The developmental states of Asia—South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore—have been widely recognized for their successful COVID-19 governance. However, despite these successes, a closer examination reveals significant differences in their strategic responses and the medical resources mobilized. This article explains the different governance approaches taken by the three developmental states. We argue that the pre-crisis industrial coordination capacity of each developmental state plays a crucial role in determining both whether and which medical resources can be mobilized during emergencies. Through comparative case studies and within-case process tracing, we demonstrate how pre-established industry-level coordination capacities enabled Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore to strategically prioritize the production and mobilization of test kits, masks, and vaccines, respectively, especially in the initial phase of the pandemic. This article emphasizes that a country’s domestic production capacity, an often-overlooked institutional factor, can facilitate a more efficient response in a short period of time and significantly strengthen crisis management efforts.

Speaking after the addition of The Forth Bridge on UNESCO’s World Heritage List (WHL), a Scottish minister described it as an ‘honour that shows this is a great industrial treasure not just to the city, to Scotland or the United Kingdom, but the entire world.’ A few years later, the delegation of Indonesia took the floor after the inscription of Ombilin Coal mines. Dubbed Indonesia’s first industrial world heritage site, the mines had been owned by the Dutch East Indies government. Thus, the delegation had to describe the industrial heritage as a colonial imposition before noting that the area became ‘modern and integrated.’ If both Scotland and Indonesia received international recognition as modern, industrial subjects, they got there differently. In apprehending that difference, this article extends social-structural theories of international recognition. Approaching these structures as providing uneven recognition possibilities, I develop three modes of recognition pursuits that mediate the challenges of such uneven terrain. I probe the traction of these modes by analyzing speeches state delegations deliver after placing their sites on the WHL. This framework and analysis extend our understanding of international recognition pursuits by pointing to the hold of symbolic structures, and their transformation under creative state engagements.

A decades-long debate has sought to determine whether judicial elections are detrimental to the impartiality of judges and public support for state court systems. We contribute to that discussion by assessing whether elections work to hold errant judges accountable. We use a novel dataset of judicial scandal, including newspaper reports of misconduct against elected state supreme court justices. Our data examines the effect of scandal from 2000–2023 to determine whether controversy affects voter support for incumbents. We find voters pay attention to the harmful effects of scandal on judiciaries and that impacted incumbents experience diminished support, relative to other incumbents.

China is well known for providing official data, but how to treat these data is a longstanding debate among China scholars. This paper advances understandings of how to interpret Chinese official statistics about the internet. Using standards for evaluating surveys in the social sciences, we systematically compare official data from the China Network Information Center (CNNIC), which is under the supervision of China’s main regulator of internet policy, with the China Internet Survey 2018 (CIS), which is, to our knowledge, the first nationally representative survey on internet use in China. Using three examples, we illustrate how methodological differences in sampling design and measurement can lead to vastly different conclusions about key indicators of internet use in mainland China, including the percentage of internet users, their regional and urban–rural digital divide, and the percentage of specific social media platforms. We discuss the challenges of survey work on internet use in China and offer recommendations on how to interpret official statistics, especially in light of the limitations researchers face when conducting face-to-face surveys in China.

This article examines the evolution of the role played by the number and gender of siblings in the survival and biological well-being of individuals in rural Spain during the twentieth century. Our aim is to test how two fundamental theories – the cooperative breeding hypotheis and the resource dilution hypothesis – about how the number of siblings affect the individual come together in this area of study during a period of economic, health, and social transformation. We used a sample of 19,331 individuals born between 1900 and 1979 from 14 rural villages, for whom data on sibling count and various family and environmental variables are available. Using these data, we ran several statistical models to discover the effects of siblings on survival. In addition, we studied the long-term effect of siblings on height using height data from 2,783 male conscripts. Our results show that the number of siblings positively influenced survival, either through the cooperation of older siblings in the care of their younger brothers and sisters or through parents exhibiting higher offspring survival abilities. However, increased reproductive success may come with a disadvantage. The biological well-being, as measured by height, of male conscripts was significantly lower among individuals with more siblings in the early decades of the study. Conversely, in the later decades, the negative relationship between sibship size and height was not statistically significant when the number of living siblings was fewer than five.

In recent times, several international courts (ICs) have faced resistance from their member states. A recurring narrative used to justify states’ backlash against ICs has been that ICs are increasingly overreaching and essentially interfering with states’ sovereignty. This article explores what backlash over sovereignty actually entails, highlighting a diverse set of political agendas and strategies. The article first develops an analytical matrix of three forms of sovereignty politics – by design, as a shield and as reprisal – to capture different aspects of sovereignty politics. This framework is then used in an empirical analysis of four African states that, within a four-year time-period, all withdrew their declarations granting direct access to the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (Court) for NGOs and individuals from those states. In all cases, sovereignty was claimed as the reason for withdrawal but as we demonstrate, the cases vary. Overall, we find that resistance against the African Court does not necessarily emerge from a challenge to a principled concept of sovereignty, but from sitting governments’ narratives of what human rights ought to be, who ought to invoke them, and when. In other words, sovereignty arguments work mainly to safeguard member states from the authority of the African Court where state practices collide with international commitments to human rights. This takes on a distinct rhetorical framing that utilizes and evokes a set of different meanings of sovereignty, for example that the Court is outside its delegated competences or the issue is inside a vague notion of internal affairs. By using these legal-rhetorical strategies, member states seek to avoid having to address directly the challenges being brought against them at the IC.

This paper examines so-called active participles in three languages with different morphological systems (Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, English and Hebrew). Based on a range of morphological, syntactic and interpretational diagnostics, I argue that these elements are uniformly deverbal adjectives. This result challenges a substantial body of work claiming that active participles show an adjectival/verbal ambiguity, but it is in line with Bešlin (2023), which analyzes passive participles as deverbal adjectives. Importantly, deverbal adjectives may denote predicates of properties or predicates of eventualities (events or states), depending on the characteristics of the verbal structure they embed. If these conclusions generalize to other languages, then there is no need to assume that (verbal) participles constitute a separate grammatical category, which is a desirable theoretical outcome. The results presented in this paper argue for an architecture of the grammar in which there is no one-to-one mapping between an item’s syntactic category and its meaning.