We present analyses of linguistic features undergoing change in South Eastern Ontario, Canada: stative possession, deontic modality, intensifiers, and quotatives. The largest urban center of the country (Toronto) and three towns outside the city are analyzed from the comparative sociolinguistic perspective. Parallel frequency and constraints are found in changes with a time depth of 200 years or more, corroborating the parallel transmission of complex systems over time and space. However, changes that began more recently show marked differences across communities. While the youngest generations in the small towns have appropriated the incoming forms, the accompanying suite of functional constraints found in the urban center is absent. This confirms that diffusing changes do not perfectly replicate the model system. There is, however, notable divergence within patterns of diffusion. The expanding changes exhibit varying configurations, depending on the community, its founders, and the stage of development of the change. The results suggest that increasingly complex contact situations will continue to expand the possible outcomes of diffusion.

The European Union (EU) is considered to be a unique economic and political union that integrates most European countries. This article focuses on the cultural aspect of European integration, which has been increasingly debated over the course of deepening and widening integration and in the context of the legitimation crisis of the EU. Among the main goals of the EU is to promote certain values, which raises the question of whether it has been efficient in (or enabled) reducing cultural value gaps among the participating countries. World polity and institutional isomorphism theories suggest that cultural values may trickle down in a vertical manner from the institutions of the EU to its member states and candidates. Furthermore, hybridisation theory postulates that values diffuse horizontally through intensified interactions enabled by the EU. These two perspectives imply the possibility of cultural convergence among countries associated with the EU. By contrast, the culture clash thesis assumes that differences in cultural identity prevent value convergence across countries; growing awareness of such differences may even increase the pre‐existing cultural value distances. To test these different scenarios, distances in emancipative and secular values are compared across pairs of countries using combined repeated cross‐sectional data from the European Values Study and the World Values Survey gathered between 1992 and 2011. This study finds that the longer a country has been part of the EU, the more closely its values approximate those of the EU founding countries, which in turn are the most homogenous. Initial cultural distance to the founders’ average values appears irrelevant to acquiring membership or candidacy status. However, new member states experienced substantial cultural convergence with old member states after 1992, as did current candidates between 2001 and 2008. Since 1992, nations not participating in the integration process have diverged substantially from EU members, essentially leading to cultural polarisation in Europe. The findings are independent of (changes in) economic disparities and suggest the importance of cultural diffusion as one of the fundamental mechanisms of cultural change. This empirical study contributes to the literature on European integration, political and sociological theories of globalisation, and cross‐cultural theories of societal value change.

There is an assumption in much of the electoral engineering literature that domestic episodes of electoral system choice occur in a vacuum, isolated from international influences. Yet this assumption remains largely untested, despite the comparative focus of much of that literature. This article focuses on part of this gap by considering two electoral mechanisms that seek to limit party system fragmentation under proportional representation – low district magnitudes and high electoral thresholds – and shows that the mechanisms have spread across many European countries during the post‐1945 period. Analyses reveal that national legislators are more likely to adopt one of these electoral mechanisms when a large number of peer countries have made similar choices within the last two or three years. This effect is robust to various model specifications and to the inclusion of multiple controls. The article also offers some qualitative evidence from case studies and parliamentary debates.

There is an ongoing debate among practitioners and scholars about the security consequences of transnational migration. Yet, existing work has not, so far, fully taken into account the policy instruments states have at their disposal to mitigate these risks, and reliable evidence is lacking for the effectiveness of such measures. This article addresses both shortcomings as whether and to what extent national migration policies affect the diffusion of terrorism via population movements are analysed. Spatial analyses report robust support for a moderating influence of states’ policies: while terrorism can travel from one country to another via larger migration populations, this only applies to target countries with extremely lax regulations and control mechanisms. This research sheds new light on the security implications of population movements, and it crucially adds to our understanding of governments’ instruments for addressing migration challenges as well as their effectiveness.

The Academic Freedom in Constitutions dataset is a new resource that empirically maps constitutional guarantees of the freedom of science, of academic freedom, and of university autonomy in 203 countries, spanning the period from 1789 to 2022. While the topic of academic freedom has been gaining increasing prominence in political and legal research over the past decade, it is so far largely absent from the comparative constitutional literature. However, its global codification process holds interesting insights for the study of international norm diffusion, both with respect to its functional connection to higher education development and its distinct constitutional genealogies. The paper first introduces the dataset and explains how it is different from previous coding efforts, before discussing its significance and potential contributions to the comparative legal literature, political science, and other research.

