Gwageo in Joseon Korea (1392–1897) was a civil service examination system rooted in meritocratic principles, selecting government officials based on Confucian scholarship. From its inception in 1393 to its abolition in 1894, a regular gwageo examination was mostly held every three years, while special examinations were held irregularly. The frequency of special examinations increased over time, and their total number eventually reached nearly three times that of the regular examinations. The sociology of education proposes that educational expansion and changes in selection rules tend to benefit the privileged more before benefiting the less privileged. Using historical records of successful civil service examination passers that are linked to information on family backgrounds, this study examines the differences in the family backgrounds of passers between regular and special examinations. The results show that the privileged, such as those with more ancestors who passed previous examinations and those who came from powerful family clans, accounted for a higher proportion in special examinations than in regular examinations. This tendency was more pronounced during periods of the Joseon Dynasty when the power of the privileged was particularly strong. These findings suggest that the privileged groups’ adaptation strategies to new and varying rules are applicable even in premodern examination systems, such as the gwageo in Joseon Korea.

Elections are moments when nations confront uncertainty about their future and re-examine their past. The present research investigated how two temporal, group-based emotions jointly shape political preferences and behaviour: collective nostalgia (longing for the group’s past) and collective angst (concern for the group’s future). We focused on the 2024 United States federal election, examining how civic-focused nostalgia (longing for civility and institutional trust) and homogeneity-focused nostalgia (longing for cultural and moral uniformity), together with collective angst, predicted three outcomes: support for strong leadership, voting intentions, and actual voting behaviour. Participants (N = 282) completed measures of these constructs pre-election (Time 1), with voting behaviour assessed post-election (Time 2). Results revealed that both civic- and homogeneity-focused nostalgia were associated with greater general support for strong leadership, but collective angst only predicted such support when civic nostalgia was low. Homogeneity-focused nostalgia robustly predicted Trump voting intentions and behaviour, whereas civic nostalgia predicted support for Harris. Collective angst interacted with homogeneity nostalgia to amplify pro-Trump voting, suggesting that anxiety about the group’s future magnifies the political consequences of longing for a homogeneous past. These findings illuminate how emotional orientations towards the past and future jointly guide democratic decision-making.

Social scientists have long examined the relationship between war and state formation, especially in Europe and Latin America. However, work on non-European and colonial cases questioned the significance of war for state formation. Analyzing the Israeli case, I examine the relationship between war and state formation in a colonial context by focusing not on war itself but on the crises war may cause. I argue that war can shape state formation in a colonial context and suggest that theorizing crisis in political development reveals novel ways in which the relationship between war and state formation plays out. Empirically, I show that some of the main obstacles that hampered Zionist colonization and state formation in Palestine were the country’s health conditions, which seriously deteriorated during World War I. These health-related obstacles to colonization and state formation were removed by the work of American Jewish organizations after the war. Importantly, the critical work of these public health organizations stemmed from the local and global crises caused by the war. I also consider how responses to the postwar health crisis in the Jewish sector shaped the plight of Palestinian Arabs. Having noted the significance of crisis, I build on existing literature to theorize it as a potentially structurally transformative “event.” But unlike eventful analyses, I claim that transformative crises are not necessarily rifts or radical breaks from past patterns. Rather, preexisting patterns and conditions that precede eventful crises shape how transformation plays out.

Recent scholarship has significantly advanced social scientific understanding of the socioeconomic consequences of skin tone and ethnoracial identity in several Latin American countries. We update and extend this literature by conceptualizing colortocracies as countries that exhibit a preference for Whiteness as evidenced by lighter-skinned individuals enjoying higher levels of socioeconomic status than their darker-skinned counterparts. Specifically, we test the preference for Whiteness hypothesis using data from the 2018 Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP)—a nationally representative dataset covering approximately 90% of the Latin American population (about 578 million people) across sixteen countries. We find strong evidence that wealth-based colortocracies are three times as prevalent throughout Latin America as occupational-based colortocracies. Interviewer-rated skin tone is a stronger predictor of inequality than self-designated racial categories, but the magnitude of its strength is far greater when predicting wealth than occupational status. We conclude that the extent to which colortocracies (e.g., preference for Whiteness) exist in Latin America simultaneously depends on the outcome measure and the country under consideration. We document this cross-national variation and discuss the implications of our findings for future research.

