The diffusion of social practices, technologies, and knowledge between municipalities

The energy transition requires new conceptual frames to understand the emergence of new spatial patterns and developing new geographies of energy. This article uses Hungary as a case study to examine the role of spatial dependency for the household energy mix, especially for traditional heating fuels, and the adoption of modern technologies such as heat pumps, solar collectors and panels. Theoretically, the article expands the use of the energy ladder, and understanding of social practices around energy technology diffusion. The Global and Local Moran I are used to test for the spatial autocorrelation, to identify hot and cold spots of different fuels, and for clustering the municipalities. Spatial (LAG) model is developed to determine the main drivers of the low-quality fuel use. The results indicate that beyond socio-economic indicators, spatial location also has a significant impact on household energy use and households with a similar energy mix are spatially concentrated. Municipalities, just as households, occupy different levels of the energy ladder. These findings confirm the need for spatially concentrated and localized energy policies for the just energy transition

Külgazdaság

Miközben 2019 őszén már jól látható volt a pénzpiacok túlértékeltsége, és csak az volt a kérdés, milyen váratlan esemény váltja ki a 11 év után már időszerű – sőt, talán törvényszerű (Csaba, 2018) – válságot, értve ezen az aktívák jelentős újraér-tékelését, merőben meglepő volt, hogy a kiváltó, a „trigger” egy egészségügyi jár-ványhelyzet volt. A megelőző évek nagy járványai a madárinfluenzától a HIV-en át az eboláig szörnyű emberi áldozatokkal jártak, de nem eredményezték a makrogaz-daság elakadását, sőt lassulását sem. While in the autumn of 2019 the overvaluation of the financial markets was already clearly visible, and the only question was what unexpected event would trigger the crisis, which after 11 years was already timely - and perhaps even legitimate (Csaba, 2018) - by which I mean a significant revaluation of assets, it was a complete surprise that the trigger was a health emergency. The major epidemics of the previous years, from avian flu to HIV to Ebola, had resulted in terrible human casualties, but they had not led to a stalling or even a slowdown in macro-agriculture

understanding interest groups-legislators ties on social media in the European Parliament

The rise of social media added an important new arena for interest group activities aimed at information-gathering, accessing decision-makers and influencing policymaking. A key theoretical and empirical puzzle is what drives interest groups’ decisions to follow some legislators on social media, but not others? We examine the conditions under which EU interest groups follow MEPs on Twitter. We develop an argument highlighting the importance of shared policy preferences and MEPs’ power as main drivers of the Twitter-following decision. We argue that the effect of both factors is reinforced when legislators are interested in the same issues that organisations care for, by virtue of their specialised committee work and shared national background. We test our argument on a unique dataset recording information about Twitter ties between 6842 organisations and 80 per cent of MEPs serving in the EP8. Our Exponential Random Graph Models show that organisations are significantly more likely to follow policy-proximate and powerful MEPs, with power being a particularly strong predictor of a Twitter-following tie. Sharing national background reinforces these positive effects, while sharing interests in the same policy domains does not. We contribute to the emergent research on interest groups and social media and the established research on legislative lobbying

Climate change anxiety and its effect on emotional and functional health:Regional analysis

This study examines the impact of climate change anxiety on emotional and functional health across diverse demographic groups. Using Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, and Duhok as a case study, demographic predictors, and functional impairments, were assessed by the Climate Change Anxiety Scale (CCAS). A cross-sectional study was conducted between July 28, 2024, and January 28, 2025, in the three main cities of the Kurdistan Region, using a convenience sampling method. Data were collected using the 13-item Climate Change Anxiety Scale (CCAS), translated into Kurdish and Arabic. The tool measured cognitive-emotional and functional impairment domains. Statistical analysis was performed using SPSS version 29. Chi-square, Kruskal–Wallis, Mann–Whitney U, Pearson correlation, and regression analyses were used to examine associations and predictors of climate anxiety. The results show that cognitive-emotional factors significantly predicted functional impairment, explaining 70.3 % of the variance, with a strong correlation (r = 0.838). The findings suggest that climate change anxiety negatively affects emotional and functional well-being, particularly among older individuals, urban residents, and those in financially precarious situations. This study concludes that high levels of climate anxiety are influenced by age, geography, and housing. Interventions should promote resilience, awareness, and sustainable urban planning. Integrated policies and further research are essential to address these challenges

