for addressing inequalities in gender relations, labour market participation, income security and family formation. However, their effectiveness depends not only on formal entitlements but on access, affordability and actual use across different social groups. This Policy Brief draws on the CA21150 Working Group 4 report Mapping the Unknown, whose primary objective was to identify research and data gaps in the European evidence base on parenting leave and social inequalities. Lammi-Taskula, J. and Reimer, T. (eds) (2026), Mapping the Unknown: Research Gaps in Parenting Leave Inequality Research in Europe, COST Action Parental Leave Policies and Social Sustainability (Sustainability@Leave), DOI: https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/8kbsz_v1, available at: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/8kbsz_v1

During their first years in the Netherlands, asylum seekers and permit holders are confronted with the reception and civic integration policies. Past research suggests these policies may have an impact on second language acquisition. Using three waves of longitudinal data collected among Syrian refugees in the Netherlands, we investigated whether any (dis)advantages in language skills accrued during the reception period are mitigated or exacerbated by the civic integration process. Our findings show that civic integration plays a key role in Dutch language acquisition, with language skills improving significantly before completion and stabilizing afterward. This is likely due to the end of mandatory classes and reduced access to further instruction. While this stabilization may reflect fossilization, it could also represent a temporary plateau, as past research suggests. Furthermore, more highly educated people improved their language skills more rapidly during civic integration, suggesting they are better able to make use of language classes. Finally, frequent relocations between asylum seeker centers initially hindered language skills but this disadvantage disappeared during civic integration, suggesting that civic integration can at least partially offset early setbacks.

Research on recycling behaviour and its influences can play a key role in supporting public policy efforts to mitigate the negative effects of waste generation and landfilling. However, recent reviews have raised concerns about the quality of research on recycling behaviour. Despite this, no previous reviews have conducted quality appraisals to judge the extent and impact of quality issues. This is partly due to the difficulty of applying validated quality appraisal tools developed for intervention reviews in the health and medicine fields to behaviour influence reviews in environment and sustainability fields. This update of a previous systematic review aims to fill this gap by developing and piloting a novel quality appraisal framework, specifically tailored to the needs of interdisciplinary reviews of the influences on recycling and other pre-environmental behaviours. Application of the novel framework to a set of 118 recycling papers highlighted a substantial lack of causal evidence and weak construct validity of measured ‘behaviour’. These quality issues undermine the ability of individual studies and the body of literature as a whole to firstly, draw strong conclusions about what factors have causal influence on real-world recycling behaviour in broad populations of interest, and secondly, therefore, to guide interventions to improve recycling outcomes. To improve future research, this review identifies instances of better practice to increase the quality of evidence and the field’s confidence in what influences household recycling, and potentially, other pro-environmental behaviour.

Extreme weather events can undermine political representation by preventing vulnerable populations from voting. Using georeferenced polling-station records from eight Brazilian elections (2010–2024) matched to daily river discharge, we exploit within-polling-station variation to show that historically low river discharge on election day increases voter abstention in communities dependent on river transportation. The effects are larger in polling sections with higher illiteracy rates and married voters. These shocks also shift electoral outcomes by reducing the vote share of parties whose bases overlap with affected populations. Our findings show that climate change can systematically weaken the political voice of the populations most exposed to climate damages.

Studying of the effect of racial differences on health outcomes is a difficult task for reasons including varying definitions of race - many of which may not adhere to current best practices - its philosophical acceptance as a well-defined exposure, and appropriate utilization of factors with important roles in the relationship between race and outcome. Inattentive approaches to any of these issues can lead to biased, irrelevant, or unreplicable study findings. We highlight these concerns paying special focus to the issue of covariates in analyses of racial causal effects. We show that mis-identifying many common covariates as confounding variables can bias estimates of racial causal effects. Rather than defaulting to using covariates as confounding variables, researchers should carefully consider the role each variable plays in the relationship between race and outcome and how accounting for each will affect effect estimates and their interpretability.

Manifestations of gender backlash such as anti-genderism and the manosphere’s anti-feminism have been extensively studied, yet there is little data on their prevalence in the general population. This study examines the prevalence of anti-gender beliefs and perceived male reverse discrimination beliefs using data from a survey conducted in Italy in December 2024 and assesses whether these two expressions of gender backlash are correlated. The findings show an ideologically committed core of individuals surrounded by a larger share of others whose adherence to such views ranges from moderate to low, approaching complete rejection. Subgroup analyses further indicate that variation by gender and age is uneven, with some of the highest levels observed among younger and middle-aged men, and factor-analytic results indicate that perceived male reverse discrimination is closely connected to anti-gender beliefs. This suggests a diffuse, albeit moderate, belief landscape that could, under specific social conditions, such as biographical events of early and middle adulthood, lead individuals from the low-intensity belief margins toward the radicalized center.

Remote work has expanded rapidly, with most research focusing on work from home and offering limited insight into how alternative work environments shape work–life boundary management. This narrative review synthesises research on remote work and boundary management to examine how different work settings influence employee experiences and outcomes. The review identifies five key themes: (1) the role of spatial and temporal flexibility in shaping boundary control; (2) the influence of environmental and social cues on boundary enactment; (3) the potential of alternative remote workplaces outside the home (or ‘third places’) to support boundary management; (4) the behavioural strategies individuals use to manage boundaries across contexts; and (5) the implications of boundary management for wellbeing and work-related outcomes. While existing research highlights the importance of the work environment in shaping boundary dynamics, evidence remains heavily skewed towards home-based work, with limited empirical attention to third places as distinct boundary-supporting environments. As such, the role of these spaces in enabling or constraining boundary management remains underdeveloped and warrants further investigation. By integrating insights across fragmented literatures, this review advances a more contextually grounded understanding of boundary management in remote work and identifies key directions for future research.

