The article examines the 1941 Ventotene Manifesto, one of the most celebrated—yet widely misunderstood—documents in the history of federalist Europeanism. Written by Ernesto Rossi and Altiero Spinelli while confined on the island of Ventotene for antifascist activity, the text diagnosed Europe’s collapse as the consequence of sovereign nation-states operating in an anarchic international order and called for the creation of a supranational government imposed by a revolutionary elite. This article situates the manifesto within interwar and wartime socialist, liberal–socialist, and antifascist debates, showing how Rossi and Spinelli elevated federalism as the primary criterion of political progress, displacing class struggle and national liberation. I argue that the manifesto’s revolutionary aims have been obscured by postwar narratives of European integration, which retrospectively recast it as a program for the gradual development of what became the present-day EU. Rather than being a blueprint for incremental unification, the manifesto advocated for a revolutionary federalism that fused socialism with a Jacobin conception of political power. This study challenges teleological readings of Europeanism, offering a historicist account of wartime federalist ideas as shaped by crisis, exile, and revolutionary expectations.

In established democracies, governing parties are expected to govern effectively. Government terminations that result from breaking the rule of law, policy blunders, or disastrous policy performances have the potential to damage voters’ perceptions of how well democracy functions in their countries. Yet, current research on coalition politics has not examined the specific consequences of scandal-based government terminations on voters’ attitudes toward politics and the quality of democracy. We analyze the attitudinal impacts of scandal-based government terminations and argue that this type of termination reduces citizens’ satisfaction with the way democracy functions in their countries and their propensity to vote for the party responsible for the scandal. We also examine whether scandal-based coalition terminations negatively impact voter perceptions of the government’s performance. We test our arguments by relying on a recent scandal that took place in Austria: the so-called Ibiza scandal, which caused the early termination of the coalition between the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) and the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ). At the time the scandal broke, the Austrian National Election Study was in the field. We utilize an Unexpected Event during Survey Design to test if the scandal had consequences for voters’ perceptions of the parties and their collaboration. The supporting evidence for our argument calls for the need to revive research on government termination and to initiate a new line of research on how government breakdowns affect citizens’ democratic attitudes.

While the legislative text of the Digital Fairness Act (DFA) has not yet been published, it is already clear that its effectiveness will depend as much on its enforcement design as on the content of its substantive provisions. Experience with recent instruments – including the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, the Artificial Intelligence Act and the Data Act – reveals persistent difficulties in ensuring consistent and timely enforcement across Member States. Building on the findings of the Commission’s Fitness Check of EU Consumer Law on Digital Fairness, this article examines how the enforcement design developed in these legal acts can inform the institutional and procedural design of the DFA. It argues that the challenges identified by the Digital Fitness Check reflect deeper patterns of procedural, institutional and epistemic fragmentation in EU enforcement. By analysing how different enforcement designs address these tensions through mechanisms of centralisation, coordination and capacity-building, the article identifies key design choices that may shape the emerging enforcement framework of the DFA.

This paper proposes a Palm-based framework for component importance measures conditioned on system failure events, uniformly applicable to nonrepairable, repairable, and phase-mission systems. The formulation does not require renewal, stationary, or Markovian assumptions. We classify measures into transition- and state-based importance. The former captures component failure transitions, recovering Birnbaum and Barlow–Proschan importance, while the latter provides an event-based interpretation of Fussell–Vesely importance. This framework yields well-defined finite-time and phase-conditioned measures for nonstationary systems, establishing a rigorous probabilistic foundation for failure-event-based analysis.

We have used a modern, medium-sized hovercraft to further explore air cushion transport in Antarctica. Hovercraft travel over hard-blown snow at safe cruising speeds of 40–60 km/h requires about 50% of the fuel consumption for hovercraft travel over a flat ocean surface. The Griffon 2000TD craft used here has an endurance of >1000 km with a 1-tonne payload (personnel and equipment). However, this standard craft, designed for operations at sea level, is limited to altitudes below about 700 m elevation by the decrease in air density. The hovercraft provides accommodation, communication and first aid facilities for its crew in the event of any weather or operational issues. Two safety features of air cushion travel in Antarctica stand out: (1) low ground pressure per unit area (15% of a human), and (2) the ability to freely cross open ice cracks of dimensions of a metre or more. The total considerations of fuel economy, safety and environmental impact suggest the surface of hard-blown snow in Antarctica provides the optimum conditions for air cushion travel on planet Earth.

Robert Colls was Professor of English History at the University of Leicester before moving to the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University, also in Leicester, where he is Professor Emeritus. He is the author of many highly regarded works examining English identity, culture and class. His most recent book is George Orwell: Life and Legacy (Oxford, 2026). Colls’s writing has consistently stood out for being both scholarly and accessible, engaging general audiences as well as professional historians. The Editors of Transactions asked him to reflect on the craft of historical research and – especially – writing, and this piece is the end result. Further reflections on this theme would be very welcome. Colleagues interested in contributing to the Common Room should contact the Editors in advance.

