Judicial authority relies heavily on the reader’s perception that judges make fair and legitimate decisions. Do such perceptions rest primarily on the reader’s agreement with the decision? Or does an opinion’s reasoning style, as distinct from outcome, impact a reader’s perceptions of legitimacy? In this study, we test whether incorporating elements of procedural fairness into judicial opinions impacts readers’ perceptions of fairness and legitimacy, distinct from their agreement with the decision. In doing so, we also test whether members of the public are sensitive to elements of procedural fairness in written judicial opinions — a different context from the interpersonal interactions in which procedural fairness has been most often studied. We ran two survey experiments that sort participants into four conditions, varying the outcome of the case and whether the judicial opinion employs elements of procedural fairness. After reading a procedurally fair or one-sided opinion, participants reported on their perceptions of fairness and judicial legitimacy. We found strong support for the hypothesis that agreement with the outcome impacts readers’ perceptions of fairness and legitimacy, and weak support for the hypothesis that procedural fairness impacts these perceptions.

Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) Americans are politically visible yet institutionally invisible, long categorized as “white” by the U.S. government despite neither self-categorizing nor racially assigned as such. Most forms—across public and private sectors—still lack a “MENA” category option. What are the political consequences of institutional invisibility? Across two survey experiments and in-depth interviews, I find that exclusion from official identity categories triggers the experience of categorization threat, a psychological response rarely linked to political behavior. When MENA Americans experience categorization threat, they respond by expressing opinions on politics in ways that attempt to signal and assert their MENA identity and, to a lesser extent, Person of Color (POC) identity. Such identity assertion demonstrates that bureaucratic categorization influences expressions of public opinion on politics, not simply how people self-categorize. Researching the effects of category exclusion on public opinions creates opportunities for more accurate and democratic scholarship.

We investigated the potential yield of conducting active case finding for tuberculosis (TB) within a defined geographic radius (50 or 100 m) around the households of individuals diagnosed with TB at health facilities. In a well-defined geographic area within Kampala, Uganda, residential locations were determined for 85 people diagnosed with TB at local health facilities over an 18-month period and for 60 individuals diagnosed with TB during a subsequent community-wide door-to-door screening campaign. Ten of the individuals diagnosed through community screening lived within 50 m of an individual previously diagnosed with TB in a local health facility (TB prevalence: 0.98%), and 15 lived at a distance of 50–100 m (prevalence: 0.87%). The prevalence ratio was 1.4 (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.7–2.9) for those <50 m and 1.2 (95% CI 0.6–2.2) for those 50–100 m, compared to >100 m. Using TB notifications to identify areas for geographically targeted case finding is at most moderately more efficient than screening the general population in the context of urban Uganda.

Critical-Level Utilitarianism entails one of the Repugnant Conclusion and the Sadistic Conclusion, depending on the critical level. Indeterminate Critical-Level Utilitarianism is a version of Critical-Level Utilitarianism where it is indeterminate which well-being level is the critical level. Undistinguished Critical-Range Utilitarianism is a variant of Critical-Level Utilitarianism where additions of lives in a range of well-being between the good and the bad lives make the resulting outcome incomparable to the original outcome. These views avoid the Repugnant Conclusion, they avoid the Sadistic Conclusion, and they agree on all outcome comparisons not involving indeterminacy or incomparability. So it may seem unclear whether we have any reason to favour one of these theories over the other. But I argue that Indeterminate Critical-Level Utilitarianism still entails the disjunction of the Repugnant Conclusion and the Sadistic Conclusion, which is also repugnant. By contrast, Undistinguished Critical-Range Utilitarianism does not entail this conclusion.

Divorce is increasingly common and can have a significant impact on later-life work and retirement. However, the lived experience of choice and control around divorce and its financial ramifications is not adequately understood. This article demonstrates how women and men differentially experience divorce as a long-run lifecourse factor, which can impact an individual’s scope for choice and control about working in later life, and how and when to retire. From a dataset of 47 in-depth interviews of workers aged over 50 in the United Kingdom from the international Dynamics of Accumulated Inequalities for Seniors in Employment project, findings show that the extent of choice and control at the time of divorce was constrained by individual and gendered lifecourse factors, by gendered, asymmetrical access to salient financial information and by emotional responses to relationship breakdown. Drawing on cumulative (dis)advantage over the lifecourse as a theoretical lens, this article demonstrates the ways in which short-term choices reinforce existing gendered and socio-economic (dis)advantage while instigating new pathways for (dis)advantage that have long-term implications for work and retirement.

