bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Severe infections as risk factors for acute myocardial infarction: a nationwide, Danish cohort study from 1987 to 2018
Authors: Pedersen Emilie Marie Juelstorp , Yonis Harman , Egelund Gertrud Baunbæk , Lohse Nicolai , Torp-Pedersen Christian , Lindegaard Birgitte , Jensen Andreas Vestergaard
Published: October 2024

Aims

Infections have been associated with acute myocardial infarction (AMI), but differences in risk between infection types and age groups are unclear. This study aims to investigate whether infections are associated with subsequent AMI and whether the risk differs across infection sites and age groups.

Methods and results

Nationwide registers were used to include 702 596 adults hospitalized between 1987 and 2018 with either pneumonia (n = 344 319), urinary tract infection (UTI) (n = 270 101), soft tissue/bone infection (n = 66 718), central nervous system (CNS) infection (n = 17 025), or endocarditis (n = 4433). Patients were sex and age matched with two unexposed controls. Outcome was first-time AMI within 10 years. A time-dependent Cox proportional hazards model with cut-offs at 30 and 90 days was used for calculating adjusted hazard ratios (HRs). Pneumonia, UTI, and soft tissue/bone infection were associated with increased relative rates of AMI compared to matched, unexposed controls. Highest relative rates were found within the first 0–30 days post-exposure: pneumonia: HR 3.39 [95% confidence interval (CI) 3.15–3.65]; UTI: HR 2.44 (95% CI 2.21–2.70); soft tissue/bone infection: HR 1.84 (95% CI 1.45–2.33). Relative rates decreased over time but remained significantly elevated throughout the follow-up period and were increased in all age groups. No association was found for CNS infection and for endocarditis only at 31–90 days, HR 2.28 (95% CI 1.20–4.33).

Conclusion

Acute infections are associated with increased relative rates of AMI across different infection sites and age groups with higher relative rates found for pneumonia. This indicates that some infections may act as a trigger for AMI with a site and/or pathogen specific risk.
Ecological speciation in East African freshwater crabs of the genus Arcopotamonautes Bott, 1955 across a lake–river boundary in the Lake Malawi catchment (Potamoidea: Potamonautidae: Potamonatinae)
Authors: Layfield Harry J , Phelps Emily , Saxon Andrew D , Jones Ben , Gray Leila , Klaus Sebastian , Turner George F , Katongo Cyprian , Smith Alan M , Shechonge Asilatu H , Ngatunga Benjamin P , Gabagambi Nestory P , Cumberlidge Neil , Genner Martin J
Published: October 2024

Geological, climate, and ecosystem changes in Africa probably influenced speciation of Afrotropical freshwater crabs. In total, the subfamily Potamonautinae comprises over 120 species, and this diversity provides a valuable opportunity to explore speciation processes. Here we study diversification of potamonautid crabs in the Lake Malawi catchment, and investigate whether speciation has taken place across a lake–river boundary. Specifically, we reconstruct evolutionary relationships of the Malawi blue crab, Arcopotamonautes orbitospinus (Cunnington, 1907), an endemic of Lake Malawi, and of A. montivagus (Chace, 1953) from rivers and streams draining into Lake Malawi, and smaller lakes within this catchment. Our phylogenetic analysis of over 28 000 single nucleotide polymorphisms shows a monophyletic A. orbitospinus nested within a clade otherwise comprising A. montivagus from across the Lake Malawi catchment (A. montivagus Group I). We also identified a second allopatric clade of A. montivagus from the Rungwe mountains of Tanzania, and neighbouring Zambia (A. montivagus Group II). Morphological differences were apparent between all three groups. Collectively these results show A. montivagus is a paraphyletic riverine taxon that has diversified in allopatry, and that this species entered Lake Malawi and seeded the specialized heavily armoured lacustrine species, A. orbitospinus. We hypothesize that formation of deep-water conditions within Lake Malawi, together with differences in predation pressures between the rivers and lake, provided ecological opportunities for natural selection to drive speciation across the lake–river boundary. We conclude that geographical separation and ecological adaptation are potentially important drivers of evolutionary diversification in these enigmatic freshwater crabs.
Strange Bedfellows: US Occupation Officials and German Catholic Organizations
Authors: Makin Stephanie
Published: October 2024

Following the end of the Second World War, Cold War political tensions reinforced US officials’ desire to form strong transnational partnerships in occupied Germany to help stoke anti-communist resolve and foster an acceptance of US leadership within the emerging Western camp. The Special Projects Program, a US State Department initiative, was instrumental in bridging cultural gulfs between the American occupation administration and the German Catholic community, which had long been wary of American influence on Germany society. As a result of the program, the US occupation administration and Catholic institutions cooperatively carried out policy objectives in West Germany that helped mould the country into a Western-style democracy and promoted a shared transatlantic Western culture.
Enhancing real-time earth–air heat exchanger outlet temperature forecasting in arid climates using artificial neural network: a case study from Bechar, Algeria
Authors: Kifouche Abdessalam , Kaddour Abdelmadjid , Lalmi Djemoui , Chenini Nadir , Alkhafaji Mohammed Ayad , Chambashi Gilbert , Kaid Noureddine , Menni Younes
Published: October 2024

