This study explored the effects of different human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs), solely and in combination, on gut microbiota composition and metabolic activity (organic acid production), using anaerobic in vitro batch culture fermenters. The aim was to compare prebiotic effects of HMOs (2’FL, 3’FL, 3’SL, 6’SL, LNT, LNnT, and 1:1 ratio mixes of 2’FL/3’SL and 3’SL/LNT) in faecal samples from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) donors and healthy controls, and to determine the best-performing HMO in IBS. Fluorescent in situ hybridisation coupled with flow cytometry was utilised to study microbiota changes in major colonic genera, and organic acid production was assessed by gas chromatography. IBS donors had different starting microbial profiles compared to healthy controls and lower levels of organic acids. In response to HMOs, there were alterations in both the control and IBS faecal microbiomes. In IBS donor fermenters, Bifidobacterium, Faecalibacterium, total bacterial numbers, and organic acid production significantly increased post-HMO intervention. When comparing the effect of HMO interventions on the microbiota and organic acid production, a mix of 3’SL/LNT HMOs may be the most promising intervention for IBS patients.

Numerous benefits materialize when people extend legitimacy to institutions; consequently, many investigations of the legitimacy of the police have been reported. However, several critical issues remain unanswered. My paper’s purpose is to revisit the question of willingness to grant police legitimacy, focusing on a nationally representative sample of African Americans. I test hypotheses connecting police legitimacy with experiences with unfair treatment by legal authorities, ingroup attachments, attitudes toward systemic racism, and engagement with Black Lives Matter. My findings reveal significant connections between experience with discrimination, ingroup attachments, and beliefs about systemic racism but little relationship between BLM attitudes and police legitimacy.

New evidence suggests that the world recently changed for the U.S. Supreme Court owing to its decision to abrogate the abortion rights first announced in Roe v. Wade. In contrast to the conventional wisdom that Court support is little undermined by unpopular rulings, the Dobbs decision generated a substantial knock on the Court’s legitimacy. Two crucial frailties limit these findings, however. First, no one has determined whether the lost legitimacy has persisted, since earlier research relied on a one-shot survey conducted shortly after the decision. Second, no analysis has addressed the “values-based regeneration” hypothesis—that support reemerges not long after a legitimacy hit is inflicted. Based on a nationally representative 2023 survey, my analysis finds that the lost legitimacy has lingered, but institutional support may be being rebuilt owing to its close connection with democratic values. Overall, I conclude that understanding persistence is more complicated than many may have assumed.

Conventional wisdom suggests that judicial legitimacy should be relatively unaffected by satisfaction with the ideological direction of judicial policy making. Recent studies challenge this assertion. The key to resolving this conundrum is estimating individual-level satisfaction with the ideological direction of judicial policy making reliably and validly. We examine the accuracy of several common measures of the concept. We find that 40% of the respondents repudiate their own scores on these measures. With this much systematic measurement error in such an important independent variable, the question of whether the Supreme Court’s institutional legitimacy is conditional on ideological agreement with its decisions must be reexamined.

Understanding place-based contributors to health requires geographically and culturally diverse study populations, but sharing location data is a significant challenge to multisite studies. Here, we describe a standardized and reproducible method to perform geospatial analyses for multisite studies. Using census tract-level information, we created software for geocoding and geospatial data linkage that was distributed to a consortium of birth cohorts located throughout the USA. Individual sites performed geospatial linkages and returned tract-level information for 8810 children to a central site for analyses. Our generalizable approach demonstrates the feasibility of geospatial analyses across study sites to promote collaborative translational research.

California arrowhead is a broadleaf weed widespread in water-seeded rice. Bensulfuron is the only herbicide currently available for use throughout the California rice growing region that provides complete control of California arrowhead; however, resistance to bensulfuron has been detected in California arrowhead and in several other weed species. Growers have herbicide alternatives for weed species other than California arrowhead but continue to use bensulfuron year after year for control because they believe California arrowhead reduces rice yields. However, damage thresholds have not been determined for this weed, and the crop may be able to tolerate relatively high California arrowhead densities. In this work, the damage thresholds for California arrowhead were determined in field and greenhouse experiments. Water-seeded rice was grown in mixture with California arrowhead in a 1992 greenhouse experiment and in field experiments in 1992 and 1998. Rice tiller density and grain yields were not affected by California arrowhead densities up to 200 plants m−2 in any year. Rice was taller than California arrowhead throughout the growing season in all experiments, and the weed senesced well before rice maturity. The ability of the crop to overtop the weed and grow weed-free during the latter part of the season may explain why California arrowhead is such a weak competitor with water-seeded rice. The results suggest that growers may be able to tolerate California arrowhead densities up to 200 plants m−2 without detectable yield losses. Implications for weed management are discussed.