This article documents the survival of gender inequalities in UK archaeology. We discover how an early equality and diversity agenda (Morris 1992) was dismantled in the late 1990s and explore the impact this had on women’s careers. Analysis of data from Chartered Institute for Archaeologists1 employment surveys for the period 1999–2008 enables a developed understanding of why many women, often reluctantly, left archaeology in their 30s, in a continual ‘leaky pipeline’, as volunteer group British Women Archaeologists was established. We find core issues linked to this ‘sector exodus’ as a gendering of tasks/under-employment, lack of support around parenting, and gendered promotion, leading to pay disparity. We argue that a refusal in the late 1990s to modernize employment structures around women workers’ needs underpins ongoing economic precarity in the sector.

Taking into consideration the socio-political history and politics of identity in Latin America, Indigenous peoples’ current demands and the contemporary context of pressure on Indigenous territories from powerful groups who deny and challenge Indigenous identities and organisations in their pursuit to appropriate the natural and cultural resources of these territories, this paper argues for the necessity of an engaged, activist Indigenous archaeology in Latin America that is committed to the goals, claims and struggles of native peoples. The argument is that archaeology should move beyond critically reflecting on the discipline’s colonial history to develop a politically oriented and theoretically informed praxis that is in tune with Indigenous peoples’ project of dual decolonisation – the decolonisation of themselves and the decolonisation of the State. This praxis must be based on two principles: respecting Indigenous peoples as subjects of collective rights and political subjects, and embracing interculturality. The paper offers four examples of the challenges faced in making archaeology available to the subaltern.

Older people with long-term care (LTC) needs represent a growing and vulnerable group in European societies. A focus on the interrelation between pension and LTC policies can be useful in determining the extent to which European welfare states address this group’s social risks. This paper asks how European welfare states differ in the extent to which their institutional constellations of pension and LTC policies address older people’s social risks. We systematically measure the generosity of both policy fields at the institutional level to investigate cross-national differences in five European countries representing different welfare regime types. Furthermore, we develop a typology with four types of institutional constellations: residual, pension-oriented supplementary, LTC-oriented supplementary, and complementary. Our empirical results show that the studied welfare states differ in their pension and LTC policy constellations, which has different consequences for the coverage of older people’s social risks.

Recent UK legislative reform has further empowered the UK Executive, degrading horizontal and vertical constraints on powers interfering with human rights, and this has largely taken place via the ‘back door’ through repeated marginalisation of Parliament. Between 2021 and 2023, 11 pieces of primary legislation were given Royal Assent which narrowed Executive accountability mechanisms in relation to coercive and administrative powers identified as weakening human rights protections by the Joint Committee on Human Rights. Echoing both recent and long-standing trends in UK law-making, such reform has been sent through Parliament while employing mechanisms of parliamentary marginalisation, undermining the ability of parliamentarians and broader civil society to scrutinise the changes. The passing of a constitutionally significant group of legislation in this manner created a ‘back door’ through which the UK Executive was able to expand its powers with minimal scrutiny. Such backdoor Executive empowerment supports scholarship highlighting the lack of firm UK constitutional constraints of the Executive. While the paper’s analysis does not make a claim on the overall status of UK democracy, it does argue that the recent legal reform mirrors dynamics identified with respect to democratic erosion, suggesting the need for further assessment of the UK’s democratic health.

This article reconciles conflicting views about the political landscape of corporate America with new data on the revealed political preferences of 97,469 corporate directors and executives at 9,005 different U.S. companies. Driven largely by turnover, I find that average observed ideology for directors and executives has shifted meaningfully to the left over time, changing from modestly conservative in 2001 to roughly centrist by 2022. This finding supports a middle-ground position between conventional wisdom casting “big business” as a conservative stronghold and revisionist views holding the opposite. Counterfactual simulations and a difference-in-differences design suggest multifaceted reasons for these changes, and hand-collected data on corporate stances on LGBTQ-related legislation suggest a strong connection between corporate political activity and individual views. Overall, this transformation has profound implications for American politics, as the individuals comprising one of the most powerful interest groups—corporate elites—appear to be fracturing ideologically and to some degree even switching sides.

Increasing prevalence of diet-related non-communicable diseases in India is attributed to overconsumption of energy-dense, nutrient-poor diets and ultra processed foods (UPF) may potentially contribute to this consumption pattern. Applying standard UPF definition and developing appropriate tools can better capture its consumption among Indians. This cross-sectional study aimed to validate the ‘Nova-UPF Screener (for India)’ and explore its potential to objectively capture UPF consumption among Indian adults. The screener, adapted in prior formative research study from a tool for Brazilian population, was subjected to content, face and concurrent criterion validation. Subject matter experts (n 74) participated in online consultations to determine its content validity. Adults (18–60 years) from different geographical regions of India were included for face (n 70) and concurrent criterion (n 304) validations. The screener comprised twenty-four UPF categories specific to Indian food environment. Critical inputs from experts on screener’s appropriateness were incorporated to enhance its content. For face validation, overall percentage agreement of 99·4 % for all questions indicated a strong agreement for retaining screener attributes in each question. Half the participants (49·4 %) who were administered the finalised screener had Nova-UPF scores between 2 and 4 out of 24. There was almost perfect agreement (Pabak index = 0·85) between distribution of participants based on Nova-UPF scores and fifths of dietary share of UPF (as energy %) assessed by 24-h dietary recall. Nova-UPF Screener (for India) is a valid tool to capture UPF consumption in India that can be used for rapid assessment of UPF consumption and informing policies to improve Indian diets.

