This study examines how political constraints influence happiness using entropy balancing on data from 125 countries over the period 2006–2021. The findings reveal a positive and statistically significant relationship. A one-standard-deviation increase in political constraints (0.233) is associated with an approximate 0.10-unit increase in happiness, corresponding to a standardised effect of 0.092 standard deviations. While this absolute effect size is modest, as is typical for macro-institutional variables, it carries population-level relevance when contextualised within the subjective well-being literature. These results remain robust across alternative measures of political constraints, diverse model specifications, heterogeneity analyses, and alternative estimation methods. Finally, we identify political and economic freedom, control of corruption, the rule of law, income redistribution, and employment as the main channels through which political constraints affect citizens’ happiness.

During the 2024–2025 impeachment protests in South Korea, practices associated with K-pop fandom entered the civic sphere, as concert light sticks, fan chants, and online mobilization were recontextualized as forms of democratic expression. This article examines how affective intensities cultivated within K-pop fandom are reorganized into collective action and democratic values. Drawing on Greimas’s (1987) generative trajectory of meaning, the study develops a four-level analytical framework—affect, passion, narrative, and value—to trace how affective experience becomes civic practice. The framework is applied to 2,218 narrative statements collected from 118 Korean K-pop fans through an open-ended survey. The analysis shows that fandom is grounded in sensory intensities generated by sound, light, rhythm, and collective immersion. These affects evolve into modalized passions such as responsibility and indignation, motivating practices including donations, boycotts, and participation in demonstrations, through which fans become collective civic actors. As these practices accumulate, they stabilize into ethical and political values, particularly solidarity and democratic responsibility. The study conceptualizes K-pop fandom as a semiotic economy in which affect, practice, and value circulate, demonstrating how fandom can function as an affective infrastructure for democratic meaning-making.

This study was conducted to determine the prevalence of the gastric nematode Ollulanus tricuspis in domestic cats in Samsun province, Türkiye, and to perform molecular phylogenetic analysis of the obtained isolates. Following the initial diagnosis of O. tricuspis in a domestic cat presenting with chronic vomiting, stomach contents from 50 necropsied cats were microscopically examined for a broader survey. The ITS-1, 5.8S, and ITS-2 gene regions of the parasites obtained from positive samples were amplified and sequenced using PCR. Phylogenetic analyses were performed using the maximum likelihood (ML) and Bayesian inference (BI) analyses. The prevalence of O. tricuspis in the examined samples was determined to be 6%. Literature data show a wide variation in global prevalence, ranging from 0.2% (USA) to 42% (Australia). This study is the first report to reveal the presence of O. tricuspis at the molecular level in Türkiye.

This article examines the political ecology of water and ethnic conflict in Kirkuk, Iraq. Kirkuk is an internally disputed frontier territory, controlled by the federal government of Iraq but claimed by Kurdish nationalists. Kirkuk contains some of Iraq’s largest oil fields and most productive agricultural lands. In recent decades Kirkuk has also faced water shortages tied to global climate change. The article deploys survey data, supplemented by qualitative historical research, to evaluate framing of environmental security and the relationship between water insecurity, ethnic conflict, and governance. We find that commitments to competing programs for territorial control in Kirkuk correlate with different framing of ecological risk factors. Arabic-speaking respondents frame water scarcity as a matter for the federal government. Kurdish-speaking respondents prefer to enlist the Kurdistan Regional Government or local politicians to deal with water scarcity, undercutting federal jurisdiction. These findings cast doubt on environmental security and peacebuilding theories which suggest that ecological scarcity can spur inter-ethnic cooperation toward sustainability. Rather, commitment to different ethnoterritorial programs justify different perspectives on ecological change. At a policy level, these findings show that political conciliation must come before progress in environmental peacebuilding.

Discrimination of vowel and consonant pairs is influenced by their order, known as perceptual asymmetry, and recent research suggests a similar effect for lexical tones. This study tested whether discrimination of two consecutive tones is easier when a dynamic contour tone (e.g., rising/falling) precedes a static-level tone (e.g., low/high) than vice versa. Thai-speaking children aged 4, 6, and 8 years and adults completed an AX task with four tone pairs in dynamic–static and static–dynamic orders. Adults showed no perceptual asymmetry, possibly due to ceiling effects. However, children in all three age groups discriminated dynamic–static pairs better than static–dynamic pairs. Although tone discrimination improved across age groups, the magnitude of the dynamic–static over static–dynamic advantage remained stable. These findings reveal a dynamic–static bias in tone perception that emerges before age four and remains stable into the school years. Implications for segmental asymmetries and theories of speech perception are discussed.

