Abstract Birth spacing remains a critical determinant of maternal and child health, yet marked socioeconomic and geographic inequalities persist in many low- and middle-income countries. This study examines the determinants of succeeding birth intervals among Ghanaian women aged 15–49 using nationally representative data from the 2022 Ghana Demographic and Health Survey. A survey-weighted Cox proportional hazards model was employed to account for right-censoring and the complex multistage sampling design. The outcome variable was the duration, in months, between consecutive live births. The findings reveal pronounced structural gradients in birth spacing. Higher household wealth and maternal secondary education were associated with significantly lower hazards of a subsequent birth, indicating longer intervals. Partner’s secondary and higher education demonstrated similar protective effects. Rural residence, certain regional contexts, specific ethnic affiliations, and older partner age were associated with elevated hazards. A strong parity gradient was observed, with higher birth orders associated with substantially reduced hazards of another birth. The survival status of the index child emerged as a key predictor, consistent with replacement dynamics following child mortality. Diagnostic testing confirmed that proportional hazards assumptions were satisfied and multicollinearity was minimal. Generally, birth spacing in Ghana is shaped more strongly by structural and contextual determinants than by individual demographic characteristics such as maternal age or employment. Policies aimed at reducing reproductive health inequalities must therefore prioritize equitable access to family planning, expansion of female education, and regionally tailored reproductive health interventions.
Abstract Many political scientists view electoral systems as falling on a continuum between pure proportional representation and single-member district voting. The closer an electoral system is to single-member district voting, the more strongly it tends to favor larger parties in the translation of votes into seats, thereby incentivizing voters to concentrate their support on larger parties. Although the continuum perspective is widespread, there is still no reliable measure that allows real-world electoral systems to be classified continuously with sufficient precision. This paper proposes a simulation-based approach that combines Monte Carlo methods with the Gallagher index to rank electoral systems along the continuum. Using a standardized procedure, 10,000 random vote distributions are generated for each UN member state. Based on these distributions, seats are allocated according to the respective electoral system, and the Gallagher index is calculated for each simulated vote distribution. Averaging the index values yields the simulative disproportionality index (DPIsim), which indicates where an electoral system is located on the proportional–majoritarian continuum. In contrast to empirical election results, simulated election outcomes are not affected by variation in strategic voting behavior or party system configurations and thus allow for more consistent comparisons across electoral systems.
Abstract This study aims to examine the environmental impacts of economic growth, green technology innovation, and natural resources, particularly the ecological footprint across NAFTA countries, for the period 1981–2019, from a robust econometric perspective. Utilizing novel Fourier ADL and Fourier-frequency Toda-Yamamoto frameworks to account for structural shifts, the long-run estimates reveal that economic growth and natural resource abundance exert a positive and significant influence on the ecological footprint. Conversely, green technology innovation is found to significantly mitigate environmental degradation. The causality analysis uncovers country-specific dynamics: a unidirectional causality from economic growth to the ecological footprint in Canada, from ecological footprint to the economic growth in Mexico, and a bidirectional relationship in the USA. Furthermore, bidirectional causality is observed between green technology and the ecological footprint in Canada, whereas a unidirectional causality from green innovation to the footprint in Mexico. Across the entire NAFTA countries, a bidirectional causality persists between natural resources and the ecological footprint. The policy focus should shift from managing the balance between growth and the environment to creating synergy through radical technological innovation.
Abstract One key component of electoral systems is ballot design. This paper focuses on the consequences of alternative – more expressive – ballot designs in terms of party performance and voter behavior. Expressive voting methods are expected to reduce wasted votes and vote splitting, potentially penalizing polarizing parties and favoring consensual ones. Yet, empirical studies show that far-right candidates perform worse under alternative rules, raising concerns about ideological asymmetry. We test this prediction in a limit case: the 2022 Italian general election, where the far-right party Brothers of Italy (FdI) was projected to win. Using an original pre-electoral online survey with a nationally representative sample ( N = 1,021), we simulate party rankings and vote shares under multiple alternative voting rules: ranked-choice, approval, score, and evaluative voting. Under all tested methods, FdI would have remained the largest party. Performance shifts primarily reflect the attenuation of strategic overstatement for viable parties and coalition dynamics rather than ideological orientation. Quorum and top-three parties lose relative support, whereas smaller coalition parties gain modestly. We further examine party exclusivity through co-approvals and distributional analysis as well as voter exclusivity through bullet voting, extreme-grade voting, and t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) dimension reduction. Neither form of exclusivity is systematically associated with ideological orientation. These findings suggest that, in mixed electoral systems, viability incentives are stronger predictors of party performance than ideological polarization under alternative voting methods.
