We present a potential test of the origin of the $\gamma$-ray Galactic Centre Excess (GCE). We demonstrate how gravitational microlensing by stellar mass objects along the line of sight to the Galactic Bulge can distinguish between the possibility of extensive emission due to dark matter self-annihilation from more prosaic astrophysical sources, namely millisecond pulsars. Such an astrophysical origin would result in emission from a population of small, currently unresolved point-like sources – in contrast to the expected smoother emission resulting from dark matter annihilation. Given that the scale of gravitational microlensing, that is, the Einstein radius for stellar mass lenses, and hence, the degree of induced magnification, is sensitive to the size of the emitting region, such microlensing will induce time variability in the emission of astrophysical sources, whereas $\gamma$-ray emission from dark matter annihilation will effectively be immune to such influences. However, we find that detecting microlensing-induced variability requires significantly greater sensitivity than that of current or planned $\gamma$-ray detectors. For a small population of bright GCE sources, more than an order-of-magnitude increase in effective area over Fermi-LAT would be required, with events remaining extremely rare. For a large population of faint sources, events would occur multiple times a year, but would only be detectable with a four-order-of-magnitude improvement. Whilst microlensing might not be a definitive test of the origin of the GCE, in future observations, it may prove useful in determining the properties of any point-like source population.

It has been a long time since political scientists have taken measure of our political engagement in the United States. Drawing on data collected from political scientists in Summer 2024, this article assesses the extent and type of political engagement, finding three alliterative dimensions into which we tend to fall: partisans (who engage in partisan politics), public scholars (who share political science logic and findings), and pedagogues (who engage through teaching and event sponsorship). This effort may represent the first time we have tried to measure individual beliefs about how personal participation should intersect with professional responsibilities. Our dimensions of engagement tend not to differ substantially by demography, institution, or rank. However, we do have different beliefs about the propriety and the likely effects of different types of engagement with politics that give structure to our presence in the public sphere.

In 1924, the Italian ship Regia Nave Italia visited twenty-eight ports in thirteen Latin American states. Initially conceived as a commercial venture, it became a tool of Mussolini’s foreign policy led by Giovanni Giurati, a cabinet minister appointed as extraordinary ambassador. This article uncovers the colonial agenda of this voyage, arguing that a racialised vision of the Italian diaspora in Latin America shaped strategic alignments between the fascist government and Italian economic elites. It shows how ideas of race, migration, and Latinity configured discursive strategies designed to materialise fascism’s project of demographic imperialism through engagement with local authorities and their population policies. Within a longer genealogy of colonial practice, the Regia Nave Italia illustrates how Italy’s informal empire intersected with fascist ambitions across the Atlantic.

Este artículo analiza los impactos de la expansión de grandes empresas forestales en el Alto Paraná, área central de esta producción en Argentina. Desde fines del siglo XX, el ingreso de capitales concentrados transformó la actividad, aumentando la integración vertical, desplazando productores y reorganizando regímenes laborales. El foco está en las condiciones de reproducción social de trabajadores sin tierra y pequeños productores con acceso limitado a medios de producción. En base a un estudio de caso en Puerto Piray (Misiones), se exploran sus estrategias laborales desde la categoría de “clases de trabajo”. Se argumenta que la diversidad de formas de trabajo y de actividades desplegadas para la reproducción de estas clases l encuentra un eje estructurador en la explotación del trabajo de las mujeres, en tanto son ellas quienes abarcan el continuo entre el trabajo reproductivo y el productivo.

Since the 1970s, Japan has occupied a position of political, economic, and technological power. The article argues that Japan’s rise during this period resulted in increased European East-West cooperation. Firstly, it demonstrates the threat posed by Japanese competition in sectors such as automobiles and electronics encouraged the expansion of Western European companies into Eastern Europe. Secondly, by examining the case of Poland, it shows how Japan’s rise served as a model for opening socialist economies. Viewing the increase in East-West European cooperation through Japan’s ascent offers a fresh perspective on this phenomenon. It illustrates how the emergence of new global powers facilitated the fragmentation of Cold War divisions, enabling a more balanced understanding of the political and economic motivations behind this cooperation in capitalist and socialist countries. It also suggests that East-West European cooperation was shaped by a broader global transformation that escapes a purely Cold War logic.

