Student debt heavily shapes the life decisions and outlook of those living with it. This article examines the relationship between undergraduates’ views of President Joe Biden’s actions on student debt and their support for him in the 2024 election prior to his dropping out of the race. Using a representative survey from a large private university in the Northeast, we assess how student views of Biden’s handling of student loan relief correlated with voting intentions among registered student voters. Our analysis reveals that students who believed the Biden administration adequately addressed student debt were significantly more likely to support him compared to those who believed he had done too little. Additionally, our findings suggest that whereas increased student debt relief could have bolstered Biden’s support among liberal and very liberal students, its impact on moderate and conservative students was more limited. This study highlights the electoral implications of student debt relief policies, particularly in shaping young voters’ preferences, and it underscores the potential for targeted economic benefits to influence voter behavior in a highly polarized political environment.

How do state actors interpret and share information? Theories of the state have long recognized the role of legibility – the modes and practices by which states render society and nature knowable through intervention and information collection – in constructing and maintaining state power. Yet, research has only begun to explore the processes by which information is created and diffused within state administrations. Drawing upon theories of agency relations in states, this article explores how administrators’ communicative practices shape knowledge and legibility. Through examining memos, legislative studies, and draft legislation for decrees recognizing water rights in the French Protectorate in Morocco, I identify a set of common patterns in the construction of bureaucratic information as it moves from street-level administrators to central officials. In analyzing these patterns, I demonstrate how administrators’ obligations and their understandings of the state’s political projects determined not only how French officials collected information, but what they communicated to others. As information moved across administrative levels, officials iteratively changed information. Joining critiques and extensions of legibility theory that emphasize the role of non-state actors in the construction of state knowledge, I argue that we must also attend to intra-state dynamics. In tracing communication and information, I demonstrate that information is iteratively constructed by state agents according to their administrative position and transformed by its particular bureaucratic routes. Modeling legibility and the development of state knowledge requires attending to administrators’ agency, their relationships with each other, and their understanding of the state’s goals.

Although women leaders assume prominent national offices in the United States (and the world), one of the well-established specializations in political science and psychology (i.e., leadership studies) is inundated with male-centric benchmarks. This research often relies on a reference group to develop leaders’ profiles in comparison to other elites. They are predominantly populated, however, with male leaders. This article suggests a remedy and introduces a women leaders reference group for operational code analysis, which is a quantitative approach measuring leaders’ beliefs about politics. We gathered American women leaders’ speeches from the Iowa State University Archives of Women’s Political Communication. Using an automated content analysis, we developed a norming group exclusively for American female politicians in national politics. Whereas our findings indicate noticeable differences and suggest similarities with existing reference groups, we aspire to initiate a conversation and hope that more data will follow and shed more light on women leaders. This reference group can serve as a crucial tool in providing contextualized political-personality profiles of American women leaders and also provide an illustrative example to bridge leadership and gender studies in advancing the study of women leaders in the United States (and beyond).

Fourier analysis is the standard tool of choice for quantifying the distribution of kinetic energy amongst the eddies in a turbulent flow. The resulting spectral energy-density function is the well-known energy spectrum. And yet, because eddies are distinct from waves, alternative approaches to finding energy-density functions have long been sought. Townsend (1976) outlined a promising approach to finding a spatial energy-density function, $V\!(r)$, where $r$ is the eddy size. Notably, this approach led to two distinct and mutually inconsistent formulations of $V\!(r)$ in homogeneous, isotropic turbulence. We revisit Townsend’s proposal and derive the corresponding three-dimensional $V\!(r)$ as well as introduce its one-dimensional variants (which, to our knowledge, have not been explicitly discussed before). By training our focus on the associated dimensionality of the function, we resolve the discrepancies between the previous formulations. Additionally, we generalise our analysis to include anisotropic flows. Finally, by means of concrete examples, we illustrate how one-dimensional spatial energy-density functions are useful for analysing empirical data. Some notable findings include new insights into the $k_1^{-1}$ scaling (where $k_1$ is the streamwise wavenumber) and a possible resolution of the enigmatic sizes of organised motions at large scales.

