Scholars debate whether the presence of multiple parties in the legislature stabilizes dictatorships or promotes their demise. We show that authoritarian regimes face a dilemma: allowing for multipartism reduces the risk of bottom-up revolt, but facilitates protracted top-down democratization. Concessions to the opposition diminish the long-term benefits of authoritarian rule and empower regime soft-liners. We test our theory in Latin America—a region with a broad range of autocracies —using survival models, instrumental variables, random forests, and two case studies. Our theory explains why rational autocrats accept multipartism, even though this concession may ultimately undermine the regime. It also accounts for democratic transitions that occur when the opposition is fragmented and without a stunning authoritarian defeat.

How do social hierarchies affect patterns of discrimination in democratic contexts? While studies of identity politics in diverse societies often focus on relations between groups formed around parallel identities like ethnicity, these same societies often feature hierarchical identities that rank individuals into stratified groups. This paper examines how culturally embedded caste identities, inherited at birth, continue to shape everyday life. Drawing on an original survey of 2,160 Senegalese citizens, we show that caste remains a salient axis of perceived discrimination despite its formal abolition over a century ago. Individuals from occupational caste and slave-descended backgrounds are significantly more likely to report experiences of exclusion such as the denial of basic services. Most respondents attribute caste-based discrimination to cultural norms rather than economic competition, religious instruction, or biological differences. Moreover, we find that high-status individuals systematically overreport tolerant attitudes in face-to-face interviews with lower-status enumerators, suggesting that social desirability can obscure the extent of status-based attitudes. These findings shed light on the persistence of caste hierarchies and their impact on citizenship in societies otherwise considered tolerant and democratic. These findings contribute to research on identity politics by highlighting the need to distinguish between ranked and unranked forms of social difference.

This study examines how Americans conceptualize democracy and whether their support for democratic principles remains consistent across different trade-offs. Using a conjoint experiment, we test whether citizens act as principle holders—maintaining support for democratic norms regardless of circumstances—or benefit seekers who prioritize material outcomes over liberal democratic norms. Our findings reveal that while respondents generally prefer democratic principles including rule of law, political equality, and freedom of expression, these preferences are moderated by economic well-being. When presented with scenarios featuring economic disadvantage, support for traditional democratic principles declines markedly. This context dependency challenges conventional survey measures of democratic attitudes, as we observe substantial divergence between participants’ self-reported understandings of democracy and their revealed preferences when forced to navigate trade-offs. These results help to explain why campaign appeals framing democracy as “on the ballot” proved ineffective in the 2024 US presidential election, as voters facing economic hardship privileged material concerns over abstract democratic principles. Our findings contribute to debates about democratic backsliding by demonstrating that economic conditions play a crucial role in shaping citizens’ commitment to democratic governance, with implications for understanding populist mobilization and the resilience of democratic norms during periods of economic uncertainty.

One of the most significant engineering accomplishments of Maya civilization is Sacbe 1, a raised road connecting the ancient urban centers of Yaxuna and Coba. Using new lidar data in concert with excavation, epigraphic inscriptions, and landscape reconnaissance, we show that settlement and an urban experience emanated westward from Coba along the sacbe. The leaders of Coba—in particular, an ambitious seventh-century queen—used the sacbe to expand the political and cultural influence of their dynasty into the center of the peninsula while securing territory and resources. Gaps in the sacbe, precise delineation of its many curves, and examination of features near these curves call to mind several possible intentions governing its construction and use. Sites located along the causeway did not present significant barriers to the expansion of Coba. Sacbe 1 represents a uniquely urban space that expanded urban social networks into a rural hinterland while advancing state interests for territory and influence.

Judith Shklar’s negative brand of liberalism is sometimes thought to have little to say about the ethical character required of citizens in liberal democracies, beyond the injunction to avoid cruelty. In this article, however, we argue that Shklar’s negative liberalism prescribes four distinctively political virtues—rational empathy, a healthy apprehension of state power, self-restraining tolerance, and being a good loser—that, taken together, constitute an ethos of skeptical vigilance. We survey Shklar’s criticisms of republican and communitarian accounts of civic virtue to clarify her concerns about attempts by the liberal state to cultivate these virtues and analyze the case of passive injustice to highlight tensions between active citizenship and liberal values. We conclude with some reflections on how Shklar’s political theory attempts to persuade her readers of the importance of adopting and practicing an ethos of skeptical vigilance.

