This article presents an account of Georges Sorel’s socialist theory during the Dreyfus affair. It demonstrates that he developed a theory of the socialist movement in which socialist progress required workers’ dissociation from Parisian crowds. The affair showed Sorel that the leaders of the Parti ouvrier français (POF) were Jacobin demagogues who used militarist political organization and press rhetoric to fashion workers into Caesarist crowds. In these crowds, workers acclaimed their leaders as savior figures and blindly followed their suggestions for violence. For Sorel, POF leaders would likely direct crowds as instruments of terror in coup d’états to establish their dictatorship in the state. I contend that Sorel embraced the bourses du travail in the 1890s because their distinctive media and cultural environment constructed a different kind of proletariat. This proletariat pursued a democratic socialism of economic self-government and communicative, coalition-building street action. These institutions thus dissolved Caesarist crowds in French socialism.

Political misinformation represents a challenge to contemporary democracies. It is widely acknowledged that misinformation is not only spread by individual users on social media, but also by politicians employing both digital and legacy media to disseminate biased or misleading content to advance their political agendas. This study explores the mechanisms through which misinformed statements made by politicians influence public opinion and examines the effectiveness of corrections from academic/official sources or fact-checking websites, also focusing on the role of partisanship. We investigate whether agreement with a misinformed statement on key policy issues – minimum wage, COVID-19 vaccination, and working hours – increases when it is attributed to a politician, and whether corrections by academic/official sources or fact-checkers reduce agreement. Through survey experiments conducted in Italy, we find that while misinformation from politicians does not always affect agreement with false statements, corrections generally decrease agreement. However, partisanship plays a crucial role, with individuals more likely to resist correction when misinformation comes from politicians they have more positive feelings toward. These findings shed light on the complex relationship between misinformation, the effectiveness of corrective messages, and political identity in shaping public opinion.

The classical account of administrative law, which holds that unlawful administrative acts are void ab initio and that judicial review remedies such as quashing orders are merely declaratory of such acts’ legal status, appears to be placed in doubt by a range of recent legislative developments, judicial pronouncements and academic commentary. However, the classical account is not only capable of withstanding those apparent challenges: it is constitutionally imperative if collateral challenge is to be maintained and the rule of law thereby upheld.

Recent scholarship highlights that executive orders issued by the president are not truly ‘unilateral,’ but require cooperation from administrative agencies for implementation. I argue that, because of this role for agencies, congressional committees can use oversight to shape executive order implementation. I demonstrate this dynamic using two datasets: a sample of executive orders that have been coded using measures of executive-branch delegation and discretion, and a collection of congressional hearings focusing on an executive order or its implementation. I find that Congress engages in more oversight activity when an order delegates more authority and a wider discretionary window to agencies. This finding reveals a previously overlooked form of interbranch conflict, and broadens our understanding of the politics of unilateralism.

Trade concerns at World Trade Organization (WTO) Committees and Councils show the WTO’s involvement in addressing digital trade beyond treaty-making and dispute settlement cases. Observations from a database analysing relevant concerns foremost raised at the Committee on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) show an increasingly significant occurrence of trade concerns not corresponding to the idea of them being a vehicle for tension-defusing dialogue. Two relevant observations are the prominence among involved WTO members of China, the European Union, and the United States of America, and the contentiousness of raised issues, such as cybersecurity or artificial intelligence. Those observations highlight that concerns voiced about digital trade in technical WTO bodies, such as the TBT Committee, also are vehicles of members’ political commitment and confrontation. The article concludes by putting these findings in the perspective of the contribution that WTO bodies, like the TBT Committee, can make to address digital trade.

This article examines Taiwan’s approach of using government-issued contractual templates to regulate unfair terms in standard forms for consumer transactions. This article studies user agreements from a sample of two different types of electronic payment service providers (PSPs) in Taiwan, one operating under a more stringent regulatory framework and the other subject to lighter regulation. This article finds that PSPs largely adhere to the templates even when they are not obliged to do so, indicating the effectiveness of the template approach for PSPs. However, PSPs often adopt or adapt template terms in ways that maximise flexibility. This is in line with the behavioural assumption that businesses modify template terms that do not meet their business interests. Moreover, where government-issued templates are widely adopted by firms in an industry, templates begin to function like regulatory rules. In these cases, greater transparency in the creation of contractual templates is required to legitimise their role in regulating unfair terms in consumer contracts.

This article discusses the changing tourist gaze on Amsterdam between the end of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth century. Based on travel guidebooks, the article analyses the increasing appreciation of buildings through time as a result of the growth and spread of architectural knowledge. Two different types of architecture are analysed: historic buildings, such as seventeenth-century canal houses and former harbour districts (in this period framed as ‘heritage’), as well as new architecture: the social housing projects and public buildings that were built between the 1920s and 1940s. By examining how architectural narratives were conveyed by guidebook writers, as well as following the path of knowledge transfer from the architectural profession towards the guidebook industry, this article offers an overview of the mechanisms behind architectural storytelling which enriches the understanding of sightseeing processes.

Let $S_g$ denote the genus g closed orientable surface. A coherent filling pair of simple closed curves, $(\alpha,\beta)$ in $S_g$, is a filling pair that has its geometric intersection number equal to the absolute value of its algebraic intersection number. A minimally intersecting filling pair, $(\alpha,\beta)$ in $S_g$, is one whose intersection number is the minimal among all filling pairs of $S_g$. In this paper, we give a simple geometric procedure for constructing minimally intersecting coherent filling pairs on $S_g, \ g \geq 3,$ from the starting point of a coherent filling pair of curves on a torus. Coherent filling pairs have a natural correspondence to square-tiled surfaces, or origamis, and we discuss the origami obtained from the construction.

In politically divided environments like Thailand, affective polarization (AP) and social distrust threaten democratic stability and hinder consensus-building. Using an original survey (N = 2,016) conducted in 2021 during intense political turmoil, we examine how perceived ideological differences and media consumption shape AP. Our findings show that perceived—rather than actual—ideological differences drive out-group animosity, affecting trust in policymaking, political discourse, and attitudes toward justice. We also highlight the role of echo chambers created by the consumption of one-sided media that exaggerates polarization and amplifies hostility toward the out-group.

We introduce the $\ell ^1$-ideal intersection property for crossed product ${\mathrm {C}}^*$-algebras. It is implied by ${\mathrm {C}}^*$-simplicity as well as ${\mathrm {C}}^*$-uniqueness. We show that topological dynamical systems of arbitrary lattices in connected Lie groups, arbitrary linear groups over the integers in a number field and arbitrary virtually polycyclic groups have the $\ell ^1$-ideal intersection property. On the way, we extend previous results on ${\mathrm {C}}^*$-uniqueness of -groupoid algebras to the general twisted setting.