Italy’s active labour market policy (ALMP) regime is marked by a paradox: despite limited investment in training, job placement services, and direct job creation, the country allocates above-average resources to employment subsidies. While this subsidy-heavy approach is often explained by the structure of Italy’s low-skill, low-productivity economy, this article proposes a complementary explanation grounded in political economy. We argue that the dominance of employment subsidies reflects the influence of a powerful discourse promoted by business interests, which frames excessive labour costs as the core challenge of the Italian labour market. This narrative has steered policy decisions towards cost-reduction strategies, crowding out more transformative measures aimed at human capital development. To unpack these dynamics, we employ a mixed-method research design combining qualitative and quantitative text analysis. We map stakeholder narratives in national media using Natural Language Processing techniques (BERTopic) and analyse parliamentary debates to identify ideational drivers. Our findings reveal how business-driven narratives have driven policy preferences towards employment subsidies. The article makes three main contributions. First, it situates employment subsidies within Italian ALMP. Second, it demonstrates how ideas structure labour market interventions. Third, it introduces an innovative methodological approach that integrates computational text analysis with traditional qualitative methods.

This article explores the relationship between urban violence in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s economic capital, and two works of contemporary Ecuadorian literature. I introduce the term mangrove gothic to analyze how María Fernanda Ampuero’s short-story collection Pelea de gallos (2018) and Mónica Ojeda’s novel Mandíbula (2018) appropriate gothic tropes to depict the violent realities of twenty-first-century Guayaquil. The mangrove gothic encompasses the narrative strategies through which these authors inscribe fear into the experience of living in—or having lived in—Guayaquil, where oppressive humidity and heat, social hierarchies, and violence haunt the urban space. At the same time, the term offers geographic, social, and cultural specificity to the broader category of the “new Latin American female gothic.” In doing so, it counters the risk of homogenizing Latin American literature under a single transnational trend tailored for global consumption.

Historical and criminological studies of female participation in gangs and organized crime have tended to focus on mixed-sex, male-dominated groups. This article offers an examination of the “Forty Elephants” gang, an all-female criminal group that operated in twentieth-century Britain. Drawing on digitized newspaper sources, the study uses social network analysis (SNA) to trace structural shifts across two periods associated with different leaders of the gang. The findings reveal a shift from a relatively centralized network in the gang’s earlier years to a looser, more diffuse structure in the later period, with influence spread across multiple figures rather than concentrated in a single, dominant leader. These structural changes are contextualized within broader historical developments, including internal gang conflict, law enforcement attention, criminal justice responses, and shifts in offending methods. By combining quantitative SNA with qualitative historical analysis, the article demonstrates how digital methods can reveal overlooked patterns of female collaboration and co-offending. In doing so, it challenges stereotypes of women as marginal offenders and provides a methodological model for applying network analysis to historical crime research, where such methods remain underused.

This article analyzes the evolutionary genesis of the aldehyde dehydrogenase 2 (ALDH2) mutation in East Asia through the lenses of institutional economics and systems sociology. While biology typically frames the absence of alcohol tolerance as a metabolic defect, this paper proposes the concept of functional redundancy. We argue that the specific social organization of rice societies—characterized by deep material interdependence—rendered alcohol consumption superfluous as an instrument for trust-building and social cohesion. The resulting genetic path dependency illustrates how historical institutional frameworks continue to shape the biological constitution of modern populations.