Abstract This study explores the interplay between behavioral heterogeneity, cultural transmission, and environmental policy within an overlapping generations framework to address sustainability challenges. The model incorporates behavioral heterogeneity, intergenerational awareness dynamics, and the trade-offs between consumption and education investment. Numerical simulations highlight three key findings. First, in the absence of policy intervention, environmental quality and awareness converge to low steady states, leading to a “low-sustainability trap.” Second, balanced policy mixes – combining pollution taxation with sustained education investment – are more effective than isolated instruments in fostering long-run sustainability. Third, cultural transmission plays a critical role: stronger intergenerational awareness transfer reduces the policy effort required to stabilize the system. The results carry practical implications for both advanced and emerging economies, suggesting that context-specific policy design, intergenerational education strategies, and cultural reinforcement mechanisms are essential to achieving durable environmental outcomes.
Abstract In 2022, SARS-CoV-2 vaccines were available in Germany. Nevertheless, ∼22 % of the population remained unvaccinated. Meanwhile, hospitalization costs due to severe COVID-19 were significant. In consequence, public debate emerged over whether unvaccinated individuals should contribute towards their (often significant) hospitalization costs. However, it remained unclear what public attitudes were towards this suggestion, which is important as political consequences, such as fierce popular resistance and pertinent costs, can significantly outweigh the benefits, if popular support is lacking in democratic societies. We, therefore, assessed public support for requiring unvaccinated individuals to contribute towards their COVID-19 hospitalization costs and examined how different frames influence this support. A randomized, controlled survey experiment was conducted in July 2022 (n = 6,725 Germans). Respondents answered whether unvaccinated individuals hospitalized due to COVID-19 should contribute to treatment costs and, if so, the proportion they deem adequate. Participants were randomized to one of five study arms: control group (no framing) or one of four experimental groups with frames highlighting individual or collective, and economic or health, consequences of severe COVID-19 or Long COVID. Due to the strong moral polarisation between SARS-CoV-2 vaccination advocates and opponents, which likely also affects views on cost-sharing, this analysis can be understood as a least likely design, since, under these circumstances, no significant effect of any kind of political framing can be assumed. In the control group, 46.6 % supported cost-sharing by unvaccinated, with an average contribution of 45.5 %. Economic framing had a modest but statistically significant positive effect: one frame increased support by 27 % ( p = 0.01) compared to the control (no a framing message). Framing did not significantly influence the size of the contribution deemed appropriate. Compared to some of the controls, and in line with the assumption of the least-likely design, the found framing effects were not particularly strong. The most influential predictor was vaccination status: fully vaccinated individuals were 96-times more likely to support cost-sharing than unvaccinated peers. Framing effects were moderated by political affiliation and personality traits. Long COVID frames had no significant overall effect but produced divergent effects across political affiliations. For example, Long COVID Frame 1 decreased support among supporters of the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) but increased it among supporters of the Social Democrats (SPD). While support for requiring unvaccinated individuals to share COVID-19 treatment costs is primarily driven by personal vaccination status, messaging effects also depend on political orientation and personality traits. Since even small changes in public health compliance can already make an important difference with regard to reducing infectious disease transmission or achieving herd immunity, these comparatively small framing effects that we find are nevertheless important – particularly as they present one of the very few relatively cost-effective and simple options that policymakers can take to combat a pandemic and they stand in stark contrast to harsh policies that involve severe restrictions on personal freedoms (such as compulsory vaccination, curfews, etc.). Public health strategies aiming to increase vaccine uptake or justify cost-sharing policies may benefit from targeted communication strategies that align with audience-specific values and partisanship.
The K-12 curriculum was implemented in the Philippines in 2013 and took effect in 2015. Despite the additional 2 years of secondary education, recent studies show a decline in returns to higher education in the country. This paper aims to identify the role of beyond-secondary education in explaining wage differentials before and during the implementation of the K-12 curriculum. We also analyze specific levels of beyond-secondary educational attainment and determine if their contribution to wage differentials applies to low-wage or high-wage workers. Using the Unconditional Quantile Regression and Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition technique, results reveal that returns to post-secondary graduate (Certificate and Associate’s degree) and college graduate (Bachelor’s degree) educational levels contributed to the reduction of wage gains between 2015 and 2019. Specifically, this applies more to low-wage female and low-to relatively high-wage male workers. This implies that despite higher household investments in higher education, lower real wage growth reduced the expected benefits. Further findings from the selectivity-corrected conditional regression confirm a decrease in estimates for beyond-secondary educational attainments between 2015 and 2019.
