Do parties respond to inequality? Despite the relevance of inequality and its consequences, existing studies fail to capture parties’ emphasis on economic equality and redistribution or to differentiate between existing levels of inequality and increases in inequality. Based on 850,000 party statements from 12 (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries (1970–2020), we introduce a crowd-coded dataset that allows us to distinguish positive references to economic equality and redistribution from upward-trending equal-rights/anti-discrimination rhetoric. We show that responses found in previous studies do not capture economic equality and redistribution. In reassessing the impact of inequality, we argue that low visibility, status quo bias, and turnout effects discourage party responses to high inequality levels, while rising inequality poses a visible status quo change and a threat that left parties respond to. We find that left parties respond to inequality increases (except less tangible gains among the most affluent) but not to (high) inequality levels. This helps to understand why inequality is not self-correcting.

Contributing to a growing interest in disability in political science, this article makes the case for the central role of disability in upholding the belief in work as requisite for full citizenship. Turning to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it shows how disability and the figure of the disabled worker were used to fortify emergent understandings of work against the changes wrought by industrial capitalism. Focusing on three sites of disabled labor—the school-based workshop, custodial institution, and industrial factory—it reveals the crucial ideological work performed by disability in sustaining the myth of the independent worker-citizen. Where existing scholarship has focused on disability either as an identity category or as a target of rights and policy, this article models an alternative approach, arguing for the relevance of disability as a concept that is integral to, and productive of, the ways we understand citizenship and political belonging.

Prior to 1953 the University had very little on Africa, but with the establishment of the African Research and Studies Program systematic buying was begun for books and periodicals later for government documents. As of June 1958, there were about 4,187 books (monographs) and 1,803 serial titles. Of these latter, 108 are periodicals; the remainder are society publications and government documents. In addition, there are twenty-seven newspaper subscriptions covering all parts of the continent save for North Africa. We have 142 linear feet of documents.

Malacological surveys were conducted in 2021 in the Kimpese region of Central Kongo Province, west of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Snail specimens were collected following a standardised protocol, identified using morphological and molecular methods, and tested for schistosome infection using a diagnostic PCR assay. Positive snail samples were sequenced to characterise the infecting schistosome species. Partial mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 (COX1) gene sequences were used in phylogenetic analyses to explore the evolutionary position of these snail species within the broader African context. At least four intermediate snail hosts were identified: Bulinus truncatus, Bulinus forskalii, Biomphalaria pfeifferi, and a Biomphalaria species belonging to the Nilotic species complex (tentatively named Biomphalaria cf sudanica), of which the species identity needs to be confirmed. A total of 37 out of 1,196 snails (3.1%) tested positive for schistosome infection, with an infection prevalence of 7.4% for B. truncatus with Schistosoma haematobium and 1.5% for Biomphalaria spp. with Schistosoma mansoni. The S. mansoni sequence retrieved from these samples formed a basal clade relative to Zambian isolates, whereas S. haematobium grouped with the most frequently characterised haplotype cluster previously identified across mainland Africa. It is important to note that no animal schistosome species were identified in this study. Both the sequences from the snail hosts and the parasites represent novel contributions from the DRC. Additionally, the findings update the current knowledge of schistosomiasis transmission in the Kimpese region by providing insight into the phylogenetic placement, species diversity, and infection status of local snail populations.

I had originally planned to focus on some of the more important aspects of race and ethnicity in Africa south of the Sahara, with particular reference to tensions and conflicts operative within the emergent social and political systems. I soon the realized, however, that the subject was far too complex for brief presentation, at least the kind of brevity ritualistically mandatory on this ceremonial occasion. I decided, consequently, to concentrate on one aspect of the complex cited, namely, the problems and prospects of the white man, particularly as settler, in the revolutionary Africa of today. Obviously, this grand theme, given all the imponderables involved, can only be touched upon lightly and is not easily susceptible to “scientific” treatment. I shall do my best, however, in handling this value-laden problem to observe the procedures and the folkways of objective analysis.