Educational attainment is a key determinant of diet quality. The overarching pathways (i.e. theories and mechanisms) through which educational attainment shapes diet quality remain largely unexplored in the nutrition literature, and the most salient pathways likely differ across time, populations and socio-economic and political contexts. This commentary proposes a research agenda and outlines methodological considerations that are intended to better illuminate the educational attainment–diet quality relationship. From an extensive review of the literature, which led to two publications pertinent to the topic, we identified three major research gaps that should be addressed to better understand how educational attainment stratifies diet quality to guide interventions and inform equity-enhancing policies: (1) interrogating the construct of educational attainment; (2) comparative population–level and subgroup studies; and (3) root cause analyses and structural reforms. We also discuss methodological considerations needed to inform future studies of associations between educational attainment and diet quality.

Public support is crucial for the success of policy interventions that aim to change behaviour. While communicating evidence of policy effectiveness can increase support, it remains unclear which type of evidence is most effective. Statistical evidence is often seen as objective and persuasive, yet personal anecdotes can strongly influence beliefs. We examined how statistical and anecdotal evidence affect policy perceptions. In three online experiments with representative UK samples (N = 908), we showed participants different types of evidence (statistical, anecdotal, or both) that argued for or against six policies, such as meat taxes (climate change), banning e-cigarettes (public health), and 20 mph speed limits (community safety). We measured policy support and perceived effectiveness before and after exposure and explored participants’ reasoning through open-text responses. Results showed that positive statistical and anecdotal evidence did not significantly increase perceived policy effectiveness or support, even when combined. However, negative anecdotes significantly reduced both, though this effect was sometimes mitigated when paired with statistical evidence. Qualitative results found that participants have broader concerns beyond policy effectiveness, such as fairness. Our findings suggest that communicating evidence on policy effectiveness alone may not increase support, as it does not address broader public concerns.

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Health Technology Assessment (HTA) activities presents an opportunity to enhance the efficiency, accuracy, and speed of HTA processes worldwide. However, the adoption of AI tools in HTA comes with diverse challenges and concerns that must be carefully managed to ensure their responsible, ethical, and effective deployment. The 2025 Health Technology Assessment international Global Policy Forum (GPF) informed GPF members of the integration of AI into HTA activities, with a particular focus on the use of Generative AI (GenAI). With the overarching goal of illuminating and inspiring tangible outputs and actionable recommendations, the event brought together a diverse range of interest holders to explore the opportunities and challenges of AI in HTA. This article summarizes the key discussions and themes that informed the GPF outcomes, including trust, human agency, and risk-based approaches, culminating in a proposed set of priority next steps for the HTA community regarding the integration of GenAI. It also highlights insights into the current state of digital transformation within HTA organizations and the life sciences industry, providing insights into where the field stands and where it is heading.

In 2015, German Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to allow over a million asylum seekers to cross the border into Germany. One key concern was that her decision would signal an open‐door policy to aspiring migrants worldwide – thus further increasing migration to Germany and making the country permanently more attractive to irregular and humanitarian migrants. This ‘pull‐effect’ hypothesis has been a mainstay of policy discussions ever since. With the continued global rise in forced displacement, not appearing welcoming to migrants has become a guiding principle for the asylum policy of many large receiving countries. In this article, we exploit the unique case study that Merkel's 2015 decision provides for answering the fundamental question of whether welcoming migration policies have sustained effects on migration towards destination countries. We analyze an extensive range of data on migration inflows, migration aspirations and online search interest between 2000 and 2020. The results reject the ‘pull effect’ hypothesis while reaffirming states’ capacity to adapt to changing contexts and regulate migration.

This paper presents a logic programming-based framework for policy-aware autonomous agents that can reason about potential penalties for noncompliance and act accordingly. While prior work has primarily focused on ensuring compliance, our approach considers scenarios where deviating from policies may be necessary to achieve high-stakes goals. Additionally, modeling noncompliant behavior can assist policymakers by simulating realistic human decision-making. Our framework extends Gelfond and Lobo’s Authorization and Obligation Policy Language ($\mathscr{AOPL}$) to incorporate penalties and integrates Answer Set Programming (ASP) for reasoning. Compared to previous approaches, our method ensures well-formed policies, accounts for policy priorities, and enhances explainability by explicitly identifying rule violations and their consequences. Building on the work of Harders and Inclezan, we introduce penalty-based reasoning to distinguish between noncompliant plans, prioritizing those with minimal repercussions. To support this, we develop an automated translation from the extended $\mathscr{AOPL}$ into ASP and refine ASP-based planning algorithms to account for incurred penalties. Experiments in two domains demonstrate that our framework generates higher-quality plans that avoid harmful actions while, in some cases, also improving computational efficiency. These findings underscore its potential for enhancing autonomous decision-making and informing policy refinement.

This article introduces the symposium titled “Political science perspectives on the emerging eco-social policies, politics and polity in the European Union” that brings together the eco-social debate with mainstream theories and concepts from the political science discipline with the aim of encouraging a mutually and reinforcing theoretical and empirical exchange between the two fields. Before presenting the other contributions to the symposium, this article unpacks what “eco-social” is by presenting the existing definitions followed by a bottom-up identification of the “eco-social” essence retrieved through a systematic review of this literature. Furthermore, it takes stock and identifies areas of deficiency of the eco-social literature along the three dimensions of policy, politics, and polity while also outlining potential contributions of political science’s approaches to this field.