As climate change accelerates and becomes a more significant existential threat, the tech sector’s carbon footprint keep increasing and they are difficult to quantify. The tech sector also continues to produce harmful technologies and engage in harmful practices, ranging from work surveillance to AI children’s toys. This essay argues that climate change and these unjust practices are entangled and cannot be individually solved in silos, as they are symptoms of a centralized system driven by competition and artificial scarcity. The essay critiques the tech sector’s reliance on top-down central planning by utilizing frameworks of Elizabeth Sawin’s multisolving, Donella Meadows leverage points, and Elizabeth Ostrom’s work that empirically proves the viability of polycentric governance. It proposes prefiguration as the necessary strategy for STEM workers to enact deep systemic change that works towards polycentricity. Concrete, actionable prefigurative practices already occurring within STEM are surveyed, including open source hardware, mesh networks, and repair cafes. While these prefigurative acts exist in the micro-scale, they are necessary practices for the adoption of circular economies, renewables, and worker-owned cooperatives. This paper reframes technical labour as a political act and provides a strategic blueprint for STEM workers to mitigate immediate environmental and social harm while constructing the democratic and decentralized infrastructure required for a just climate transition.

Vanessa Fong (2002) theorised that China's One-Child Policy (OCP; 1979–2016) enhanced female empowerment by removing competition from sons and allowing daughters to obtain resources traditionally reserved for sons. However, no systematic review has comprehensively assessed the available evidence on this issue. Drawing on Fong’s framework, we examined the relationship between the OCP and female empowerment across seven subfields: family investment and parental support, education, employment and career development, gender attitudes and norms, intergenerational relationships, reproductive rights and autonomy, and other social dynamics. We searched six scientific databases, yielding 1265 sources and, after applying exclusion criteria, analyzed 32 studies published between 2002 and 2024. The majority (21 of 32) report a positive relationship between the OCP and female empowerment. Resource concentration driven by reduced sibling size emerges as a central mechanism, benefiting only-daughters in family investment, education, and career development. In contrast, impacts on mothers are more mixed; while the OCP reduced childbirth burdens and enhanced life autonomy, it also violated reproductive rights and imposed disproportionate contraceptive burdens on women. Moreover, it emerges the OCP's empowering effects were contingent on external conditions, such as local educational and economic resources or place of residence. We point out various research gaps in the existing literature, amongst other the consistent failure to distinguish the OCP’s effects from concurrent socio-economic transformations. Nonetheless, the evidence suggests that the OCP, together with broader social changes, has shaped women's lives and promoted female empowerment, although its impacts were neither uniform nor inherent, but rather shaped by contextual factors.

The six-week postpartum visit remains the primary — and often only — formal clinical encounter a woman receives following childbirth in the United States. Despite recommendations by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) that this visit be broadened into a comprehensive postpartum care model, most providers continue to rely on a narrow set of single-domain screening tools that collectively fail to capture the full scope of postpartum experience. The Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS), the most widely administered postpartum instrument, screens for depression alone. Other validated tools address anxiety, PTSD, bipolar spectrum disorder, or pelvic floor dysfunction in isolation. No existing instrument integrates physical recovery, psycho-emotional wellbeing, birth trauma, relational identity, energetic depletion, and the capacity for meaning-making and awe into a single, clinically usable framework. This paper introduces the Comprehensive Postpartum Assessment Index (CPAI), a novel multi-domain screening instrument grounded in the panchamayakosha model from the yoga therapy tradition — a five-layered framework that understands the human being as physical body, breath and energetic body, psycho-emotional realm, discernment body, and capacity for awe. The CPAI draws on validated, open-source items from existing instruments where applicable and introduces original items in domains that are currently unaddressed in clinical practice. It is designed to be administered by obstetricians, midwives, or other postpartum providers as a starting point for whole-person assessment and targeted referral. This paper reviews the current landscape of postpartum screening tools, articulates the clinical and humanistic gaps they leave unaddressed, introduces the theoretical framework underlying the CPAI, and presents the instrument itself. While formal psychometric validation studies are beyond the scope of this initial work, the CPAI is offered as a rigorously grounded foundation for future research, clinical pilot testing, and iterative refinement. Keywords: postpartum care, postpartum depression, comprehensive screening, panchamayakosha, yoga therapy, birth trauma, matrescence, pelvic floor, postpartum PTSD, body awareness, bodily dissociation, whole-person assessment

The COVID-19 pandemic introduced a massive shock to global economic activity, and micro and small enterprises (MSEs) were among the most impacted. Women-led enterprises in residential estates in Lagos, Nigeria, were particularly vulnerable as Lagos is a highly densely populated urban center that is characterized by very high dependence on informal enterprise. Most of these enterprises, however, showed resilience by basing their operations on hyperlocal means like estate management, social networks, and community leadership, despite the limited mobility and affected consumer behavior. Many of these businesses found strength in hyperlocal structures, such as estate management, social networks, and community leadership, despite shifting consumer behaviors and limited mobility. This article examines how these community-based systems helped the survival and even expansion of women-led businesses throughout the pandemic. The study highlights the value of grassroots systems in protecting women entrepreneurs against macro-level disruptions by synthesizing theoretical perspectives on social capital and local governance. Keywords: COVID-19 pandemic, Women-led business, Estate management, Social capital, Community leadership, Lagos.

