Which social groups do citizens view as deserving of beneficial policy? Research on welfare deservingness has long emphasized relatively homogeneous deservingness perceptions, raising concerns that groups widely seen as undeserving could be systematically disadvantaged in policymaking. More recent findings point to variation in deservingness perceptions across geography, time, and individuals. Building on these insights and on studies that examine specific groups in isolation, we claim that ideology systematically shapes divides in how social groups are perceived. Because left-wing and right-wing individuals prioritize different considerations—groups’ needs on the left, merit, reciprocity, and identity on the right—we expect them to differ in the level of deservingness attributed to most groups. Drawing on survey data collected among 5,541 German and 6,020 French citizens, we provide unique evidence on perceived deservingness for a broad range of politically salient target groups by adopting a cross-group perspective in two different contexts. Crossed random effects models depict the expected ideological divides for most groups. These divides create incentives for political parties to compete over “who gets what” and, thereby, to represent diverse interests including those of groups perceived as less deserving on average.

This study reports on 26 Maya ballcourts in the southeastern Three Rivers adaptive region, many of which are newly identified through a 2022 lidar survey. We analyze the ballcourts in terms of their form, dimensions, orientations, and integration with processional and ceremonial architecture. Statistical analyses and comparisons with ballcourts from neighboring regions, including the Belize River Valley, Holmul, and the western and northeastern Three Rivers region, highlight both shared architectural norms and regional variations, particularly in alley width and the relationship between alley length and width.

The HIV/AIDS epidemic in Britain was an overwhelmingly urban phenomenon. Towns and cities were home to the majority of people living with HIV and boasted most of the hospitals which diagnosed and treated them. The epidemic was not simply understood as urban because of demographic epidemiological factors; it was also seen as antithetical to rural life. This article explores the ways in which HIV/AIDS was positioned as urban through a particular cultural construction of rurality in late twentieth-century England. This cultural imaginary rested on a nostalgic construction of the English countryside in which conventional heteronormativity buttressed social, moral, and sanitary stability. The English countryside was frequently thought to be in need of protection from HIV/AIDS, whether in the form of metropolitan producers shoe-horning the virus into cherished rural soap operas, or more directly from the urban import of HIV and the gay men understood to be its most likely carriers. This article examines the cultural mentality in which rurality was mobilized as distinct from HIV/AIDS, pointing to the wider anxieties about changing rural life for which the epidemic often acted as a proxy.

Indonesia’s Tax Court faces a rapidly growing caseload and limited judicial capacity, leading to prolonged dispute resolution and eroding public trust. Manual review processes create inconsistencies that undermine legal certainty, particularly within Indonesia’s civil law system, where jurisprudence is nonbinding and a judge’s personal knowledge may serve as admissible evidence. To address these challenges, we introduce the AI-driven Decision and Integrity for Tax Court Law (ADIL) pipeline, which automates the analysis of 4377 Indonesian Tax Court decisions from 2008 to 2023. ADIL applies advanced natural language processing and legal informatics to extract structured insights from unstructured judicial texts through a trilayered architecture: (i) rule-based pattern matching for high-precision extraction, (ii) transformer-based named-entity recognition for robust entity detection, and (iii) local large-language-model prompting for semantic summarisation and classification. Using exclusively pre-decision metadata, 49 structured metadata fields, including dispute number, tax year, judge identity, and verdict, were used to train a model that resulted in several machine-learning models to predict case outcomes and resolution duration. ADIL achieved 97.5% precision and strong macro-F1 performance in outcome prediction, and an R2 of 92.9% (RMSE = 63.8%) for duration estimation, equivalent to 7–8 months of predictive accuracy. Notably, incorporating encoded judge identity improved accuracy by 11–16%, revealing systematic variation in judicial behaviour. Feature-importance analysis suggests that ADIL can substantially enhance efficiency, consistency, and transparency in tax adjudication. ADIL offers a data-driven decision support framework towards a more agile and accountable judicial system in Indonesia’s legal and institutional context.

This study examined trends in adolescent self-harm incidence rates and associated contextual factors among 77 low- and lower-middle-income countries. Annual sex-specific self-harm incidence rates for ages 10–19 years were obtained from the Global Burden of Disease 2021 database. Joinpoint regression assessed trends while country and year fixed-effects models examined their association with self-harm incidence rates. Median incidence rates declined from 35.9 to 35.3 per 100,000 among males and from 40.8 to 38.1 among females. Average annual percentage changes (AAPCs) among males were negative in 40 countries and positive in 37 (maximum 2.16%); among females, AAPCs were negative in 47 and positive in 30 (maximum 3.64%). Male self-harm incidence rates were positively associated with drug use exposure, adolescent fertility, new HIV infections, rule of law and unemployment, and negatively with control of corruption, alcohol use and urban population. Female incidence rates were positively associated with adolescent fertility rates, drug use, rule of law, mean years of schooling and labor force participation, and negatively with alcohol and tobacco use exposure, control of corruption, regulatory quality and sociodemographic index. These sex-specific differences in trends and contextual factors emphasize the need for integrated reproductive, mental and substance use targeted country-level prevention strategies.

We develop a health demand model informed by Grossman's theoretical framework, examining how air pollution governance (APG) affects health and income inequality. Analysis of the China Health and Nutrition Survey data reveals that APG has markedly enhanced the health status of local residents, consequently mitigating regional income inequality. For every doubling of air pollution control, the likelihood of residents falling ill diminishes by 40.3 per cent; in contrast to regions with inadequate APG, the income inequality coefficient in regions with robust APG declines by approximately 6.2 per cent. An in-depth examination of the welfare implications of APG, both theoretically and empirically, reveals that such governance enhances the ‘production possibility frontier’ for the population, thereby augmenting individual utility.

