Descriptive research—work aimed at answering “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” and “how” questions—is vital at every stage of social scientific inquiry. The creative and analytic process of description—through concepts, measures, or cases, whether in numeric or narrative form—is crucial for conducting research aimed at understanding politics in action. Yet, our field tends to devalue such work as “merely descriptive” (Gerring 2012), subsidiary to or less valuable than hypothesis-drive causal inference. This article posits four key areas in which description contributes to political science: in conceptualization, in policy relevance, in the management and leveraging of data, and in challenging entrenched biases and diversifying our field.

Aquinas's views about the morality of lying are well known and often discussed by commentators. But his views about the nature of lying have yet to receive the attention they deserve. In this article, I take some of the first steps necessary to correct this state of affairs by clarifying and offering a limited defense of the account of lying that Aquinas presents in in his Summa Theologiae—more specifically, in that portion of it known as the treatise on truth (Part 2-2, Questions 109–113).

The death of the 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Jina Amini in September 2022 sparked a movement that immediately captivated the Iranian diaspora around the world. The morality police had detained Amini in Tehran for allegedly improper hijab. Protests began in Iranian Kurdistan, where Amini was from, and spread across the country to regions and sectors of society that have historically been less involved in political protests than major urban centers like Tehran. What began as a street protest became a full-throated rejection of the status quo. Merchants, teachers, and students organized coordinated labor strikes, while protesters and security services clashed in the streets. Additional economic sanctions were implemented against Iran's government by the United States and Europe; the United Nations Human Rights Commission initiated an independent investigation of the government's response to the protests; Iran was expelled from the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women; and the European Parliament cut diplomatic ties with Tehran. The United States has nearly abandoned the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) even as it was in the final stages of renegotiation, while calls by activists and the European Parliament to designate Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a terrorist group are ongoing.1 We also saw significant global solidarity protests in numerous major cities in the United States, Europe, and Australia.

The study was undertaken to estimate the genetic parameters of lactation curve parameters of Wood's function in Jersey crossbred cattle using the Bayesian approach. Data on 33,906 fortnightly test day milk yields of 1,718 lactation records of Jersey crossbred cows, maintained at the ICAR-National Dairy Research Institute in West Bengal, were collected over a period of 40 years. The lactation curve parameters including ‘a’ (initial milk yield after calving), ‘b’ (ascending slope up to peak yield) and ‘c’ (descending slope after peak yield) and lactation curve traits, peak yield (ymax), time of peak yield (tmax) and persistency of milk yield (P) of individual cow for each lactation were estimated using the incomplete gamma function (Wood's model) by fitting the Gauss–Newton algorithm as an iteration method using PROC NLIN procedure of SAS 9.3. Variance components and genetic parameters of lactation curve parameters/traits were estimated by a repeatability animal model using the Bayesian approach. Estimates of heritabilities were found to be 0.18 ± 0.05, 0.09 ± 0.03 and 0.11 ± 0.04 for parameters ‘a’, ‘b’ and ‘c’, respectively and 0.24 ± 0.05, 0.12 ± 0.04, and 0.15 ± 0.05 for ymax, tmax and P, respectively. Repeatability estimates were 0.31 ± 0.03, 0.21 ± 0.04 and 0.30 ± 0.04 for parameters ‘a’, ‘b’ and ‘c’ respectively and 0.39 ± 0.03, 0.24 ± 0.03 and 0.37 ± 0.03 for ymax, tmax and p, respectively. Genetic correlations among lactation curve parameters/traits ranged from −0.75 to 0.95. Existence of genetic correlations among lactation curve parameters/traits indicated substantial genetic and physiological relationships among lactation curve parameters/traits of Jersey crossbred cattle.

This paper proposes a switched model to improve the estimation of Euler angles and decrease the inertial navigation system (INS) error, when the centrifugal acceleration occurs. Depending on the situation, one of the subsystems of the proposed switched model is activated for the estimation procedure. During global positioning system (GPS) outages, an extended Kalman filter (EKF) operates in the prediction mode and corrects the INS information, based on the system error model. Compared with previous works, the main advantages of the proposed switched-based adaptive EKF (SAEKF) method are (i) elimination of INS error, during the centrifugal acceleration, and (ii) high accuracy in estimating the attitude and positioning, particularly during GPS outages. To validate the efficiency of the proposed method in various trajectories, an experimental flight test is performed and discussed, involving a microelectromechanical (MEMS)-based INS. The comparative study shows that the proposed method considerably improves the accuracy in various scenarios.

It feels fitting to have worked on this review in Baden bei Wien, in which Beethoven spent many summers. This pretty town southwest of Vienna boasts not only a Beethoven-Haus, but also a Beethoven-Panoramaweg, Beethoven-Rundwanderweg, Beethoven-Spazierweg, and even an imposing Beethoven-Tempel, offering a scenic view; notions of decentring, decolonizing, or even critically engaging with Beethoven’s canonic status feel not only remote, but also faintly inappropriate in this, as many other, Beethoven-designated spaces. Moreover, at the time of writing, the international press is reporting that Beethoven’s skull fragments are being returned to Vienna, as though they are holy relics.1 Such material traces of Beethoven’s canonicity seem to mock attempts to rattle the ideological cage, yet two recent books by Erica Buurman and Nancy November make significant contributions.2 The former indirectly poses questions about Beethoven’s relationship to Viennese dance culture, while the latter is a deeply impressive account of the chamber music arrangements of Beethoven’s symphonies. Both left me a touch nostalgic for the now marginal cultures of formal dancing and musical arrangement, which dominated the soundscape of early nineteenth-century Vienna.

This article studies the influence of the antineoliberal social movements in Peru and Ecuador in the face of the Multiparty Trade Agreement (MTA) between both countries and the European Union (EU). To identify and analyze this influence, a transdisciplinary theoretical framework was created, integrating debates and concepts from social movement theory and critical international political economy. In Peru, the movement used European allies to establish their demands on the EU’s agenda, which resulted in increased pressure on the government to enforce labor rights and environmental standards. In Ecuador, the movement was able to establish food sovereignty and the rejection of free trade in the national constitution. As a result, the negotiations with the EU were delayed and Ecuador achieved certain exceptions in its adhesion protocol. Nevertheless, both movements were unable to maintain their influence, due to political and socioeconomic dynamics on the domestic and global levels.