This study improves earth–air heat exchanger (EAHE) outlet temperature forecasting using artificial neural networks (ANNs) to enhance building energy efficiency. Leveraging data from Bechar, Algeria, an arid climate, a FFBPNN with one hidden layer was trained, validated, and tested. Increasing the number of neurons in the hidden layer significantly improved model accuracy. The optimal architecture, with 40 hidden neurons, demonstrated high predictive accuracy, as shown by reduced MSE and increased R2 values across datasets. This research highlights the potential of ANN-based models to optimize EAHE system performance, contributing to energy-efficient building designs, particularly in arid regions.
Coronavirus Disease 2019 Lineages in a Minimally Vaccinated Island Population: Genomic Epidemiology of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 in Haiti
Authors: Mavian Carla N , Tagliamonte Massimiliano S , Bassett Maclean , Alam Meer T , Cash Melanie N , Hitchings Matt , Louis Rigan , Riva Alberto , Zainabadi Kayvan , Deschamps Marie Marcelle , Liautaud Bernard , Rouzier Vanessa , Fitzgerald Daniel W , Pape Jean William , Morris J Glenn , Salemi Marco
Published: October 2024

We monitored severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) variants in Haiti from 2020 to 2023. Despite Haitian coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) travel restrictions and in the setting of a vaccination rate of 2.7%, the timing and lineage evolution of the Haiti epidemic mirrored what was occurring in the rest of the world. Sources for importation of lineages into Haiti were the United States, the Dominican Republic, Europe, and Brazil, with exportation of lineages to the United States, the Dominican Republic, Europe, and Asia. Viral loads in patients infected by the Delta and Omicron BA.1 variants were correlated along the phylogenies, suggesting that higher viral loads have facilitated strain transmission and evolution.
FIFA’s Football Agent Regulations and European Competition Law
Authors: Podszun Rupprecht , Kirk Alexander
Published: October 2024

We assess the relationship between professional sport and European Union competition law using the example of the FIFA Football Agent Regulations (FFAR), a set of rules enacted by FIFA, the world football governing body, to regulate the activities of football agents. The FFAR have been challenged under competition law before national courts and in arbitration proceedings before the Court of Arbitration for Sport. The European Court of Justice has been asked to rule on the matter. The FFAR are the result of an anti-competitive decision by an association of undertakings. In particular, there is no exception for such agreements under the so-called Meca-Medina test. This analysis is supported by the European Court of Justice’s 2023 rulings in sports cases, in particular the European Superleague.
Accelerated Frostbite-induced Acroosteolysis in Pediatric Insensate Hand: A Case Report and Literature Review
Authors: Ma Sara L , Baldwin Carolyn , Rapolti Mihaela-Elena
Published: October 2024

In pediatric patients, frostbite is a well-documented cause of epiphyseal cartilage destruction and subsequent growth deformity of the affected phalanges. Cases of full acroosteolysis also referred to as phalangeal osteolysis, of distal phalanges as soon as 3 months after cold exposure have yet to be reported. We describe a complicated case of frostbite-associated phalangeal osteolysis in the dominant hand of a 9-year-old patient, in the context of post-traumatic insensate hand after sustaining prior electrical burn injuries. This case demonstrates the unique sequela of pediatric frostbite injury involving early loss of the distal phalanx through resorption of the bone and parallel soft tissue retraction, rendering early plastic surgery reconstruction impractical. Reconstructive strategies for frostbite injury in pediatric patients will need to account for the individualized dynamic tissue changes that develop in the months after cold exposure.
Field tests reveal acoustic variation of call types in a subterranean rodent, the Northern Mole Vole Ellobius talpinus
Authors: Dymskaya Margarita M , Volodin Ilya A , Smorkatcheva Antonina V , Rudyk Anna , Volodina Elena V
Published: October 2024

