The Bretton Woods system is often described as freeing national monetary policies from the gold-reserve constraints of the gold standard. Breaking the 'gold fetters' was essential to the embedded liberalism and economic interventionism of the post-war era. Yet gold retained a crucial role: monetary authorities backed currency with gold reserves, both de facto and de jure, frequently maintaining gold cover ratios comparable to those of the gold standard. How, then, could gold backing coexist with autonomous domestic macroeconomic policy? This article shows that the combination of two phenomena provides an answer: credit growth and currency growth became increasingly decoupled after 1945, and central banks shifted their emphasis from money toward credit. This created substantial scope to stimulate domestic economic activity through credit expansion without being constrained by the link between gold and currency in circulation. Econometric analysis for 38 countries indicates that gold reserves remained strongly correlated with currency, but not with bank credit. Changes in credit markets and central bank instruments therefore allowed gold backing to persist largely as a symbolic tie, without constraining domestic policy. Gold, however, exerted pressure on US policy and shaped international monetary relations. These findings show that institutional persistence does not guarantee similar economic effects.
Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects1. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.
This special issue presents ethnographic research exploring the everyday lives of Muslims in diverse urban settings from cities across France, Norway, Spain, and the UK. It examines how pervasive anti-Muslim discourses and critical events contribute to atmospheres of fear, framing Muslims as exceptional citizens within polarized national contexts. Central to the issue is the notion of "the trap" - a surface of representation that reduces Muslim agency to reactive resistance or threat, casting (or framing) as causes and manifestations of polarization. Yet, rather than dwell on the experience of Islamophobia alone - not withstanding its importance in everyday Muslim life - the papers foreground the ordinariness of Muslim life, marked by aspirations, improvisations, and hopeful futures. Contributors show how Muslims re-evaluate civic relations, engage creatively with state institutions, and develop alternative modes of belonging. Viewing the city as both archive and active site, the research highlights how Muslim subjectivities are shaped and expressed across time and space. The issue ultimately challenges reductive framings, offering a more expansive, relational understanding of Muslim agency.
We consider a bistable reaction- diffusion equation on in the presence of an obstacle , which is a wall of infinite span with many holes. More precisely, is a closed subset of with smooth boundary such that its projection onto the -axis is bounded and that is connected. Our goal is to study what happens when a planar traveling front coming from meets the wall . We first show that there is clear dichotomy between "propagation"and "blocking." In other words, the traveling front either passes through the wall and propagates toward (propagation) or is trapped around the wall (blocking), and that there is no intermediate behavior. This dichotomy holds for any type of walls of finite thickness. Next we discuss sufficient conditions for blocking and propagation. For blocking, assuming either that is periodic in or that the holes are localized within a bounded area, we show that blocking occurs if the holes are sufficiently narrow. For propagation, three different types of sufficient conditions for propagation will be presented, namely "walls with large holes," "small-capacity walls," and "parallel-blade walls." We also discuss complete and incomplete invasions.
Studying political activity on social media often requires defining and measuring political stances of users or content. Relevant examples include the study of opinion polarization, or the study of political diversity in online content diets. While many research designs rely on operationalizations best suited for the US setting, few allow addressing more general political systems, in which users and media outlets might exhibit stances on multiple ideology and issue dimensions, going beyond traditional Liberal-Conservative or Left-Right scales. To advance the study of more general online ecosystems, we present a dataset pertaining to a population of 519 K X/Twitter users, parliamentarians, and media outlets embedded in a political space spanned by dimensions measuring attitudes towards immigration, the EU, liberal values, elites and institutions, nationalism and the environment, in addition to left-right and liberal-conservative scales. We include indicators of individual activity and popularity: mean number of posts per day, number of followers, and number of followees. We provide several benchmarks validating the positions of these entities and discuss several applications for this dataset.
