This paper investigates the contamination effect in Japan’s mixed-member majoritarian (MMM) electoral system by examining whether the presence of a party’s candidate in a single-member district (SMD) increases its vote share in the proportional representation (PR) tier. While mixed systems are designed to combine the benefits of majoritarian and proportional rules, scholars have debated whether these systems operate independently across tiers or whether contamination occurs. Using panel data from Diet elections in Japan between 2013 and 2025, I analyse how the changing candidacy status for Japanese parties impacted their PR vote share. The results from propensity score-weighted two-way fixed effects models indicate a significant contamination effect for some parties: minor parties tend to gain higher PR vote shares in districts where they field SMD candidates, creating incentives to nominate non-viable candidates. Also, candidates with prior political or professional experience were more effective in boosting their party’s PR vote share. This study highlights how the interplay between tiers in MMM systems affects party strategies and disproportionality, and underscores the strategic dilemma faced by parties under Japan’s increasingly fragmented party system.

This paper offers a reassessment of the expansion of Spanish banks in Latin America between 1990 and 2020. We build upon the seminal work of Pablo Martín-Aceña and draw on the intangible assets framework developed by Guillén (2005) and Guillén & García Canal (2010). Incorporating new primary sources, particularly first-hand testimonies from key participants, we argue that it was not financial strength or technological invention that necessitated expansion, but decisive organizational capabilities proved instrumental. This perspective sheds new light on the motivations behind the expansion, the processes of consolidation, and the relative success of Spanish banks in the region. Our analysis reveals how strategic entry methods, innovative managerial practices, and targeted technological developments enabled these institutions to gain a competitive edge over both domestic banks and long-established international competitors. A key theoretical contribution lies in our distinction between technological adoption and transformative deployment.

This article examines the early post–Second World War Polish state’s campaign to ‘repatriate’ German citizens of Polish descent from the Ruhr region and the consequent official and public contestations that erupted between Polish, British and German observers. Alternate interpretations of the Ruhr’s labour regime and its transformative ethno-social impact lay at the heart of these debates. For many Polish commentators, repatriating the Ruhrpolen from Germany’s industrial heartland was inextricably intertwined with Poland’s recent acquisition of the ‘Recovered Territories’ and modernising growth imperatives. By contrast, British and (especially) German observers depicted the Ruhr’s labour regime as a transformative forge of Germanisation, one that had elevated individuals of Polish descent into the region’s native working class and now depended on their presence to drive recovery efforts in Western Europe. Even after the late 1940s, repatriation – and frustrations therewith – continued to serve as a legitimising force for redemptive state-building projects in West Germany and Poland.

Douglas Laycock’s career in Religion Clause scholarship and advocacy spans two periods marked by two distinct concerns at the heart of the debates. This article connects them. In the first period, from the 1980s into the 2000s, the central issue was what general value or principle should drive Religion Clause decision-making. Laycock’s approach, substantive neutrality toward religion, focused on minimizing government effects on religious choices and thus led the way in reconciling two key values: neutrality on the one hand, and religious liberty or voluntarism on the other. In the second period, from the mid-2000s forward, religious liberty became caught up in the United States’ cycle of polarization. Laycock again led the way; his work on Religion Clause neutrality supports the effective defense of religious liberty in a polarized age. In particular, he called for aggregating neutrality: recognizing that any policy can have differing effects on the religious choices of different relevant actors and comparing those effects with the goal of minimizing burdensome effects on religious choices overall. This approach, done with care, can take account of the effect on competing sides and thus productively address polarized conflicts.

The article aims to provide an analytical and empirical reassessment of the transformation of post-socialist political activism, with implications for the general analysis of civil society. Based on a distinction between two types of political activism—transactional and participatory—we seek to illustrate how these help us understand the development of the key aspects of post-socialist civil society. First, we conceptualize a general mode of activism with three dimensions: mobilization, transactional capacity, and strategic capacity. Using a unique protest event dataset (1989–2022), we empirically examine this activist mode in two thematic areas of activism—economic and environmental ones—over the course of three decades. We show, first, how each dimension of the activist model is linked to different contextual or intra-organizational factors, and second, that these two fields of activism, which were considered dramatically different, are slowly converging in all three dimensions.

