This article presents a comparative analysis of four Basic Income (BI) experiments conducted between 2017 and 2019 in Finland, the Netherlands, Spain, and Uganda. While existing research has focused primarily on economic and behavioural outcomes, this study shifts attention to the political, institutional, and implementation dynamics that shape BI experiments. Drawing on policy implementation, diffusion, and social experimentation theories, the article examines how different governance structures, actor constellations, and institutional settings influenced the initiation, design, and interpretation of these trials. Using qualitative methods, including document analysis and semi-structured interviews, the study identifies key factors that facilitated implementation and policy impact. Findings reveal significant variation across cases, particularly in terms of design autonomy, stakeholder alignment, and political reception. The inclusion of Uganda challenges highlights the transformative potential of BI in low-income contexts. The article concludes by offering practical recommendations for designing more politically viable and institutionally grounded BI experiments.

The increase in the mobilization power of public sector unions is one of the most puzzling features of twenty-first-century labor politics in both advanced and emerging market democracies. We posit that public labor mobilization is driven by economic, institutional, and political factors. Mobilization decreases during the expansionary phase of the economic cycle, when incumbents can placate public unions with state resources; when collective bargaining is mandatory; and when governments share a common partisan identity with a unified labor leadership, facilitating a “political exchange” in which union moderation is traded for wage and non-wage concessions. Based on a qualitative, subnational comparative case-study approach, we trace union organizational dynamics and coalition building process in Argentina’s education sector, and seek to identify their effects on teacher union militancy or moderation across the country’s provinces between 2006 and 2019. We illuminate the causal mechanisms and temporal sequences of union mobilization/moderation by examining both “typical” and “deviant” cases of our general theory

Within-person changes in racial attitudes influence presidential vote switching in the United States, but not all forms of racial attitude change are equally consequential. An analysis of a three-wave panel of American National Election Studies respondents from 2016, 2020, and 2024 contrasts two types of racial attitude change: perceptions of discrimination against Black Americans and relative racial affect (the difference in warmth toward white versus Black Americans). First, difference and fixed-effects models, which leverage within-person variation, reveal that decreases in perceived discrimination predict movement toward the Republican presidential candidate and shifts in relative racial affect show no association with vote choice. Reverse causality tests reinforce a directional effect from attitudinal change to vote change. There is minimal evidence that those who switched from voting for a Democrat to a Republican shift their racial attitudes in response. These findings demonstrate that dynamic grievance about racial injustice is a key driver of partisan realignment, highlighting that cognitive assessments of discrimination, rather than general racial affect, are central to understanding changes in electoral behavior.

Body-mass evolution in extinct mammals is an important factor in understanding their diversification and niche occupation dynamics over geological time. To know how Macraucheniidae, South American native ungulates, diversified over 30 Myr, we estimated body mass for 15 genera within this family and investigated which evolutionary process best explains body-mass evolution in this lineage. For this purpose, we applied a set of body-mass estimation equations and conducted comparative phylogenetic analyses to assess the presence of phylogenetic signals and identify the best-fitting model of trait evolution. Our results show that all Macraucheniidae genera can be classified as megafauna (i.e., mammals weighing more than 44 kg). The evolutionary model that best explains body-mass diversification in this family is a directional, gradual increase over time. The subfamilies Cramaucheniinae and Macraucheniinae did not differ significantly in body-mass evolutionary rates; however, the negative relationship between body mass and temperature, together with the most parsimonious evolutionary scenario, supports temperature as the primary ecological driver of body-mass evolution in macraucheniids.

This study examines how the Roman Catholic Church formulated and implemented its principal directive during China’s civil war and subsequent regime change in the mid-twentieth century, particularly the obligation that clergy remain at their posts alongside the relocation of seminarians to safer areas. Drawing on newly available Vatican archival materials, it demonstrates that the decision to evacuate seminarians was not solely prompted by the petition of the first Chinese cardinal to the pope, as previously assumed; rather, the Apostolic Internuncio’s shift in position played a decisive role. It further identifies an original Italian version of the directive that differs in sequence and emphasis from the widely circulated Chinese text. Against this background, criticisms of the Internuncio as “the executioner of native priests” require reconsideration. Rather, the study reinterprets him as an adaptive intermediary within the process of policy formation and implementation.