This study investigates the professional integration of young applied statistics graduates in Algeria using the Cox proportional hazards model. Analyzing time-to-employment duration, the study identifies key determinants influencing workforce entry. Findings reveal significant effects of language proficiency and cohort year. Arabic proficiency was associated with lower employment hazards compared to French, while English proficiency exhibited higher hazards. The 2000–2004 cohort demonstrated substantially prolonged job-seeking duration relative to recent graduates. Lack of open positions emerged as the predominant obstacle to employment, followed by procedural difficulties and skill mismatches. The public sector absorbed most graduates, with services and public administration being the largest employers. Though no gender differences in hazards were found, males exhibited longer mean survival times to first employment. This research provides insights into challenges faced by Algerian statisticians, highlighting determinants of successful professional integration and implications for enhancing employability through tailored policies and interventions.
This paper investigates the role of government support in driving socio-economic benefits during renewable energy transitions, using Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 as a pivotal case study of a fossil-fuel-dependent economy. This study tests the central hypothesis that a bundled approach – integrating financial, regulatory, and localization policies – generates amplified outcomes compared to isolated interventions. Our analysis employs panel data from 42 renewable energy firms (2012–2024) using dynamic fixed-effects, system GMM, and Vector Autoregression (VAR) models to establish causal inference and trace temporal dynamics. The findings offer critical policy implications for designing state-led energy transitions, underscoring the necessity of policy bundling under a unified vision, the primacy of regulatory precision for equitable poverty reduction, and the importance of complementary measures for small and medium enterprises to ensure inclusive growth alongside localization mandates. Our results demonstrate that coordinated post-2016 policy implementation under Vision 2030 significantly enhanced socio-economic returns: financial support rapidly expanded renewable capacity and reduced fossil fuel imports; regulatory frameworks delivered the most significant and sustained reductions in energy poverty; and localization mandates spurred job creation, despite initially raising carbon costs. Furthermore, a crucial sequencing effect emerged, with financial stimuli yielding rapid but short-term gains, while regulatory and localization impacts developed more slowly yet produced more durable improvements in social welfare and labor markets.
The contribution of cocoa to the economies of countries, especially producing countries cannot be understated. However, volatility in the prices of commodities affect all stakeholders in the production value chain as it affects planning, policy implementation and mitigation of risks. Thus, it is very crucial to be able to forecast cocoa prices with a high degree of certainty. Hence, this study modeled cocoa prices in Ghana using 15 machine learning models and their corresponding decomposition based hybrid models. The machine learning models incorporated input variables, including interest rates, inflation rates and crude oil prices. Variational mode decomposition (VMD) and ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) techniques were applied to the data and the 15 models were further used to model the data, thus obtaining 30 hybrid models. The results of the study revealed that among the 15 machine learning models, quantile random forest model was the best for the data set. Generally, EEMD hybrid models performed better than the VMD based models, with EEMD-generalized additive model with splines being the best hybrid model. The findings show that interest rates play a major role in the prediction of cocoa prices in Ghana. This was closely followed by crude oil prices. Hence, it is recommended that policies that would reflect favorable interest rates and crude oil prices are implemented by policy makers.
On February 4, 2025, U.S. President Trump’s proposal to take over Gaza shocked the world. This study aims to interpret the policy shift by analyzing evolving U.S. public opinion on Gaza. Using Google Trends data from September 2018 to March 2025, it constructs innovative time series variables to capture the U.S. public agenda. The analysis reveals a structural shift in public sentiment beginning in October 2023. Prior to that, opinion was largely reactive to isolated extreme events. Afterward, discourse was driven by polarized narratives: (far)-left slogans such as “Free Palestine” and “From the River to the Sea,” and far-right apocalyptic themes, proxied by interest in Jesus’ Second Coming. A parallel humanitarian layer within pro-Israel attention—captured by searches for “Israel hostages”—is also consistently significant and positively associated with the Gaza narrative. By contrast, legal–humanitarian framing (“Gaza Genocide”) and mainstream solidarity slogans (“Stand with Israel”) are generally less significant or less stable. Overall, extreme framings dominate, but hostage-related humanitarian concerns remain an important driver of attention, with implications for U.S. policy agenda. Future research should examine whether other Trump–Vance policies exhibit similar patterns.
