We review the methods we developed to study female genital cutting in Sudan and sex-selective abortion in Armenia. These methods were untested at the time of our original research, and here we compare the distinct but overlapping approaches we used to validate our methods for each of the two countries. Additionally, we repeat a number of analyses, including those related to validation, with previously unpublished data from Sudan. All results replicate previous findings. Replicating previous results is encouraging, but we nonetheless argue that validation for Armenia is more convincing than for Sudan. Specifically, even if female genital cutting and the preferential abortion of females are equally sensitive as research topics, son bias is inherently easier to study than cutting because biological sex determination is a random process with no natural analogue in the case of cutting. This randomness provides a kind of cover for research participants who are son-biased but want to create the impression that they are not. This cover, in turn, allows the researcher to resolve any trade-off between methods that produce explicit granular data and methods that produce untraceable, highly aggregated data in favour of methods producing the explicit and granular.

In the study of politics, many theoretical accounts assume that we are experiencing a ‘crisis of democracy’, with declining levels of political trust. While some empirical studies support this account, others disagree and report ‘trendless fluctuations’. We argue that these empirical ambiguities are based on analytical confusion: whether trust is declining depends on the institution, country, and period in question. We clarify these issues and apply our framework to an empirical analysis that is unprecedented in geographic and temporal scope: we apply Bayesian dynamic latent trait models to uncover underlying trends in data on trust in six institutions collated from 3,377 surveys conducted by 50 projects in 143 countries between 1958 and 2019. We identify important differences between countries and regions, but globally we find that trust in representative institutions has generally been declining in recent decades, whereas trust in ‘implementing’ institutions has been stable or rising.

Since the implementation of the Basel III Accord, expected shortfall (ES) has gained increasing attention from regulators as a complement to value-at-risk (VaR). The problem of elicitability for ES makes jointly modeling VaR and ES a popular method to study ES. In this article, we develop model averaging for joint VaR and ES regression models that selects the two weight vectors by minimizing a jackknife criterion. We show the large sample properties of the estimators under potential model misspecification with increasing dimension of parameters and the asymptotic optimality of the selected weights in the sense of minimizing the out-of-sample excess final prediction error. Simulation studies and three empirical analyses reveal good finite sample performance.

The participants in deliberative mini-publics are typically randomly selected; therefore, mini-publics are often marketed as representative of the wider population. However, in practice, mini-publics are unlikely to be fully representative due to their small size and non-response bias. I report the results of a pre-registered survey experiment designed to assess the implications of deviations from statistical representativeness for citizens’ legitimacy beliefs (N = 1,308). Consistent with prior research, I find that the involvement of a mini-public in democratic decision-making can lead to substantial increases in perceptions of process legitimacy; however, even minor biases in the composition of mini-publics substantially decrease those gains while larger biases can wipe them out entirely. The results of this study temper hopes that mini-publics offer an easy fix to perceptions of low democratic legitimacy.

This piece troubleshoots an array of epistemological, political, and practical difficulties involved in public studies of colonial atrocities. It explores the deficiencies of the Commission on Colonialism backed by the Belgian parliament between 2020–22, and suggests pathways for facilitating a fuller accounting of colonial wrongs. The argument leverages the author’s experiences in investigating and publicizing the colonial massacre of Mozambican civilians in Wiriyamu in 1972, which culminated in a public apology from Portugal’s prime minister in 2022.