We present a simple and robustly incentive-compatible price list methodology to elicit quantiles of a subjective real-valued belief. These elicited quantiles can be employed to approximate a subject’s complete subjective distribution, and we establish that the distribution maximizing entropy while adhering to the elicited quantiles is piecewise linear. Using this approach, our methodology extends to estimating arbitrary unobserved attributes of the subjective distribution, such as mean and variance, which are otherwise challenging to elicit. We provide a proof-of-concept for our framework through an experiment involving the elicitation of participants’ beliefs regarding the mathematical abilities of their peers.

Recent work in social epistemology has discussed obligations to engage with challenges to our beliefs like climate change denial or anti-vaccine sentiment, and the potential benefits and dangers for both the engager and the engaged from doing so. The spotlight being trained here, however, has elided a key issue: the possible risks from engaging for third-party observers, not merely the engager and the engaged. In this paper, I argue that not only are these risks an underappreciated aspect of engaging that should be discussed, but also their neglect is especially concerning as the potential negative epistemic fallout threatens to overwhelm any possible benefits that may be gained from engaging, regardless of how the engagement actually goes. I close by drawing out the theoretical and practical implications from this and sketch a few strategies to conceivably avoid said risks.

Since the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) was created in 1985, producers in the United States (US) have voluntarily enrolled their environmentally sensitive agricultural lands for conservation in exchange for an annual rental payment. However, enrollment in General CRP has been decreasing over time. This study used a discrete-time duration analysis model to examine factors influencing the length of time producers in the southeastern US (n = 5000) take to enroll in the General CRP. Younger producers enrolled relatively faster than their older counterparts. Furthermore, increased total land area, awareness about CRP, and positive perspectives on the sign-up ranking process reduced overall time to enrollment.

This study argues that trans-contextual migration experiences can lead to various changes in self-identification among multiethnic and multiracial Japanese individuals. This case study examines in-depth interviews with six participants with roots in Japan, Thailand, and Germany through a narrative-based approach. The authors discusses the dynamic relationship between contextual and individual factors in influencing self-identification. Through thematic analysis of participant narratives, this exploratory case study identifies four recurring themes; migration can trigger significant changes in self-identification; migration can lead to unresolved mismatches between self-identification and societal categorisation; migration can result in the development of hybrid identifications that transcend rigid ethnic boundaries; and migration to a third cultural context can validate self-identifications in new ways. By examining themes that emerged from participant narratives, this case study illuminates the fluid and complex nature of multiethnic and multiracial self-identifications, particularly how racialisation processes intersect with ethnic identity formation across different national contexts. The study contributes to the growing scholarship on mixedness by emphasizing the importance of a biographical understanding of multiethnic and multiracial self-identifications through the lens of trans-contextual migration experiences.

This article examines one of thousands of reports describing murder trials that are stored in the archives of the Habsburg ruler in Vienna. The monarch was required to evaluate every civilian death sentence in his realm, including the Kingdom of Hungary, and he alone could decide if the execution should proceed or be commuted. But it was the relevant justice minister who composed the reports and framed the decision for the monarch. Through these reports, the minister shaped what would happen through persuasive narrative and expert advice. After evaluating seven hundred reports, we selected one specific case: a murder conviction in Budapest in 1915. We show how the justice minister, an expert in criminal justice reform and an opponent of the death penalty, directed the emperor towards clemency and contributed to the steady decrease in the use of capital punishment.

How do far-right actors influence mainstream parties over time? Previous research shows that mainstream parties contribute to the electoral success of far-right parties through coalitions or policy alliances. However, a long-term perspective on the influence of far-right actors, including parties, civil society organisations, and social movements, on mainstream parties’ communication is lacking. This article investigates how far-right actors and issues have influenced mainstream parties’ communication in Germany since the 1990s. Using automated text analysis, we analyse 520,408 articles from six newspapers. First, we semi-automatically collect far-right actors and mainstream parties and implement a structural topic model to analyse their issue agendas. Second, we use time-series analysis to examine agenda-setting effects and their drivers. The results show that far-right influence on mainstream parties’ communication has increased, particularly among opposition parties and around issues of Islam and migration. Notably, the agenda-setting effect cuts across party ideologies, indicating mainstream parties’ impact on the rise of the far right in democracies.