This study investigates acoustic variation of human-audible sonic (below 20 kHz) and human-inaudible ultrasonic (above 20 kHz) calls in a wild subterranean rodent, the Northern Mole Vole (Ellobius talpinus), under 3 call-eliciting tests conducted during captures for 1 day. The Contact-in-Tunnel Test modeled contacts of 2 individuals during digging earth in a burrow tunnel. The Restraint Test modeled restraint of an animal by a surrogate predator (human hand). The Release-to-Burrow Test modeled acoustic communication of many family members returned to their home burrow after their isolation for about 8 h, from morning to evening. We described 8 call types: 3 sonic, 3 ultrasonic, and 2 expanding from sonic to ultrasonic range of frequencies; 6 call types were described for the first time for this species. No relationship was found between acoustic parameters and proxies of body size (body mass and the width of 2 upper incisors). No sex differences were found in body size or the acoustic parameters. Different call types prevailed in different tests: wheeks and upsweeps were made during peaceful interactions; squeaks and squeals were related to animal discomfort during the Restraint Test; rasps were only made in Release-to-Burrow Tests when animals were plugging the burrow entrance; and variative calls did not show any relationship with type of test. Based on presence or absence of certain call types in the tests, we evaluate their potential communicative role in comparison with published data on vocal repertoires of other subterranean rodents.
The conundrum of the giant condyloma: is it carcinoma?
Authors: Kim Hyung C , Schlenker James D , Post Amber B , Agoff Nicholas S , Feldmann Timothy , Simianu Vlad V
Published: October 2024

Perineal verrucous carcinoma is a rare variant of squamous cell carcinoma that is mainly treated with surgical excision. In this case report, we present a 58-year-old man with human immunodeficiency virus who presented with an extraordinarily large perineal mass that was ultimately found to be verrucous carcinoma in association with giant condyloma acuminata. He was treated with a wide local excision followed by staged abdominoperineal resection and fasciocutaneous flap reconstruction. In the post-operative course, the patient developed relatively short interval recurrence which was successfully managed with salvage radiotherapy. He is now post-radiation without evidence of recurrence.
Rwanda’s first Marburg virus outbreak
Authors: Mohanty Aroop , Sharma Sakshi , Mehta Rachana , Srivastava Shriyansh , Sah Ranjit , Satapathy Prakasini , Manirambona Emery , Vargas-Gandica Jair , Rodriguez-Morales Alfonso J
Published: October 2024

As of 15 October 2024, Rwanda’s Marburg Virus Disease outbreak had caused 62 cases and 15 deaths (case fatality rates 24.2%), with significant transmission among healthcare workers. World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control issued warnings and travel advisories, emphasizing strict protocols. We discussed the local and global implications of such a situation here.
Collective Care as Affective Justice in Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy
Authors: Yu Hyunjoo
Published: October 2024

This essay focuses on the body-sentimentality connections in Frances E.W. Harper’s 1892 novel, Iola Leroy; Or, Shadows Uplifted. This essay examines how Iola Leroy foregrounds affective Black bodies as a mutable site of future-oriented pedagogy, which resists not only the liberal sentimental culture’s insistence on seeing Black bodies only as a vessel of anti-Black violence but also the popular scientific imagination that predicted that Black American heredity is irrelevant to imperialist US modernity. This physical-sentimental pedagogy practiced by Iola Leroy’s Black community members nurtures and invests in affective Black bodies as a potential to reconstruct Black life and futures within extended, less private versions of home. In doing so, Harper moves away from liberal individualism at the core of sentimental culture and thinks of alternative modernities based on solidarity and collective care that are outside the eugenicist destiny in which Black life is not imagined. To think of the political significance of this movement, this essay situates Iola Leroy’s imagination of the otherwise-future against US sentimental culture.
Girls' Education in the Developing World
Authors: Desai Karishma , Casey Olivia , Devi Asha
Published: October 2024

The education of girls in the Global South has been championed as a hopeful solution for unlocking economic and social transformation within international development discourse. Marginalized adolescent girls have been constructed in complex and contradictory ways—portrayed at once as imperiled and vulnerable, yet also aspirational and hopeful. This article sheds light on key literature that critically examines and importantly unsettles common framings and understandings of girlhoods and girls’ education. For instance, several scholars trace the imperial, colonial, and neoliberal tropes that proliferate throughout representations in girls’ education campaigns, past and present. A great deal of scholarship has traced the incredibly persistent framings of girls in crisis—as victims of cultural and sexual oppression and in need of external salvation through educative missions. On the other hand, feminist scholars have also cast a critical eye on commonsense representations of girls’ agency and empowerment, which often position privileged girls as empowered feminist saviors. Critical literature within the field illuminates how commonsense girls’ education ideals often flatten the peculiarities and unequal relations of power and difference that girls’ lives are situated within, depoliticizing calls for girls’ education. Meanwhile, recent philanthropic and corporate efforts to promote girls’ education are also increasingly framed in terms of neoliberal business and market rationalities that idealize girls’ economic potential as human capital investments. Responding to and resisting these challenging stereotypes, critical gender and education scholars demonstrate how particular ideas of educated girlhoods are deeply animated by particular desires and attachments informed by cultural, historical, and sociopolitical contexts. Collectively, these authors shed light on the nuances, ambiguities, and contradictions of girls’ lived experiences. Girls navigate their precarious and uncertain lives within and beyond schooling and contest and negotiate the overdetermined discourses that surround them. This article is organized thematically and covers both historical and contemporary scholarship surrounding girls’ education, informed by a wide range of disciplinary, theoretical, and methodological perspectives. Drawing connections between girl crises past and present, this collection of scholarship brings light to the anxieties, concerns, and hopes placed in educating girl.
Indigenous Peoples of the Andean Region during the Colonial Period
Authors: Guengerich Sara V.
Published: October 2024

