The Liber Lynne, a fifteenth-century manuscript in the archive of the City of London Corporation, is a puzzle. Catalogued among the City of London’s collections of written custom (formerly Guildhall MS Cust. 15), it is generally defined as a cartulary. In this article, I study the Liber Lynne as a book that was both about family and for family. Its chance survival, a consequence of its acquisition by the Hanseatic Steelyard in London before the end of the fifteenth century, offers an unusual opportunity to explore the concept of family in the medieval English town. I situate the Liber Lynne in a distinct place and time, and argue that the book is a distinctively urban manuscript, the outcome of urban interests, ambitions, and anxieties. It also reveals the persistent and ubiquitous presence of plague, which exposed the fragility and precarity of families, but helped to give them different shapes. These shapes, or structures, were fluid because of the mutable nature of ideas about family and its voluntaristic qualities. Family, the Liber Lynne suggests, was a choice and a practice.

Subjective group relative deprivation (SGRD) is a powerful driver of political protest and support for radical parties. Yet, we lack insights into whether such subjective perceptions of disadvantage attack the very core of democratic legitimacy, that is, citizens’ support for democracy. Against this backdrop, we investigate how SGRD relates to diffuse democratic support. We argue that perceptions of being systematically disadvantaged fuel disaffection with and resentment against the prevailing democratic system, whereas authoritarian systems with their strongmen leadership appear appealing as they promise a stronger in-group protection and pursue more confrontational in-group-out-group relations, which both can be understood as coping strategies to overcome an unfair disadvantage. Employing original – cross-sectional and panel – survey data, we show that SGRD has the potential to undermine citizens’ support for democracy across six European countries in 2020–2022. Our study highlights the negative impact of subjective disadvantage on support for democracy by combining literature from political psychology and political economy.

This paper is about whether we can revise the highest rule in a legal system using legal reasoning. HLA Hart and Alf Ross argued that we can’t: either the highest rule is unchangeable, or it can only be changed in a revolution—a merely causal change, not a legal one. I argue, drawing on an idea from Hartry Field about logic and epistemology, that we can. The emergence of the conclusion, within a legal system, that the highest rule should be replaced by something else can provide a legal reason for the change. In making the change, we act for reasons internal to the legal system. This allows us to make sense of the distinction, recognized by legal subjects, between a revolution and a legal change of sovereignty.

The Flint water crisis was a lead-in-water disaster that occurred in Flint, Michigan. The Center for Children’s Integrated Services Assessment Center (CISAC) was established to provide neuropsychological assessments and recommendations for exposed children. Our objective was to describe the implementation of the CISAC and report the clinical diagnoses of the first cohort of children who received comprehensive assessments. The CISAC’s eligibility criteria were broad and allowed referrals from physicians, schools, community organizations, and parents. A cross-sectional, descriptive analysis was conducted for 376 children who received initial neurodevelopmental assessments. About 60% of assessed children (ages 3-18) were diagnosed with ADHD, and 70% were diagnosed with ≥2 conditions. Most (96.8%) children received recommendations for new or continued educational, medical, and mental health services. Recognizing the implications of lead exposure and community-wide trauma on neuropsychological trajectories, the CISAC provides longitudinal assessments, secondary prevention efforts to mitigate potential sequelae, and trauma-informed treatment.

Créé par l’Institut Fraser et l’Institut économique de Montréal au début du siècle, le palmarès des écoles secondaires du Québec constitue une stratégie d’influence visant à réformer le système scolaire en offrant aux familles de l’information afin d’amplifier les comportements de marché en éducation. Cette étude portant sur 108 écoles de Montréal et de Laval montre que, de 2000 à 2020, les écoles faiblement cotées dans les palmarès et celles ayant décliné d’un écart-type ou plus ont connu une baisse de leur population comme le voulait la théorie économique de l’éducation sur laquelle reposent ces classements. Or, les données recueillies montrent que, sur vingt ans, les scores des écoles sont davantage influencés par des facteurs socio-économiques se traduisant par une amplification de la ségrégation scolaire générée par une concentration accrue des élèves présentant des difficultés ou provenant de milieux défavorisés dans les établissements figurant au bas des classements.

When deciding new issues, judges face uncertainty about how cases map into their existing understanding of the law. This uncertainty can lead to conflicting decisions on the same legal question, generating inconsistent law. I develop a formal theory of judicial decision making, where courts learn about and rule on new legal issues. I find that courts learn most from their ideological allies; however, increasing the ideological distance between courts can either increase or decrease legal uniformity. Using an original dataset of cases of first impression in the U.S. Courts of Appeals, I find that increasing the ideological distance between two courts increases the probability of disagreement if the previous court’s decision is in-line with their relative bias, and decreases disagreement when the decision runs counter to their relative bias. My findings highlight the ways that courts can use decisions from even ideologically distant peers to learn about new legal issues.