This study introduces an improved gesture-based human–swarm interaction control system for drone swarms that unifies motion and formation control while addressing the critical challenge of neglecting the impact of faulty robots on task performance. Unlike conventional approaches that treat these functionalities separately, our integrated framework enables robust task execution in challenging environments. Using 26 hand gestures (18 formations and 8 flight commands) processed by a variety of deep learning models, including convolutional neural networks (e.g., ResNet101 and MobileNetV2) and recurrent neural network-based approaches such as long short-term memory (LSTM), bidirectional LSTM, gated recurrent unit (GRU), and bidirectional GRU (BiGRU), the system provides comprehensive yet accessible control, notably through the BiGRU network with 99.4% accuracy in real-time gesture recognition tasks. Deployment testing conducted using the CrazyFlyt simulation platform demonstrated the system’s robustness in maintaining user-intended formations with low positional error and stable convergence times, even in the presence of sensor noise and faulty robots. Statistical analysis revealed highly significant main and interaction effects ($p\lt 0.05$) for swarm scale and scenario on performance metrics, indicating that the impact of swarm size is dynamically contingent upon environmental conditions. Post hoc evaluations predominantly highlighted significant performance degradation in faulty-robot scenarios compared to normal or noisy conditions, with swarm scale critically modulating these effects.

Collisional merging experiments on field-reversed configurations (FRCs) in the FRC amplification via translation–collisional merging (FAT-CM) device have suggested that the mirror magnetic field strength influences the final merged plasma state. Analytical models do not account for mirror magnetic fields at the ends of the confinement section. To explore their effect, experiments were conducted at FAT-CM, where the strength of mirror magnetic fields were varied. Increasing the mirror field strength was found to promote relaxation to an FRC with larger radius and shorter axial length. Based on these observations, the dependence of equilibrium states on the mirror field strength and the resulting plasma parameters were investigated using a model that reconstructs fully two-dimensional equilibria primarily constrained by wall-mounted magnetic probe measurements. Consistent with the experimental results, computed equilibria with stronger mirror fields converged to plasma states with a larger radius and shorter length. Further, these results showed a bifurcation of topologies with a closed FRC core for higher mirror field and an open-field high-$\beta$ mirror for lower field. This result agreed with internal magnetic probe data which confirm the FRC-to-high-$\beta$ mirror transition. This demonstrates the importance of employing fully two-dimensional modelling of plasma equilibria.

Digital policymaking in the European Union (EU), once seen as an internal market concern, is increasingly shaped by non-economic aims, such as the pursuit of security and the protection of fundamental rights. Recent pieces of legislation, such as the AI Act or the Cyber Resilience Act, have nominally acknowledged the relevance of such factors, but serious concerns have been raised about security considerations de facto trumping all others. In this article, we argue that, despite its predominance, security does not displace fundamental rights or the internal market as the foundations of EU digital law. Instead, we propose a framework to explain how the interaction among rationales for security promotion, rights protection, and market-making goes beyond mere opposition. Applying this framework to three case studies of post-GDPR regulation, we show that the deepening of fundamental rights safeguards in digital regulatory instruments offers, at most, a limited check to creeping securitisation – and sometimes even allows the EU legislator to extend the reach of security measures in the name of protecting certain rights. Understanding the logics and actors that shape the triple helix of markets, rights, and security is therefore crucial for properly understanding – and responding to – security overreach in cyberspace.

This article examines the recent dissolution of H-Coop, South Korea’s first feminist-oriented consumer cooperative, founded in 1989 by a women’s organization. Initially established to promote gender equality and civic participation through daily practices such as consumption, H-Coop played a symbolic and pioneering role in the Korean cooperative movement. However, despite its ideological significance, the cooperative experienced long-standing business stagnation, mounting financial deficits, and management challenges, ultimately leading to its closure in 2025. Drawing on qualitative research methods, this study explores H-Coop’s collapse within the broader discourse on cooperative failure. This article critically engages with existing theoretical frameworks, mainly developed in the Western European context, while also considering the unique historical and socio-cultural context of the cooperative movement in South Korea. This study has two implications. First, through the case of H-Coop, the study assesses the applicability of existing theoretical explanations and considers new insights into the failure of cooperatives in the contemporary Korean context. Second, analyzing the challenges and eventual failure that H-Coop has experienced over the years offers valuable and meaningful insights not only for practitioners within Korea’s cooperative sector but also for cooperative stakeholders globally.