The Andean region of western South America was invaded by Spanish adventurers beginning in the 1530s. Despite swift and brutal conquests from present-day Colombia to Chile, Indigenous peoples contested and survived nearly three centuries of colonial rule. Historians, art historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, linguists, and literary scholars have long sought to recover Native histories and mentalities as they changed over the course of this long period. Yet the task of making sense of Indigenous responses to colonialism is still challenging, not only because the written records of this period are fragmentary but also because a handful of them cannot be considered either contemporary or firsthand accounts. Even after the Spanish arrival, Indigenous scribes did not produce documents in the main Andean languages, using Spanish alphabetic script, as Native peoples did in Mesoamerica. The few works produced by Indigenous authors such as Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui, and the anonymous Huarochirí Manuscript (cited under Indigenous Knowledge and Indigenous Intellectuals) only appeared in the late sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries and have caused conflicting interpretations of the pre-Hispanic past and of colonial history. Landmark studies on the history of colonial Peru, such as James Lockhart’s Spanish Peru, 1532–1560 (1968, 1994), spearheaded the use of notarial records and related documentation as indispensable sources for the study of this period. While he only dedicates a chapter to the Indigenous population, this book has been a model for the research produced afterward. Art historians, archeologists, and anthropologists have even gone beyond these textual sources to include textiles, paintings, ceramics, structural remains, and even waste materials to add a nuanced vision of the survival, resilience, and agency of Native Andeans after 1532. For the sake of brevity, this entry will cite the most representative monographs and a few focused anthologies rather than articles or book chapters on the subject. Even so, the task of gathering and summarizing such works is incomplete at best. In the progression of scholarly production, academics first evaluated the trauma, dislocation, and collapse of Indigenous societies under Spanish rule. Then, a look at the diverse experiences of Native people from cosmopolitan centers to provincial and rural areas coupled with the differences between Native and commoner elites provided fresh and enriching interpretations of this heterogeneous colonial past. Understanding the internal structures of Indigenous societies has been key to bring forth this bottom-up history of the conquest, assessing their struggles and highlighting their strategies to subvert domination.
Bacterial Species Concepts
Authors: Cohan Frederick M.
Published: October 2024

To classify bacteria at the species level, systematists may choose between concepts based in theory versus the theory-free definitions used in the practice and tradition of systematics. Theory-based approaches aim to demarcate species as groups that hold certain species-like, dynamic properties. Following Ernst Mayr, many zoologists have attempted to demarcate their species as cohesive lineages—that is, species are classified so that populations of the same species are hindered from diverging owing to recombination between them. Some bacterial systematists have argued for extending recombination-based demarcation to bacterial species. However, both theoretical and experimental evidence argue that recombination is unlikely to hinder either the splitting of bacterial species or their further divergence, owing to the low frequency of recombination in bacteria, although this conclusion is not universally accepted. Among alternative, dynamic properties ascribed to bacterial species is that each species is ecologically distinct and irreversibly separate from other species; moreover, each species is cohesive in that some force constrains diversification within a species. In the rarely recombining bacteria, this force of cohesion may be natural selection favoring novel adaptive mutations within an ecologically homogeneous group (an ecotype). The cohesive, species-like ecotypes may be recognized as sequence clusters, and many such ecotypes may fit within the more broadly defined species recognized by the traditions of bacterial systematics. Alternatively, a “speciation spectrum” model argues that, depending on the bacterial group, either selection or genetic exchange may be more important in the cohesion of species—here, lineages may be classified by their ability to coexist as a result of some combination of ecological divergence and sexual isolation. Most bacterial systematists defer to theory-free traditions on the quantity of diversity that should be included within a species. As the criteria for discovering and characterizing bacterial taxa have shifted from phenotypes to various sequence and whole-genome characters, systematists have aimed to recalibrate the threshold of divergence within species with one aim—that species should appear as clusters with clear phenotypic and molecular gaps between them. Recent developments suggest that theory-based and tradition-based systematics may be able to reach a rapprochement, in that the traditional species recognized by most systematists as well as the theory-based ecotypes may both be subject to a kind of cohesion. Molecular characterizations of bacterial diversity have shown that systematists will never come close to describing all bacterial species unless radical changes are made in how species can be classified. To characterize and classify all bacterial diversity at all taxonomic levels, from infraspecific ecotypes to species to phyla, systematists will need to streamline classification using genome-based methods.
Collaboration in Financial Regulatory Reform
Authors: Cecchetti Stephen G.
Published: October 2024