Traditional sexualities are in decline. Across the world, individuals in liberal democracies are increasingly identifying with sexual identities that challenge the heteronormative status quo. Today, an average of one in five young people identify with a sexually inclusive identity. How do members of the sexual majority group in liberal democracies respond to this change? Women are far more likely to express public support for sexual minorities, but does this public support translate into private behaviour? Do women accommodate potential partners with gender-inclusive dating preferences more than men? Relying on three novel pre-registered experiments – a double-list experiment, a visual conjoint, and a vignette study – I demonstrate that: i) the sexual majority group penalises sexually inclusive individuals on the dating market, and ii) women in the sexual majority group are far more likely to reject gender-inclusive and sexually inclusive partners compared to men. Empirically, I show that the sizeable difference in the penalty exhibited against sexually inclusive men, an empirical expectation equally anticipated by men and women, can be explained by women perceiving sexually inclusive men as deviating from traditional gender norms. These findings reveal a critical disconnect between public support for LGBTQ+ inclusion and actual behaviour in intimate contexts. They highlight how entrenched expectations of gender-congruent behaviour continue to shape interpersonal dynamics, even in ostensibly liberal societies. As a result, sexually inclusive men face distinct and intensified pressures to conform, which may help explain patterns of identity suppression among young men.

Reliability analysis is one of the most conducted analyses in applied psychometrics. It entails the assessment of reliability of both item scores and scale scores using coefficients that estimate the reliability (e.g., Cronbach’s alpha), measurement precision (e.g., estimated standard error of measurement), or the contribution of individual items to the reliability (e.g., corrected item-total correlations). Most statistical software packages used in social and behavioral sciences offer these reliability coefficients, whereas standard errors are generally unavailable, which is a bit ironic for coefficients about measurement precision. This article provides analytic nonparametric standard errors for coefficients used in reliability analysis. As most scores used in behavioral sciences are discrete, standard errors are derived under the relatively unrestrictive multinomial sampling scheme. Tedious derivations are presented in appendices, and R functions for computing standard errors are available from the Open Science Framework. Bias and variance of standard errors, and coverage of the corresponding Wald-based confidence intervals are studied using simulated item scores. Bias and variance, and coverage are generally satisfactory for larger sample sizes, and parameter values are not close to the boundary of the parameter space.

Public service institutions such as the judiciary, universities, and the police force derive their legitimacy from their impartial functioning. Yet, around the world, such institutions are increasingly accused of holding a left- or right-wing bias. This study examines to what extent citizens perceive ideological bias among the actors working in public service institutions, and what explains these perceptions. We collected original survey data in five European countries (Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, Poland, and the Netherlands), measuring citizen perceptions of left-right bias among the actors working in six public service institutions. We find that bias perceptions are widespread, with some institutional actors (scientists, schoolteachers, and journalists) being associated more to the left, and others (police, judges) more to the right. Bias perceptions are more common among citizens with more political interest, lower levels of education and income, and ideologically extreme positions. Crucially, we find that the (left-right) direction of perceived bias depends on one’s own (left-right) position, such that left- and right-leaning citizens tend to associate institutional actors with the opposite (‘hostile’) ideology. Our analyses reveal cross-national and cross-institutional variation in bias perceptions and suggest that public service institutions can become politicised in the eyes of citizens. This highlights the need for further research into the contextual drivers of bias perceptions and their implications for perceived institutional legitimacy.

The Iranian economy under the Islamic Republic of Iran has experienced 9 exchange rate shocks since the 1979 revolution. In particular, the shocks intensified with the sanctions on Iran in 2011. Many econometric tests have identified the effects of shocks, but the institutional sources of these shocks are underexplored. The contribution of this paper demonstrates that the Iranian macroeconomic dynamics are shaped by institutional factors. Anfal, the exclusive property of res nullius by the supreme jurisconsult, and the Shiite political capitalism deriving from it, foster parallel institutions, specifically parallel public treasuries, and speculative (hoarding) behaviour among agents, which in turn cause recurring exchange rate crises. Different economic policies of fundamentalists and reformists in the Islamic Republic of Iran are critically assessed, and the importance of constitutional elimination of the religious public finance (Anfal) and the creation of a unified secular public finance system is discussed.