This article studies latent space models for social network data in which actors are embedded on a hypersphere and link probabilities depend on angular similarity. In contrast to Euclidean embeddings, the spherical formulation provides a compact parameter space, stabilizes the linear predictor through bounded inner products, and offers a natural representation of directional and cyclic structure. For inference, we combine maximum likelihood estimation, used to obtain initial values for latent positions and model parameters, with geometry-aware Bayesian methods based on Metropolis–Hastings and Hamiltonian Monte Carlo algorithms, including a geodesic Hamiltonian scheme for manifold-constrained parameters. We conduct a systematic empirical comparison between Euclidean and spherical latent space models on a benchmark social network dataset, evaluating model fit, predictive performance, and interpretability. The results show that spherical representations provide competitive performance while offering a more constrained and geometrically interpretable structure. Overall, the paper clarifies the role of latent space geometry in network modeling and highlights the importance of geometry-aware inference in statistical analysis of relational data.

Only two cases of migrant trafficking have been successfully prosecuted in Canada (R v. Gonzalez-Valbuena and R v. Domotor). This article considers why by offering a comparison of human trafficking offences defined at section 118 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) and sections 279.01-279.011 of the Criminal Code of Canada (CrC). We also assess the application of these provisions to seven publicly reported cases of migrant trafficking. We demonstrate that the anti-trafficking frameworks fail to capture the offence of migrant trafficking. We also confirm that the prosecution of migrant trafficking is undermined by the promotion of racist and gendered ideas of victimization in judicial decision making. Our analysis offers support for the work of Nandita Sharma (2005) on the existence of “global apartheid” in the Canadian context, which operates to sustain the illegalization, criminalization and removal of specifically racialized female migrants from Canada.

Racial and ethnic disparities in Clostridioides difficile infection outcomes have been reported but are incompletely understood. In a retrospective study at a major academic hospital, we observed that testing rates were lower in racially and ethnically minoritized (REM) patients, but important outcomes did not differ.

Agricultural research in North America has shifted across three paradigms in the last century. Each research paradigm has a different assumption of what the research and innovation process is, the expected outcome of the research, and the focus of change within an agroecosystem. Now research institutions and networks are in the process of shifting from the research paradigm of eco-technology, which prioritizes technology as a means for limiting the negative impacts of agriculture, to a transformative research paradigm. However, there is limited knowledge on how to support an intentional paradigm shift toward transformative research. This case study aims to identify the research capacities and characteristics of transformative research in agriculture using interviews with leaders in the Long-Term Agroecosystem Research (LTAR) network. Semistructured interviews with 18 research leaders across the network reveal characteristics of transformative research and lock-ins that limit their ability to transform the research at their site. Four transformative research characteristics and capacities are identified, and lock-ins at different levels of the scientific system are identified that prevent transformative research from occurring. We propose stakeholder engagement as a tool to facilitate a paradigm shift in agricultural research. Tools for integrating stakeholder engagement within the research process are discussed, including stakeholder typologies and stakeholder engagement typologies. A focus on using stakeholder engagement as a means to create transformation by increasing a research site’s capacity includes facilitating stakeholder engagement that (1) supports systems-level innovation and social outcomes, (2) emphasizes research that fosters learning and adaptation processes, (3) incorporates multiple ways of knowing within research, and (4) increases perceived agency to create systems-level change. This research provides a methodology and tool for understanding how research paradigms shift and evolve.

Recent studies on cognitive diagnostic models (CDMs) have extended the framework to longitudinal data. Various methods combined CDMs and hidden Markov models (HMMs) to assess changes in attributes over time and to evaluate the effects of interventions and covariates. A requirement for model fitting, inference, and interpretation is that models are identifiable. In this article, we derive identifiability conditions for experimental design used in education research. Specifically, we consider three designs: pretest/posttest single-group design, counterbalancing, and multiple-group longitudinal design. Drawing on existing HMM research, we examine the extent to which these designs satisfy common identifiability assumptions and propose new constraints for the counterbalancing and multiple-group longitudinal designs. These two setups are recommended in situations where item parameters differ over time or when there is heterogeneity in transition patterns across groups. We introduce a general HMM model for the multiple-group longitudinal design and a Gibbs sampling algorithm to estimate the parameters. We assess parameter recovery through a Monte Carlo simulation study and apply the model to a dataset from a study which evaluates the effectiveness of two interventions relative to a control condition. The results demonstrate the flexibility of the model and its potential to offer new insights into learning processes.