In the aftermath of the 2007–9 global financial crisis, the global standard setting process evolved into a comprehensive policy development cycle with collaboration across various international organizations. The Financial Stability Board (FSB) and the Standard Setting Bodies (SSBs) have responsibility for identifying needs for additional regulation or further harmonization; proposing, assessing, and agreeing on standards; implementing rules; and evaluating impact prior to proposing refinements. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) contributes to the analysis through its participation in the various organizations and bringing its analytical capacities to bear on a variety of macro-financial questions, and providing an independent voice.
What Has Replaced the Washington Consensus?
Authors: Güven Ali Burak
Published: October 2024

This chapter examines the trajectory of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) policy outlook in the past half century. It finds that evolving member preferences and organizational dynamics, in a context of ever-changing external institutional and normative conditions, have continually interacted to produce substantive shifts in the Fund’s prescriptive gaze during this period. Advocating a rigid neoliberal approach labeled the Washington Consensus in the 1980s and the 1990s, the Fund around the turn of the century embraced a paradigm broadening toward a more social and regulatory neoliberalism, often called the post-Washington Consensus. The organization’s policy vision shifted once again after the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–8, this time exhibiting an increasingly pragmatic and flexible stance that nonetheless still rests on a broadly neoliberal orientation.
The IMF
Authors: Ghosh Atish R.
Published: October 2024

The establishment of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference was a remarkable feat of international cooperation. But it was not without controversy and debate. At the time, there were five major debates: (i) should the IMF be a clearing union or a credit union? (ii) Should there be symmetric penalties for surplus and deficit countries? (iii) Should IMF financial support be subject to conditionality? (iv) Should there be any special consideration for developing countries? (v) Should the IMF’s attitude toward capital movements mirror its mandate for liberalizing payments for current transactions? These defining debates would recur in various guises in the subsequent history of the international monetary system and of the IMF.
IMF Fiscal Policy
Authors: Clift Ben
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores the ideas and debates that shape International Monetary Fund (IMF) prescriptive fiscal discourse. The Global Financial Crisis, COVID, and climate change challenged core premises and contours of mainstream macroeconomics and fiscal policy rectitude. The IMF was an active interlocutor in these debates. The Fund’s interpretation of its core mandate has evolved to accommodate not only limiting inequality, but also tackling climate change. Fund flagships advocated fiscal activism to boost demand, to stave off economic scarring or depression. Ongoing commitments to fiscal discipline and fiscal sustainability coexist with new fiscal priorities. The analysis kicks the tyres of an ongoing rehabilitation of more activist fiscal policy within the Fund, asking how wide and deep activist and redistributive fiscal commitments go.
Advancing Climate Policy at the IMF
Authors: Ram Bhandary Rishikesh , Gallagher Kevin P.
Published: October 2024

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is at the institutional core of the global economic governance system and is uniquely capable of engaging in surveillance functions, especially on cross-border climate risks, providing emergency financing, and engaging in capacity development. This chapter traces the history of the IMF’s engagement on climate change, laying special emphasis on the Fund’s Climate Change Strategy (CCS) launched in 2021. The chapter shows how the IMF has mostly focused on surveillance activities and capacity development in its CCS, with limited integration of climate change into the Fund’s lending toolkit despite the creation of the Resilience and Sustainability Trust. Most crucially, fiscal consolidation requirements that accompany IMF programs erode the investment push that countries need to transition to a low-carbon economy.
Inclusive Growth
Authors: Farnsworth Kevin , Irving Zoë
Published: October 2024

This chapter examines the extent to which high level International Monetary Fund (IMF) discourse actively reflects commitment to redistribution (through public spending, public service expansion, and fiscal reform) as an essential component of inclusive growth, or whether inclusive growth is framed within the IMF’s established patterns of advice where social policy is simply another economic instrument stripped of its social and transformative goals. Following discussion of the rise of the inclusive growth agenda amongst international governmental organizations and the IMF specifically, it reports quantitative content analysis to assess both the temporal and ideational associations between growth that is inclusive and the social policies that make it so.
Anti-Corruption Work at the IMF
Authors: Weeks-Brown Rhoda
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores the evolution and operationalization of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s approach to addressing governance vulnerabilities and corruption over the past 30 years in the context of changes in the nature of corruption and the rise of the global anti-corruption agenda. Through its examination of governance-related reforms embedded in recent work, such as the IMF’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the chapter highlights the important progress to date and continuing challenges (e.g., ownership, vested interests, and capacity constraints) in supporting sustained improvement in integrity and the rule of law, and the interlinkages of the governance and anti-corruption agenda with other issues increasingly central to the work of the IMF, including state fragility and climate change.
The IMF in the Post-Bretton Woods Era (1973–Present)
Authors: Boughton James M.
Published: October 2024