In accessing financial capital and sustaining their businesses, minority women entrepreneurs in the United States confront structural barriers. These barriers are influenced by interconnected structural factors, such as systems of residential estate management, opportunities for educational and leadership, and broader economic frameworks. This research explores how these structural areas enable or impede financial access and entrepreneurial resilience. Drawing on the theory of intersectionality, empirical data from U.S. entrepreneurial studies, and a framework for economic justice, the article investigates (1) how estate and housing policies influence access to networks and resources; (2) the role of education and leadership pathways in equipping minority women for competitive business environments; and (3) how economic systems perpetuate or dismantle barriers to capital. The paper contends that addressing financial exclusion necessitates an integrated strategy that takes into account the spatial, educational, and economic determinants of entrepreneurship. Keywords: minority women, entrepreneurs, Estate Management, Education, Leadership, Financial access, Economic system.

Este artigo examina o papel do requisito de fluência em inglês nos processos de contratação de graduados como um mecanismo de estratificação racializada no mercado de trabalho brasileiro. Os dados provêm de 19 entrevistas semiestruturadas com graduados beneficiários da política de cotas e profissionais de recursos humanos realizadas no Rio de Janeiro e em São Paulo entre julho de 2025 e janeiro de 2026. O argumento central é que a exigência de fluência em inglês opera como um mecanismo de fechamento social na transição para o emprego. Esse mecanismo não se baseia na função produtiva da habilidade, mas em três processos inter-relacionados: (i) seleção por um recurso cultural cuja distribuição é fortemente estratificada por classe e raça; (ii) legitimação institucional do requisito como marcador de profissionalismo, associada a modelos organizacionais internacionalizados; e (iii) exclusão antecipatória de candidatos que, ao confrontar o requisito, deixam de se candidatar às vagas. Abstract: This article examines the role of English proficiency requirements in graduate hiring as a mechanism of racialized stratification in the Brazilian labour market. Data come from 19 semi-structured interviews with quota-policy beneficiary graduates and human resources professionals conducted in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo between July 2025 and January 2026. The central argument is that English proficiency requirements operate as a social closure mechanism in the school-to-work transition. This mechanism does not rest on the direct productive function of the skill, but on three interrelated processes: (i) selection by a cultural resource whose distribution is strongly stratified by class and race; (ii) institutional legitimation of the requirement as a marker of professionalism, associated with internationalised organisational models; and (iii) anticipatory exclusion of candidates who, upon encountering the requirement, choose not to apply.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 compelled the European Union (EU) to take the unprecedented step of providing coordinated military aid to Ukraine. This article explores the intriguing, yet under-researched question of how this major policy transformation was discursively legitimised in the EU’s official communication. Theoretically drawing on Van Leeuwen’s (2007) framework of legitimation and methodologically combining qualitative content analysis with critical discourse analysis, it examines posts published on X (Twitter) between 2022 and 2024 by eight EU institutions and representatives. The findings reveal a complex pattern of discursive coherence achieved through a division of labour across the actors. While all actors relied on legitimation strategies of moral evaluation, authorisation, and rationalisation, they did so through distinct yet complementary registers, ranging from institutional consensus and strategic resolve to moral duty, emotional urgency, and the Union’s normative vocation.

As the Earth's climate system approaches critical tipping points, systemic and chronic disasters are becoming more frequent and severe. The harmful algal bloom (HAB) affecting South Australian (SA) coastal waters from early 2025 is one such disaster. What do Australian citizens know about this sort of coastal disaster? How concerned is the community about HABs, and who do they think should be responsible for mitigation and response? To address these questions, we conducted a nationally-representative survey of 1,031 Australian residents. Findings highlight critical gaps in public understanding of systemic and chronic disasters which can affect coasts, which is striking given 87% of Australia’s population lives within 50km of the coast. Results reveal low awareness and literacy, especially compared with disasters such as bushfires and floods. Despite relatively low baseline awareness, exposure to information about the SA HAB prompted substantial concern amongst all respondents, and measurable behavioural change among South Australian respondents. This, combined with high public expectations that governments are responsible for action on coastal HABs and other disasters, suggests that targeted risk communication could support timely protective action by governments rather than amplifying alarm.

This tutorial paper introduces two approaches to modelling tongue conoutr data obtained with DeepLabCut using Multivariate Generalised Additive Models (MGAMs) and Multivariate Functional Principal Component Analysis (MFPCA). For each method, we present a fully commented analysis of two illustrative data sets: VC coarticulation in Italian and Polish, and consonant emphaticness in Lebanese Arabic. All the materials (inlcuding data and code) are available in the research compendium of the tutorial at . We conclude by discussing advantages and disadvantages of the two methods (MGAM and MFPCA) and we recommend researchers to prefer MFPCA over MGAM as an initial step for modelling tongue contours.

How do individuals respond to conquest? While prior studies document its long-term legacies, they typically focus on single forms of response and offer limited theoretical priors on how individuals adjust in the immediate aftermath. I argue that conquered populations choose between emigration, assimilation, and mobilization. I study these responses among intellectuals in Alsace-Lorraine after the German conquest of 1870 and the French reconquest of 1918, leveraging a difference-in-differences design and novel georeferenced data on historical book publications. Both conquests triggered large shifts toward the conqueror's language. Within-author estimates show that these shifts reflected not only the selective emigration but also assimilation efforts among those who remained. Conquest simultaneously spurred regionalist mobilization, and the two responses are substitutes rather than complements. The findings show that conquest induces trade-offs between alternative strategies of adaptation, and that even instrumental assimilation can have lasting political consequences.

Generative artificial intelligence is diffusing throughout society, adoption decision by adoption decision. Simultaneously, long-standing practices in higher education are being reconsidered and reimagined. While many of the narratives we hear about AI focus on possibilities and potential, to innovate in a principled and ethical way, we must also critically evaluate these systems and the stories about them. By doing so, we can surface what we collectively want the adoption of AI to actually accomplish and the means by which we get there.

