Governance principles reflect procedural values that govern the means of implementing public policies. Using survey data from Italy and the United Kingdom, we explore the public’s orientations towards those principles. We model them as instrumental values in belief systems, and as components of a network of attitudes. We find that governance principles largely occupy their own community; their interdependence with each other is far greater than their dependence on any other values or attitudes. Public employment experience neither alters the internal integration of governance principles nor changes their relationship with the larger belief system. We observe low levels of dynamic constraint among governance value orientations and show evidence that higher-order values account for the greatest influence over them. They remain strikingly invariant to simulated shifts in other attitudes, though modestly more constrained in Italy than in the UK. Our results suggest that orientations towards transparency can be most strongly influenced by other beliefs.

Cet article examine la mise en œuvre de la Politique d’aide internationale féministe (PAIF) du Canada au Mali à partir d’une approche qualitative basée sur des entrevues effectuées auprès de personnes oeuvrant dans le milieu. Il montre que la PAIF ne s’applique pas de façon linéaire : il s’agit plutôt d’un processus narratif impliquant traduction, filtrage et légitimation. Les acteurs intermédiaires locaux, notamment via le Projet de services d’appui sur le terrain (PSAT), jouent un rôle clé en réduisant les frictions normatives et la perception d’ingérence. En mobilisant les notions de narratif, courtiers en développement et résonance locale, l’analyse révèle que ces ajustements favorisent la recevabilité de la PAIF, tout en limitant sa portée transformatrice.

This study uses the learning management system (LMS) to track student engagement with a pedagogical intervention in a research methods course. The data were collected over 10 semesters to gauge whether students accessed the supplemental learning materials and whether those materials impacted their learning. I find that although the level of engagement and its effectiveness were mixed and varied by semester, engaging more with the supplemental materials did improve student performance overall. This research emphasizes the importance of measuring whether our interventions even reach their intended targets (i.e., students) and demonstrates the utility of the LMS as a data-collection tool for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning research.

This study investigates how behavioral interventions affect prosocial decision-making in dictator and trust games, examining immediate and persistent effects. We conducted a two-round experiment with five treatments (defaults, sanctions, social norms, anchoring, moral persuasion) vs control, separated by an unrelated task to measure persistence. We explored how self-efficacy and gender moderate treatment effectiveness. Sanctions were initially most effective for increasing prosocial behavior across both games. When interventions were removed in round two, sanctions continued influencing trust game participants but showed gender-specific patterns in the dictator game, with effects observed only among women. Social norms affected only women across both rounds, significantly in the Trust Game and marginally in the Dictator Game. Additionally, we found self-efficacy and moral persuasion interactions among women only: higher self-efficacy increased giving in the dictator game but decreased giving in the trust game, with effects persisting into round two. No significant relationships emerged for men. Our findings demonstrate important policy implications. While sanctions effectively promote immediate prosocial behavior, interventions affect demographic groups differently. Understanding these differential impacts is crucial for policymakers evaluating behavioral intervention outcomes, suggesting that effective regulatory design must account for individual characteristics rather than assuming universal responses across populations.

Despite its place at the core of EU integration, support for the EU’s single market is under-investigated by European public opinion scholars. This paper uses novel survey data from eight EU member states to compare how utilitarian concerns, postmaterialist values and national identities shape popular views of the EU’s single market. Focusing on the freedom of movement for goods, workers, and services, we find that postmaterialist attitudes more consistently predict attitudes towards the single market than economic positioning. We thus contribute to the literature on attitudes towards European integration by showing that postmaterialist values and national identities matter not only for views of highly politicized issues like migration, but also for “bread-and-butter” policies like single market governance. These results are particularly surprising given that we would expect utilitarian expectations to be particularly prominent for these kinds of economic policies.

The purpose of this article is to give an account of how the values and organizational arrangements sustaining academic freedom and institutional autonomy may be affected by external pressure on academic research. The first part of the article seeks to clarify the concepts of academic freedom and institutional autonomy that guide our argument. The second part deals with external pressures on universities and introduces some distinctions that may help us tell the difference between external pressures that may be beneficial and those that may be harmful to academic research. The third part focuses on how organizational changes in research institutions have affected their ability to handle external pressures. It discusses how changes in leadership and internal decision making have affected the capacity of institutions to resist or deflect harmful effects of pressures. The fourth part analyses the role of public policies and how they may sustain or jeopardize academic freedom, before drawing a prescriptive conclusion about its defence under democratic and authoritarian political conditions.

In his analysis of ‘ignorance culture’ in eating disorder services, Downs describes how repeated alarms raised by patients, carers and clinicians are routinely ignored, deflected or reframed as individual pathology. In this Opinion piece, I reflect on the clinical implications of that analysis, arguing that ignorance culture is enacted through everyday treatment structures that misread multi-layered presentations, invalidate advocacy and displace responsibility. Drawing on dialectical theory and biosocial frameworks, and using multidiagnostic eating disorder–dialectical behaviour therapy as an illustrative example, I suggest that addressing ignorance culture requires treatment models that operationalise responsibility rather than merely espouse it.