The end of the Bretton Woods exchange rate system in 1973 ushered in major changes in the nature of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s role. Its core principles, however, remained unchanged, and demands for its services increased. The IMF responded by amending its charter to reflect the new reality, especially by introducing the concept of “firm surveillance” over the exchange system. The increasing complexity of global economics and finance then forced it to expand the scope of its activities until around the end of the century. The most recent history has been characterized by an increased flexibility and responsiveness to criticism.
The Populist Challenge to the IMF
Authors: Clark Richard
Published: October 2024

Populists have increasingly criticized international organizations (IOs) as out-of-touch institutions run by globalists and lifelong bureaucrats. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), in particular, has become a target of populist ire due to the perceived intrusiveness of its surveillance and lending operations. Conditionality, or the policy requirements often attached to IMF lending, is especially incompatible with populists’ pro-sovereignty and anti-elite disposition. This chapter provides an overview of the challenges populism poses to the IMF, discussing why populists oppose the institution and analyzing their engagement with the Fund. It highlights the IMF’s efforts to accommodate populists in order to retain their participation. The chapter concludes by examining policy implications and suggesting future research directions.
Europe Unresolved
Authors: Angin Merih , Metinsoy Saliha
Published: October 2024

This chapter examines the International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s pivotal yet contentious role in Europe post-GFC, marking a significant departure from its historical focus on developing countries. It explores the multi-layered conflicts ignited by the IMF’s lending arrangements among the Troika institutions, European states, and within the IMF, alongside domestic upheavals mirroring those in the Global South. Despite shifts toward accommodating capital controls and social policies, the IMF’s European engagement underscores its nuanced adaptation to the politics of powerful states, and at times its subsumption in it. The chapter also argues that most of those conflicts remain unresolved for all three actors, the Troika, the IMF itself, and European states. It culminates by reflecting on the IMF’s positioning in recent crises.
Debt Concerns of Low-Income and Emerging Market Countries
Authors: Caliari Aldo
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores the International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s responsibilities in the international debt architecture, including analysis, debt crisis prevention, and resolution. The chapter argues that low-income and emerging market countries’ historically high debt levels and risks will impact the institution. Looking at how debt concerns already inspired changes in the past, it identifies the three areas where these impacts are likely to be more noticeable: concessional funding and debt relief, debt sustainability assessments, and the IMF’s role in sovereign debt restructurings. The chapter identifies challenges for each and examines how the challenges may affect the IMF’s path of evolution.
The IMF and the Future of the Liberal International Order
Authors: Heldt Eugenia C. , Fioretos Orfeo
Published: October 2024

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been an integral element of the liberal international order that has been repeatedly tested. Over 80 years, the Fund has been confronted with a more diverse membership, crises of legitimacy, global power shifts, populist backlash, and a more complex global institutional landscape. This contribution explores what the Fund’s responses to past challenges portend for its future. It finds that the IMF has overcome past challenges without becoming a peripheral organization or undergoing radical restructuring by engaging in frequent and at times wide-ranging incremental changes to its policies and governance structures. The contribution concludes that the IMF has been a resilient organization that is poised to remain a central element in a liberal international order.
Election Law and Constitutional Law
Authors: Gerken Heather K.
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores a long-standing debate over the relationship between election law and constitutional law. During its early years, scholars insisted on “electoral law exceptionalism”—the claim that election law was an independent field, separate and apart from constitutional law. Scholars wrote that election law involved structural dimensions that distinguished it from constitutional law’s rights-based focus. Election law emphasized groups and aggregation, whereas constitutional law focused heavily on individual harms. Election law had an institutional bent, again in contrast to constitutional law. Election law was also heavily inflected by political science and offered more wide-ranging institutional solutions. Even the field’s doctrinal work was deeply focused on real-world consequences. Finally, academics argued that election law scholars were more attentive than our constitutional law counterparts to the subconstitutional statutes and rules that constitute our democratic system. While these claims about election law’s distinctive features largely hold true of the field today, the work in constitutional law now shares many of the same features as election law scholarship. This chapter makes the case that the two fields have begun to reconverge. It concludes by suggesting that we may witness the emergence of a new, broad-gauged field focused on democratic governance, one that will dissolve whatever boundaries now stand between election law and constitutional law.
Redistricting Criteria
Authors: Cover Benjamin Plener
Published: October 2024