Stereotype construction is a complex process, with multiple relations to language processing, that combines collective sociocultural factors with individual cognitive elements. Regarding gendered languages, there is a debate about the effect of grammatical gender on the representation of inanimate entities. To evaluate the potential interaction between gender stereotypes and gender morphology on words that refer to inanimate entities in three different communities of Spanish speakers, we developed a task of conscious judgments on the level of association to men or women of words that refer to objects. In a 3 × 2 × 3 × 2 design, we manipulated Semantic Bias (gender stereotypicality), with three levels (male, e.g., martillo, hammer-M; female, e.g., vestido, dress-M; neutral, e.g., lápiz, pencil-M); Morphology, with two levels (masculine, e.g., vestido, dress-M; feminine, e.g., pulsera, bracelet-F); Linguistic variety, with three levels (Argentine, Chilean and Peninsular) and Questionnaire, with two levels (related to men vs. related to women). The results showed that grammatical gender has an effect on words that refer to inanimate entities when those words do not carry a strong stereotypical association (neutral items), semantic bias related to gender stereotypes overshadows any potential effect of grammatical gender in biased items, and there are differences depending on the community (Argentine, Chilean and Peninsular).

This article looks at the everyday experiences of rural communities in the province of Arezzo, Tuscany, during the first years of Italian fascism. Following an approach that borrows from Alltagsgeschichte and microstoria, the article uses diaries, memoirs, local newspapers, and fascist reports to analyse the phenomenon of village parochialism, or campanilismo, in the context of fascist paramilitary violence. Firstly, it reassesses the role of campanilismo in provincial society, showing that parochialism was a function of community expression that contributed to the making of webs of ‘thin trust’ across rural communities. Secondly, the paper distinguishes the types of parochial conflict inherent to campanilismo from the violent conflicts generated by the fascist movement. Ultimately, the paper claims that fascist violence destroyed the functional mechanisms of campanilismo, replacing these with dysfunctional and terroristic violence that made the successful implementation of the fascist programme impossible in the provincial space.

Through compositional inclusion or exclusion, the photograph can assert and communicate what belongs in a picture, in a landscape, in an ecosystem. It can illuminate what we deem conservation-worthy, or, on a larger scale, which extinctions are attention-worthy. Photographic practice helps to illuminate the active nature of extinction, and our choices as actors and witnesses within that process. Here, researchers from the University of Leeds’ Extinction Studies Doctoral Training Programme present individual reflections on interdisciplinary practice-led research in the Scottish Small Isles. We consider how photography, as a form of praxis, can generate new forms of knowledge surrounding extinction: its meanings, representations, and legacies, particularly through visual representation. We offer seven perspectives on contemporary image-making, from disciplines including philosophy, conservation biology, literature, sociology, geology, cultural anthropology, and palaeontology. Researchers gathered experiential, ethical, even biological meanings from considering what to include or exclude in images: from the micro to the macro, the visible to the invisible, the aesthetic to the ecological. We draw conclusions around meaning-making through the process of photography itself, and the tensions encountered through framing and decision-making in a time of mass ecological decline.

The Xuanquan postal station is to date the most well-documented example of a working postal station from the Han period. This paper presents a corpus of 115 excavated horse names recorded in Xuanquan administrative documents. Analysis of these names not only clarifies what tasks these horses were expected to perform at the station, but two unique naming conventions further articulate the complex relationships forged between humans and horses at this frontier site: giving horses human surnames and venerating aged horses. This article thus centers the act of naming individual animals as being of significant importance for future studies of human-animal interactions.

Femininity and metaphors of motherhood have always determined the perception of nature and environment. With the rise of the ecological movements, they have also accompanied political eco-activism and nature conservation regimes. In this context, ecofeminism emerged as an academic, intellectual and social movement to critically question environmental conflicts and their interrelatedness to gender norms and power constellations. To what extent is ecofeminism a topic of pop music? Showcasing selected pop music examples from Tracy Chapman, Björk, Marina, Anohni and others, this article identifies four major thematic strands of narrating ecofeminist positions through pop music: (1) violence and vulnerability, illustrating the contrast between female nature and male culture; (2) strength and togetherness, focusing on the ontological connection between female bodies and nature; (3) protest and empowerment, drawing an activist demarcation against patriarchy and binary thinking; and (4) transecology and gender-queerness, crossing both heteronormative boundaries of bodies and dualistic nature conceptions.