Let X be a rationally elliptic space. Utilizing the Gorenstein algebra structure of X, we present three algorithms that together induce a generating class of $\mathrm{Ext}^N_{(\Lambda V,d)}(\mathbb {Q},(\Lambda V,d))$ with N being the formal dimension of X. From these algorithms, we develop an algorithm to compute the rational Lusternik–Schnirelmann category $\mathrm{cat}_0(X)$. Furthermore, by applying a spectral sequence argument based on the Eilenberg–Moore spectral sequence, we compute the rational Ginsburg invariant $l_0(X)$ introduced by M. Ginsburg in (1963, Ann. Math. 77, 89–96).

Neopragmatism is what local expressivism becomes when it is fully generalized and globalized. One of its attractions is its promise to demystify long-standing metaphysical puzzles by shifting the focus from ontology to language. Among current neopragmatists, there is an important divide. Members of one group hold that we cannot explain language without making use of normative notions such as reasons or entitlements. Members of the other group deny this. In this paper, I defend the naturalistic version of neopragmatism from arguments coming from proponents of the normative version.

Iterations in the early stages of design can stagnate, reducing final concept quality; however, it is hard to identify these critical moments. We propose a diagnostic framework that identifies stagnation, defined as the absence of substantive changes in problem framings or solution ideas across consecutive phases, by visualizing their substantive changes/non-change as trajectories. We analyzed data collected across five-month design thinking projects, combining the visualization of 31 teams created using the framework and post-project interviews with 24 participants. Statistical analyses showed that stagnation in the problem framing was closely associated with lower creativity. A lack of change in both problem framing and solution ideas indicated a breakdown in interconnected activities between problem formulation and solution development, whereas changes in solutions alone indicated entrenchment in a single problem framing. Teams that revised both yet produced low-creativity outcomes focused disproportionately on problem-definition activities rather than solution evaluation. Teams with fixed framings but evolving solution ideas recognized the need for change yet were unable to abandon prior commitments. The proposed framework enables early detection of stagnation, allowing instructors and teams to intervene before it undermines design outcomes.

In developing economies, where fiscal space is often constrained, the minimum wage is often seen as a potentially important tool for improving living standards and reducing inequality. Yet, rigorous evidence on its effects at the household level – where well-being is ultimately realised – remains scarce. This article provides the first region-wide analysis of the relationship between minimum wages and household income inequality in Latin America, distinguishing between market (pre-tax and public transfer) and disposable (post-tax and public transfer) income to assess whether the observed pattern is consistent with a predistributive interpretation. Using two-way fixed-effects models on a panel of 15 countries from 2003 to 2020, and triangulating results across SWIID, SEDLAC, and LIS, I find that a higher minimum wage is robustly associated with lower household inequality. The association is strongest when the wage floor is measured relative to average pay, and it appears for both market and disposable income. This parallel compression is consistent with a predistributive interpretation, and the findings are robust to controls for partisanship, alternative specifications, and small-cluster inference. Overall, the results suggest that minimum-wage policy can plausibly form part of a broader inequality-reducing policy mix in contexts of high informality and limited fiscal capacity.

This article reviews Roger Cotterrell’s landmark paper, ‘Trusting in Law: Legal and Moral Concepts of Trust’. That paper identified a shift from a moral conception of trusteeship based on the notion of a settlor reposing personal trust in a trustee, to an amoral systems-based conception of trusteeship, in which personal entrustment is largely absent. This article examines contractualised trusts, containing widely drawn exemption clauses, which commonly underpin commercial arrangements. It identifies two developments which have the potential to limit the amorality of the contractualised trust. The first is a reaffirmation of the existence of a non-excludable core of fiduciary obligations. The other is an enhanced understanding of the trustee’s accountability, owed to the court as well as to the beneficiaries, for the due administration of the trust. The developments demonstrate that equity has the resources to overcome contractual overreach in trusts law.

While the abolition of secondary school fees has expanded educational access across low-income countries, empirical research has focused predominantly on student outcomes and institutional or elite perspectives, overlooking how ordinary citizens perceive such reforms or the factors shaping those perceptions. This gap is especially salient in Ghana, where the Free SHS policy, arguably the most comprehensive in Sub-Saharan Africa, is both nationally lauded and politically contested. Drawing on policy feedback theory and deservingness heuristics, this article explores how Ghanaians interpret the policy’s goals, trade-offs, and implementation using a nationally representative sample of 1915 respondents. Latent Class Analysis reveals five classes, from Universal Access Champions down to Ambivalent Observers. A follow-up multinomial logistic regression shows that partisanship, education, civic engagement, and economic outlook significantly predict class membership. These findings highlight that sustaining support for large-scale reforms requires not just expanded access, but also public trust in their fairness and responsiveness.

Michael Jensen’s late-career work on integrity is often interpreted as a departure from agency theory or as an attempt to introduce ethical considerations into a positive framework. This paper argues instead that integrity can be reconstructed as an extension internal to agency theory itself. Drawing on the Jensen and Meckling decomposition of agency costs, integrity is modelled as a bonding cost; a self-imposed constraint that raises the private cost of opportunistic behaviour and thereby economises on monitoring and reduces residual loss. Incorporating Buchanan’s constitutional-stage logic, the analysis shows that integrity relocates rational optimisation to the choice of rules rather than to particular transactions. Integrity is further classified as an informal institution whose effectiveness depends on decentralised enforcement and institutional context. The paper concludes that integrity is neither an ethical supplement nor a scalable substitute for formal governance, but a bounded informal bonding mechanism whose effectiveness attenuates with organisational scale.