This paper examines Funan County’s ‘Three-Fix’ policy as a significant case of China’s agricultural procurement reforms. Utilising extensive archival materials and data, it focuses on the interactions between central and local governments in shaping rural governance and agricultural policy. The study evaluates the policy’s effectiveness in stabilising grain procurement and fostering cooperative relationships between the state and farmers, while also identifying its limitations, such as uneven implementation, local resistance, and inconsistent enforcement. By analysing the policy’s impact on farmers’ production behaviours, social psychology, and local governance, the research uncovers the intricate political economy underlying early reforms in the People’s Republic of China. The findings highlight the necessity of balancing central and local flexibility in policy design and implementation and offer valuable lessons for contemporary rural governance and development.

We inquire how a commodity cartel is created by studying the negotiations between Colombia and Brazil to stabilize the international coffee market in the 1930s. We show how differences among actors involved in the industry within the negotiating countries in terms of land ownership and type of coffee produced, prevented early cartelization agreements. Cartelization was only achieved when four factors converged: financial and infrastructural capability to store excess production, in-depth knowledge of the industry by the negotiating parties, full government support, and presence of a third-party enforcer. We combine an innovative game-theoretic approach with previously unexplored archival sources.

In the early nineteenth century, parliamentarians in Britain debated whether the Crown’s prerogative could be used to exclude and deport aliens. These arguments were later expanded in litigation about the immigration practices of the British colonies. On behalf of the colonies, some lawyers proposed that the executive powers of colonial officials were informed by the writings of Samuel Pufendorf and Emer de Vattel, who had claimed that the state could forbid the entry of foreigners. But across three disputes, from Mauritius (1830s), Australia (1880s), and Canada (1900s), lawyers in the colonies and in London revealed several doubts about this line of thought. In doing so, they expressed a more general skepticism about the relevance of sovereignty to immigration control.

In June 2021, the last of the eighteen tomes of Tocqueville’s Oeuvres complètes was published by Gallimard. This project had been instigated more than seventy years earlier by Jacob Peter Mayer, a German Jewish writer who had fled to England in 1936. Mayer believed that Tocqueville’s insights into democracy, fanaticism, and revolution were more relevant to the nation-states of the postwar era than those of any other writer, and so he embarked upon a mission to publish Tocqueville’s complete works to underscore their contemporary relevance. Utilizing many unpublished documents, this article tells the story of how Mayer came to direct the publishing venture, how he battled with the national commission that was set up by the French government to oversee it, and how he eventually lost control of the project after thirty years as editor in chief. His experience confirmed in his eyes that free states lacked democratic cultures sufficient to sustain them.

The matrixdist R package provides a comprehensive suite of tools for the statistical analysis of matrix distributions, including phase-type, inhomogeneous phase-type, discrete phase-type, and related multivariate distributions. This paper introduces the package and its key features, including the estimation of these distributions and their extensions through expectation-maximization algorithms, as well as the implementation of regression through the proportional intensities and mixture-of-experts models. Additionally, the paper provides an overview of the theoretical background, discusses the algorithms and methods implemented in the package, and offers practical examples to illustrate the application of matrixdist in real-world actuarial problems. The matrixdist R package aims to provide researchers and practitioners a wide set of tools for analyzing and modeling complex data using matrix distributions.

The question to what extent EU law is constitutive of European society as articulated in Article 2 TEU is, at its core, a question about the nature, scope and limits of EU law. This article suggests certain clear limits to EU law’s ability to make the European society visible in law, or legible for law – let alone composable through law. The article is entitled ‘Is this Europe?’ as a direct challenge to the widely held belief that EU law is somehow constitute of European integration; that EU law contains all that European integration is, can and will be. Sure, the Europe that we see when analysing cases, treaties and legislation matters. But the ‘real’ Europe – the one that is felt, experienced, lived – resides in what happens due to, in spite, or irrespective of those cases, treaties and legislation. For EU law to remain sensitive to its society, then, EU law needs to reformulate the expectations it has of itself and create an analytical framework that allows it to transcend its immanent nature. This requires three changes to the way we ‘do’ EU law. First, more sensitivity to the material and relational context in which EU law operates. Second, creating space for forms of lay knowledge that are rooted in social praxis. Third, more ambition and playfulness in the way we – as scholars – ‘speak’ EU law.

We prove that there is an absolute constant $C{\,\gt\,}0$ such that every k-vertex connected rainbow graph R with minimum degree at least $C\log k$ has inducibility $k!/(k^k-k)$. The same result holds if $k\ge 11$, and R is a clique. This answers a question posed by Huang, that is a generalisation of an old problem of Erdös and Sós. It remains open to determine the minimum k for which this is true.

This paper presents the palaeoecological analysis of five latest Pleistocene (17,500–13,500 cal yr BP) Arctic ground squirrel (Urocitellus parryii) middens from three sites in the Klondike goldfields of central Yukon Territory. Plant and invertebrate macrofossil records were represented by 24 and 20 taxa, respectively, providing a record of the local environment and the earliest known occurrences in Yukon Territory for several taxa (e.g., the robber fly [Lasiopogon sp.] and marsh yellowcress [Rorippa cf. palustris]). The plant and invertebrate assemblages indicate the persistence of steppe-tundra to at least 13,680 cal yr BP by the preservation of taxa typically occupying dry sites, many of which remain components of grasslands and south-facing azonal steppe communities in present-day Yukon Territory. In the context of shrub expansion that is documented to have occurred by 14,000 cal yr BP in interior Alaska, we consider the taphonomic biases associated with Arctic ground squirrel middens that may lead to the lack of shrub macrofossils preserved at the sites. Our study provides an ecologically unique and chronologically constrained perspective on the local persistence of steppe-tundra in easternmost Beringia despite the regional expansion of shrubs.

Research indicates a lack of presence of lower socioeconomic status (SES) individuals in parliament, hindering their representation due to a lack of shared experiences between low SES citizens and representatives. Theorists argue that understanding low SES experiences depends not only on representatives’ own SES but also on those closest to them. However, little is known about whether elected representatives count lower SES citizens in their intimate network. Surveying 1,185 representatives across 13 Western countries, we examine the educational attainment and social class of their parents, partner, and two closest friends. In none of these countries do representatives’ ties mirror the share of lower SES citizens in the population. The results are only slightly better when we examine how many representatives have at least a single lower SES tie. We also find evidence for homophily. High SES representatives tend to associate with high SES individuals, and they tend to do that much more than high SES citizens associate with other high SES citizens. This shows that representatives who could benefit most from lower SES perspectives in their personal networks often lack them.