Este artículo propone una herramienta de análisis de la voz aplicada a documentales de actualidad y reportajes televisivos con el objetivo de contribuir a la alfabetización mediática en el ámbito audiovisual. A partir de la identificación de distintos tipos de voces (diegética, extradiegética y voz en off), se examina cómo se configuran las fuentes de autoridad y los pactos de lectura en la no ficción televisiva. El estudio incluye un análisis comparativo de dos reportajes del programa En Portada (RTVE), que permite ejemplificar el uso de esta herramienta y observar diferentes formas de construcción narrativa, especialmente en relación con el protagonismo del periodista y la distribución de voces entre ciudadanía y élites. Los resultados ponen de manifiesto la relevancia de la voz como elemento estructurador del relato y subrayan su utilidad para favorecer una lectura crítica de los contenidos audiovisuales en contextos de sobreexposición informativa y creciente hibridación entre información y entretenimiento This article proposes a voice analysis framework applied to current affairs documentaries and television reports, with the aim of contributing to media literacy in the audiovisual domain. Through the identification of different types of voice (diegetic, extradiegetic, and voice-over) it examines how sources of authority and interpretive frameworks are constructed in non-fiction television. The study includes a comparative analysis of two reports from the programme En Portada (RTVE), illustrating the application of this tool and highlighting different modes of narrative construction, particularly regarding the prominence of the journalist and the distribution of voices between citizens and elites. The findings underscore the relevance of voice as a structuring element of the narrative and emphasize its usefulness in fostering critical engagement with audiovisual content in contexts of information overload and increasing hybridization between information and entertainment.

Conversational systems increasingly mediate how people encounter data, yet most still respond with text or single charts that offer limited support for data visualization literacy in real contexts. We propose the concept of conversational data comics: system-generated comic strips that answer questions, interpret uploaded charts, or explain situated data through paced panels combining visualizations, annotations, and visual metaphors. We define the concept, distinguish it from adjacent formats, and illustrate three scenarios: vis-to-comic interpretation, question-to-comic responses, and situated product micro-stories. We then outline a research agenda on in-context literacy outcomes, multi-turn comic conversational strategies, and mechanisms for faithfulness, uncertainty, and responsible framing.

Final published paper here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10865-026-00642-w Unhealthy diets and a lack of physical activity (PA) concur in the same individuals and jointly contribute to overweight and related diseases. Limited self-regulation abilities commonly result in a gap between intentions to eat better and move more and behavior enactment (‘intention-behavior gap’). What is less clear is whether the two health behavioral domains eating and physical activity facilitate or inhibit each other. While cybernetic and resource depletion models would predict that engaging in one behavior leads to reduced effort in the other behavior (compensation), motivational accounts predict the opposite: more PA should increase healthy eating and vice versa (transfer). Elucidating such relationships across time requires multiple assessments from the same individuals and sufficient incidences of both behaviors, and hence, relatively long assessment periods. This study uses data obtained through ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to examine the day-level association between PA and healthy eating. 25 participants (20 women, 5 men, mean age = 56) of a health-insurance organized health promotion course provided daily data on intentions, self-efficacy, and behavior enactment for PA and healthy eating for seven weeks with the average participant submitting data on 42 days. We found that cross-behavior associations on all assessed variables and intention behavior gaps as a marker of self-regulatory success were positive. This positive relation between IBGs was independent of day-level variables typically implicated in self-regulation (stress, mood, tiredness, and hours of sleep during the preceding night). Results contradict cybernetic and resource depletion models of self-regulation and speak more to effects of positive transfer between behaviors. Providing feedback on such positive associations might be a beneficial intervention component to encourage parallel engagement in PA and healthy eating. Future research should aim to further identify other within- and between-person factors (e.g., willpower beliefs) contributing to the PA-healthy eating association.

Iconic historical figures are meant to represent a society’s most enduring and universal values. And yet, across partisan and sociodemographic groups Americans believe their most important values are widely contested rather than shared. Whether these perceived divisions extend to sentiments for objects of collective memory meant to represent shared values remains unknown. Relying on a dataset measuring public sentiments toward the 15 most institutionally consecrated iconic historical figures, we examine both polarization and false polarization, defined as the misperception that political opponents hold polarized views of these figures. We find little evidence of true polarization in sentiments toward iconic historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Anne Frank, Martin Luther King Jr., and many others. In contrast, we find that false polarization is widespread, patterned, and asymmetric. Ultimately, we find that the false polarization of collective memory is rooted in partisan animus and social sorting into mental camps, both of which are amplified by homogeneous social networks and attenuated by crosscutting ties.

Leading news outlets play a central role in shaping how political leaders and the public understand the causes, impacts, and solutions to climate change. Here, we provide the first comprehensive assessment of how The Guardian, a globally influential newspaper widely recognized for high-quality climate journalism, has reported on climate change between 2010 and 2025. We applied a validated methodology based on large language models to analyze N = 18,785 articles and evaluate to what extent reporting covers scientifically grounded causes, impacts, mitigation strategies, and adaptation measures. We find that climate coverage increased markedly after 2018 and has remained structurally elevated relative to the preceding decade. Coverage of causes and mitigation is dominated by fossil fuels and renewable energy, whereas agriculture, overconsumption, carbon inequality, and economic growth are mentioned far less frequently. Aspects related to adaptation receive considerably less attention than aspects related to causes, impacts, and mitigation. Our findings highlight opportunities for more comprehensive coverage that better reflects full range of societal transformations needed to address climate change.