The aim of this study was to evaluate fetal survival and neonatal outcomes following fetoscopic laser ablation (FLA) for twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS). This retrospective study included 106 TTTS pregnancies treated with FLA at Harapan Kita Women and Children Hospital, from January 2016 to January 2025. Maternal and neonatal data were collected from medical records. Fetal survival, gestational age, and neurodevelopmental outcomes were assessed. Quintero staging was used to classify TTTS severity. Statistical analysis used the Mann‒Whitney-U test for continuous variables and the chi square test for categorical variables. Among the 106 pregnancies, 93 (87.73%) had at least one surviving fetus, and 82 (77.35%) had both fetuses that survived the procedure. The highest proportion of double fetal survival was observed in Quintero stage 2 (35/82, 42.68%), whereas double fetal death was most frequently observed in stage 3 (7/13, 53.84%) and stage 4 (4/13, 30.76%) (p = .003). Neonates surviving to 28 days were born at a significantly higher gestational age than nonsurvivors (32.25 ± 2.95 vs. 27.62 ± 2.68 weeks, p < .001; OR 1.70, 95% CI [1.40, 2.10]). The neonatal survival rate at 28 days was 44.87%. Brain injury was observed in 52.17% of the screened infants and long-term neurodevelopmental follow-up was documented in 8 infants, with 2 showing delayed milestones. Quintero stage at the time of the procedure, prematurity, and growth restriction were significantly associated with neonatal survival outcomes. Early detection, timely intervention, and long-term follow-up are essential to optimize outcomes and address potential developmental delays.

In Burundi, weekly services are the primary point of contact between churches and their followers, with most of the population attending. These gatherings provide churches with a strategic platform to attract and retain members. Over six months, we collected data from five churches in the rural town of Muramvya—Catholic, Anglican, Pentecostal, FECABU (Evangelical), and Adventist—analyzing 125 transcripts for structure, themes, scope, tone, and key words. We find that emerging denominations—Pentecostal, FECABU, and Adventist—pursue different strategies than traditional ones. Pentecostal and FECABU churches place greater emphasis on rituals than on scripture readings, adopt a more positive tone, and focus on the immediate concerns of their congregants rather than abstract topics. The Adventist Church, while also emphasizing rituals and using a positive tone, distinguishes itself with a stronger commitment to scripture. The Pentecostal church uniquely combines a focus on morality with references to supernatural punishment. We argue that this blend of approaches among emerging denominations strengthens group cohesion and enriches individual faith experiences, helping them attract followers. Our findings shed light on the growth of these denominations in Burundi and may help explain broader religious trends across Sub-Saharan Africa.

The present article articulates and defends a version of constitutionalism that is only present in a few jurisdictions around the world: unwritten constitutionalism. Far from being irrelevant or unconnected, however, the operation of constitutionalism within unwritten constitutional settings has a great deal to offer to the theory and practice of constitutional studies. In doing so, we uphold the use of ‘written’ and ‘unwritten’ terminology, differentiate unwritten constitutionalism from other types of constitutionalism and argue that the insights of unwritten constitutionalism are crucial given the global turn to more authoritarian types of government. Examining some of the indicative features of unwritten constitutionalism, the article goes on to explore what lessons unwritten constitutionalism may be able to bring to written settings. By further unpacking the mystery of the unwritten constitution, we hope to make this unique form of constitutionalism more accessible and relevant to those that acknowledge constitutional text is not the end of the story.

This article examines the transformation of the Ottoman empire’s maritime boundary policies in the Red Sea during the early modern period. It focuses on the dual character of the Red Sea, as both a religious frontier safeguarding the Holy Cities and a strategic maritime corridor within global trade networks. Drawing on Ottoman and British archival sources, the study analyses the period from 1517 to 1798 in three distinct phases: a closed sea era shaped by the Portuguese threat (1517–1608); a phase of negotiation with friendly European actors (1608–36); and a period of controlled openness (1636–1798), in which limited access was granted to merchants recognised as müsteʾmin (protected foreigners). The article argues that Ottoman maritime sovereignty in the region was not exercised through absolute control, but through a flexible and negotiable mode of boundary management. This perspective offers a contribution to early modern debates on imperial border-making and sovereignty by revealing how empires balanced ideological commitments with economic pragmatism.

Past research relates design creativity to “divergent thinking,” i.e., how well the concept space is explored during the early phase of design. Researchers have argued that generating several concepts would increase the chances of producing better design solutions. “Variety” is one of the parameters by which one can quantify the breadth of a concept space explored by the designers. It is useful to assess variety at the conceptual design stage because, at this stage, designers have the freedom to explore different solution principles so as to satisfy a design problem with substantially novel concepts. This article elaborates on and critically examines the existing variety metrics from the engineering design literature, discussing their limitations. A new distance-based variety metric is proposed, along with a prescriptive framework to support the assessment process. The framework measures the real-valued distance between two design concepts using any chosen representation of their underlying abstraction levels. The proposed framework is implemented in a software tool called “VariAnT.” Furthermore, the tool’s application is demonstrated through an illustrative example.