This article examines the Puerto Rican legal mobilisations for the right to access public information through the lenses of activist-scholarship. Based on ethnographic research with Puerto Rican scholars, lawyers and civil society organisations, the article explores how they have used the legal system to demand greater transparency and accountability from the Puerto Rican government and the Federal Oversight and Management Board (FOMB). First, it engages with the efforts of Proyecto de Acceso a la Información, a law clinic and civil society organisation initiative aimed at securing access to public information, transparency and accountability in government. Second, it reflects on Sembrando Sentido’s efforts, an anti-corruption and transparency civil society organisation, to draft and enact a series of anti-corruption laws. These case studies illustrate how activist-scholarship shapes Puerto Rican society by using legal tools to challenge colonial legality and resist the imposition of neoliberal policies that exacerbate inequality and corruption.

Can political activism foster electoral participation? We investigate this question by examining the role of the British suffragists in fostering women’s electoral participation. While scholars have shown that women politicians increase women’s participation in politics, less attention has been paid to the role of activists. We fill this gap by studying the 1913 Pilgrimage, a large-scale nationwide march in support of women’s parliamentary suffrage. Using a novel database of geocoded electoral registers, we employ a differences-in-differences strategy to show that proximity to the Pilgrimage increased women’s registration in local elections. To explain this effect, we show that exposure to women activists spurred other women’s political mobilization, and that our results are not driven by an endogenous selection of the march path and cannot be attributed to mobilization by other movements or politicians. Our findings highlight that women’s activism can drive political participation even in the virtual absence of women politicians.

The rise of the knowledge economy draws workers towards concentrated skill clusters and creates political conflicts between urban high-opportunity areas and rural and suburban areas of lower dynamism. We advance the existing literature with a dynamic perspective by studying the political consequences of a structural pull into destinations that are typically more progressive than the places of origin. We create an innovative, multidimensional ‘opportunity map’ at the NUTS-3 level in Germany and merge this novel index with individual-level panel data to assess the political implications of residential relocation. Our findings consistently show that moving to opportunity results in stronger political integration, more left-leaning self-identification, and lower support for far-right parties. This article therefore underscores the role of structural change and internal migration in shaping political polarization: while economically motivated relocations to opportunity-rich destinations create significant progressive potential in knowledge hubs, the ongoing pull into thriving areas exacerbates resentments in low-opportunity places.

We develop a new scaling theory for the resistive tearing mode instability of a current sheet with a strong shear flow across the layer. The growth rate decreases with increasing flow shear and is completely stabilized as the shear flow becomes Alfvénic: both in the constant-$\varPsi$ regime, as in previous results, but we also show that the growth rate is in fact suppressed more strongly in the nonconstant-$\varPsi$ regime. As a consequence, for sufficiently large flow shear, the maximum of the growth rate is always affected by the shear suppression, and the wavenumber at which this maximum growth rate is attained is an increasing function of the strength of the flow shear. These results may be important for the onset of reconnection in imbalanced MHD turbulence.

How does the form of community dissent shape public support for coercive state policies? This article addresses this question through a vignette experiment on coca forced eradication in Colombia. Participants were randomly assigned to scenarios in which communities either verbally objected to or mobilized against coercive eradication efforts. Exposure to mobilization, compared to verbal objection, reduces support for both unconditional eradication and outright opposition. By contrast, it increases support for eradication conditioned on community consent. These effects are consistent across racial frames, suggesting that the impact of dissent form may transcend ethnic boundaries. We interpret these findings as evidence that visible, organized community dissent can shift public preferences toward more community-centered and conditional approaches. These findings contribute to research on protest, state coercion, and public opinion by showing that the form of dissent shapes support for coercive state interventions.

Suicide and self-harm in people with depression are major public health concerns; electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is a treatment recommended in UK clinical guidelines for severe mood disorders. We aimed to investigate published literature on the effect of ECT on the incidence of suicide, self-harm, and the recorded presence of suicidal thoughts (suicide-related outcomes). We hypothesized that ECT would be associated with a reduced incidence of suicide-related outcomes and all-cause mortality. We reviewed systematically all eligible studies as specified in our protocol (PROSPERO 293393). We included studies that compared ECT against a comparator treatment, and which included suicide-related outcomes or mortality. We searched Medline, EMBASE, and PsycINFO on January 24, 2022, updated to February 12, 2025. We identified 12,313 records and, after deduplication, screened 8,281 records on title and abstract and 212 on full-text, identifying 17 eligible studies. Studies showed significant heterogeneity in methodology, outcomes, time points chosen, and study populations. Three included studies investigated change in the suicidality domain on psychological rating scales: two showed a reduction in the ECT group; the other was underpowered for this outcome. Meta-analysis of suicide outcomes showed significant statistical heterogeneity and did not detect differences in a consistent direction. Meta-analysis of other mortality outcomes showed reductions in the risk of all-cause mortality (log relative risk [logRR]: −0.29; 95% CI: −0.53, −0.05) and non-suicide mortality (logRR: −0.21; 95% CI: −0.35, −0.07). Further high-quality studies are needed, which should seek to minimize biases (particularly confounding by indication) and report a wider range of suicide-related outcomes.