This article investigates how parliamentary debate in the Dutch House of Representatives (“Tweede Kamer”) (1945–1995) narrowed as MPs turned into domain specialists. We call this narrowing epistemic capture: a few experts progressively bound what can be said. To detect epistemic capture, we deploy a three-layer computational pipeline. Latent-Dirichlet topic modeling converts 8.2 million sentences into 250 semantic themes; Pointwise Mutual Information networks connect themes within six-month windows; Louvain clustering traces the birth, drift and endurance of topical communities.

Capture appears on every scale. Macro-level: network modularity almost doubles after 1960 while density falls, marking compartmentalized debate. Meso-level: cabinet turnovers act as “reset switches”: topic-neighborhood similarity drops in the half-year after a new coalition forms, then anneals along partisan lines. Micro-level: enduring communities – foreign policy, agriculture and education – lock topics and MPs together for decades, yet resistance to capture is visible in distinct contentious topics.

These multiscale patterns show how 20th-century Dutch parliamentary debate saw a rise of technical specialism that significantly constrained the breadth of political debate. Methodologically, the study demonstrates the value of structural (network) distant reading over purely lexical counts and offers a transferable workflow for measuring how democratic discourse undergoes structural transformations.

Despite the recent “epistemic turn” in the philosophy of measurement, philosophers have ignored a nearly 80-year controversy about the relationship between statistical inference and measurement theory. Some scholars maintain that measurement theory places no constraints on statistics, whereas others argue that the measurement scale (e.g., ordinal or interval) of one’s data determines which statistical methods are “permissible.” I defend an intermediate position: Even if existing measurement theory were irrelevant to statistical inference, it would be critical for scientific inference, which requires connecting statistical hypotheses to broader research hypotheses.

John Carter’s fervour as a recorder and polemicist for Gothic architecture has been debated since his lifetime, but his classical designs have attracted less interest. However, these give some insight into the influences upon aspiring young Georgian architects, as Carter was in the 1770s. His two sets of designs for Bywell Hall, Northumberland, the first published in the Builder’s Magazine in 1776, and a more detailed portfolio now in a private collection, are presented together for the first time. This is an opportunity to examine Carter’s early ideas and his thoughts on the appropriate styles to be employed for public, domestic and ecclesiastical buildings. Analysis of Carter’s designs demonstrates his desire to create impressive interior spaces, but poor consideration of the practicalities for family and servant life in country houses. Carter’s preference for Gothic over classical architecture, combined with humble origins and personality traits, prevented his aspiration to be an architect, but his drawing skills secured fame as one of the foremost architectural draughtsmen.

Eating disorders (ED) are psychiatric conditions with profound impacts on physical health, emotional well-being and quality of life. They are associated with reduced employment participation and increased healthcare costs, representing a significant public health concern. Major ED, including anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge-eating disorder and other specified feeding and eating disorders, are closely linked to oral health complications, which serve as both diagnostic markers and therapeutic targets in ED management. This narrative review explores twenty-two studies, organised around transdiagnostic behavioural and physiological risk factors, including caloric restriction, purging behaviours, binge episodes and oral hygiene neglect. Evidence indicates that malnutrition, vomiting-induced acid exposure, high intake of cariogenic foods and inconsistent hygiene practices contribute to the deterioration of dental and periodontal health. The review highlights the diagnostic and therapeutic potential of oral assessments in ED management, underscoring the importance of early detection. A dedicated section addresses the role of dental professionals, proposing individualised care pathways and the use of clinical indices such as the Basic Erosive Wear Examination and Schiff air index, alongside emerging tools like tele dentistry. The findings advocate for a multidisciplinary approach, incorporating nutritional support, psychological therapy and targeted dental treatment, which is crucial for developing comprehensive care plans. Such collaboration enhances the effectiveness of interventions, addressing both the physiological and psychological dimensions of ED to improve patient outcomes.