This study aimed to identify latent profiles of mental health among Chinese senior high school students using latent profile analysis (LPA), and to examine the associations through which problematic smartphone use (PSU) is linked to mental health, focusing on the mediating role of emotional growth mindset (EGM) and the moderating role of left-behind experience (LBE). Using a dual-factor model of mental health as the conceptual basis for identifying mental health profiles, a cross-sectional survey was conducted of 34,831 students in Grades 10–12 in Tianmen, China. Validated scales were used to assess PSU, EGM, subjective well-being and depressive symptoms. LPA identified four distinct mental health profiles: very low depression–high well-being, low depression–moderate well-being, moderate depression–moderate well-being and high depression–low well-being. PSU was directly associated with poorer mental health and showed an indirect association through EGM. LBE moderated the first stage of the mediation pathway, that is, the PSU–EGM association, with a stronger effect observed among students with LBE.

In England, Lyme disease (LD) surveillance is based on laboratory-confirmed cases. However, clinical and epidemiological characteristics of these cases are limited; therefore, we conducted an enhanced surveillance study of acute LD in England. Enhanced data were collected through an online questionnaire sent to all laboratory-confirmed acute cases of LD resident in England, with specimen dates between 1 April 2023 and 31 March 2024. The analysis included data from 511/1086 cases. Respondents were representative of age, sex, and region of national LD trends. A total of 57.3% of the respondents reported that they did not realize that they had been bitten by a tick. Among those who remembered a tick bite, 66.1% reported bites close to their home and only 10.6% happened abroad, and 28.5% reported that the tick bite could have occurred in a garden. Most respondents were residents of areas of higher socioeconomic status. Erythema migrans was noted by 70.5% of the respondents. It is important to raise awareness among both patients and clinicians that ticks can be found in urban and suburban parks and gardens, as well as ensuring that wildlife initiatives to increase biodiversity include information on tick prevention and tick checks.

Word Grammar (WG), a dependency grammar, has historically permitted mutual dependency, a structure where two words depend on each other. This paper re-evaluates mutual dependency within WG, focusing on contradictions arising when dependency relations are inherently tied to word-order via WG’s ‘landmark’ relation. It is argued that mutual dependency which involves conflicting landmark relations is untenable. I examine earlier WG analyses of English dependent interrogatives and free relatives, which were the principal motivators for mutual dependency analyses. It is proposed that dependent interrogatives do not require mutual dependency and are better analysed with the verb as the head, with selection being semantic. Free relatives, however, with their matching effects where the wh-word is head, necessitate a form of mutual constraint. A solution is offered by refining WG’s theory of word-order and its relationship to extraction, by distinguishing between the general relationship of word-order, ‘landmark’ and a distinct relation of word-order that is part of the extraction start-rule. This approach allows for mutually constraining relations in free relatives without contradictory landmark assignments, thereby preserving a coherent theory of word-order while accommodating mutual dependency.

The Haitian Revolution shaped how planters and pro-slavery intellectuals, abolitionists, and colonial bureaucrats thought about the possibilities, promises, and pitfalls of abolishing enslavement in the nineteenth-century Americas and Caribbean. Uncovering a distinct way of thinking about the Haitian Revolution, this article analyzes how Harriet Martineau’s representation of this revolution placed it under the fold of liberal abolitionism by tracing how liberal political economy grounded her abolitionism. For Martineau, the Haitian Revolution under Toussaint Louverture’s leadership illustrated how a state-managed emancipation process would reproduce and strengthen capitalist plantation production by transforming the enslaved into wage laborers. In this account, Martineau disavowed the conflict between Louverture’s use of state coercion to retain cultivateurs in plantations and cultivateurs’ demands to obtain provision grounds. Engaging Martineau’s representation of the Haitian Revolution, this article expands scholarship that has explored how political thinkers in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world developed conflicting visions of revolutionary Saint Domingue.