This article reassesses the relationship between the British government and British commercial interests during the Spanish civil war. It has often been argued that British economic interests inclined the government toward non-intervention, effectively favouring Franco’s insurgents over the Spanish Republic. However, records from the Spanish Emergency Committee (SEC) – a little-known and hitherto unstudied committee formed by British insurers operating in Spain – reveal a more nuanced picture. Initially, the SEC pursued ‘mercantile neutrality’, avoiding state involvement and playing little if any role in the British government’s policy of non-intervention. But as their efforts to protect their interests failed under increasing Francoist pressure and a worsening European political context, they turned to the British government for support. The SEC’s experience highlights the complexities of state–capital relations during the inter-war period and the difficulty of defining ‘national’ interests in times of crisis, showing how business archives can provide new insights into key debates in international history.

As elected officials and citizens struggle to understand the increasingly polarized political landscape in the United States, some have pointed to the introduction of “gavel-to-gavel” camera coverage in legislative bodies as driving the downward trajectory of these institutions. Advocates of increased transparency suggest cameras empower voters, producing more moderate behavior among legislators, whereas opponents suggest cameras encourage partisanship and dysfunction. Previous research offers mixed conclusions, in part, because of a focus on national legislatures where the introduction of cameras occurs only once. Using an original dataset of the adoption of gavel-to-gavel coverage in state legislative chambers, we examine whether cameras are associated with a range of chamber- and individual-level outcomes. The findings suggest that there are no systematic impacts from the introduction of gavel-to-gavel coverage. Normative concerns about cameras in legislatures may be overstated, an important finding given their proliferation in public proceedings since the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study examines the role of political campaigns in reducing voter susceptibility to framing effects. The case chosen is the 2022 EU defence opt-out referendum in Denmark. Using a novel survey experiment design that exposed voters to arguments at the start and the end of the campaign, we were able to directly test the impact of a real-world campaign on voter susceptibility to frames. The findings reveal a notable reduction in framing effects. Initially, loss-related framed arguments swayed voters, but this impact waned at the campaign’s end. Our analysis suggests that the campaign provided voters with information and arguments that made them less susceptible to framing effects and instead empowered voters to make informed decisions on the referendum based on their own attitudes towards the EU. In the conclusions, we encourage further research on susceptibility to elite messages in real-world settings.

The Liber Lynne, a fifteenth-century manuscript in the archive of the City of London Corporation, is a puzzle. Catalogued among the City of London’s collections of written custom (formerly Guildhall MS Cust. 15), it is generally defined as a cartulary. In this article, I study the Liber Lynne as a book that was both about family and for family. Its chance survival, a consequence of its acquisition by the Hanseatic Steelyard in London before the end of the fifteenth century, offers an unusual opportunity to explore the concept of family in the medieval English town. I situate the Liber Lynne in a distinct place and time, and argue that the book is a distinctively urban manuscript, the outcome of urban interests, ambitions, and anxieties. It also reveals the persistent and ubiquitous presence of plague, which exposed the fragility and precarity of families, but helped to give them different shapes. These shapes, or structures, were fluid because of the mutable nature of ideas about family and its voluntaristic qualities. Family, the Liber Lynne suggests, was a choice and a practice.

Subjective group relative deprivation (SGRD) is a powerful driver of political protest and support for radical parties. Yet, we lack insights into whether such subjective perceptions of disadvantage attack the very core of democratic legitimacy, that is, citizens’ support for democracy. Against this backdrop, we investigate how SGRD relates to diffuse democratic support. We argue that perceptions of being systematically disadvantaged fuel disaffection with and resentment against the prevailing democratic system, whereas authoritarian systems with their strongmen leadership appear appealing as they promise a stronger in-group protection and pursue more confrontational in-group-out-group relations, which both can be understood as coping strategies to overcome an unfair disadvantage. Employing original – cross-sectional and panel – survey data, we show that SGRD has the potential to undermine citizens’ support for democracy across six European countries in 2020–2022. Our study highlights the negative impact of subjective disadvantage on support for democracy by combining literature from political psychology and political economy.

This paper is about whether we can revise the highest rule in a legal system using legal reasoning. HLA Hart and Alf Ross argued that we can’t: either the highest rule is unchangeable, or it can only be changed in a revolution—a merely causal change, not a legal one. I argue, drawing on an idea from Hartry Field about logic and epistemology, that we can. The emergence of the conclusion, within a legal system, that the highest rule should be replaced by something else can provide a legal reason for the change. In making the change, we act for reasons internal to the legal system. This allows us to make sense of the distinction, recognized by legal subjects, between a revolution and a legal change of sovereignty.