Tuberculosis (TB) represents a major threat to global health security and is currently the world most deadly infectious disease. TB is noted to affect people of all age groups and exposure to the disease has been shown to exhibit variation in the risk of infection across different factors. This study was therefore carried out to identify possible disease associations of some risk factors in relation to time until onset of TB among TB infected individuals in the Bolgatanga Municipality of the Upper East Region of Ghana. To this end, secondary data on time until onset of TB was obtained from the Bolgatanga Regional Hospital of the Upper East Region of Ghana and used for statistical analysis. In order to obtain appropriate underlying disease associations, the Bayesian approach to the modelling of survival time was employed in the statistical analyses. Thus, different parametric models including; skew normal, lognormal, shifted lognormal, exponential, Weibull and Fréchet models were fitted to the TB data within the Bayesian framework. The Weibull was the overall best fitted model. Based on the estimation results of the Bayesian Weibull regression model; individuals with no education, individuals with diabetes and males were identified as high-risk groups with shorter time frame for the onset of TB in the Bolgatanga Municipality. The study was concluded by indicating the need for Ghana Health Service to institute targeted interventions aimed at preventing and controlling the TB with special emphasis to the high-risk groups in the Bolgatanga Municipality.
Having long been largely ignored in political science, emotions have become increasingly acknowledged as integral to human life, making them the subject of academic interest for political and social psychologists, political scientists and policy scholars alike. Challenging an understanding of reason and affect as one of opposition, empirical as well as theoretical work analysing the effects of emotions in political communication, voting behaviour, populism and public policymaking is continuously growing. There is therefore an increased need to take stock of these recent scientific advances on the role of emotions in the political sphere, and more importantly, with regards to public policymaking. This two-fold literature review provides such a state-of-the-art in a systematic and critical manner, showing that whereas knowledge on emotions in the broader realm of politics is already extensive, there is far less on public policies. In fact, from a policy studies perspective, it is policy preferences and policy-related communication which have enjoyed most of scholarly attention, thereby neglecting the concrete role of emotion in the process of public policymaking. Future studies should focus more on the effects of emotions on the actual making of policies.
This study examined GDP per Capita, military expenditure, trade openness capital formation, inflation and unemployment as determinants of political instability in ECOWAS from 1991 to 2022. Four countries in ECOWAS that have experienced military coup/political instability (Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali and Niger) and another four countries that have not had military coup (Cote dÍvore, Ghana, Nigeria and Togo) were used for the study. The article modeled the independent equations for each country to show how the various countries’ cross-sectional indicators/variables affect political instability. Findings show that the major determinants of political instability in ECOWAS are GDP per Capita, military expenditure, and trade openness. GDP per Capita is negatively related to political instability in Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali and Niger. A 1 %, increase in GDP leads to a, 0.067 %. 0.002 %, 0.001 % and 0.041 % in Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali and Niger respectively. Military expenditure has a negative influence on political instability in Burkina Faso, and Niger but positively influences in Mali. A 1 %, increase in military expenditure in Burkina Faso and Niger reduces political instability by 0.196 % and 0.045 % respectively. Trade openness positively impacts on political instability in Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Mali. The statistics illustrate that a % increase in trade openness leads to about 0.0925 %, 0.029 % and 0.625 % in Burkina Faso in Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Mali respectively. Hence, GDP per Capita, military expenditure, trade openness, and unemployment are the main drivers of political instability in the region. The results from the four countries that did not experience democratic reversal during the study period reveal that GDP per capita, military expenditure and unemployment are significant and inversely related to political instability. The results from the aggregate analysis of the countries without military coups show that military expenditure (0.155 %), unemployment (0.164 %) and GDPC (0.00045 %) are significant and inversely related to political instability in these countries. This suggests that these countries are susceptible to political instability. Thus, the study recommends that governments in the ECOWAS region should invest in people-oriented projects to lift citizens out of poverty, cater adequately for security agencies and minimize undue interference in their economy’s economic, political and social structure by foreign actors.
Remittances from Kerala’s migrant workers and professionals constitute a vital financial inflow, surpassing their relative significance in most other Indian states. With public debt nearing 60 % of NSDP, these transfers offer a potential buffer for debt sustainability. Applying Oates’ theory within Bohn’s debt-sustainability framework using an FMOLS model, and validated through Johansen testing, this study examines the remittance–debt nexus from 1980 to 2023. FMOLS results indicate a deterioration of debt sustainability despite substantial remittance inflows. The findings emphasize the need to reduce market borrowings, enhance the fiscal role of remittances, and promote policies supporting formal transfer channels, source diversification, remittance-linked investment, and financial literacy among migrant households to strengthen Kerala’s long-term fiscal resilience and enable more productive use of remittances.
