Whether countries and their publics are responsive to the international legal commitments they make is the source of long‐standing academic debate. Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine brought real‐world significance to these debates. While Ukraine is not a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the invasion raised the prospect that other NATO members could be targeted and that Article 5 collective security commitments would be invoked. While recent research suggests that emphasizing mutual defence treaties can increase public support for defending an ally, prior work focuses on US opinion in a less fraught political environment. We constructed and fielded a survey experiment in Italy in the initial weeks of the Ukraine invasion to probe support for defending a NATO ally, the relevance of the Article 5 legal commitment on support for defending an ally, and the potential moderating influence of gender and political party. Our findings show that the Article 5 commitment significantly increased support for defending an ally. Consistent with past research, we find a significant gender gap, with men being more supportive of defending an ally than women; however, both men and women responded to the Article 5 commitment to virtually the same degree. The estimated treatment effect was larger for supporters of right‐wing parties than for the left; however, the difference was not statistically significant.

The main event in the cabinet during 2000 was the dismissal of Dover Samuels. Allegations were made that some years before entering Parliament he had a sexual relationship with an under-age teenager. On June 17 the allegations were in the hands of an opposition party, Act, and leader Richard Prebble sent a letter containing the claims to the Prime Minister on June 20. Samuels stood down from cabinet, and referred the matter to the police for investigation. Before any findings from the investigation were available, on June 28 the Prime Minister dismissed Samuels on the grounds that he could not be effective as a minister while ’allegations, controversy, and public debate swirl around him’. Various other allegations had surfaced behind the scenes, including drug running and incest. In September all allegations against Samuels were found to be without foundation, but Samuels was not restored to cabinet. On July 6 Parekura Horomia had taken his place. Samuels had been Minister of Maori Affairs, and his performance in that role was already under question before the events that led to his dismissal. Prime Minister Helen Clark had described herself in May as the de facto Minister of Maori Affairs. Samuels had owed his cabinet position to support from his colleagues on the right of Labour’s parliamentary party and his status as senior Labour Maori MP. The allegations against Samuels made it possible for the Prime Minister to appoint a minister in whom she had more confidence.

Party leaders are often regarded as crucial to a party's success. Successful leaders tend to be big personalities who dominate their party's organisation, policy development and electoral campaigns. But does that control come with a price? We test to see if such leaders damage their parties in the medium term. This happens because strong leaders might be ceded too much control of the party organisation, policy and electoral strategy. We specifically hypothesise that political parties will go through a period of leadership instability and electoral decline after strong leaders step down. Using a dataset with elections under party leaders in nine countries over a 25‐year period, and a qualitative case study, we find some evidence for the theory, which should prompt further research of the question.

Can communicative interventions by the government influence political trust and increase public compliance during crises? This study examines the impact of a televised speech by German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the onset of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Using an unexpected‐events‐during‐survey‐design, we find that the speech led to a 7‐percentage point increase in trust in the federal government and up to a 25‐percentage point decrease in citizens' mobility. We also observe demographic variation in susceptibility to speech. We explore the underlying mechanisms by comparing Merkel's speech with similar televised addresses by Mark Rutte and Boris Johnson, where we observe no comparable effects on attitudes. We suggest that specific content, such as an emphasis on solidarity and positive sentiment, may have played a role in mobilizing public support. Our findings indicate that effective leader communication can be a powerful tool for sustaining public support and ensuring compliance with crisis measures.

There were no elections to the Chamber of Deputies in 2000. Elections to the upper house of Parliament, the Senate, were held on 12 and 19 November 2000 in 27 districts of the 81 senatorial election districts. With the November 2000 elections, all of the transitional two- and four-year terms of the Senators elected in the first Senate elections in 1996 have expired. At present, there are only Senators elected for six-year terms.

In answer set programming, two groups of rules are considered strongly equivalent if they have the same meaning in any context. Strong equivalence of two programs can be sometimes established by deriving rules of each program from rules of the other in an appropriate deductive system. This paper shows how to extend this method of proving strong equivalence to programs containing the counting aggregate.