The National Labor Relations Act no longer protects the right to unionize because business organizations and their allies have succeeded in redirecting the statute to protect their interests over workers’ right to collective action. This paper examines how processes of conversion have reshaped the agency charged with enforcement—the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). I argue that conversion does not produce institutional collapse but rather internal fragmentation, creating space for normative subcultures of enforcement. Drawing on interviews with NLRB officials and publicly available agency documents, I find that mission-committed officials sustained the agency’s original pro-worker mission through two strategies: mining latent legal resources within the statute and building external partnerships for proactive enforcement. These enforcement subcultures differ from the “pockets of effectiveness” identified in developing countries—they operate within fragmented institutions rather than controlling whole agencies, requiring strategic adaptation to shifting political conditions.

The findings bridge historical institutionalism and public administration scholarship, showing how bureaucratic legacies enable resistance to institutional change. They also illuminate urgent questions about whether such resistance can survive systematic civil service dismantling, with implications beyond labor law for understanding mission-driven governance under authoritarian pressure.

This article examines the position of the Slovak minority in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) during the Second World War, focusing on the tension between official discourses of interstate friendship and local experiences of insecurity. Drawing on extensive archival sources, including diplomatic correspondence and administrative and security reports, it shows how ethnic Slovaks were formally portrayed as members of a friendly nation while remaining exposed to administrative exclusion, stigmatization, and violence in peripheral regions. Inspired by selected insights from Brubaker, Wimmer, and Kalyvas — used as heuristic points of reference rather than deductive frameworks — the article conceptualizes this ambivalent position as that of a “frenemy” minority: symbolically included yet structurally marginalized. It argues that the deterioration of the Slovak community’s security from 1942 onward resulted from an uncoordinated syncretism of centrally implemented policies of ethnic exclusion and processes of state degradation, manifested in fragmented authority and the brutalization of local actors. By highlighting the gap between declared friendship and practical neglect, the article contributes to debates on minority governance under fascist rule and on the effects of weak state capacity and localized violence in wartime authoritarian contexts.

This paper presents a brief history of archival provenance and its shifting role across different paradigms of archives, considering how this past work can provide insights into current trajectories of AI. It explores what archival provenance does, or can do, differently than current imaginations of data provenance in AI. It proposes three “lessons from archival provenance” that challenge the present focus of existing approaches in AI, in particular highlighting how narrowly this work structures and models evidence, authenticity and creatorship of data. These lessons can be used to identify new opportunities for applying concepts of archival provenance by presenting a roadmap for future work where AI research might align and converge with related work in archival theory. It concludes by asserting that grounding AI datasets in this perspective of archival provenance can realize a new paradigm of “data as archives,” serving to envision responsibilities to a range of data creators, determine needs for documentation of context and establish a crucial role for “data archivists.”

We propose a spatially resolved B-integral measurement method for high-power laser drivers based on off-axis aberration characterization. Theoretical analysis confirms the feasibility and high precision of this approach, in which coma-shaped intensity modulation is intentionally introduced into the laser system, imprinting nonlinear phase modulation with a corresponding aberration profile. The B-integral is then extracted by measuring the coma component of the output beam using a Shack–Hartmann sensor. The experimental results demonstrate a 5.8% deviation between the measured and simulated B-integral values for coma aberration, showing that the proposed method significantly outperforms the defocus-based measurement method (67.4% error) in terms of error reduction. This method does not require modifications to the laser setup, offers a single-shot measurement capability and achieves high accuracy and excellent repeatability. The direct quantification of wavefront phase distortions provides a practical solution for nonlinear phase modulation diagnostics in high-power laser systems.

This article examines the Peoples Bicentennial Commission (PBC), a New Left group founded in 1971 to provide an alternative to official celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the American Revolution that culminated on July Fourth, 1976. The PBC has gone down in history mostly as a disappointment for having failed to halt the rise of the New Right. This study, though, takes a longer view of history to argue that the PBC, despite its faults, pursued a red, white, and blue brand of patriotic protest that worked to rekindle traditions of dissent that date from the early republic. By embracing America’s revolutionary heritage and rediscovering forgotten practices, such as staging July Fourth protests and issuing alternative declarations of independence, the PBC helped not only to reinvigorate the left at a critical juncture in the 1970s but to model effective protest strategies moving forward.