Electoral politics constitute a formative, agenda-setting phase in the development of mixed-economy approaches to social welfare. This study examines issue-salience and policy framing related to the welfare role of the third sector in party manifestos in UK Westminster and regional elections 1945–2011. The findings reveal a pronounced increase in salience over recent decades. Welfare pluralism, whereby voluntary organisations complement state and market-based services, is shown to be the dominant approach at both state-wide and regional levels. Yet election data also reveal inter-party and inter-polity contrasts in policy framing. This is significant to contemporary understanding of mixed-economy approaches to welfare because it shows electoral discourse to be a driver of policy divergence in multi-level systems. The result is differing policy prescriptions for the third sector that (re-)define governance practices and underpin the rise and territorialisation of welfare pluralism. In turn this poses questions about policy co-ordination and differential welfare rights in the unitary state.

This article explores literatures from various sources to highlight and understand differences among key players surrounding the perceived nature and role of civil society in research from different literature streams. Including Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) in research activities is an integral part of a broad drive towards integration of science and society. Interest in CSO inclusion in research is widespread, but lacks a coherent focus and clarity on what CSOs are. Without this clarity, CSO-inclusive research, or policy, may be ineffective. This article addresses this gap in knowledge by presenting findings from an exploration of academic, policy and research project literature in order to come to a view on CSOs in research. This culminates in a typology of CSOs and provides a means of identifying types of CSOs. The typology shows four main types of CSO (common cause, shared voice, research-oriented, commercially oriented) and provides a definition for each type, along with a basis for the definition; an example of each; some typical terminology; typical area of activity; properties; typical mission; key areas of interest and their ‘action logic’ in research.

This symposium makes a first step in bridging the emerging eco-social debate and the established political science theories and concepts, indicating the mutually beneficial analytical perspectives and common research pathways that may arise. In addition to identifying several aspects in the policy, politics and polity dimensions that appear to be particularly relevant in view of the emerging eco-social policies, this collection of articles points out two cross-cutting themes, namely the transformation of the welfare state set-ups, and new cleavages and power relations, which pose new questions and open a promising research agenda for political scientists.

When it comes to the impact of institutions such as electoral systems, parliamentary or presidential systems and executive–legislature relations, political science has predominately been preoccupied with their political effects, such as whether they lead to two-party or multi-party systems and whether stable governments result. What has been less discussed and researched are the policy implications of different electoral systems. Do they lead to more economic growth? Does Proportional Representation lead to higher budget deficits? Do majoritarian systems lead to more or less political violence? The shortage of research analysing these questions is surprising. This article critically outlines the research to date, summarises the main results and points to methodological problems in the literature before it outlines a framework for future research analysing how the choice of electoral system affects policy output. The main recommendation is that, before trying to connect policy outputs to broad labels such as ‘Proportional Representation’, which can cover significantly different systems, one should investigate the connection of policy outputs to intervening variables such as the effective number of parties and the mean duration of cabinets.

Despite a growing interest in migration questions, it is still not possible to systematically analyse immigration policies across time and a large number of countries. Most studies in this field have heretofore focussed on individual cases. Recently, there have been a series of studies that have proposed policy indices that allow for large-N analyses. It appears, however, that these studies have not always adequately addressed the main challenges of index building, that is, conceptualisation, measurement and aggregation. Moreover, they are for the most part limited to individual policy fields or there is a trade-off between the number of countries and years that are covered. The aim of this article is to present the Immigration Policies in Comparison (IMPIC) project, which proposes a new and comprehensive way to measure immigration regulations. The data set covers all major fields and dimensions of immigration policies for thirty-three OECD countries between 1980 and 2010. This article discusses the way immigration policies have been conceptualised, how policies have been measured and aggregated and demonstrates the potential of such a new data set.

Scholarship has categorized referendums predominantly along their procedural and institutional features. This paper moves beyond these formal dimensions, argues that the policy subjected to a popular vote is the missing link and proposes a complementary typology based on the policy areas. This typology fosters comparisons across countries, political systems and over time within one policy area, thus serving as a powerful analytical tool for further analyses. At the same time, the typology maps out the history of referendum use showing the chronology of salient issues in different societies. The empirical evidence draws on an original dataset of 630 nationwide referendums in Europe between 1793 and 2019.

Efforts to address human trafficking require a multi-faceted approach. The “3-P” index outlined in the U.N. protocol on human trafficking highlights the importance of prosecuting criminals, protecting survivors, and preventing the crime. In addition to states, civil society organizations (CSOs) play a crucial role in fighting this issue. Cooperation between the state and CSOs is increasingly recognized as a vital strategy for combatting human trafficking. Does the consulting of CSOs by policymakers affect outcomes in prosecution, protection, and prevention? Using data from an original data set of 183 countries, my findings suggest that cooperation significantly influences prosecution and prevention efforts, but not protection efforts. I theorize that this is because there are low technical and political costs to implement prosecution and prevention policies, but high technical and political costs to implement protection policies. Furthermore, I argue that CSO consultation is more likely to be associated with shallow, rather than deep, policy changes.

This article argues that existing concepts of the civil society-democracy relationship are misleading guides for analyzing political development because they incorporate limited perspectives on the nature and activities of civil society, particularly the nonprofit sector. First, three contemporary conceptualizations of civil society are critiqued, and a contradiction is noted between the importance assigned to ideational functions and the inadequacy of reliance upon elections and party systems. Particular emphasis is placed on civil society’s involvement in policy formation, for it is there that a weak state—society connection may be discovered, with significant ramifications for democratic development. Second, recent political instability in the Czech Republic is related to negative trends in political attitudes, indicating a weak connection. Third, the general nature of Czech policy-making processes is examined, and then a closer look is taken at the formation of nonprofit legislation and environmental policy. Finally, implications for the future development of Czech democracy are drawn.