This paper examines whether childhood cultural capital leaves a lasting imprint on health in later life and identifies the pathways through which that influence operates. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital and life-course research on health inequality, the study argues that early cultural resources shape later-life health not only through socioeconomic attainment, but also through the formation of health-related dispositions and continued cultural engagement. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), the Life History Mail Survey (LHMS), and the Consumption and Activities Mail Survey (CAMS), the analysis follows a nationally representative sample of roughly 14,900 older adults in the United States. Childhood cultural capital is measured through the number of books in the household at age 10, and its association with later-life health is estimated through a life-course structural equation model incorporating childhood conditions, education, adult socioeconomic attainment, health behaviors, cultural participation, and adult health history. The results show that childhood cultural capital is positively associated with later-life health both directly and indirectly. Approximately 65% of its total association operates through mediating pathways, with the strongest indirect effects running through educational and occupational attainment and through healthier behavioral profiles in adulthood; cultural participation also contributes, though more modestly. Gender differences are limited and largely concentrated in the behavioral pathway. Overall, the findings suggest that childhood cultural capital is an important and distinct determinant of later-life health, helping to reproduce health inequalities across the life course through multiple, interrelated mechanisms.

While the Healthy Immigrant Paradox documents an initial health advantage among the foreign-born, ample evidence shows that they present an accelerated decline in comparison to the native-born. However, heterogeneities in these patterns of aging by different migrant groups remain largely understudied. This study addresses this gap by examining how marital assimilation stratifies functional health trajectories among U.S. immigrants. Using longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and growth curve models, we compare the accumulation of Activities of Daily Living (ADL) limitations between immigrants in intramarried (same-origin) and intermarried (native-partner) unions. Our results reveal distinct stratification by union type. We find that intermarried immigrants present "premium," allowing immigrants to maintain health trajectories indistinguishable from the native-born population. In contrast, intramarried married immigrants experience accelerated functional decline, a disadvantage that is particularly pronounced among women. Furthermore, we find support for a "Substitution Hypothesis," where marriage to a native-born partner effectively substitutes for the integration benefits typically accrued through duration of residence. These findings showcase that the "immigrant health advantage" and its ensuing erosion is not uniform but is conditional on the type of union, duration of residence and gender.

The author introduces a new approach called modified-analytic autoethnography (M-AA), which integrates the elements of analytical ethnography. M-AA comprises three main components: 1) self-disclosure as a researcher subject, which includes complete member researcher and analytic reflexivity; 2) reflexivity experience sampling method, incorporating experience sampling method, and diary method; and 3) narrative visibility of the researcher’s self through text mining. This study is original in that it reconstructs analytic autoethnography as a framework to simplify and ensure methodological transparency. For papers employing analytical autoethnography, this study proposes a framework that integrates statistical methods, including quantitative text analysis, thereby contributing a new method to the flexible methodology of autoethnography and providing new insights for researchers.

Objective: This study aimed to develop a Female University Student Self-Advocacy Skills Scale (FUS-SSS) and test its reliability and factor model fit. This study also assessed factors associated with maladaptation to university life among female university students (FUS). Methods: Two self-advocacy skills (SAS) scales were consulted when creating the preliminary FUS-SSS items to ensure construct validity. A focus group interview was held with FUS (N = 15), and qualitative data were used to ensure content validity. A questionnaire survey was administered to FUS (N = 362). A factor analysis was performed to test the reliability and factor model fit of the FUS-SSS. Results: The factor analysis yielded one factor and eight items. The Cronbach’s alpha was .77. The factor analysis produced a comparative fit index of .90, a goodness of fit index of .97, an adjusted goodness of fit index of .94, a root mean square error of approximation of .09, and a standardized root mean square residual of .54, thus confirming that the reliability and factor model fit of the FUS-SSS met the desired statistical criteria. Question items characteristic of the low-scoring group from the total scores for SAS were identified. Conclusion: In creating the FUS-SSS, questionnaire items were used to identify factors such as maladaptive behaviors, thereby highlighting the importance of SAS education in the lives of FUS.

Social systems, ranging from workplaces to digital platforms, are structured by implicit hierarchies in which individual performance is continuously evaluated through upward social comparison. This review examines the psychological mechanisms underlying hostile responses to peer downfall within such close systems. By synthesizing research from social, organizational, and experimental psychology (1954–2025), the paper analyzes how schadenfreude emerges in contexts of self-evaluation threat, perceived deservedness, and status-based comparison. It further examines how moral disengagement processes may facilitate the cognitive justification of emotionally rewarding but socially harmful responses. The review proposes an integrative model in which emotional reactions, cognitive justification, and structural conditions interact to determine whether peer misfortune remains an internal emotional response or develops into overt hostility. It emphasizes that evaluative pressure, competitive norms, and digital visibility can strengthen these processes across different contexts. Finally, the paper discusses implications for designing social, organizational, and digital systems that reduce comparison-driven hostility and promote more ethically regulated interaction in high-evaluation environments.