Political alignment and the distribution of investment subsidies:quasi-experimental evidence from Germany

In fiscally decentralized countries, intergovernmental transfers are essential for reducing regional disparities and ensuring equitable public good provision. However, extensive research has shown that these transfers are often politicized, with higher-level governments disproportionately favoring districts governed by political allies. While this pattern is well-documented in competitive federal systems, less is known about whether party favoritism persists in cooperative federal systems, where intergovernmental interdependence and institutional constraints are designed to limit discretionary allocation. This paper investigates whether partisan alignment between local, state, and federal governments influences the distribution of public investment subsidies in Germany’s cooperative federalism. To test this, we constructed a novel dataset (1995–2018) combining data on investment subsidies to all German districts from federal and state governments with information on partisan alignment across all three governance levels. Using matching techniques and difference-in-differences estimators, we identify the causal effect of political alignment on subsidy allocation. Our findings show that partisan favoritism influences state-level investment subsidies but not federal-level subsidies. At the state level, this effect is particularly pronounced at the end of election cycles, in electorally competitive districts, for right-wing parties, and in West Germany. These findings indicate that party favoritism also influences discretionary transfers like investment subsidies under cooperative federalism but that the political economy of intergovernmental transfers is more intricate than in competitive fiscal federal systems

Causal Perception(s)

In addition to detecting “low-level” features like shape, color, and movement, the human visual system perceives certain “higher-level” properties of the environment, like cause-and-effect interactions. The strongest evidence that we have true causal perception and not just inference comes from the phenomenon of retinotopically specific visual adaptation to launching, which shows that launching events have specialized processing at a point in the visual system that still uses the surface of the retina as its frame of reference. Using this paradigm, we show that the visual system adapts to two distinct causal features found in different types of interaction: a broad “launching-like” causality that is found in many billiard-ball-like collision events including “tool-effect” displays, “bursting,” and event “state change” events; and an “entraining” causality in events where one object contacts and then moves together with another. Notably, adaptation to entraining is not based on continuous motion alone, as the movement of a single object does not generate the adaptation effect. These results not only demonstrate the existence of multiple causal perceptions, but also begin to characterize the precise features that define these different causal event categories in perceptual processing

Toward a Qualitative Study of the American Voter

The contemporary field of American political behavior lacks a methodological tradition of in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork. In this article, we illustrate the causes and consequences of this gap and argue for a renewal of methodological pluralism. First, we situate the current dearth of qualitative approaches within two key methodological debates during the behavioral turn in political science, showing that scholars initially embraced open-ended interviews and fieldwork but that these methods were ultimately sidelined. Although qualitative approaches persisted in historical and institutional research on American politics, their marginalization within the field of American political behavior has come at significant conceptual cost. Second, to redress this loss, we draw on existing discussions of the comparative advantages of qualitative methods to propose a framework for reintegrating interviews and ethnography into the study of American political behavior. We identify four “modes of inquiry” that should inform qualitative and mixed-methods research design in the subfield: innovating theoretically through the discovery of surprising findings, innovating theoretically through research design and case selection, identifying how contexts shape meaning-making, and tracking dynamic processes of change

Anscombe, joint action, and the guise of the good

Discussion of Anscombean joint action has thus far focused primarily on the possibility of joint practical knowledge. In this paper, I raise an under-recognised problem for theorists of Anscombean joint action: how can we make sense of the idea that action is taken under the guide of the good in cases of joint action? Considerable collaboration seems possible in the absence of any shared characterisation of the good to be achieved in thus acting. I sketch some straightforward responses to this problem and suggest that they all face problems, before finally briefly gesturing towards a more promising avenue of response