High-concentrate diets are commonly used to enhance lamb growth performance; however, their long-term impacts on metabolic health, particularly fat deposition and liver function, remain a challenge. This study utilized an integrative multi-omics approach to explore the role of keystone rumen microbiota in modulating the rumen-liver-tail adipose axis under high-concentrate diets. Keystone rumen bacterial taxa, including Ruminococcus_gauvreauii, Syntrophococcus, Solobacterium, Bifidobacterium, and Ruminococcaceae_UCG-010, were identified as critical mediators linking dietary changes to tail fat deposition. Liver transcriptomic analysis revealed disrupted folate biosynthesis, regulated by key members of the AKR1C3 family (AKR1C23, AKR1C1, and PGFS), which played a pivotal role in glucose and fatty acid metabolism through the action of tetrahydrobiopterin. In tail adipose tissue, pathways associated with vitamin B6 metabolism and fatty acid elongation were significantly enriched, with pyridoxal 5’-phosphate and elongation-related genes (ELOVL3, HSD17B12, and FADS2) contributing to lipid biosynthesis and deposition. These findings establish a mechanistic framework for the rumen-liver-tail adipose axis, highlighting the influence of keystone rumen microbiota on host metabolism. This study offers novel insights into dietary interventions and microbial strategies to improve ruminant healthy production efficiency and meat quality.

Under what conditions citizens accept public institutions as legitimate authorities is a key question in political science. Recent accounts suggest that populist citizens reject international organisations (IOs) as distant, elitist, and undemocratic. Conversely, technocratic citizens should favour IOs as they represent the pinnacle of depoliticised, expertise-driven decision-making. In this article, we provide the first joint analysis of technocratic and populist attitudes as drivers of attitudes towards IOs. We analyse a unique survey conducted in five European countries that covers four IOs and ask how individual populist and technocratic attitudes influence attitudes towards IOs. We find only conditional evidence for a structural association between technocratic and populist and IO attitudes, and credible evidence that country-specific experiences with populism in power moderate these associations. Our contribution has important implications for our understanding of citizen attitudes towards various forms of political representation and the legitimacy of IOs.

Previous research has demonstrated that predictable words that are not presented linger in memory and lead to false recognition in subsequent memory tests. However, little is known about these effects among second language learners, a population that is known for engaging less in prediction. Here, we used a self-paced reading and word recognition memory test to examine encoding differences and subsequent memory effects in groups of L1 and L2 speakers of German. For initial reading, results showed no group differences in the size of the predictability effect, possibly because group differences in attention allocation during reading masked predictability effects. For recognition memory, L2 learners showed reduced rates of false remembering for predictable words (after correcting for response bias), and they were also less likely to false-alarm to predictable words with high subjective memory confidence, similar to L1 speakers. In addition, L2 learners showed reduced recognition memory for previously presented words. Taken together, these results are consistent with models arguing that lexical-semantic entries are less firmly represented in the L2 lexicon, which in turn lowers pre-activation of predictable referents during L2 sentence processing and leads to the formation of less distinct memory representations for previously encoded information.

Two interrelated trends have narrowed the class backgrounds of policymakers over the past decades: a decreasing share of working-class MPs and a parallel rise of highly educated ‘career politicians’ with little occupational experience outside politics. Although these trends risk aggravating representational inequality, we know little about their causes. Focusing on parties as the main gatekeepers to parliament, we analyse how the class background of political candidates influences the chances of being nominated in electorally safer positions. Based on original data on MPs’ backgrounds and the German GLES Candidate Study, we show that candidates with a working-class background have lower chances to be placed in safe positions, especially in center-right parties. Careerists, in contrast, enjoy systematic advantages in the nomination process, at least in left-wing parties. Lacking individual resources is thus not the only obstacle to working-class representation, but political parties are important actors in shaping the class composition of parliaments.

Recent development in the Upper Ordovician conodont biostratigraphy of Baltoscandia highlights the mismatch between the traditionally used conodont zonation and ranges of the eponymous species. Practical application of the zonation is further complicated by the fact that the morphology of the long-ranging species Amorphognathus tvaerensis, the key taxon of the eponymous conodont zone, changes through its distribution interval, and its older and younger representatives are quite different. The latter one was recently described as a new species, A. viirae. Also, it appeared that the specimens assigned earlier to A. ineaqualis in the northern Baltoscandian region are conspecific with A. tvaerensis and A. ineaqualis is missing here. As a result, the A. ineaqualis Conodont Zone has to be abandoned from the regional zonal scheme. Restudy of conodont collections from the Bliudziai-150 (Lithuania) and Kovel-1 (Ukraine) core sections demonstrated the absence of A. ineaqualis and the presence of A. viirae also in the southern Baltoscandian area and Ukraine. This paper contains a formal description of the new, emended conodont zonation for Sandbian and the lowermost Katian of the Baltoscandian Palaeobasin and its correlation to the regional chemostratigraphic standard.

Rigid meromorphic cocycles are defined in the setting of orthogonal groups of arbitrary real signature and constructed in some instances via a p-adic analogue of Borcherds’ singular theta lift. The values of rigid meromorphic cocycles at special points of an associated p-adic symmetric space are then conjectured to belong to class fields of suitable global reflex fields, suggesting an eventual framework for explicit class field theory beyond the setting of CM fields explored in the treatise of Shimura and Taniyama.