We introduce Satellite Sociology, a framework for observing and interpreting social processes using Earth observation data. The framework treats artificial satellites as devices that capture the material traces through which human activity becomes expressed in space. These traces are not limited to urban environments but include any spatial configurations shaped by human behavior, institutions, and economic processes. A central feature of Satellite Sociology lies in the definition of the unit of analysis. Spatial units—such as buildings, grids, or administrative regions—are not treated as neutral technical choices, but as explicit constructions of the social system under investigation. Different unit definitions yield different representations of social structure, enabling multiple interpretations of the same spatial domain. The framework interprets spatial patterns as observable traces from which underlying behavior can be inferred, and emphasizes the feedback relationship between activity and its spatial manifestations. Spatial configurations both reflect accumulated decisions and influence subsequent behavior, linking observation with process. To illustrate one application, we analyze urban space as an accumulated outcome of social decisions and examine its structural persistence. Using Shinagawa Ward (Tokyo) and Christchurch (New Zealand), we construct two building-level indicators: the Building-Level Vegetation Exposure Index (BVEI) and the Built--Vegetation Imbalance Index (BVII). The results reveal distinct allocation regimes and identify spatial configurations consistent with structural constraints on environmental redistribution. These findings demonstrate how satellite-derived spatial patterns can support inference about the processes that generate and stabilize spatial structure. Satellite Sociology provides a general framework for interpreting spatial data as traces of human activity and for linking Earth observation with sociological analysis.

Το παρόν άρθρο αξιοποιεί τη Θεωρία Παιγνίων για να διαγνώσει επίμονες παθογένειες της δημόσιας διοίκησης, όπως η γραφειοκρατική αδράνεια, αντιμετωπίζοντάς τις όχι ως τυχαίες αστοχίες αλλά ως σταθερές, αν και μη βέλτιστες, Ισορροπίες Nash. Μέσα από μια συστηματική βιβλιογραφική ανασκόπηση εστιασμένη στην ελληνική πραγματικότητα, προτείνεται μια θεμελιώδης εννοιολογική μετατόπιση: η δημόσια διοίκηση οφείλει να μεταβεί από τον ρόλο του παθητικού «παίκτη» σε αυτόν του προορατικού «σχεδιαστή του παιγνίου» (game designer). Ο σχεδιαστής αυτός τροποποιεί στρατηγικά τα κίνητρα, τους κανόνες και τη διαθέσιμη πληροφόρηση. Η ανάλυση καταδεικνύει ότι το συγκεκριμένο πλαίσιο προσφέρει έναν πρακτικό οδικό χάρτη για την αντιμετώπιση βαθιά ριζωμένων προβλημάτων, όπως η φοροδιαφυγή και οι συγκρούσεις αρμοδιοτήτων, μετασχηματίζοντας τις δυσλειτουργικές ισορροπίες. Τελικά, προσφέρεται ένα εφαρμόσιμο μοντέλο για τον σχεδιασμό αποτελεσματικών μεταρρυθμίσεων που μπορούν να μετακινήσουν πολύπλοκα διοικητικά συστήματα από το αδιέξοδο προς τη βιώσιμη συνεργασία.

Sickness absence has become a focal issue in labour market debate across high income economies- Specifically, accessible telemedical sick leave procedure is politically cited as a driver of opportunistic absenteeism. However, empirical evidence on the prevalence of such behaviours and their underlying mechanisms remains limited as traditional questionnaires on sensitive behaviours are prone to social desirability bias (SDB). We estimate the prevalence and predictors of voluntary absenteeism in this large, population-based pre-registered study (N = 1964) with an indirect questioning technique designed to circumvent SDB responding. We find that self-reported voluntary absenteeism doubles when measured indirectly (34.6%) compared to directly (18.6%). Psychosocial workplace factors - burnout, role conflict, and low work engagement - emerge as consistent predictors along with injunctive social norms (p’s < 0.05). Uncertainty about telemedical access was associated with reduced odds of voluntary absenteeism compared to having access (OR = 0.58, p = .003), while no effect was found for no access. Findings challenge dominant narratives attributing telemedical-sick leave to opportunistic misuse. Rather voluntary absenteeism is better understood as a function of workplace conditions and employee well-being rather than procedural access to certification. Policy efforts should focus on improving workplace conditions over simplistic reforms of sick leave certification procedures.

Unequal access to cultural goods remains a social problem that public policy tries to mitigate. But is the state efficient in heightening cultural equality compared to what non-governmental organizations are doing? This study compares the importance of social and cultural preconditions for receiving cultural training for children in Norway and investigates the propensity to participate in Kulturskole (The Norwegian publicly funded School of Music and Performing Arts) or in third sector cultural organizations using survey data of 15 182 children aged 6-15 years old. The findings display a paradoxical situation, where a state cultural policy program is warped to benefit the highly educated and culturally privileged, whereas cultural training in organizations that are not subject to public policy and not directly funded is less characterized by social and cultural inequalities. This paradox is heightened by the fact that the large-scale program (Kulturskole) is in no small part justified because it is “for all”, with a stated aim to contribute to democratization of cultural goods. The result is a cultural policy program that serves as a vehicle for cultural reproduction, rather than a mitigator of this problem, despite being devised and funded in an egalitarian-oriented cultural welfare state.

This paper reexamines evidence of corruption in India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), the largest public-works programme in the world. We estimate “validation ratios”, defined as the proportion of MGNREGA person-days that are reflected in independent surveys such as the National Sample Surveys and the India Human Development Survey. In the initial years of the programme, estimated validation ratios were as low as 50% or so, but they rose steadily, and by 2011-12, the bulk of MGNREGA employment was validated by two independent national surveys. The more recent Periodic Labour Force Surveys, however, suggest that validation ratios fell again after that, and may be as low as 40% or so today. In other words, MGNREGA seems to be back to square one as far as corruption is concerned. We note that PLFS data on MGNREGA may not be entirely reliable, yet the evidence of resurgent corruption is hard to dismiss. We discuss possible reasons for this setback. Briefly, MGNREGA seems to be trapped in a vicious circle of underfunding, erratic wage payments, worker discouragement and high leakages.