The Shona people of Zimbabwe hold rich social histories that should be approached as public humanities. This article explores the oral traditions, pre-colonial sociopolitical systems, and the profound impacts of colonial and post-colonial developments on cultural identity to understand the cohesion of the Shona people. The Shona people’s rich culture of myths, folktales, and storytelling serves as a repository of collective memory that preserves the values, beliefs, and cosmologies underpinning their society. In examining pre-colonial Shona governance, this article highlights the decentralised political systems rooted in chieftaincy, kinship networks, and communal land tenure still in practice today. Using a hybrid methodological approach that integrates ethnographic insights, historical analysis, and theoretical frameworks, such as Santos’ (2018) epistemologies of the South, this study positions Shona public humanities within broader debates on African Indigenous knowledge systems and post-colonial identity reconstruction. The analysis extends to the economic practices of agrarian subsistence and long-distance trade, underscoring the sophisticated socio-economic frameworks of Shona society. Despite the challenges posed by industrial encroachment and cultural commodification, a resilient Shona heritage upholds adaptive strategies. A Shona situated approach contributes to broader debates on decolonisation for the preservation of Indigenous knowledge in a rapidly globalising world.

Since the 1990s, incumbent-led autocratization in democracies is increasingly common. However, there is surprisingly little systematic and comparative research into the actions would-be autocrats actually take when they undermine democracy. We analyse the wealth of in-depth case studies of all cases of incumbent-led autocratization in democracies from 1990 until 2023 to develop such an overview of autocratic actions inductively. This empirically based would-be autocrats’ toolkit encompasses over 400 unique autocratic actions which we classify into seven overarching modes of autocratization: evasion, manipulation, infiltration, duplication, restriction, prohibition, and delegitimation. Would-be autocrats selectively use these different modes in varying arenas of democracy to gradually erode democracy. The toolkit provides a starting point to more systematically study autocratization within and across different cases, enabling the identification of sequencing and diffusion patterns, and helping generate better understanding of when autocratization is successful.

The Viewpoint Alberta Consolidated Dataset is a novel resource for understanding political attitudes and behaviours in Alberta which includes over 10,000 interviews across nine waves in 5 years. The Viewpoint dataset combines both cross-sectional and longitudinal (panel) data on Albertans’ attitudes towards political parties, federalism, democracy, social movements, energy transitions, media and a range of issue areas. We demonstrate some of these potential applications in this note. To our knowledge, this dataset is the largest and most comprehensive dataset of political attitudes in a single province that has ever been publicly released. This matters because we know much less about provincial politics than national politics in Canada, despite many of the most interesting and important political developments taking place at the provincial level. Furthermore, by following the same respondents over multiple periods of time, we can develop a much greater understanding of individual-level changes across a range of key issue domains

Co-morbid mental health diagnoses present challenges for services structured to provide disorder-specific models of treatment, such as NHS Talking Therapies services. Intolerance of uncertainty (IU) has been identified as both disorder specific and transdiagnostic, although little research explores transdiagnostic approaches to treatment of IU alone. A transdiagnostic cognitive behavioural therapy treatment targeting IU, the ‘Making Friends with Uncertainty’ (MFWU) group, was developed and piloted in a Talking Therapies primary care service in an earlier evaluation (Mofrad et al., 2020). The aim of this study was to replicate and further evaluate the intervention. Twenty people presenting with a range of anxiety disorders started the intervention in two groups. The study used a single group, within-subjects quasi-experimental design, collecting data at eight points for routine outcome measures of anxiety, depression and functioning, and five points for measures of anxiety disorder-specific symptoms and IU. Intention-to-treat analyses showed improvement on a general measure of anxiety as well as improvement on the measure of IU. Significantly there was improvement on the disorder specific measures even though the intervention was aimed at the underlying process of IU, rather than the particular symptoms targeted by these measures. The MFWU group may be an efficient and effective way to deliver a highly specified transdiagnostic intervention for intolerance of uncertainty when people are treated in a mixed group format.

Key learning aims

1. (1) To consider the effectiveness of a transdiagnostic group targeting IU.

2. (2) To develop understanding of a group intervention for building tolerance to uncertainty.

3. (3) To consider the impact of targeting IU on specific anxiety disorders.

4. (4) To offer a methodological framework for effectively evaluating a group intervention in routine practice.

Cold War historiography has long assumed an interruption of most pan-European, West–East economic relations between 1945 and 1989, before the circulation paradigm imposed the idea of a porosity of the ‘iron curtain’. This article offers a double displacement in the analysis of pan-European economic connections during the Cold War. It first highlights the legacy, up to the late 1950s, of pan-European economic debates about socialist economics that have been developed in the interwar period within the communist parties’ network in Europe. Second, it shows how these networks created opportunities in the people’s democracies for challenging the implementation of the Soviet economic model. A clear Cold War divide in the field of economic ideas was delayed, at least until the beginning of the 1960s. A pan-European discussion about the limits of the equation between central planning and socialist economics, developed in capitalist interwar Germany, lived on.