The extent to which legislators pursue their privately held preferences in office has important implications for representative democracy and is exceedingly difficult to measure. Many models of legislative decision-making tacitly assume that members are willing and able to carry out the wishes of their constituents so as to maximize their reelection prospects and, in so doing, relegate their personal preferences. This project explores this assumption by examining the role that members’ place of birth plays in shaping legislative behavior, apart from other politically relevant factors like partisanship. We find that birthplace exerts an independent influence on members’ voting behavior. Using a variety of geographic measures, we find that members who are born in close proximity to one another tend to exhibit similar patterns in roll call voting, even when accounting for partisanship, constituency attributes, and a variety of other determinants of voting. We also demonstrate in a secondary analysis that the agricultural composition of members’ birthplace influences their support for agricultural protection. Our findings suggest that members’ personal history shapes the representational relationship they have with their constituents.

Cartographic representations of Kashmir and Taiwan act as sites upon which Indian and Chinese state power is exercised to govern the logics of visibility and legibility for these two regions. Despite the differences in regime type, these major non-Western powers represent Kashmir and Taiwan respectively as internal and integral parts of their sovereign territorial form. In this article, we consider two cases that have not hitherto been studied together in International Relations (IR), putting forward ‘cartographic imaginaries’ as a framework to reveal systematic analytical dynamics in relation to representation, nationalism, and diaspora. Cartographic imaginaries are sites of productive power that evoke certain emotions and carry a set of ideas relating to territory that can be naturalised through repeated exposure. We present in-depth investigations providing a range of examples to trace Indian and Chinese states’ efforts, both domestic and international, involved in constructing and controlling cartographic imaginaries of Kashmir and Taiwan. Our analysis relates to significant current concerns in IR about critiques of imperial cartography, impact of rising powers on global order dynamics, and transnational governance of diaspora. Our framework thus demonstrates the connexions between affect, visuality, and state power and offers empirical insights into non-Western projections of imperialism on a global scale.

This article uses letters from BL, ms Lansdowne 99 to explore how a diverse group of individuals experiencing mental and emotional distress utilised religious ideas as a primary means of interpreting their experience and expressing themselves to those in authority in Elizabethan England. It shifts emphasis away from the causes and towards the construction and experience of distress. It argues that such letters shed important light on the character and progress of the English Reformation by the closing decades of the sixteenth century, as well as on the operation of the process of Reformation itself.

Using a recent result of Bowden, Hensel and Webb, we prove the existence of a homeomorphism with positive stable commutator length in the group of homeomorphisms of the Klein bottle which are isotopic to the identity.

Using a laboratory experiment, we investigate complexity in decision problems as a cause of failures in contingent reasoning. For this purpose, we introduce three dimensions of complexity to a decision problem: the number of contingencies, the dominance property of choices, and reducible states. Each decision problem is designed to reflect variations in complexity across the three dimensions. Experimental results show that the number of contingencies has the most significant effect on failures in contingent reasoning. The second dimension, the dominance property of choices, also has a statistically significant effect, though the effect size is smaller than in the existing literature. In contrast, the third complexity dimension has no impact; presenting the decision problem in a reduced or reducible form does not change subjects’ performance on contingent reasoning. Additionally, we examine the Power of Certainty and show its existence. This effect is particularly pronounced when the number of contingencies is large.

Considering the alarming energy demand for cooling and seeking sustainable cooling alternatives to over-reliance on air conditioning, our pre-registered study is the first attempt to apply social norm nudges on two cooling behaviors – lighter clothing and the use of personal cooling devices (PCDs). To examine and compare the effectiveness of a descriptive norm message, an injunctive norm signal from leadership, and the two norms combined, we conducted an online randomized controlled survey experiment among financial employees (n = 743) in Guangdong, China. We measured their behavioral intentions before and after the intervention, and their level of commitment to these behaviors as an alternative outcome. We found that while single-norm conditions did not lead to desirable increases in lighter clothing, the both-norm condition nudged participants toward selecting lighter work clothes and boosted commitment to lighter clothing. Outcomes related to the use of PCDs were not affected by any of the norm conditions. These mixed findings present a cautionary tale for designing social norm interventions in office spaces and highlight the boundaries of their effectiveness in energy-saving behaviors.

