Why did Chile’s think tank sector become more concentrated even as supply and demand for expert opinion expanded? This article examines nine organizations between 2011 and 2022, tracking 18,948 public interventions and conducting sixty-six interviews with think tank members and stakeholders to understand this apparent paradox. While political crises, from student movements to the 2019 social “outbreak” offered opportunities for new voices to emerge, established think tanks systematically consolidated their advantages. This article develops the concept of intellectual infrastructure—the material, institutional, technological, and network conditions enabling expert interventions—to explain how advantages in funding and media access become self-reinforcing. In a middle-income country where international funding dried up without the emergence of domestic philanthropy, organizations with larger, more flexibly allocated resources could effectively crowd out competitors. This challenges assumptions about expertise democratization, revealing how intellectual authority becomes concentrated even during periods of apparent openness.

Scholarly work on the politics of immigration in the U.S. has focused primarily on the influence of local demographics. Less understood are the ways in which local governments respond to demographic changes beyond the city limits. We hypothesize that local governments anticipate future influxes of immigrants from neighboring localities and adjust policies ex ante in order to constrain their movement before it can occur. We predict variation in anti-immigrant legislation as a function of proximity to nearby immigrant populations and find that a 10 percentage point increase in the share of the foreign-born population in a city’s surrounding areas doubles the likelihood that a city considers a restrictive policy. The effect is more pronounced when neighboring immigrants originate from Latin America than from other regions. We also find suggestive evidence that knowledge of adjacent foreign-born populations is transmitted via commuting patterns as neighboring populations commute into cities for work. Our research highlights the importance of spatial networks in local politics and how local political units influence one another and engage in an anticipatory strategic response.

This paper examines reflective judgement as a crucial aspect of the power of judgement in Kant’s third Critique. Following Ginsborg’s normative-regulative interpretation, it demonstrates how aesthetics and teleology emerge from a single principle of reflection, which takes the form of contingent contingency, or possible lawfulness, in both. This reading establishes a parallel between common sense and the intuitive intellect, and allows one to preserve the normative dimension of Kant’s work while making Kant’s more speculative legacy continuous with it.

This article examines the multifaceted nature of the rule of law. It primarily shows a way to measure how the meaning of the rule of law differs across countries, or across different contexts more generally, by analyzing parliamentary discourse on the rule of law. The findings point to a convergence in the conceptualization of the rule of law across diverse legal traditions despite ex ante differences between common law, French, German, and post-socialist legal traditions. The article also proposes a principled approach for deriving weights for rule-of-law indicators in order to assess the sensitivity of country rankings with respect to the adherence to rule-of-law principles.

Many guidelines recommend deprescribing benzodiazepines and z-drugs in most long-term users. Due to physical dependence in those using medication as prescribed (distinct from addiction), discontinuation can be difficult and is often unsuccessful, as withdrawal symptoms can be severe and long-lasting, especially after long-term use. There is a lack of clarity on how to taper patients in a tolerable manner that minimizes discomfort. Current guidelines vary with some suggesting linear reductions (e.g. 1 mg every 1–4 weeks) and some proportionate reductions (e.g. 5%–10% of the most recent dose per month, with smaller reductions as the dose decreases). The shape of the relationship between dose of benzodiazepine and activity at gamma-aminobutyric acid-A (GABA-A) receptors is hyperbolic: steeply inclining at low doses, flattening at higher doses. Consequently, linear dose reductions produce increasingly large changes in receptor occupancy, predicting escalating withdrawal effects, while hyperbolic or proportionate dose reductions produce linear reductions in pharmacological effect. Slower tapering (over months and years) may be more successful than tapering over days or weeks. In practice, rate of tapering should be adjusted according to severity of withdrawal effects. Final doses for some people will need to be very small (equivalent to as little as 0.2 mg of diazepam, or less) so that the last ‘step down’ to zero is not larger than prior tolerated reductions in terms of pharmacological effects. Liquids or compounded formulations of medication can be helpful at low doses to make small reductions. Guidelines should recommend hyperbolic tapering while awaiting randomized trials comparing linear with hyperbolic tapering.

The ‘left behind’, commonly defined by socio-economic factors such as rural residence, working-class status, and subjective perceptions of marginalization, have been repeatedly linked to support for populism and authoritarianism. However, it remains unclear whether the left behind are truly turning away from democracy and whether and how perceived marginalization (understood as a lack of recognition in different areas) is linked to fundamental democratic orientations (democratic attitudes, understandings, and governance preferences) that go beyond support for populist parties or specific policies. Using data from about 2,500 respondents in both the United States and Germany, I investigate how perceived societal marginalization is related to democratic orientations while accounting for traditional socio-economic factors. The results show that a lack of cultural recognition (feeling that one’s values are becoming less important or that one’s group cannot freely express its opinion in public) is associated with lower democratic support, an authoritarian and majoritarian understanding of politics, and higher support for authoritarian governance. Conversely, feeling unseen and unheard by politicians is associated with dissatisfaction with democracy and lower support for representative governance but also with high democratic support, a liberal understanding of politics, and support for citizen-centered decision-making in the form of referendums. These findings challenge simplistic portrayals of the left behind as inherently undemocratic. They also highlight the need for nuanced approaches to engage the left behind based on the dimensions in which they experience a lack of recognition to ensure democratic stability.