The disciplinary focus on explanatory research designs leads researchers to concentrate on differences between political systems to maximise variation in independent and dependent variables. This causes a bias in comparative analysis towards cross-spatial differences and a neglect of similarities and change that occurs in most or all political systems invariably and simultaneously. The article identifies the main reason for this bias is the misled perception that a strong focus on explanation is necessary for a discipline to establish itself as scientific. The article debates the consequences of such a distortion towards differences in a world in which interdependence and diffusion create convergence. It thus proposes a stronger role for (1) descriptive analysis, (2) cross-temporal explanation, and (3) ‘Most Different Systems Designs’ as ways to address parallel change, re-establish the balance of focus between differences and similarities, and control for diffusion effects.

Quotative be like is a rapid global innovation, yet no evidence pinpoints when it arose, under what circumstances, or the consequences of its emergence. Using a data set spanning four cities and two hemispheres, we document systemic regularity across time and space. The results force us to confront three issues: the uniformitarian principle, the criterion of face-to-face contact in the diffusion of language change, and the nature of language as a complex adaptive system. Be like is an outlier, it has had a major impact on the linguistic system, and it can only be rationalized by hindsight, demonstrating the possibility of significant random events outside the predictable structures and processes in language. We conclude by suggesting that be like is a (linguistic) black swan event (Taleb 2010).

This study investigates the linguistic outcome of migration-induced dialect contact in contemporary urban settings by tracking the development of the variable deletion of /w/ in Seoul Korean. The results from apparent-time and real-time analyses reveal that the rate of postconsonantal /w/-deletion, which previously had been rising, has begun to fall. In addition, the strong effect of the preceding consonant on this deletion has weakened significantly. Meanwhile, the rate of non-postconsonantal /w/-deletion has continued to rise, and, for younger speakers, non-postconsonantal /w/-deletion now patterns similarly with postconsonantal /w/-deletion. I argue that the dilution of the original pattern of the deletion rule is the result of the interplay between linguistic diffusion induced by a massive influx of migrants into Seoul and phonological restructuring by subsequent generations.

Scholars have extensively studied the diffusion of criminal laws across the American states, and this paper examines an overlooked story of penal diffusion: the mid-twentieth-century spread of habitual offender laws. These laws, which escalated sentences for repeat offenders, proliferated across the states decades before the enactment of the three-strikes laws to which they bore remarkable resemblance. But whereas prior research has traced the legislative diffusion of habitual offender laws, this article alternatively explores how state courts’ interpretations of habitual offender laws diffused across jurisdictions. Using an innovative theoretical framework blending judicial diffusion research with literatures in neo-institutional theory, this article reveals how state courts borrowed legal decisions from other states to interpret, legitimize, and alter laws within their own jurisdictions. This reveals how state courts can shape the trajectory of legislative diffusion in enduring and profound ways. This study’s unique theoretical framework uses the history of habitual offender laws as a case study to explore underappreciated features and dynamics of the diffusion process that have shaped the development of American criminal law.

Bioreactor scaffolds must be designed to facilitate adequate nutrient delivery to the growing tissue they support. For perfusion bioreactors, the dominant transport process is determined by the scale of fluid velocity relative to diffusion and the geometry of the scaffold. In this paper, models of nutrient transport in a fibrous bioreactor scaffold are developed using homogenisation via multiscale asymptotics. The scaffold is modelled as an ensemble of aligned strings surrounded by viscous, slowly flowing fluid. Multiple scales analysis is carried out for various parameter regimes which give rise to macroscale transport models that incorporate the effects of advection, reaction and diffusion. Multiple scales in both space and time are employed when macroscale advection balances macroscale diffusion. The microscale model is solved to obtain the effective diffusion coefficient and simple solutions to the macroscale problem are presented for each regime.

Existing research shows a significant relationship between state racial minority population, the proportion of racial minority welfare recipients, and state levels of racial resentment with the proposal and adoption of punitive welfare policies. This article contributes to the extant literature by expanding on Ledford’s (2018) 2008–2014 analysis of state drug testing proposals by evaluating state-level racial factors and the diffusion of drug testing proposals from 2009 to 2018. Moreover, the author accounts for the potential influence of drug-related variables on the proposal probability by including variables measuring opioid overdose deaths and illicit drug use estimates. Event history analyses do not find that the size of a state’s Black population or the percentage or proportion of Black welfare recipients significantly affects the proposal rates. However, higher estimates of state-level racial resentment increase the likelihood of proposing drug testing for welfare legislation, supporting Ledford’s conclusion that racial biases matter in the diffusion of these policies. In addition, the author has found evidence that while opioid overdoses are negatively associated with the likelihood of proposal, estimates of illicit drug use have the opposite effect. Finally, analyses suggest that liberalism in state governments actually increases the probability of a proposal.