This article examines media discourse about commuting travel time in Australia’s two largest metropolitan areas – Sydney and Melbourne – between 1970 and 2000. In major newspapers from each of the cities, reportage and commentary conveyed expanding commuting geographies oriented towards the mass pursuit of home ownership enabled by public policy and reflective of pluralism around households’ time use preferences. In a period when time use was widely understood as increasingly pressured, the choices available to households were frequently portrayed as responding to a wide range of opportunities but co-existed with discourses of market-driven compromise and consequences.

Despite the multiple advantages of 25-hydroxyvitamin D (calcifediol or 25(OH)D) compared to cholecalciferol, it is used sparingly. This study was planned to assess the safety and efficacy of supplementing daily 25 µg of calcifediol capsules vis-a-vis 100 µg (4000 IU) of cholecalciferol sachets in apparently healthy individuals with vitamin D deficiency in Chandigarh, India (latitude 30.7° North, 76.8° East). It was a prospective, interventional study to evaluate the effects of calcifediol vis-a-vis cholecalciferol. Following initial screening of 70 subjects in each group, 62 were included in the calcifediol and 41 in the cholecalciferol group. Forty-six from calcifediol and 37 from cholecalciferol group completed the 6-month follow up. There was a significant increase in serum 25(OH)D (355% in cholecalciferol & 574% in calcifediol groups, respectively, p < 0.001) and 1,25 (OH)2D (p < 0.001) with a marked decrease in iPTH (p < 0.001) and ALP (p = 0.016) in both groups. Though serum ALP decreased significantly more in the calcifediol group than the cholecalciferol group, no appreciable difference in other biochemical parameters was noted between the groups. No episodes of hypercalcaemia or incidence of new renal stone disease were observed during follow-up. However, hypercalciuria (spot urine calcium creatinine > 0.2 mg/mg) was noted in 8/46 individuals in the calcifediol group and 5/37 individuals in the cholecalciferol group at final visit with no significant difference between two groups. This study establishes the efficacy and safety of correcting vitamin D deficiency with daily 25 µg calcifediol capsules as an alternative to 4000 IU (100 µg) cholecalciferol sachets.

Balancing pest control and pollination is a dual challenge for pollinator-dependent crops and the producers that grow them. For organic cucurbit production, organic compliant insecticides underperform at suppressing pests and can have nontarget impacts on pollinators. One promising alternative is pest-protective row covers, which successfully exclude insect pests from damaging cucurbit crops. However, they also exclude pollinators. In this study across two years, four row cover pollination management strategies were compared for their efficacy for acorn squash (Cucurbita pepo L.). Row covers were installed at crop transplant and four treatments were initiated: on–off (row cover removed at flowering), on–off–on (row cover removed at flowering and reinstalled post-flowering), open ends (row cover tunnel ends opened at flowering and reclosed post-flowering), and full season (row cover installed through whole season, commercial bumble bee colonies installed at flowering). During the pre-flowering net stage (when row covers were installed), all treatments had low pest abundance and were not statistically different. In the post-flowering net stage, the full season and open ends treatments had statistically lower cucumber beetle pest abundance relative to the on–off–on treatment. The number of seeds per squash fruit weight, an indicator of pollination success, was statistically lower in the full season treatment relative to the on–off–on treatment in 2021, which may be explained by the statistically lower bee activity in the full season treatment relative to the on–off and on–off–on treatments. Squash seeds were not counted in 2020. The open ends treatment had statistically higher marketable yield than the full season and on–off–on treatments in 2020; in 2021, there was no difference in marketable yield across treatments. For the open ends treatment, increased distance from the opened tunnel ends significantly decreased the pest abundance, while it significantly increased marketable yield. However, there was no relationship between pollinator activity and distance to the tunnel opening. This two-year study suggests the open ends strategy had the most consistently high yields, while it reduced pollination management effort and eliminated the costs of commercial bee colonies compared to other treatments. Only minor pressure from insect-vectored diseases was observed during the study, thus, the advantages of each pollination strategy should be considered in relation to varying pest, pollinator, and disease conditions.