The need for safety is one of the basic human needs. States implement different protective policies to fulfil the task of granting safety to their citizens. Aim of the present study conducted online on a representative sample of Polish citizens ( N = 1,124), was to explore emotions potentially evoked by seven protective policies in the areas of: the economy, social welfare, health, personal security from crime and terrorism, one’s own way of life, tradition and culture of the country, as well as climate and environment. It also examined the relationship between emotional responses to protective policies across these different policy areas and the political orientation of participants, together with their socio-demographic characteristics. The results showed that emotions evoked by protective policies vary across areas of protection. Only four emotions (discouragement, anxiety, disappointment, and dissatisfaction) were indicated by more than 10 % of adult Poles in all areas of protection. Age of respondents was the most systematic predictor for all policies. Although there were general trends in emotional reactions to all policies, there were also area-specific emotions and their predictors. These include policy-specific emotions such as grief in the area of economy, despair in the area of healthcare (with gender and political orientation as predictors), and pride in the area of protecting traditions and culture in Poland (with political orientation as a predictor). Protective policy regarding climate was the only one that evoked only negative emotions. The area of economy was the one with the largest number of different emotions indicated.
Research on representation and responsiveness is based on the idea that voters have concerns about certain policy problems and that representatives respond to these concerns with concrete policy outputs, such as laws. In addition, once adopted, this policy output can feed back on voters’ concerns which are then satisfied. Consequently, citizens do not demand more of the respective policy (negative feedback, thermostatic model (Soroka & Wlezien 2010)) or are, in contrast, incited toward demanding even more of the policy (positive feedback, policy overreaction (Maor 2014, Jones et al 2014)). In this research note, I argue that by focussing mainly on such preference-policy linkages, existing research has underestimated the role emotions play in this “chain of responsiveness” (Powell 2004), especially when it comes to protective policies, that is policies that are presented as providing protection to citizens. I propose an amended concept of responsiveness which adds an emotional layer to the existing framework and present an empirical exploration on the emotion-policy link on the micro level using data from the European Social Survey which indicates the fruitfulness to bring in emotions more plainly into the literature on responsiveness.
How does support for civil liberties prevail in times of external threat? Simultaneously, how does internal polarisation affect how tightly citizens hold to these liberties? We argue citizens may follow partisanship in evaluating foreign threats, supporting erosion of liberties if co-partisans advocate it in favour of national security. We conduct a survey experiment on a representative sample of 3281 US citizens, treating them with vignettes of potential conflict with China attributed to randomly varying partisanship. We interact such treatments with respondents’ own partisanship, then measure support for various civil liberties. Our findings yield mixed results and we are unable to decisively demonstrate that co-partisans are better at encouraging the surrender of civil liberties. This is congruent with other recent research that also shows partisan polarisation may neither lighten nor worsen in times of external threat.
This study examines the economic and geopolitical determinants of Indonesia’s defense expenditure from 1984 to 2022 using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model to capture both short-term and long-term dynamics. Recognizing the contextual relevance of Indonesia’s Total People’s Defense and Security System (SISHANKAMRATA), the analysis relies on conventional military expenditure data (% of GDP) due to the absence of consolidated multi-ministerial records. The results show that in the short run, defense spending is highly sensitive to macroeconomic shocks: inflation, exchange rate volatility, and foreign direct investment exert negative effects, while debt, trade openness, and regional military expenditure strengthen budgetary allocations. In the long run, macroeconomic fundamentals (debt, growth, inflation, and foreign investment) together with neighboring countries’ military spending drive defense expenditure, whereas regional average spending has a negative effect and U.S. military expenditure does not show a structural impact. These findings underscore the dual pressures of fiscal fragility and regional security competition in shaping Indonesia’s defense budget. Policy implications highlight the importance of inflation-adjusted and exchange rate–resilient budgeting, sustainable financing mechanisms such as defense bonds or a Defense Sovereign Wealth Fund (D-SWF), and deeper ASEAN defense cooperation to balance security needs with fiscal discipline. This study contributes a macro-level perspective on defense economics under conditions of institutional fragmentation, offering a framework for future comparative and panel-based research across decentralized security systems.