Analyzing nominally partisan contests, previous literature has argued that state and local politics have nationalized. Here we use individual ballots from the 2020 general elections covering over 50 million voters to study the relationship between individual national partisanship and voting in over 5,700 contested down-ballot contests, including nonpartisan races and ballot measures. Voting in partisan contests can be explained by voter’s national partisanship, consistent with existing literature. However, we find that voting for local nonpartisan offices and ballot measures is much less partisan. National partisanship explains more than 80% of the within-contest variation in voting for partisan state and local offices but less than 10% for local nonpartisan contests and local ballot measures. The degree of partisanship in local spending measures varies by the type of service—for example, education, roads, public safety, housing. Finally, we find evidence of structure in the pattern of votes on local spending measures.

Evaluation teams have been critical to the success of Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) programs funded by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS). Given the limited resources often available to evaluation teams and the growing emphasis on impact evaluation and continuous quality improvement (CQI), CTSA programs may need to develop innovative strategies to build capacity for effectively implementing CQI and impact evaluation, while still tracking commonly reported metrics. To address this challenge, the Boston University (BU) Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) partnered with the BU Hariri’s Software and Application Innovation Lab (SAIL) to develop a web-based digital tool, known as TrackImpact, that streamlines data collection, saving significant time and resources, and increasing evaluation team capacity for other activities. Time and cost saving analyses are used to demonstrate how we increased evaluation team capacity by using this innovative digital tool.

An integrative approach addressing diet and other lifestyle factors is warranted in studying obesity and its related diseases. The objective of this study is to examine the associations of lifestyle patterns with overweight/obesity among children in the United Arab Emirates. Data were derived from a cross-sectional survey of children aged 4–9 years living in Dubai, Sharjah and Abu Dhabi (n 426). Dietary intake was collected using a 24-h dietary recall and evaluated with the Healthy Eating Index. The Youth Physical Activity Questionnaire assessed physical activity, while other lifestyle factors included the presence of a live-in household helper, number of electronic devices in the child’s bedroom, eating while watching TV, family dinner frequency, fast-food and breakfast consumption and hours of sleep. Factor analysis was used to identify the lifestyle patterns. Two lifestyle patterns emerged: an unhealthy pattern marked by higher fast-food intake, eating while watching TV, having a live-in household helper and lower family dinners and a healthy pattern with higher physical activity, better Healthy Eating Index, more sleep, micronutrient supplements and breakfast consumption. The healthy lifestyle pattern was linked to a 30 % reduction in overweight/obesity odds (OR = 0·7, 95 % CI: 0·53, 0·93). A healthy lifestyle pattern, characterised by higher physical activity, better dietary quality, adequate sleep and breakfast consumption, is associated with lower odds of overweight/obesity among children in the United Arab Emirates. These findings highlight the importance of promoting comprehensive lifestyle interventions to effectively address childhood obesity in this population.

This article reflects on the pitfalls of the combined search for big and better data and argues for more attention to everyday experiences and incidental evidence. It proposes that including spatial aspects, perspectives from cultural, colonial, and women’s history, as well as widening the source base helps to remedy these challenges, and encourages historians to abandon their hesitations and embrace the uncertainties in doing so. It draws on the results of a research project at the University of Amsterdam that utilizes incidental evidence to enhance our understanding of gendered spatial patterns in premodern cities.

In this study, we present a low-numerical-aperture (NA) confined-doped fiber architecture that synergistically mitigates transverse mode instability (TMI) through combined optical waveguide engineering and spatially tailored gain distribution. The individual and combined benefits of low-NA fiber design and the confined-doped fiber design strategy on TMI mitigation are numerically investigated. Building upon these theoretical analyses, a self-developed fiber, featuring a core/cladding diameter of approximately 26/400 μm, a core NA of approximately 0.045 and a core doping ratio of approximately 75%, is fabricated. Further experimental validation in a master oscillator power amplifier demonstrates 6.74 kW output power with near-single-mode (M${}^2\sim$1.49) beam quality, validating the design’s efficacy. This study establishes a novel fiber design paradigm that concurrently addresses TMI mitigation, beam quality maintenance and power scalability, offering a viable pathway toward robust high-power fiber laser sources with near-diffraction-limited beam quality.