Federal and state legislative elections rely heavily on geographic electoral districts, which makes the districting map itself an important component of the electoral system. This chapter situates contemporary electoral mapmaking in historical and institutional context, tracing how redistricting evolved from the geographic approach of early state legislatures in the direction of increasing federal constraint, judicial intervention, and attention to nongeographic representational considerations. The U.S. Supreme Court has construed federal constitutional and statutory law to mandate approximate population equality and to regulate the role that race, but not politics, plays in the drawing of district lines. Federal redistricting law imposes important constraints on state mapmakers, but still leaves them plenty of discretion. States channel this discretion through a wide variety of state redistricting criteria designed to further constrain and guide mapmakers as they navigate the trade-offs between conflicting representational values.
Voting Under Federal Election Laws
Authors: Weinstein-Tull Justin
Published: October 2024

Although states and local governments administer elections in the United States, the federal government has also occasionally enacted laws that regulate election administration. Most prominent among these laws are the National Voter Registration Act, the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, and the Help America Vote Act. With its recent attempt to enact the For the People Act, Congress has demonstrated an interest in more aggressively regulating election administration. This chapter discusses both the promise and the challenges of federal election laws, with an emphasis on federal election administration laws (and excluding the Voting Rights Act). It discusses the good that these laws can accomplish, but also the difficulties enforcing them. It explains how federal election administration laws fit into voting rights scholarship, and suggests avenues for future research. Building on these insights, it concludes by suggesting novel ways that the federal government could effectively administer elections while retaining the benefits of local election administration.
Racial Gerrymandering
Authors: Ross Bertrall L.
Published: October 2024

The Supreme Court’s racial gerrymandering doctrine has become unmoored from its roots. A doctrine originally concerned about a state’s use of race to deprive racial minority groups of tangible opportunities to participate politically now targets a state’s predominant use of race to cause unproven and speculative representational harms. This chapter traces the evolution of the constitutional racial gerrymandering doctrine with a focus on the Court’s shifting account of the constitutional harm from the use of race in districting. It shows how the shift from a participatory to representational account of the harm has resulted in a confused, incoherent, and inconsistent doctrine—leaving the Court deeply enmeshed in a political thicket that it has long sought to avoid. It concludes by arguing the Court should return racial gerrymandering doctrine to its roots and confine its role to policing state uses of race that cause participatory harms.
The Electoral College
Authors: Shaw Katherine
Published: October 2024

This chapter considers a profoundly anomalous feature of American democracy: our system of presidential selection. From very early on in the country’s history, the Constitution’s system for presidential selection proved flawed in ways both large and small. Those flaws have only become more conspicuous, and more pressing, with the passage of time. Today, the complex system, part constitutional and part statutory, that we refer to collectively as the “Electoral College,” has not only repeatedly misaligned popular will and presidential selection, but has exacerbated polarization, distortion, and dysfunction, both in presidential elections and in our politics more broadly. In recent years the College has also shown itself dangerously susceptible to manipulation and abuse. For these reasons, addressing the deficiencies in the Electoral College should be high on any agenda that takes seriously the imperative of democratic reform. The chapter begins by tracing the origins of the Electoral College. It then briefly compares the Electoral College to other mechanisms for selecting chief executive officers, both abroad and in the American states. It next surveys the College’s key shortcomings today, both conceptual and practical, concluding that the College, far from serving any genuine democratic purpose, is flatly antidemocratic, a corrosive force in our politics, and dangerously vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. The chapter ends by considering prospects for reform, examining both historical efforts to change or abolish the College, and the efforts underway today.
Partisan Parity in U.S. Election Administration
Authors: Green Rebecca
Published: October 2024

Election reformers commonly decry the participation of overt partisans in the administration of U.S. elections. Reliance on partisan actors to run elections in the United States makes it an outlier in comparison to other developed democracies. But focus on partisan involvement as a chief evil in U.S. election administration bears risk. Since the 2020 election particularly, both the political right and left have stoked fears that partisans “rig” U.S. elections. This has contributed to astronomic distrust of election outcomes and alarming targeting of election workers (and their families) with threats of violence and harassment. This chapter seeks to reframe the debate, suggesting that a fixation on partisan participation in election administration misses the mark. It contends instead that addressing single-party domination of state and local election administration should be the focus of reform.
One Person, One Vote
Authors: Eisler Jacob
Published: October 2024

In the early 1960s, the Supreme Court declared that all legislative districts must contain equal numbers of persons. This one person, one vote rule has endured, and had significant practical impact. It has mandated the decennial redistricting of state and local legislative and House of Representatives districts following each census. The one person, one vote rule has thereby eliminated numerical malapportionment in these types of districts. Yet critics have argued that one person, one vote has failed to reconfigure elections dramatically to satisfy the demands of democratic equity, and scholars have challenged the normative adequacy of the principle. The rest of this chapter discusses the justification for, historical and doctrinal development of, and possible future of one person, one vote.
Election Law and Gender
Authors: Karlan Pamela S.
Published: October 2024