Although the role of issues in elections has been widely studied, different approaches to the definition, classification, and measurement of issues render cross-national comparisons difficult. Further, little attention has been paid to the stability or instability of issues across time, and the possible implications of issue change for voting behaviour and election outcomes. In this analysis, a common classification scheme is employed for measuring the salience of issues in the elections of four countries, and the linkage of issues to political parties in the thinking of individual voters is explored. Panel data are employed to test the stability of attitudes towards political issues across a series of three elections in each country. Although there are wide differences in the specific array of issues in each country, issues can be broadly typed into five general categories of public concerns. Even given the common emphasis on economic issues throughout the 1970s, considerable instability exists across time in all categories of issues. This instability makes it more difficult to sustain a consistent issue/party link over more than one election, and thereby has implications for the accountability of parties in issue/policy terms.

As representative democracy is increasingly criticized, a new institution is becoming popular among academics and practitioners: deliberative citizens’ assemblies. To evaluate whether these assemblies can deliver their promise of re‐engaging the dissatisfied with representative politics, we explore who supports them and why. We build on a unique survey conducted with representative samples of 15 Western European countries and find, first, that the most supportive are those who are less educated and have a low sense of political competence and an anti‐elite sentiment. Thus, support does come from the dissatisfied. Second, we find that this support is for a part ‘outcome contingent’, in the sense that it changes with respondents’ expectations regarding the policy outcome from deliberative citizens’ assemblies. This second finding nuances the first one and suggests that while deliberative citizens’ assemblies convey some hope to re‐engage disengaged citizens, this is conditioned on the expectation of a favourable outcome.

Attempts to predict the number of political parties emerging in democracies have usually been based on one of two seemingly incompatible approaches: (1) the ‘institutional’ approach (e.g., Duverger's Law and Hypothesis) focuses on the nature of the electoral system and also on the number of seats per district; (2) the ‘ideological’ approach stresses the nature and extent of social cleavages. This article attempts a synthesis by showing that election system and cleavage type interact to affect the number of parties, with the former factor determined in part by the latter. Our most striking finding, however, is that the effective number of parties tends to be obtained by adding ‘one’ to the number of issue dimensions. Within this broader framework, Duverger's Law emerges as a special case for polities with a single issue dimension, and Duverger's Hypothesis is replaced by a much more quantitative prediction as to the effective number of parties.

The recent publication by the Mental Health Commission (MHC) constitutes a welcome acknowledgement of the unique challenges within mental health care delivery for LGBTQIA+ populations in Ireland. This timely guidance illustrates a comprehensive framework to tackle the entrenched disparities in mental health outcomes and service access challenges experienced by sexual and gender minorities in Ireland, aiming to align with international best practices of affirming and inclusive mental health care. The purpose of this critique is to situate the MHC guidance within the broader multimodal context of societal change and service provision, rather than to provide procedural or implementation instructions. For clinicians, this is an opportunity to reflect on the landscape in Ireland.

Perceptions that others will contribute their fair share are fundamental to the legitimacy of the political system. To better understand how these perceptions take shape beyond the influence of political narratives and socializations, this paper investigates the role of the formative personal experiences of benefit recipiency and income changes in explaining views on welfare abuse as well as tax evasion. Theoretically, both increasing identification or ‘othering’ could occur when these experiences lead to new group adherence. To test this empirically, three‐wave Norwegian panel data (2014–2017) are analysed. Within‐ as well as between‐group analyses show that becoming dependent on benefits leads to lower perceptions of welfare abuse, while positive income changes prompt higher perceptions of tax evasion, albeit mostly among those with lower income levels. Overall, this article shows that formative personal experiences affect views that are fundamental to the perceived fairness, legitimacy and sustainability of the social and political system.