Does group-based tribal thinking against ethnic out-groups condition support for both liberal and illiberal policies? Our thesis is that, irrespective of the direction of the policy (progressive or conservative), nativists express selective support for policies based on different signals of group-identity: descriptive markers, group-based substantive representation, in- and out-group norms, and group-based reasoning. We test this theoretical expectation using a novel AI-powered visual conjoint experiment in the Netherlands and Germany that asked individuals to select between hypothetical educational reform proposals presented by civic actors during a public consultation. Empirically, our results demonstrate that citizens, on average, are indeed selectively (il)liberal and that this instrumental policy support is greater among those with higher levels of underlying nativism. Specifically, we show that—among our multidimensional markers of group-based identities, norms, and reasoning—group-based substantive representation and in-group norms are the strongest determinants of support for diverse reform proposals. These findings have key implications on the malleable nature of citizens’ support for the backsliding of the liberal tenets of democracy as well as the persuasive power of out-group disidentification.

Relationships between characters are not just themes in a story but key elements that shape how plots unfold. This article presents a large-scale study of relational arcs, the trajectories of ties, such as kinship, romance, alliance and enmity as they rise and fall across the course of a novel. We build on the Artificial Relationships in Fiction dataset, which contains over 120,000 automatically annotated relationships from 96 novels published between 1850 and 1950. Our study makes four contributions. First, we show that relationship dynamics can be modeled as arcs that highlight recurring narrative patterns, such as conflicts peaking near the climax or romances resolving toward the end. Second, we use temporal normalization to compare books of very different lengths, allowing us to identify consistent trends across the corpus. Third, we demonstrate that genres and historical periods leave clear relational “fingerprints.” For instance, domestic fiction emphasizes family ties, while adventure stories highlight shifting alliances and adversaries. Finally, we cluster arcs into four common shapes (Rise, U-shape, Decline and Oscillating) that echo well-known narrative prototypes. By bringing narratology together with modern natural language processing, we argue that relationships provide a measurable grammar of plot. This approach offers new resources for literary analysis, new methods for computational modeling of narrative, and fresh evidence about how cultural storytelling patterns change over time.

South Africa’s democracy is 30 years old, and for 30 years the courts have been interpreting the right of access to adequate housing found in section 26 of the Constitution. Many parts of this right have been developed; one such development is that courts have found that the right includes a duty on the state to provide (temporary) emergency alternative accommodation in eviction matters to those facing homelessness. Throughout the years, courts have grappled with the suitability of this alternative accommodation; it finally seems like some clarity has been reached regarding when alternative accommodation would be considered suitable, due to the courts’ recent acceptance of alternative accommodation offered by the state as suitable. This article considers how the courts currently determine the suitability of emergency accommodation and what types of alternative accommodation has been accepted; it further explores the issues arising from these findings.

This article is about how Calcutta’s image as the world’s foremost crisis city was constructed from the mid-1950s, and how it came to be used by a broad political spectrum—from the American left and right to, allegedly, Fidel Castro—for rationalizing a variety of positions on urban development. This hyperreal Calcutta was the product of a global conjuncture which centred on Western, mainly American, anxieties about how large cities of the Global South could destabilize the postwar world order and development paradigms. It influenced global urban development by challenging the anti-urban bias of development institutions of the 1950s and bolstering the case for state-led interventions thereafter. However, from the mid-1970s, Calcutta’s ‘refusal to die’ became an example used by the American right to argue in favour of planned shrinkage and benign neglect of cities. Calcutta’s resonance in global debates on urban issues lay in the city’s confrontation with ‘life’ and ‘death’ which helped mask divisive issues such as race and immigration in discussions about American and Western cities.

Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park, located in Macon, Georgia, is one of the most iconic cultural sites in the Southeast and is a Traditional Cultural Place (TCP) of the Muscogee Nation and other federally recognized Tribal Nations. Early work (1933–1941) revealed a network of earthen monuments and other features. Prior to our work, there were only two radiocarbon dates from the primary Native American occupation of Ocmulgee. Both were run in the 1960s—and only one is from the famous Earthlodge community building. These assays contributed to a general chronological assignment of the site to AD 1015. Our new dating program—including wiggle-matched radiocarbon dates from one of the timbers of this building—indicates a later construction for the Earthlodge and likely continuous occupation for other areas of the site, calling into question beliefs about Ocmulgee and its place in interpretative constructs. This work is a collaborative effort that includes Muscogee Nation, academics, National Park Service archaeologists, and private citizens. The results have implications for understanding not only the Muskogean-speaking people’s histories and their relationship to TCPs but also how we can begin to conduct archaeology in a way that strengthens descendants’ connections to ancestral homelands.