The concept of security, with its various dimensions, is fundamental to the field of ageing literature. However, feeling safe does not always equate to feeling at ease or being comfortable with people and places. Building on these premises, this article presents and analyses the factors involved in the perception of security and social safeness among women ageing in a top-down co-housing project and a nursing home in Italy. This country has one of Europe’s oldest populations, and the ageing population phenomenon is particularly notable in the Veneto region. In response to changing demographics, the search for alternative housing solutions and associated innovative paradigms of care and support has been gaining ground in recent years. Our study analysed data gathered from women who decided not to age in place. Fieldwork was carried out in one of the most densely populated provinces in the Veneto region during 2022 and 2023. The methodology was qualitative and consisted of in-depth interviews, a focus group and a workshop. Participants were 11 self-sufficient older women, aged 75 and over, living in these facilities. Among the elements that contribute to the perception of social safeness, the following stood out: material and structural factors, physical and emotional factors, relational factors and factors linked to independence and autonomy. Finally, the article stresses the need to study social safeness in greater depth, as it could become a new line of social science research capable of providing relevant information on the housing needs of older adults.

Building on our previous work on enriched universal algebra, we define a notion of enriched language consisting of function and relation symbols whose arities are objects of the base of enrichment $\mathcal {V}$. In this context, we construct atomic formulas and define the regular fragment of our enriched logic by taking conjunctions and existential quantification of those. We then characterize $\mathcal {V}$-categories of models of regular theories as enriched injectivity classes in the $\mathcal {V}$-category of structures. These notions rely on the choice of an orthogonal factorization system $(\mathcal {E},\mathcal {M})$ on $\mathcal {V}$ which will be used, in particular, to interpret relation symbols and existential quantification.

Consumers play an important role in regulating labor rights in global supply chains, either by punishing companies that violate labor rights or rewarding those that market fair labor practices. There is, however, currently limited understanding of how consumer demand can be effectively harnessed to protect freedom of association and collective bargaining (FACB) rights in garment-exporting countries. Through a series of conjoint experiments, we test the strength of consumer demand for FACB rights relative to other labor and environmental standards, and manipulate price and information frames to analyze the extent to which a business case exists to promote FACB rights. We find that consumers display willingness to pay premiums for various ethical labels around labor protections, indicating a business case for promoting ethical labor standards in supply chains. However, we also find that consumer demand for certain labor rights—including FACB rights and payment of a living wage—can diminish considerably in the context of price increases, thus limiting the profits firms might accrue by marketing labor rights protections. Our results open up the black box of consumer demand for different labor standards and evaluate the different modes through which consumers can influence labor protections in the global economy.

Rugged terrain is a landscape characteristic that has complex and often contradictory impacts on the size, geographic distribution, and economic vitality of locations. The USDA ERS’s Area and Road Ruggedness Scales provide two different types of information on the relative topographic variation of 2010 census tracts. These data characterize both the overall landscape and land where people travel. However, researchers frequently conduct analyses at larger geographic scales, such as counties. In this paper, we describe how the Area and Road Ruggedness Scales data were created and suggest several methods of aggregating the data to the county level. We use correlations and regressions of natural amenities on net migration to compare the suitability of our suggested county-level area ruggedness measures to the topography measure from the Natural Amenities Scale. We find that, despite data loss due to aggregation, county-level area ruggedness measures can serve as reasonable proxies for topographical amenities. However, they do not capture certain landscape features that positively influence migration.

The pre-Critical Kant holds that God is the ground of the possibility of all predicates. Yet it is not clear how God does this. A common approach is to distinguish between fundamental predicates, which God grounds directly by instantiating them, and derivative predicates, which God grounds indirectly. This essay argues that we should not distinguish between two sorts of predicates, some grounded directly and some grounded indirectly. We should distinguish between two sorts of grounding relations. As I will show, this dualism about grounding is both justified by the text and gives a satisfactory solution to the ‘how’ question.

Social scientists have long been interested in elite cohesion in American society, recognizing its potential implications for democracy and governance. While empirical research has focused on corporate elites and, in particular, on cohesion derived from shared board memberships, cohesion among those in the highest positions in the American state and historical change in that cohesion have been little studied. Drawing on a novel dataset of the career histories of 2,221 people who were appointed to these elite positions between 1898 and 1998, I examine whether administrative elites, prior to their elite appointment, attended the same educational institutions or worked in the same agencies of the federal government at the same time. I find evidence of increasing elite cohesion during the twentieth century. Educational cohesion increases significantly in the three decades following the World War II and then declines slightly toward the end of the century. This increase goes hand in hand with a change from college to graduate education as the primary site generating educational cohesion. Federal government workplace cohesion increases markedly in the 1930s and 1940s and then remains high. As people are appointed to different organizations within the American state, their educational and workplace connections create inter-agency networks that, it is expected, facilitate mutual understanding and coordination and thus help integrate the American administrative state.