El presente estudio tuvo como objetivo analizar los factores estructurales, organizacionales e interpersonales que condicionan la atención a la población racializada en España. Para ello, se desarrolló una investigación cualitativa con diseño descriptivo basada en entrevistas en profundidad realizadas entre mayo y julio de 2025 en distintas ciudades del País Vasco y Cataluña. En el estudio participaron profesionales expertas en la atención sanitaria de población racializada, incluyendo personal sanitario, representantes de organizaciones del tercer sector, profesionales del ámbito institucional e investigadoras. La selección de participantes se llevó a cabo mediante un muestreo intencional a partir de perfiles previamente identificados, ampliado posteriormente con la técnica de bola de nieve hasta alcanzar la saturación del discurso. Los datos obtenidos fueron analizados mediante un análisis de contenido temático. Los resultados muestran que diversos factores estructurales e interpersonales condicionan la calidad de la atención sanitaria ofrecida a las personas racializadas. Entre ellos destacan la falta de información clara y accesible sobre el sistema sanitario, la limitada adaptación de este a la diversidad sociocultural de la población, la insuficiente formación del personal sanitario en competencias interculturales y la presencia de prácticas de estereotipación racial y cultural. Estas dinámicas tienen repercusiones tanto en el ámbito clínico como en otros aspectos de la atención, afectando de manera significativa la experiencia asistencial de esta población. En conclusión, el estudio señala que la mejora de la atención sanitaria a las personas racializadas requiere intervenciones orientadas tanto a la organización de los servicios sanitarios como a la formación del personal profesional. En particular, resulta necesario promover una atención más competente desde el punto de vista sociocultural e incorporar de forma transversal un enfoque de equidad en salud que permita responder adecuadamente a la diversidad de necesidades de la población.

Background: Extreme heat is an increasing public health threat in sub-Saharan Africa, yet evidence on subnational disparities and group-specific vulnerability remains limited. We characterized heat hazard, exposure, and vulnerability across all 290 Kenyan subcounties, focusing on pregnant women, children under five years, and adults aged 60 years and older. Methods: We conducted a nationwide ecological panel study using annual subcounty observations from 2015 to 2025, with extended climatological context from 1991 to 2025. Heat hazard was defined using Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI)-derived metrics from the Copernicus ERA5 HEAT product, including annual counts of days with UTCI > 38°C (H38) and UTCI > 46°C (H46). Group-specific population denominators were derived from WorldPop, and socioeconomic vulnerability was represented using the Relative Wealth Index. We quantified long-term trends, anomalies relative to the 1991 to 2020 baseline, hotspot persistence, person-day exposure burden, and a composite Heat Vulnerability Index for each population group. Results: National area-averaged mean annual H38, defined as days per year with UTCI > 38°C, increased significantly over 1991 to 2025 (Sen slope 0.97 days per year; p < 0.001), reaching record levels in 2024 and 2025. In 2025, 136 subcounties recorded zero H38 exposure, whereas 61 experienced sustained heat, defined as H38 ≥ 30 days per year. These 61 sustained-heat subcounties accounted for 96.2% of annual person-day heat burden for pregnant women, 96.8% for children under five, and 95.0% for older adults. Heat exposure was inversely associated with subcountylevel relative wealth (Spearman rho = -0.561; p < 0.001). In a separate hotspot-stability analysis, 62 subcounties entered the annual top-quintile H38 tier at least once during 2015 to 2025, and 50 of these remained in that tier in all 11 years. Heat Vulnerability Index rankings were highly concordant between pregnant women and children under five (Spearman rho = 0.977), but less so for older adults, whose priority geography extended further into coastal transitional subcounties. Rankings based on 2025 conditions were highly consistent with rankings based on mean conditions over 2015 to 2025. Conclusions: Heat stress in Kenya has increased markedly over the past 35 years and is concentrated in a structurally stable set of socioeconomically disadvantaged subcounties. These findings support tiered, geographically targeted heat-healthplanning, with shared priority areas for maternal and child health and additional agespecific targeting for older adults.

Research suggests that humans recognize familiar faces reliably but struggle to learn new ones. Uncontrolled variations—in facial appearance and viewing conditions—facilitate learning new faces in lab-based studies. Conversely, stability in appearance seems to support early learning stages in the real-world and changes in appearance disrupt recognition regardless of familiarity. To reconcile these findings, we examined the specific role of variability in appearance, based on a cost-efficient learning framework in which stability in appearance would shape initial coarse representations, while variability would refinement over time. We conducted five pre-registered experiments manipulating appearance and exposure, using strictly controlled but ecological stimuli. Participants in different exposure groups learned two stable and two variable faces (3, 6, 9, or 12 videos/face), via interleaved learning episodes (Experiments 1, 2 and 5) or in a blocked manner (Experiments 3 and 4). The correspondence between test and learning materials varied across experiments. Stable faces were recognized better than variable ones, but only when test images corresponded to stable learning material. Recognition improved with additional exposure but only in interleaved learning experiments. This set of studies highlights multiple factors that affect face learning and open new research avenues to refine current theoretical accounts of face learning.

This study examines how moral identity shapes green purchase intentions among young consumers in an emerging market context, and why identity-driven morality often requires expressive pathways to become behaviorally effective. Drawing on Identity-Based Motivation Theory, the study distinguishes between moral identity internalization and symbolization and propose that their effects on green purchase intentions operate through Green Conspicuous Consumption Motives (GCCM). Survey data from 206 students and young professionals in Ghana were analysed using covariance-based structural equation modelling. The findings reveal that neither dimension of moral identity directly predicts green purchase intentions. Instead, moral identity internalization significantly predicts self-oriented GCCM, while moral identity symbolization predicts other-oriented GCCM. Both forms of GCCM, in turn, positively influence green purchase intentions. These results indicate that moral identity motivates green consumption primarily when it can be affirmed or communicated through visible, identity-expressive behaviour. This study makes three key contributions. First, it clarifies mixed findings in prior research by showing that moral identity influences green consumption indirectly rather than directly. Second, it extends Identity-Based Motivation Theory by identifying conspicuous consumption motives as a critical mechanism linking identity to sustainable behaviour. Third, by focusing on Ghana, it broadens the geographic scope of green consumption research and highlights the growing role of digital self-presentation in shaping ethical consumption among youth in emerging markets.

