Oversight, scholars argue, allows Congress to control the executive agents it empowers to implement law. Yet the tools of oversight are rather limited and debate continues as to how much influence oversight provides. How well can members of Congress motivate bureaucratic performance? To measure the efficacy of oversight, we create a new dataset matching oversight efforts to a bureaucratic deficiency Congress has sought to reduce since the early 2000s: improperly made payments to contractors and clients. We estimate the effect of congressional hearings, one of the most important tools of congressional oversight, as well as correspondence, appropriation committee reports, statutes, and executive action. We find that hearings lead to subsequent declines in improper payments. The magnitude of the effect, however, is small relative to the scope of the problem, suggesting strong limits on the efficacy of oversight. Our findings imply that America’s elected officials struggle to effectively manage implementation of policy.

We prove a large deviation principle for the slow-fast rough differential equations (RDEs) under the controlled rough path (RP) framework. The driver RPs are lifted from the mixed fractional Brownian motion (FBM) with Hurst parameter $H\in (1/3,1/2)$. Our approach is based on the continuity of the solution mapping and the variational framework for mixed FBM. By utilizing the variational representation, our problem is transformed into a qualitative property of the controlled system. In particular, the fast RDE coincides with Itô stochastic differential equation (SDE) almost surely, which possesses a unique invariant probability measure with frozen slow component. We then demonstrate the weak convergence of the controlled slow component by averaging with respect to the invariant measure of the fast equation and exploiting the continuity of the solution mapping.

Leadership emergence is fraught with pervasive gender stereotypes, and women remain underrepresented in senior leadership roles, particularly in healthcare organisations. We apply ecological systems theory to explain how environmental factors enable or inhibit women’s leadership emergence in healthcare settings. We interviewed 17 senior female leaders in the Australian healthcare sector to explore how gender-related perceptions affected their leadership journeys. Five themes emerged that challenge existing narratives: men supported women’s advancement; women impeded other women’s progress; vulnerability was a leadership strength; ambitious women were ostracised; and women were ‘given’ leadership opportunities rather than actively pursuing them. By situating these findings within the ecological systems theory framework, we highlight the interplay of individual and contextual influences across ecosystem levels. Our study offers a novel perspective on gender stereotypes in leadership emergence, advancing ecological systems theory by extending it into a new field. We provide recommendations at individual, organisational, community, and societal levels to empower women leaders.

This paper considers the large N limit of Wilson loops for the two-dimensional Euclidean Yang–Mills measure on all orientable compact surfaces of genus larger or equal to $1$, with a structure group given by a classical compact matrix Lie group. Our main theorem shows the convergence of all Wilson loops in probability, given that it holds true on a restricted class of loops, obtained as a modification of geodesic paths. Combined with the result of [20], a corollary is the convergence of all Wilson loops on the torus. Unlike the sphere case, we show that the limiting object is remarkably expressed thanks to the master field on the plane defined in [3, 39], and we conjecture that this phenomenon is also valid for all surfaces of higher genus. We prove that this conjecture holds true whenever it does for the restricted class of loops of the main theorem. Our result on the torus justifies the introduction of an interpolation between free and classical convolution of probability measures, defined with the free unitary Brownian motion but differing from t-freeness of [5] that was defined in terms of the liberation process of Voiculescu [67]. In contrast to [20], our main tool is a fine use of Makeenko–Migdal equations, proving uniqueness of their solution under suitable assumptions, and generalising the arguments of [21, 33].

Returning from a four-month tour in America, the Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga (1871–1940) stopped for a few days in Switzerland, on his way home. On May 7, 1930, he gave a lecture in Bern on medieval peasants and their struggle for freedom in the 14th century. Peasants against feudal armies inspired memories from America. However, Iorga, who was at the time preoccupied with questions of world history and comparative research, did not simply associate the War of Independence with the victory of the Swiss “peasants” at Sempach against Duke Leopold III of Tyrol. He drew a parallel between the military success of the Eidgenossen of 1386 and the defeat inflicted 56 years earlier upon the king of Hungary, Charles I, by Romanian peasants. The battle, on the 600th anniversary of which Iorga delivered his lecture, was illustrated in the Hungarian Illuminated Chronicle. The Romanian historian was convinced that the illustrator had been an eyewitness or, at least, somebody informed by a participant. There is no mention of peasants in the text of the Chronicle, but on the basis of the last illuminations in the manuscript, Iorga thought he could recognize the dress of the Romanian peasants of his own time: the woolen hat (căciulă, a sort of Phrygian cap); the long, braided hair; the leather jacket doubled with wool; the leggings; and the leather sandals (opinci). The Romanians fought like peasants as well: they cut trees in the forest, which they then pushed over King Charles and his heavy cavalry. Iorga did not find this detail either in the text or in the illuminations of the Hungarian Chronicle. He got it from the Chronicle of the Prussian Land by Peter of Dusburg, although that source is not mentioned in the lecture.