Some who have written about the logic of experimentation argue that random assignment of subjects to treatment conditions is an essential attribute of an experiment. Others disagree. Rather than treating this as a matter of dueling definitions, we consider experiments without randomization from a theoretical perspective. Our central contention here is that, for some research questions, theory dictates systematic (not random) assignment of respondents to experimental conditions. Two such areas of inquiry are research on political tolerance and on institutional legitimacy. This article gives cursory attention to the former body of work and detailed attention to the latter, based on an experiment conducted in a survey in 2001 on the consequences of the American presidential election for institutional legitimacy. Because in both instances theory requires nonrandom assignment, the problem becomes one of identifying the costs of nonrandomization (threats to internal validity) and specifying analytical techniques that might ameliorate those costs. Consequently, we present results from a statistical approach that addresses the problem of nonrandomization. The most important claim of this article is that theory ought to specify research design, including experimental designs, and that dogmatic attachment to one definition of experiment will not serve the discipline of political science.

How is it that the U.S. Supreme Court is capable of getting most citizens to accept rulings with which they disagree? This analysis addresses the role of the symbols of judicial authority and legitimacy—the robe, the gavel, the cathedral-like court building—in contributing to this willingness of ordinary people to acquiesce to disagreeable court decisions. Using an experimental design and a nationally representative sample, we show that exposure to judicial symbols (1) strengthens the link between institutional support and acquiescence among those with relatively low prior awareness of the Supreme Court, (2) has differing effects depending upon levels of preexisting institutional support, and (3) severs the link between disappointment with a disagreeable Court decision and willingness to challenge the ruling. Since symbols influence citizens in ways that reinforce the legitimacy of courts, the connection between institutional attitudes and acquiescence posited by Legitimacy Theory is both supported and explained.

First, I would like to declare how much I appreciate the opportunity to engage in this dialogue with Monika Nalepa. As I have said, her work on lustration constitutes a major contribution to our understanding of transitional justice processes.

Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe. By Monika Nalepa. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 328p. $88.00 cloth, $27.00 paper.

In the not-too-distant past, systematic transitional justice research was a rarity. Normative treatises on various aspects of the justice of transitions have long been a staple of the human rights literature, but empirical and analytical inquiries into the causes and consequences of efforts to deal with the past have not.

This article investigates citizen perceptions of the impartiality and legitimacy of courts, focusing on a state (West Virginia) that has recently been a battleground for conflict over campaign support, perceived conflicts of interest, and loss of impartiality. We employ an experimental vignette embedded within a representative sample to test hypotheses about factors affecting perceived judicial impartiality. Perhaps not surprising is our finding that campaign contributions threaten the legitimacy of courts. More unexpected is evidence that contributions offered but rejected by the candidate have similar effects to contributions offered and accepted. And, although recusal can rehabilitate a court/judge to some degree, the effect of recusal is far from the complete restoration of the institution’s impartiality and legitimacy. The processes by which citizens form and update their opinions of judges and courts seem to involve preexisting attitudes, normative expectations of judges, and perceptions of contextual factors associated with judicial decision making.

Does understanding how U.S. Supreme Court justices actually decide cases undermine the institutional legitimacy of the nation's highest court? To the extent that ordinary people recognize that the justices are deciding legal disputes on the basis of their own ideological biases and preferences (legal realism and the attitudinal model), the belief that the justices merely “apply” the law (mechanical jurisprudence and the myth of legality) is difficult to sustain. Although it is easy to see how the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, the most unaccountable of all American political institutions, is nurtured by the view that judicial decisionmaking is discretionless and mechanical, the sources of institutional legitimacy under legal realism are less obvious. Here, we demonstrate, using a nationally representative sample, that the American people understand judicial decisionmaking in realistic terms, that they extend legitimacy to the Supreme Court, and they do so under the belief that judges exercise their discretion in a principled and sincere fashion. Belief in mechanical jurisprudence is therefore not a necessary underpinning of judicial legitimacy; belief in legal realism is not incompatible with legitimacy.

This article investigates support for redistributive land policy in contemporary South Africa. From a large survey conducted in 2004, the author assesses whether contemporary policy preferences reflected egocentric instrumentalism – direct and immediate profit from redistributive policies – or symbolic justice – non-instrumental concern for contemporary and historical injustices against groups. Analysis of the data decidedly favours the symbolic justice hypothesis. Land redistribution is a symbolic issue for most black South Africans, grounded in values connected to land as a symbol and in concern for the historical injustices of apartheid and colonialism. Because land policy preferences are so strongly associated with concerns for historical injustices against groups, the land issue remains volatile and resistant to ‘simple’ economic solutions. Land is thus an example of historical injustices colliding with demands for contemporary fairness.