How do young people conceive of their ability to meaningfully contribute to climate change action? Adopting a social-ecological perspective, and situated in the understudied context of regional Australia, this Case Study research explores how students at a Catholic high school make sense of climate change and their agency to respond. Thematic analysis of focus group discussions, involving 37 participants, revealed that place-based and relational factors were key influences that strengthened or diminished students’ developing sense of climate agency. Educational and social experiences shaped how they viewed their agentic potential, and the kinds of climate action they perceived as meaningful. Importantly, participants valued opportunities for dialogue, and for socially connected activities pursuing tangible environmental benefits. These insights contribute a contextualised, youth perspective on climate agency, highlighting a need to support young people in developing a repertoire of action that reflects their values and social realities. Implications for climate change education policy and practice are discussed.

Effective coordination between the human neuromuscular system and wearable assistive devices remains a key challenge in enhancing gait performance. We propose a concerted control strategy synchronizing biological and artificial actuators using shared feedback. Positioned between centralized (e.g., CPG) and distributed (e.g., reflex-based) control, this approach avoids a central controller by relying on a coordinating signal. Ground reaction force (GRF) emerged as a strong candidate for this role. To implement this concept, we use Force Modulated Compliance (FMC) – a control mechanism that adjusts joint stiffness based on real-time GRF input. FMC has been validated in simulations and robotic platforms, confirming its ability to synchronize joint actuation. We applied this strategy in an active soft biarticular thigh exosuit (BATEX) and tested it in human walking experiments. The GRF-informed controller increased preferred walking speed, advanced the walk-to-run transition, and reduced metabolic cost. These results highlight the effectiveness of GRF-based control in enhancing human-exosuit coordination and aligning assistance with natural gait dynamics. This bioinspired approach offers a scalable framework for real-world locomotion support by harmonizing human and robotic contributions.

This paper explores the mechanism and metaphysics of aesthetic experience according to the 10th–11th-century Sanskrit nondual Pratyabhijñā Śaiva philosopher Abhinavagupta. It contributes to the global history of aesthetics by showing how the same mechanism, apoha (exclusion), accounts for both art appreciation and artistic creation in Abhinavagupta’s work. Examining the technical elements of this mechanism from Abhinavagupta’s metaphysical works sheds notable light on the nature of commonization (sādhāraṇī+√kṛ/bhū), a key element of Abhinavagupta’s aesthetic theory. This paper also contributes to cross-cultural aesthetic theorizing by drawing on C. Thi Nguyen’s work on agency as an artistic medium to provide a framework for contemporary philosophers of aesthetics to approach Abhinavagupta’s theory.

Assuming the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis, it is known that the least quadratic non-residue modulo a prime p is less than or equal to $(\log p)^2$. In the present article, we establish unconditional results on the distribution of partitions associated with quadratic non-residues in even smaller intervals of size $(\log p)^A$ with $A> 0$, for almost all primes p.

This article presents a new method for analyzing narrative structure using sentence embeddings. We embed chunked text sequences to create narrative plot trajectory curves. This enables us to apply commonly used unsupervised word embedding techniques, such as semantic axes projection, to narrative sequence analysis at the scale of entire books. Our aim is to prototype several simple examples of the kinds of narratology techniques this method might enable. We apply a pretrained sentence transformer model to books, represented as embeddings of chunked sequences, from nearly 5 percent of the Project Gutenberg English Books Corpus filtered to works in the fiction category (totaling 2,965 texts). Texts date from the 1500s through the early 1900s, with the majority of texts concentrated in the nineteenth century. This period and dataset offer an opportunity to investigate the rise and development of the early novel form. Our analysis measures narrative trajectories along seven binary oppositions – class, gender, morality, collectivity/individual, nature/artifice, order/disorder, emotional/rational, and segments texts by decade, genre, and dialogue gender. We find trends broadly relevant to hypotheses from postclassical and feminist narratological theory and also present novel aggregate findings on narrative presentation and story shape.

Local government amalgamations lead to pre-merger overspending. To prevent this, higher levels of government can temporarily restrict local fiscal autonomy. However, scholars have been unable to demonstrate the effect of reform-specific regulations due to the difficulty in comparing regulated and non-regulated scenarios. Reformers consequently cannot assess the costs and benefits of regulations, resulting in cases of unrestricted overspending incentives. The article studies the effect of regulating opportunistic fiscal behavior in the context of mergers of local governments. It compares local government reforms in Norway (non-regulation) and Denmark (multiple regulations), using a Difference-in-Difference-in-Difference design to estimate the cost of non-regulation. The results show that the costs are significant. In the final year before merging, Norwegian municipalities overspent substantially in relation to both current expenditure and capital investment compared to their regulated Danish counterparts. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed, including the case for not implementing regulations of opportunistic fiscal behavior.

In the present paper we present psychometric properties on a Social Dominance scale from items which are embedded in the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales 3.1. In two samples we show that psychometrics of the Social Dominance scale are sufficient and that correlations with scales measuring Panksepp’s primary emotional systems fail to consistently reach statistical significance with the exception of associations with ANGER (moderate effect size), SEEKING and CARE (small effect sizes). No associations with satisfaction with life and only small negative associations with Spirituality could be observed. We concur with Panksepp that Social Dominance is not a primary emotion but is a learned secondary emotion involving several primary emotions. We show evidence that Social Dominance is not the same as ANGER. We also briefly review mammalian (including humans) evidence that supports the view that Social Dominance is learned and also that the ANGER, SEEKING, and CARE primary mammalian emotions contribute to the learning of Social Dominance.