This article discusses the Swedish Business Fund (Näringslivets fond) from its creation in 1940, over the postwar decades of welfare state consensus and the radicalised 1970s into the privatisation drive of the 1980s. The article shows that the Fund was created to break the business interest out of the corporatist model and establish it as a market liberal voice in Swedish politics. In doing so, a main ambition of the Fund was to act as a battle instrument for business, and the article shows that it demonstrates a continuous presence of Hayekian thinking with the welfare state. The article revisits the story of the so-called wage earner funds debate (1976–83) and argues that the Fund saw anti-funds mobilisation in view of the preparation of a larger programme of privatisation.

To determine the prevalence of FA in individuals with type 2 diabetes and to assess the association between FA and type 2 diabetes. MEDLINE, EMBASE, Web of Sciences, Latin American and Caribbean Literature in Health Sciences, ScienceDirect, Scopus, and PsycINFO were searched until November 2024. This study was registered with PROSPERO (CRD42023465903). Cross-sectional studies, case-control, cohorts, and clinical trials that were carried out with individuals with type 2 diabetes, regardless of age and sex, were included. The complete data extracted included the prevalence, odds ratio, and/or risk ratio of FA, the number of individuals evaluated, age, sex, weight, presence of comorbidities, age of participants, and FA symptoms. A pooled prevalence of FA of 30% (95% CI [18; 44] with estimated predictive interval [0; 85]; I2 = 99.51; 12 studies; 15947 participants) was identified. For the associations between FA and type 2 diabetes, we found a grouped crude odds ratio value of 2.35 (95%CI [1.71; 2.98]). The pooled odds ratio adjusted for age and sex was 2.60 (95% CI [1.77; 3.42]). Finally, the odds ratio adjusted for age, sex, and body mass index (BMI) was 2.01 (95%CI [1.39; 2.64]). The results of the meta-analyses showed a high prevalence of FA in individuals with type 2 diabetes and that the associations between these two conditions remained even after adjustment for age, sex, and BMI, although with a high heterogeneity among individual estimates.

Despite the extensive research on bubble collapse near rigid walls, the bubble collapse dynamics in the presence of shear flow near a rigid wall is poorly understood. We conduct direct simulations of the Navier–Stokes equations to explore the bubble dynamics and pressures during bubble collapse near a rigid, flat wall under linear shear flow conditions. We examine the dependence of the bubble collapse morphology and wall pressures on the initial bubble location and shear rate. We find that shear distorts the bubble, generating two re-entrant jets – one developing from the side opposite to the mean flow and the other from the far end toward the wall. Upon impact of the jet on the opposite side of the bubble, water-hammer shocks are produced, which propagate outward and interact with the convoluted bubble shape. The shock stretches the bubble towards the wall, resulting in a closer impact location for the jet originating from the far end compared with the case with no shear flow. The water-hammer pressure location can be approximated as the theoretical distance travelled by a particle initialised at the bubble centre with the corresponding constant shear flow velocity. The maximum wall pressures can thus be predicted by considering the distance between the far jet impingement location and the wall along the wall-normal direction. As the shear rate is increased, the maximum wall pressure increases, although only marginally. We determine the critical initial stand-off distance from the wall at which the bubble morphology is shear dominated, i.e. characterised by converging re-entrant jets.

We prove that a group $\Gamma $ admits a discrete, topological (equivalently, smooth) action on some simply connected 3-manifold if and only if $\Gamma $ has a Cayley complex embeddable—with certain natural restrictions—in one of the following four 3-manifolds: (i) $\mathbb {S}^3$, (ii) $\mathbb {R}^3$, (iii) $\mathbb {S}^2 \times \mathbb R$, and (iv) the complement of a tame Cantor set in $\mathbb {S}^3$. The fact that these are the only simply connected 3-manifolds that allow such actions is a consequence of the Thurston–Perelman geometrization theorem.

How did the new Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) obtain 9% of the vote in the 2020 Romanian general elections? This article explores the fast rise of populist radical right (PRR) parties by examining the support for the AUR at the locality level in Romania during the coronavirus crisis. The AUR's discourse combined populism, nationalism and anti-masking rhetoric. The findings show great variation across the 3,181 localities, from 0% to 50% support for the AUR, and highlight the significant influence of local cultural and political factors, while economic explanations were not confirmed. The vote for the AUR was high in localities with low ethnic diversity and low voter turnout. This research underscores that national-level explanations obscure important dynamics of PRR support that take place at the subnational level. The rise of the AUR is important beyond the Romanian and European contexts and emphasizes the significance of local responses to global crises.

This Illustration focuses on Kua’nsi (kʰwa33n̩21si33, ISO639: ykn), a Central Ngwi (or Yi) language of the Sino-Tibetan family (Bradley 1997; Fan et al., 2017). It is spoken by approximately 5000 people in Liuhe Township (六合乡, Liùhé Xiāng), Heqing County (鹤庆县, Hèqìng Xiàn), Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan Province, China (see the map in Figure 1). Kua’nsi people refer to themselves as Kua’eshi (夸萼氏 Kuà’èshì) in Chinese and other ethnic groups, Bai (白 Bái) and Han (汉 Hàn) people living in the county, call them as Baiyi people (白依人 Báiyīrén) in Chinese because of their white traditional clothes.