This paper discusses the need for public policy limitation on two issues that the Nigerian Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act (SSMPA) regulates. First, the paper argues that the blanket non-recognition of the benefit(s) of same-sex marriage may breach Nigeria’s conflict of laws norms in certain transnational contexts. Second, it finds the prohibition of registration of gay clubs and organizations under the SSMPA a violation of the right to freedom of expression and association which both the Nigerian Constitution and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights guarantee. The paper therefore recommends an approach that Nigerian courts might adopt in determining whether the conferral of a specific benefit of same-sex marriage conflicts with Nigerian public policy in light of recent jurisprudence.

States began passing legislation that bans transgender athletes from competing on teams that match their gender identity in 2020. Republican lawmakers largely introduced and supported athlete bans, but were party preferences the only predictor of support for these bills? What effect did legislator demographics or district-level attributes have on the likelihood that a state legislator would support or oppose an athlete ban? This study explores the voting preferences of individual state legislators in states that passed athlete bans from 2020 to 2023. Using an original dataset and multilevel modeling, this analysis looks beyond party affiliation to determine whether a relationship exists between support and less apparent indicators such as district ideology and composition, gender, race, and electoral success. While party identification is a significant predictor of support, legislators representing districts characterized by lower educational attainment and a high proportion of evangelical Protestants are more likely to support transgender athlete bans.

This article examines the effects of changes in 2018–19 to the Income Tax Act and Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) regulations that were ostensibly intended to facilitate public policy engagement by Canadian charities. The article examines a case study of charities in the international development sector through interviews with charity leaders and quantitative analysis of data from the Canada Revenue Agency, Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying, and House of Commons Standing Committees. The article finds that the 2019 change in CRA regulations had very little effect on policy engagement by international development charities. Rather, a series of other factors continue to shape and constrain policy engagement by charities—including concerns about the future repoliticization of the CRA, misunderstandings of the regulations, difficulties fundraising for public policy work, fears of jeopardizing federal government funding, and a strategic preference for insider approaches to policy advocacy.

Welfarism is the idea that government should always try to make individuals’ lives go better, for them, than they otherwise would, overall. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate welfarism’s compatibility with, and potential to support, the ambitions of person-centred justice. Welfarism is a normative theory applicable to public policy generally, but one which has distinct consequences in the realm of law and legal systems. They are considered just to the extent that they generate the best possible expected welfare consequences for all of the individuals who are affected by them. Welfarism is radically person-centred because it requires lawmakers to treat each individual affected by their work as a distinct locus of value, including those who have been subordinated or ignored.

Politicians appear to overestimate how conservative public opinion is in the U.S. and other Western democracies. Whether this “conservative bias” extends to voters remains unclear but has important implications for belief formation and behavior. I examine this in the context of abortion access after the Dobbs decision. Despite the salience of the topic, original survey data collected post-Dobbs reveal consistent underestimation of public support for abortion access. Individuals identifying as “pro-life” drive most of this underestimation, suggesting the presence of egocentric biases in which “pro-life” Americans overestimate the commonality of their views. Conservative biases among voters may contribute to a skewed information environment for politicians, potentially providing leverage for further restrictions on abortion access.

Grandparent childcare is important to support parents’ work/care reconciliation. Research has begun to identify relationships between grandparent childcare patterns and policy settings. However, this work is disparate and focused on childcare policy, with little engagement with the broader range of policies that shape grandparent childcare. A holistic approach to understanding the relationship between policies and grandparent childcare is important to capture the intergenerational dynamics of family decisions about childcare and the complementarities (or not) of policies in different domains. This scoping review identifies policies that directly aim to shape grandparents’ involvement in childcare and that indirectly shape configurations of care. Most literature focuses on childcare and parental leave policies’ impact on parental demand for grandparent childcare. But a wider, intergenerational, policy lens reveals that policies (such as retirement income policies) affect parents’ demand for, and grandparents’ supply of childcare, and that policies in different domains are not always aligned.

Nathan Witkin, in his article The Cost of Closed Doors…, attempts to reframe the question of whether child dependency proceedings should be open or closed to the public and press by positing a balancing test between “dependent families seeking privacy…and the macro-level benefits of a more transparent system.” Witkin’s hypothesis is that opening dependency proceedings educates the public that child welfare spending must be increased, that transparency leads to “greater per capita” spending in open versus closed dependency systems, and finally, that more child welfare spending will result in fewer per capita child welfare fatalities in open court states. This article will examine both sides of Witkin’s proposed balancing test to demonstrate that his approach fails to prove his hypotheses. First, it will discuss how Witkin’s almost total reliance on twenty-five to thirty-year-old psychological studies rather than on contemporary mental health research substantially understates the potential dangers to child abuse victims, especially LGBTQ+ and polyvictimized children, from opening child dependency proceedings. Second, it will present evidence that the welfare budgets did not constantly increase in some closed court states that were later opened to the public, but rather fluctuated through sporadic ups and downs which over time resulted in almost no net longitudinal budgetary increases. Second, those originally closed courts that were later opened had their child fatality rates actually increase which is the opposite of Witkin’s predictions.