The article introduces the concept of Smart Infrastructure Metaverse (SIM) and considers it from the perspective of Distributed Adaptive Systems (DAS). The approach combines technologies such as IoT, Digital Twins, AI, and XR to form an infrastructure intended to provide continuous real-time monitoring of objects, along with their prediction. The key idea behind SIM is that the infrastructure is viewed as an entity that changes continuously through data synchronization. The REMM (Real Estate Metaverse Manager) tool is provided as one way to apply the principle of distributed intelligence alongside edge and cloud computing to manage infrastructure. The experimental results demonstrate improvements in energy optimization, predictive maintenance, and situational awareness.

Increasing visitation to Wilderness Areas is intensifying pressure on ecological conditions and visitor experience quality, highlighting gaps in current monitoring systems that rely heavily on biophysical indicators while overlooking visitor-based psychological and experiential dimensions. This mixed-methods study addresses these gaps by operationalizing Wilderness Character Qualities as measurable visitor motivations and examining how these motivations relate to substitution-based coping behaviors and intentions to return across the six Wilderness Areas of the White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire, USA. Guided by stress-coping theory, the research assessed how the perceived importance of core wilderness motivations (e.g., solitude, pristineness, unconfined recreation) shaped behavioral adaptation and long-term visitor loyalty. On-site intercept surveys (n=1,086) provided quantitative and qualitative data analyzed using descriptive statistics, structural equation modeling, and thematic coding. Findings extend stress-coping theory by demonstrating that coping functions as an adaptive, experience-maintaining process rather than solely a reaction to participation impacts. Visitors who placed high importance on solitude and pristineness were more likely to adjust timing or location through temporal and resource substitutions to maintain desired conditions. These adaptive behaviors, in turn, positively influenced return intentions, highlighting substitution as a key mediating process linking motivations to loyalty. Results provide a validated approach for assessing wilderness character from the visitor perspective and a theory-driven framework for integrating motivations, coping, and loyalty into wilderness management. Strategies that promote voluntary temporal or spatial dispersion, improve infrastructure, and offer targeted educational messaging can help sustain core wilderness character quality while supporting long-term visitor retention.

Work engagement and burnout have detrimental effects on the wellbeing of librarians and can be one indicator of how well a library functions. This study uses the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES) and the Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT) to measure work engagement and burnout of librarians. With 786 responses, this study finds librarians have high burnout and average work engagement. Older librarians have higher levels of work engagement and lower levels of burnout compared to their younger colleagues, confirming previous research, while diverse genders have lower work engagement and higher burnout compared to men and women. Additionally, library administrators have higher work engagement and lower burnout than department heads and librarians. Contrary to previous research, librarians with children or elderly dependents have similar levels of work engagement and burnout compared to librarians without dependents. With this study’s results, it is incumbent upon library leadership and management to implement strategies to increase work engagement and decrease burnout.

This study investigates how urban futures are represented on Google Images and by visual generative AI, such as DALL-E, focusing on the prioritized sociotechnical imaginaries. Anchored in concepts on imagined spaces, socio-technical imaginaries, and from critical future(s) studies, as well as a conceptualization of algorithms and AI as biasing technologies, this research employs an image-type analysis combined with an interpretive iconographic-iconological framework to examine images ranked or generated by these tools. Preliminary findings reveal dominant tropes of urban eco-technical sustainability and technological solutionism, with a limited representation of human-centered or participatory design elements and, thus, of alternative futures. Results suggest that the algorithmic hierarchy of Google Images and AI tools promotes a narrow vision of urban futures, often favoring commercial and techno-centric ideals over nuanced social, political, and ecological considerations. This research critically assesses the implications of these algorithmically mediated urban imaginaries, raising questions about representation, inclusivity, and the democratization of urban planning. The project contributes to discussions on the power of digital tools in shaping public perceptions of urban futures, proposing a need for more inclusive and diversified sociotechnical imaginaries that better reflect varied urban realities and aspirations.

The Queen Bee syndrome is well established in organisational scholarship as a pattern in which senior women distance themselves from female peers in male-dominated environments. However, the existing literature treats this behaviour as a relatively fixed response to identity threat, attending insufficiently to its developmental trajectory and the evolved forms of power it may produce. This concept paper introduces the Queen Bee Mother as a distinct and previously unnamed archetype: a senior woman who has moved beyond competitive self-group distancing and now exercises informal organisational power through selective inclusion, network cultivation, and the strategic grooming of loyal successors. The warmth and apparent mentorship that characterise Queen Bee Mother behaviour render it structurally invisible and considerably more damaging to organisational culture than the visible dominance dynamics that have historically received greater research attention. Drawing on social identity theory, maternal gatekeeping, benevolent sexism theory, and informal organisational network research, this paper develops a two-archetype typology comprising the Legacy Queen Bee Mother and the Late-Entrant Queen Bee Mother. The paper situates both archetypes within the specific cultural ecology of Aotearoa New Zealand, where enforced egalitarianism, tall poppy norms, small population dynamics, and tightly bounded professional networks create conditions of unusual potency for these dynamics. A research agenda is proposed to invite empirical engagement from scholars in organisational behaviour, gender studies, and New Zealand workplace discourse.