This article proposes the creation of constituency juries to enhance accountability and check oligarchy in representative governments. Constituency juries would be made up of randomly selected citizens from an electoral constituency who exercise oversight over that constituency’s elected representative. Elected representatives would be required to give a regular account of their actions to the constituency jury, and the jury would have the power to sanction the representative. In addition to this general model of constituency juries, I offer a more specific institutional design that shows how the general model can be operationalized and realistically incorporated into existing representative governments. In contrast to lottocratic proposals that replace elections with sortition, constituency juries are a promising way to combine the two to address the oligarchic tendencies of elections in representative government.

Shock interactions on a V-shaped blunt leading edge (VBLE) that are commonly encountered at the cowl lip of an inward-turning inlet are investigated at freestream Mach numbers ($ M_\infty$) 3–6. The swept blunt leading edges of the VBLE generate a pair of detached shocks with varying shapes due to the changes in $ M_\infty$ and $L/r$ (i.e. the ratio of the leading-edge length $L$ to the leading-edge blunt radius $r$), which causes intriguing shock interactions at the crotch of the VBLE. Three subtypes of regular reflection (RR) and a Mach reflection (MR) are produced successively with increasing $ M_\infty$ for a given $L/r$, which appear in the opposite order to those with increasing $L/r$ for a given $ M_\infty$. These shock interactions identified in numerical simulations are verified in supersonic and hypersonic wind tunnel experiments. It is demonstrated that the relative position of the shocks is crucial in determining the transitions of shock interactions by varying either $L/r$ or $ M_\infty$. Transition criteria between subtypes of RR and from RR to MR are theoretically established in the parameter space $(M_\infty,L/r)$ by analysing the shock structures, showing good agreement with the numerical and experimental results. Interactions between either immature or fully developed detached shocks are embedded in these criteria. Specifically, the transition criteria asymptotically approach the corresponding critical $ M_\infty$ when $L/r$ is sufficiently large. These transition criteria provide guidelines for improving the design of the cowl lip of an inward-turning inlet in supersonic and hypersonic regimes.

Experiments were performed that (i) document the effect of the steady spanwise buffer layer blowing on the mean characteristics of the turbulent boundary layer for a range of momentum thickness Reynolds numbers from 4760 to 10 386, and (ii) document the effect of the buffer layer blowing on the unsteady characteristics and coherent vorticity in a boundary layer designed to provide sufficiently high spatial resolution. The spanwise buffer layer blowing of the order of $u_{\tau }$ is produced by a surface array of pulsating direct current (pulsed-DC) plasma actuators. This was found to substantially reduce the wall shear stress that was directly measured with a floating element coupled with a force sensor. The direct wall shear measurements agreed with values derived using the Clauser method to within $\pm 0.85$ %. The degree to which the buffer layer blowing affected $\tau _w$ was found to primarily depend on the inner variable spanwise spacing between the pulsed-DC actuator electrodes, i.e. ‘blowing sites’. Utilizing pairs of $[u,v]$ and $[u,w]$ hot-wire sensors, the latter experiments correlated significant reductions in the $\omega _y$ and $\omega _x$ vorticity components that resulted from the buffer layer blowing and translated into lower Reynolds stresses and turbulence production. The time scale to which these observed changes in the boundary layer characteristics would return to the baseline condition was subsequently documented. This revealed a recovery length of $x^+ \approx 86\,000$ that translated to a streamwise fetch of $x \approx 66\delta$. Finally, a comparison with the recent work by Cheng et al. (2021, J. Fluid Mech. vol. 918, A24) and Wei & Zhou (2024 in TSFP13, June 25–28, 2024) that followed our experimental approach to achieve comparable wall shear stress (drag) reductions has led to a new scaling based on the baseline boundary layer $\textit{Re}_{\tau }$ and buffer layer blowing velocity.

Democracy requires responsiveness. While empirical responsiveness research tends to focus on opinion polls, there are other ways elites listen to public opinion. Therefore, we need to examine those forms of public opinion that elites see and hear. This is explored through a dataset of letters to Australian Prime Minister John Howard, coded consistent with the Comparative Agendas Project. I find evidence of deliberate, systemic non-responsiveness in the political agenda (measured by the topics of Mr Howard’s speeches) to the volume of letters. Mr Howard knowingly, deliberately ignored this public opinion. There are, however, indications that the topics of the letters are responding to government announcements. The findings highlight the selective nature of elite engagement with public opinion. The study contributes to understanding political agenda-setting, representation and the institutional conditions under which public input is ignored. These results have implications for theories of representation and responsiveness in policymaking.