This study investigates the significant presence and function of nonhuman elements, specifically flora and fauna, in Aluísio Azevedo’s seminal Brazilian naturalist novel, O Cortiço (1890). Drawing on the increasing academic interest in plant and animal studies in literary criticism, this analysis catalogs and categorizes the numerous references to plants and animals, as well as instances of animalization, to illuminate Azevedo’s naturalistic portrayal of the urban environment of Rio de Janeiro. The research demonstrates how, in line with naturalist principles, Azevedo employs these nonhuman comparisons to characterize his human figures, often reducing them to their physical or instinctual traits under the deterministic influence of the milieu. The study investigates patterns in the use of flora and fauna where both are frequently used to evoke sensuality, purity, the physical states of characters—often reinforcing social hierarchies, reflecting racist and patriarchal views. Ultimately, this study argues that Azevedo’s extensive use of flora and fauna in O Cortiço is crucial to conveying to naturalist ideas, characterized by degeneration, decay, and the leveling of distinctions. The constant interplay of the characters and their environment, mediated through plant and animal allegories, underscores the deterministic forces at play, where individuals are subject to the relentless and often brutal influence of heredity and their surroundings. This analysis contributes to a deeper understanding of Brazilian naturalism and the sophisticated ways nonhuman elements can shape and influence narrative meaning.

This article brings together two stories of 1970s Mexico that are often narrated separately: the story of the PRI’s attempts to reform itself, specifically through the right to know, and the story of activists’ mobilizations against disappearances. Epistemic struggles surrounding the right to know and disappearances created a shared discursive arena in which activists and state officials contested the nature of information, the authority to produce it, and the seemingly unbridgeable gap between evidence and the state’s recognition of wrongdoing. Debates in the legislative and activist realms often occurred in parallel without necessarily intersecting. Nonetheless, they engaged similar questions: What would it mean to entrust the public and media with sensitive information? What strategies could move state actors to produce information and what effects would doing so have on public life? This article contends that the struggle over information and recognition became the central battlefield for negotiating state violence and opening in Mexico.

This article tests claims from the comparative extractive literature by examining how state-company linkages shape civil society mobilization against extractive projects. We focus on convenios de cooperación (CCs)—contracts through which extractive companies finance branches of the Colombian armed forces or judiciary to provide security for company operations. We employ a mixed-methods design. First, we analyze a panel dataset of nearly six hundred contracts signed between 2002 and 2020, assessing their relationship to threats, assassinations of social leaders, arbitrary detentions, and other security indicators across municipalities. We then pair this statistical analysis with fieldwork in two case study sites: Jericó, Antioquia, and the Ariari region of Meta. Our analysis asks two central questions. How do CCs fit into extractive companies’ broader repertoires of community control? And what do they mean for civil society mobilization—how are they lived and felt on the ground? Findings reveal sectoral variation and differences in how CCs are activated and experienced over time. By introducing the first systematic dataset on CCs, we make visible a widespread but understudied mechanism through which firms embed repressive capacity in state security apparatuses, thereby advancing debates on corporate counterinsurgency, protest criminalization, and security governance in Latin America.

Missed hospital appointments (Do Not Attend [DNAs]) undermine healthcare efficiency and access. A high-profile study found that adding descriptive social norms (DSNs) or specific institutional cost (SIC) messages to SMS reminders could substantially reduce DNAs. This prompts optimism that integrating behavioural insights, besides reminders themselves, offers a cost-effective approach to mitigate DNAs. However, subsequent similar interventions have reported heterogeneous findings, echoing broader debates on recent meta-analyses about how to evaluate such findings. We address this issue by framing Behavioural Insights as Applied Science, which structures validation in three phases inspired by clinical research. We treat the aforementioned study as a Phase 1 proof of concept and conduct a Phase 2 replication under comparable operational conditions in a quasi-experimental, time-blocked field trial at South-western Jutland Hospital (20,867 appointments) across Cardiology, Endocrinology and Pulmonology. Patients received SMS reminders rotating every 2 months between a standard message, DSN framing or SIC framing. Neither DSN nor SIC reduced DNAs overall. SIC increased cancellations (OR = 1.41, p < 0.001) but not DNAs; DSN reduced DNAs in Cardiology (OR = 0.76, p = 0.027), while SIC increased DNAs in Endocrinology (OR = 1.31, p = 0.021). Our findings underscore the importance of applying a systematic approach in the evaluation of Behavioural Insights.