National innovation systems (NISs) have been important in the literature since the 1990s for highlighting the institutional performance of economies and promoting economic development. Inclusion in systemic innovation activities is an emerging area of research. However, the definition of inclusion within innovative activities remains unclear and is associated with numerous forms and characteristics depending on the context visited. Our work highlights the conceptual gap that exists around the notion of inclusive innovation by characterising three forms of inclusion in relation to innovation activities. We thus set out, in the form of a typology, three distinct framings which enable us to identify three different levels associated with specific institutional mechanisms and forms of inclusion. This typology makes it possible to identify appropriate innovation policies, depending on how inclusive innovation is characterised (low, medium, and high). It also helps to clarify the inclusive nature of innovation in NIS approaches.

This study explores the effectiveness of antipsychotic medications in restoring competency to stand trial in individuals with severe mental illness, particularly psychotic disorders. While antipsychotic medications are known for reducing symptoms of psychosis, this research focuses on their ability to improve functional outcomes necessary for competency to stand trial (CST). Among over 3,000 patients in California’s forensic state hospital system, 86.5% were successfully restored to competency, with 98.8% discharged on antipsychotic medications. Patients on antipsychotic monotherapy demonstrated higher restoration rates compared to those requiring additional mood stabilizers, suggesting that more complex cases demand more intensive treatment. Delusional disorder, traditionally seen as more resistant to treatment, showed a high restoration rate of 93.8% with antipsychotic use.

Our findings emphasize the pivotal role of antipsychotics in not only reducing symptoms but also in restoring critical functional abilities for participation in legal proceedings. The functional improvements they enable extend beyond the courtroom. Incorporation of antipsychotic medication as an integral evidence-based mechanism in facilitating community reintegration for individuals with severe mental illness supports the broader goal of transitioning individuals from the legal system back into society, consistent with the ultimate promise of deinstitutionalization.

A vast body of work investigates the consequences of legislative term limits for public policy. However, considerably less research has delved into their effects in noneconomic policy domains. In this article, we develop the argument that implemented term limits increase the effect that a state government’s ideology has on the state’s incarceration rate. When analyzing incarceration rates among all states between 1979 and 2017, we find evidence to support our theoretical expectation. Specifically, for states with term limits, we find that an increase in state government conservatism is associated with a higher incarceration rate. Conversely, for non-term-limited states, we find that the policy preferences of the state government have little influence on the incarceration rate. These findings deepen our insight into how institutional design can affect public policy.

We take a deep dive into the sponsorship and cosponsorship activity of Republicans in the US House of Representatives from 1993–2014 to examine how ideology and gender influence the policy priorities of Republican legislators on issues associated with women, as well as on the party-owned issue of tax policy. We expect that Republican women are cross-pressured since assumptions about their policy expertise as women conflict with the policy reputation of the Republican Party. As a result, Republican women’s policy choices are impacted by their ideology in a way that is different from their male counterparts. Moreover, our analysis of which members’ bills move through the legislative process demonstrates that beyond their own policy preferences, women are strategic party actors. Thus, women are only more likely to see action on their women-focused and anti-abortion proposals, the two areas that define the partisan divide over women’s place in society.

In this paper, I examine the factors associated with public attitudes toward foreign policy among white Americans and argue that racial attitudes play an important role. To test this hypothesis, I perform quantitative studies across four iterations of the American National Election Survey (ANES)—(1) 2012, (2) 2016, (3) 2020, and (4) the Cumulative Survey (1986–2020). While the results include white public opinion across several different areas of foreign policy across several decades of data, the findings are consistent: American foreign policy opinion among white Americans is highly racialized—meaning that their views on foreign policy are strongly associated with their views on race and racism. This study contributes to our knowledge of a relatively poorly understood phenomenon in American politics: how the American public forms their attitudes on foreign policy. Overall, I find strong evidence that racial attitudes play an important yet understudied role in the foreign policy attitudes of white Americans. This study also extends our knowledge of the role of racialization in public opinion and reminds us that while racism is one of the most central problems for U.S. domestic politics, we should also be wary of how these hierarchies of domination extend beyond our borders through its foreign relations.