Contaminated surfaces in clinics pose a pathogen transmission risk. Far ultraviolet-C light (UVC), with a favorable safety profile for human exposure, has the potential for continuous pathogen inactivation in occupied clinical areas. This study demonstrated real-world bioburden reduction on surfaces, despite frequent contamination from routine use by staff and patients in clinics.

Politicians frequently face toxic behaviors. We argue that these behaviors impose a double burden on women, who may not only face higher exposure to toxicity, but experience attacks that they and others understand to be motivated by prejudice and designed to push them out of office. Using large-scale image-based conjoint experiments in the United States, Denmark, Belgium, and Chile, we demonstrate that both politicians themselves and citizens regard messages targeting women politicians as more toxic than otherwise equivalent messages targeting men. This perception intensifies when messages mention gender or come from perpetrators who are men. A second experiment to investigate the mechanisms shows that hostile behaviors toward women are more frequently understood as driven by prejudice and attempts to remove women from politics. These findings highlight the importance of understanding how perceptions of perpetrators’ motives affect the severity of political toxicity, and provide insights into the gendered effects of political hostility.

While political scientists regularly engage in spirited theoretical debates about elections and voting behavior, few have noticed that elected politicians also have theories of elections and voting. Here, we investigate politicians’ positions on eight central theoretical debates in the area of elections and voting behavior and compare politicians’ theories to those held by ordinary citizens. Using data from face-to-face interviews with nearly one thousand politicians in 11 countries, together with corresponding surveys of more than twelve thousand citizens, we show that politicians overwhelmingly hold thin, minimalist, “democratic realist” theories of voting, while citizens’ theories are more optimistic and policy oriented. Politicians’ theoretical tendencies—along with their theoretical misalignment from citizens—are remarkably consistent across countries. These theories are likely to have important consequences for how politicians campaign, communicate with the public, think about public policy, and represent their constituents.

While interest groups are consulted at different stages of policy making to provide expertise and legitimacy, their influence is often criticized as being undemocratic. Yet, we know little about how their participation in policy making affects citizen perceptions of the legitimacy of governance. Based on survey experiments conducted in the UK, the United States and Germany, our study shows that unequal participation between group types reduces the benefits of interest group consultation for citizens' perceived legitimacy of decision-making processes. Importantly, these legitimacy losses cannot be compensated for by policies that represent the opinion of the under-represented groups and are even greater when policy decisions favour the over-represented groups. Moreover, we show that citizen perceptions of how economically powerful and representative of society different types of interest groups are act as important drivers of legitimacy evaluations. Our results provide important new theoretical and empirical insights into when and why interest groups affect democratic legitimacy.

Does party government moderate the responsiveness of public policy to public opinion? Analysing a new dataset, we examine whether the ability of governments to respond to the public on 306 specific policy issues in Denmark, Germany and the UK is affected by the extent of coalition conflict and by the fit of the considered policy changes with the government preferences. We find a systematic but relatively weak positive impact of public support on the likelihood and speed of policy change. Contrary to expectations, a higher number of coalition partners are not associated with fewer policy changes nor with weaker responsiveness to public opinion. We also find no evidence that responsiveness to public opinion is necessarily weaker for policy changes that go against the preferences of the government. Rather, it appears that public and government support for policy change are substitute resources.

The panel, “Negotiating the Personal and Professional: Ethnomusicologists and Uncomfortable Truths,” presented at the Forty-third ICTM World Conference in Astana, Kazakhstan, grew out of informal conversations common among ethnomusicologists. As practitioners in our discipline, we are involved in complex webs of experience, relationships, and representations focused around music, broadly defined. Our work is inherently social and, when in the field, we develop close relationships with our teachers and consultants as we become comfortable in our sites of research. We are grateful for priceless access to communities and individuals. The intensity and combination of certain relationships and circumstances, however, can lead to conflicting expectations, unanticipated misunderstanding, and situations of personal and professional conflict.