Previous research has shown that US Spanish heritage speakers produce the tap-trill contrast with varying manners of articulation and a non-canonical number of occlusions, while using duration as a more robust cue to the contrast. This contrast is present in Spanish, the heritage language, and absent in English, the majority language. In this paper, we examine the development of duration as an acoustic correlate of the tap-trill contrast by analyzing semi-spontaneous productions from child and adult heritage speakers as well as age-matched Spanish speakers from a monolingual environment. The durations of phonetic taps and trills were fitted to Bayesian hierarchical models to examine how these speaker groups differ with respect to their use of duration as an acoustic correlate. The results of our analysis show that the average child heritage speaker produces a smaller durational contrast with increased variability, and that some child heritage speakers show near-complete overlap in the duration of the two segments. Adult heritage speakers demonstrate a reduced difference in the tap-trill contrast when compared to Spanish speakers raised in a monolingual environment, but maintain a contrast between the two sounds. Developmental analyses within the child groups do not show significant differences in trill duration by age, but child Spanish monolinguals show a non-linear reduction in tap duration by age that does not occur for heritage children. Overall, our results support a scenario of protracted development in heritage children for the tap-trill contrast, as well as a potential sound change in progress for US Spanish.

Dr. Anthony Harris is Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health and Internal Medicine, and Head of the Division Genomic Epidemiology and Clinical Outcomes of Health Care Outcomes Research. He is an infectious disease physician and epidemiologist whose research interests include emerging pathogens, antimicrobial-resistant bacteria, hospital epidemiology/infection control, epidemiologic methods in infectious diseases, and medical informatics. He has published over 360 papers. He has current or has had funding from the NIH, CDC, VA, and AHRQ to study antibiotic resistance and hospital epidemiology. He is extremely proud of his mentoring track record.

We advocate for a change in the way individuals with cognitive impairment are enrolled in minimal risk clinical research. We do so in the hope that such a change will lead to more cognitively impaired individuals being enrolled in research. Our proposal applies only to cases where would-be participants retain some interest in decision-making as well as the ability to express a decision. In these cases, we argue that the common practice whereby researchers either obtain consent from the individual or consent from a surrogate and assent from the individual, is ethically unnecessary. Instead, a process of facilitated decision-making based on SDM (supported decision-making) should be employed. Although it is possible that this process of facilitation will enable some individuals to make a capacitated choice who would not otherwise have done so, this should not be a requirement of getting to choose. In those cases where a would-be participant, despite support, fails to make a capacitated choice, the individual should still have the final say about participation. In this respect, our proposal deviates from standard practice. However, we argue that our proposal offers participants as much ethical protection as the more common procedures involving surrogates.

We assume that some monetary assets are unobserved and that the demand for them affects the demand for observed assets. We develop a model of the demand for both observed and unobserved assets based on the normalized quadratic flexible functional form and augment the Divisia monetary aggregates with unobserved assets. We construct a new set of Divisia aggregates and argue that they are more accurate measures of money in terms of capturing the relationship between velocity and the opportunity cost of holding money, a relationship that has been a major concern in monetary economics for more than half a century.

Analyses of online social interactions on major platforms have become central to evaluating the ideological leanings of users. Social scientists often represent individuals’ policy preferences as ideal points in a low-dimensional space. We first demonstrate that standard ideal-point estimation approaches can be temporally inconsistent by examining the evolution of ideological positions for political elites and non-elite Twitter users from 2017 to 2022. To address this instability and to improve overall measurement quality, we augment the social-network data conventionally used for ideal-point estimation with unstructured text data widely available on social media. Our results indicate that this data-augmented approach improves identification at the extreme ends of the ideological spectrum and yields robust estimates consistent with those from more complex word-embedding techniques, while offering greater computational efficiency and interpretability. This framework can enhance future studies that measure political ideology using behavioral data and inform broader discussions about integrating textual and network information.

Humanitarianism is imagined to be a short-term response to a temporary emergency. However, in reality, both crisis and aid often become protracted. This article examines a glaring consequence of protracted humanitarian presence in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo: the formation of a local humanitarian class, for whom the sector becomes a site of social mobility and identity construction. Incorporation into the humanitarian political economy, however, has been vastly unequal, exacerbating processes of social stratification. There has been a groundswell of public discontent with global humanitarianism. Framing these tensions as a story of local resistance versus international intervenors overlooks the fact that most employees working for global aid agencies in the Global South are locally hired. This article illustrates how protracted humanitarian action also generates localised tensions around access to resources and employment, and questions of material inequality and class stratification produced by humanitarian permanence itself. A focus on local class transformation and stratification challenges neat assumptions about local empowerment in the global politics of humanitarianism. Instead, the humanitarian class is at the centre of contemporary debates about the future of international humanitarianism: a lightning rod for mounting public frustration at the paradoxical consequences of protracted emergency operations.