Urban–rural divides are large and growing in many national elections, but the sources of this widening divide are not well understood. Recent research has pointed to policy disagreement as one possible mechanism for this growing divide; if urban and rural residents hold increasingly dissimilar policy preferences, this disagreement could produce ever‐widening urban–rural electoral divides. We investigate this possibility by creating a synthesized dataset of nearly 1000 policy issue questions across 10 distinct Canadian national election studies conducted between 1993 and 2021 (N = 5.3 million), combined with a measure of the urban or rural character of every federal electoral district. This dataset allows us to measure urban–rural policy disagreement across a much larger range of policy issues and over a much longer time period than has previously been possible. We find strong evidence of urban–rural policy disagreement across a range of issues, and especially in areas of cultural policy, including questions relating to gun control, immigration and Indigenous affairs. We further find strong support for the ‘progressive cities’ hypothesis; in nearly all policy domains, urban residents support more left‐wing positions on policy issues than rural residents. However, we find no evidence these urban–rural policy divides have grown since the 1990s. Urban–rural policy disagreement, while large and meaningful, cannot explain the ever‐widening urban–rural political divide.

Trichostrongylus spp. are globally distributed gastrointestinal nematodes that affect ruminants and humans, posing significant veterinary and public health challenges. Despite their zoonotic potential, the temporal dynamics of Trichostrongylus infection remain poorly understood globally. This study aimed to estimate long-term trends in Trichostrongylus prevalence in humans, ovines, and bovines using time series modelling. A systematic review identified 240 eligible studies with annual prevalence data across 60 countries. Following Kalman smoothing, annual prevalence time series were constructed for each host species covering 1947–2024 for humans, 1966–2024 for ovines, and 1962–2024 for bovines. ARIMA models were fitted separately: ARIMA(0,1,1) for humans, ARIMA(3,0,0) for ovines, and ARIMA(0,1,1) for bovines. Model selection was based on Stationary R2, RMSE, MAPE, and the Ljung-Box Q test for residual independence. Forecast 95% confidence intervals were reported to convey uncertainty in the projected trends. All three models demonstrated good in-sample fit and adequate residual diagnostics. Infection rates in humans and bovines are projected to decline, from 4.64% to 3.73% in humans and from 20.11% to 11.76% in bovines by 2034. In contrast, the ovine model forecasts an increase in infection rates, from 6.50% to 15.56%. This increase in ovines may reflect greater pasture exposure and environmental persistence of infective larvae, while improvements in hygiene and livestock management likely contribute to the declining trends observed in humans and bovines. The rising infection rate in ovines, coupled with sustained zoonotic risk, underscores the need for integrated One Health surveillance and control efforts.

Global warming is not only a serious threat for humanity but increasingly structures political competition in Western Europe. The rise of green (niche) parties and public awareness of the issue pressure mainstream parties to emphasise climate protection. Yet, while scholars reflect on the factors influencing mainstream parties’ environmental agendas, we know little about what triggers climate standpoints and about the role public opinion plays in this process. This study measures the salience of climate protection in 292 election manifestos of mainstream parties in 10 Western European countries since the 1990s and estimates the impact of different factors on their climate agenda using OLS regressions. The findings suggest that green parties are not the driving factor, and that it is the public salience of environmental issues and pressure from the Fridays for Future movement influencing mainstream parties’ agendas. Accordingly, mainstream parties seem to be responsive to public opinion pressure adopting climate protection stances. The study further proposes a different measure of niche party success than that used in previous studies.

Why are women under‐represented even in democratic and egalitarian countries? Previous research considers either demand‐side or supply‐side explanations. We integrate both perspectives in a least‐likely case for the under‐representation of women, namely the municipal councils in Denmark. The data stems from a candidate choice conjoint experiment, a survey among potential candidates, and data on the actual pool of nominated candidates. On the voter demand‐side, we show that there is no pro‐male bias in general or in combination with other candidate traits nor that traits evaluated positively by voters appear more frequently among actual male candidates. On the supply‐side, we find that women are less likely to be interested in running for political office. This is primarily because women assess their own political qualifications significantly lower than men. The under‐supply of female candidates seem to drive the disparity suggesting that we should focus more on supply‐side factors to overcome the gender imbalance.