How do state actors interpret and share information? Theories of the state have long recognized the role of legibility – the modes and practices by which states render society and nature knowable through intervention and information collection – in constructing and maintaining state power. Yet, research has only begun to explore the processes by which information is created and diffused within state administrations. Drawing upon theories of agency relations in states, this article explores how administrators’ communicative practices shape knowledge and legibility. Through examining memos, legislative studies, and draft legislation for decrees recognizing water rights in the French Protectorate in Morocco, I identify a set of common patterns in the construction of bureaucratic information as it moves from street-level administrators to central officials. In analyzing these patterns, I demonstrate how administrators’ obligations and their understandings of the state’s political projects determined not only how French officials collected information, but what they communicated to others. As information moved across administrative levels, officials iteratively changed information. Joining critiques and extensions of legibility theory that emphasize the role of non-state actors in the construction of state knowledge, I argue that we must also attend to intra-state dynamics. In tracing communication and information, I demonstrate that information is iteratively constructed by state agents according to their administrative position and transformed by its particular bureaucratic routes. Modeling legibility and the development of state knowledge requires attending to administrators’ agency, their relationships with each other, and their understanding of the state’s goals.

Although women leaders assume prominent national offices in the United States (and the world), one of the well-established specializations in political science and psychology (i.e., leadership studies) is inundated with male-centric benchmarks. This research often relies on a reference group to develop leaders’ profiles in comparison to other elites. They are predominantly populated, however, with male leaders. This article suggests a remedy and introduces a women leaders reference group for operational code analysis, which is a quantitative approach measuring leaders’ beliefs about politics. We gathered American women leaders’ speeches from the Iowa State University Archives of Women’s Political Communication. Using an automated content analysis, we developed a norming group exclusively for American female politicians in national politics. Whereas our findings indicate noticeable differences and suggest similarities with existing reference groups, we aspire to initiate a conversation and hope that more data will follow and shed more light on women leaders. This reference group can serve as a crucial tool in providing contextualized political-personality profiles of American women leaders and also provide an illustrative example to bridge leadership and gender studies in advancing the study of women leaders in the United States (and beyond).

This article proposes the creation of constituency juries to enhance accountability and check oligarchy in representative governments. Constituency juries would be made up of randomly selected citizens from an electoral constituency who exercise oversight over that constituency’s elected representative. Elected representatives would be required to give a regular account of their actions to the constituency jury, and the jury would have the power to sanction the representative. In addition to this general model of constituency juries, I offer a more specific institutional design that shows how the general model can be operationalized and realistically incorporated into existing representative governments. In contrast to lottocratic proposals that replace elections with sortition, constituency juries are a promising way to combine the two to address the oligarchic tendencies of elections in representative government.

Securitization scholars in Canada have investigated how settler-colonial governments discursively construct extractive infrastructure and policing on Indigenous lands as “critical” for Canada’s economic security. Less literature exists about how Indigenous activists through provincial institutions counter colonial securitization discourse and legislation. This article interrogates discourse in the Manitoba Legislature pertaining to three “critical infrastructure” bills presented by the PC government during the fall 2020 and winter 2021 sessions: Protection of Critical Infrastructure Act (Bill 57), Animal Diseases Amendment Act (Bill 62), and The Petty Trespassers Amendment and Occupiers’ Liability Amendment Act (Bill 63). The study combines an analysis of the bills’ debates, drawn from Hansard, with an interview with then-official opposition house leader, Nahanni Fontaine, to explore the interactions between securitization and counter-securitization discourse(s) and defeat of Bill 57. The study hypothesizes that Indigenous MLAs’ counter-securitization discourse reconstructed the bills as attacks on Indigenous ontological, environmental, and physical security.

Following the French example, the Meloni government has introduced the phrase ‘sovranità alimentare’ (sovereignty in food) into the title of the ministry of agriculture, and makes clear that it is engaging in a very determined effort to defend and promote the cultural heritage of Italian cuisine on all fronts, at home and abroad. But the origins of this impulse go back to the 1980s and the arrival of the McDonald’s hamburger chain, which gave birth to the Slow Food movement, now a global phenomenon. All this conceals several paradoxes: Italian cuisine has always been open to hybridised versions invented elsewhere (especially in America); production in key sectors, including wine, depends on large numbers of immigrant workers at a time when the government is trying to discourage immigration; and the ‘sovereignty in food’ concept unwittingly unites the government and some of its most radical opponents. But the very basis of this concept is challenged by the hyper-protectionist trade policy of the Trump administration.

This article examines the Philippines’ engagement with international law and institutions under Duterte’s populist presidency. While populism is often associated with hostility toward multilateralism, this case study reveals a more nuanced dynamic. The article argues that state engagement under populist administrations is more complex than assumed, and populist rhetoric does not uniformly dictate international behaviour. Using a novel conceptual framework and empirical data, it analyzes the Philippines’ multilateral interactions in human rights, trade, and health. Duterte’s government displayed ritualistic engagement with the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), constructive engagement with the World Trade Organization (WTO) and World Health Organization (WHO), and destructive disengagement from the International Criminal Court (ICC). Key themes include the divergence between rhetoric and action, instrumental use of institutions for domestic priorities, and the critical filtering role of domestic institutions. These findings offer broader insights as to how populist states balance domestic imperatives with international commitments, offering broader insights into the interplay between populism, foreign policy, and multilateralism.

This study provides a comprehensive analysis of the impact of helideck surface conditions on the safe operation of helicopter landing and take-off platforms on offshore drilling vessels. Over time, the deterioration of helideck surface coatings necessitates periodic friction coefficient testing every two years in compliance with international standards. Surface coatings that fail to meet the required thresholds are replaced, and the performance of the renewed surface is reassessed using the Helideck Micro GripTester (HMGT), in accordance with U.K. Safety Regulation Group CAP 437 (2023) standards for offshore helicopter landing areas. The findings indicate that the renewed helideck surface coatings lead to a significant increase in the coefficient of friction, thereby enhancing the stability of helicopters upon landing and while on deck. Independent sample t-test and correlation analyses confirmed statistically significant differences between the old and new surface conditions, demonstrating the positive impact of surface improvements on coefficient of friction and, therefore, operational safety. Furthermore, machine learning techniques were employed to model and analyse the non-linear relationships between surface conditions and flow number. The model results demonstrate that variations in helideck surface coatings directly influence helicopter performance and operational safety. These findings underscore the critical importance of regular resurfacing and friction testing in ensuring the safety and reliability of offshore helicopter operations.