The U.S. Constitution contains only two provisions that deal explicitly with gender, and both of them concern voting. Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment penalizes states that deny or abridge “the right to vote” of their “male inhabitants” who meet age and citizenship requirements. The Nineteenth Amendment forbids both states and the federal government from denying or abridging the “right of citizens of the United States to vote … on account of sex.” The two provisions are linked by more than just their references to the sex of the citizens involved. They share a tangled history that continues to reverberate in contemporary issues in election law. This chapter discusses how law governing the right to vote has affected women’s suffrage, election outcomes, and public officeholding throughout U.S. history. The history of women’s participation in the political process illustrates a number of points central to the law of democracy, including the cyclical expansion and contraction of voting rights and the interaction of socioeconomic conditions with formal legal rules. Along the way, this chapter also spotlights several little-known events, such as the nineteenth-century experience with women voting in New Jersey, Puerto Rico’s short-lived women-only literacy requirement, and a 1919 article that is the ancestor of techniques for inferring the behavior of individual voters.
The Census
Authors: Levitt Justin
Published: October 2024

The decennial census is essential to American governance. It appears in the sixth sentence of the U.S. Constitution, the first enumerated affirmative obligation of the new federal government. The census determines representation in government and the disbursement of trillions of dollars in funding; it sets the informational architecture for countless public and private decisions. The census helps us understand who we are, and that understanding drives what we choose to do together, and how we do it. This chapter discusses the law of the census, shining a light on some of the policy considerations and design choices that frame our national portrait, with striking consequences for our democracy. It discusses the extraordinary challenges that the census has faced most recently, but also grounds current census practice in historical context. The chapter reviews important controversies about how to conduct the count, where to count people, what information to ask for, and undervalued choices about how to report that data—and the ways in which each of these decisions may alter our conception of the American public and the representation we may receive.
Election Law and Race
Authors: Tokaji Daniel P.
Published: October 2024

Race and election law are inextricably intertwined. We cannot understand American constitutional democracy, nor hope to improve it, without attending to the ways in which racism and racial exclusion shaped the laws governing elections. Nor can we advance the broader struggle for racial justice without attending to election law, including past violations of the right to vote as well as contemporary efforts to secure political equality for all people. This chapter addresses the past, present, and future of the struggle for racial justice in our electoral system. It begins with a brief summary of the history of race discrimination in voting, including the systematic exclusion of African Americans after Reconstruction and the restoration of voting rights through both the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and judicial decisions. It then turns to contemporary barriers to electoral equality, divided into three categories: vote denial, vote dilution, and vote dissociation. The chapter concludes with reflections on the ongoing struggle for a more inclusive democracy, which requires attention to the relationship between racial identity, party affiliation, and economic inequality.
Islamic Feminism in Turkey
Authors: Burak-Adlı Feyza
Published: October 2024

This chapter provides an overview of the rise of Islamic feminism in Turkey. The movement aims to achieve gender equality within Islamic frameworks, which reinterprets religious texts to empower women while advocating social justice. Despite longstanding Muslim women’s activism in Turkey, Turkish women did not build alliances with the global platforms of Islamic feminism until very recently. The chapter discusses the division of women’s movements along the secular and religious divide by assessing the liberal reflexes of different feminist aspirations regardless of their epistemological proximity to Islam and secularism. It explains how the contemporary Islamic feminist consciousness in Turkey solidified as part of a broader Muslim dissent against the AKP’s policies.
Reinventing Social Work Education in Thailand
Authors: Wiwitwongwana Rangsima , Worland Shirley
Published: October 2024

In 1942 formal social work education in Thailand evolved within a bureaucratic model of social welfare and social security to strengthen nationalistic aims. The enactment of the Social Welfare Act in 2003 formally legitimized social work as a nation-building development strategy, and later, in 2013, the passing of the Social Work Professions Act legitimized the role of social workers. However, to understand the nature and efficacy of social work education and practice in Thailand in the current time, one needs to understand its deeper roots, which are embedded in Buddhism. In this process, it is important to realize that power can be understood in many ways and takes many forms, exercised in relationships and structures. This chapter employs a Foucauldian heterotopian approach to develop a social topology of social work education and practice in Thailand. Through the lens of four heterotopian principles—form, function, juxtaposition, and relation—this study finds that formal social work education and practice have advanced significantly from their origins in 1942, with representative bodies contributing to social work development in national, regional, and international social work forums. However, the continued reliance on imported Western curricula in schools of social work is impacting the ability of social work service delivery to be fully relevant to Thai society and its cultural communities. A growing interest in research focused on Buddhist social work highlights the need for Asian social work scholars to develop an indigenous social work model to parallel global ethical social work standards with culturally relevant modes of practice.