Science

In recent years, some states have prioritized purging their voter rolls of those who have passed away or moved out of state. During election season, there is often increased discussion about the necessity and impact of these actions. Voter purging can be an important step for creating election integrity, but others have raised concerns about how the process is conducted and who it targets.

So, are there negative effects of voter purging? Researchers from Michigan State University wanted to find out—especially due to the minimal data that exists about who is purged at local and state levels. What their research suggests, published in the journal Social Science Quarterly, is that voter purging in Michigan disproportionately targets underrepresented and lower-income communities. Recently, the Michigan Senate recently passed a bill to expand voter rights and accessibility in the state.

Richard “Dick” Sadler is an associate professor in the departments of Public Health and Family Medicine at the College of Human Medicine, and Thomas “Wally” Wojciechowski is an assistant professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the College of Social Science. Together, they teamed up with community partner Eileen Hayes from Michigan Faith in Action to examine Michigan’s voter purging data and found troubling elements.

“Wally and I are both methodology experts: he knows statistics, I know spatial analysis,” Sadler said. But our disciplinary expertise in criminal justice and public health is also complementary, because the political system is intimately intertwined in both of these areas.

“Understanding the potential implications of which voters are being purged and where is important because protectors of democracy need to stay ahead of the ball when it comes to voter disenfranchisement, and it’s not always clear which purges are legitimate and which purges target oppressed population subgroups. And so, when my community partner (Eileen) reached out to me to study this issue, I jumped at the chance and knew Wally was the right collaborator for the project.”

Background on voter purging

Voter rights are an essential component to America’s democracy, but there has been a complicated history of disenfranchisement through poll taxes, literacy tests and other barriers to voting access. More modern forms include gerrymandering by cracking voters into districts, expelling members of chambers and now, voter purging when it comes to who it targets.

Voter purging is a practice that removes duplicate voter records, voters who are deceased, voters with felony convictions, or those who have moved to a different jurisdiction, among other reasons.

Key modern examples include Georgia, where 100,000 voters were purged prior to the 2016 presidential primary, which impacted the 2018 gubernatorial race, and North Carolina purged 10% of its total voters after the 2016 election. There have also been cases in Michigan where outside groups tried to purge voter rolls in places like Detroit.

In these cases, the intent or result was that it influenced who participated in the election because many living people were purged erroneously, so the purpose was not just to maintain accurate voter rolls.

Method of data examination

In Michigan, the Bureau of Elections maintains a qualified voter file and voter records are canceled for the reasons noted earlier. Michigan uses the Electronic Registration Information Center, also known as ERIC, to uphold integrity by maintaining roles and notifying voters if they are not registered.

For their study, Sadler and Wojciechowski analyzed the just over 175,000 voters purged from the qualified voter file from Nov. 4, 2014, to Nov. 5, 2018, which equated to 2.5% of the 6.7 million voters in Michigan during that time.

They then brought in data considering four associated factors: total population density, racial composition, socioeconomic status and population residing in urban areas. From this data they established the percentage of voters purged according to their area-based racial community, socioeconomic status and 2020 election results.

“There are legitimate reasons why voter rolls periodically need to be purged, as people move and die over time and we need to remove them from the voter rolls,” Wojciechowski said.

“However, when we included community mortality rates and the rates at which people were moving in and out of communities, communities with a greater proportion of Black residents still experienced increased levels of voter purging.”

Key findings and results

From the analysis, two key findings emerged. First, there was a clear urban-rural divide where cities tended to have higher purge rates than suburban or rural areas. For these cities, there was a strong correlation between the percentage of Black voters and the percentage of individuals voting for the Democratic nominee for president. During this period, there was a Republican legislature majority in Michigan.

Second, a regional pattern was observed where border areas had higher purging rates, namely at the southern part of the lower peninsula and the western part of the upper peninsula of the state.

The characteristics of places where voters were purged included locations where 17% of the population were Black, the average income was just under $50,000, life expectancy was just under 70 years, and the neighborhoods, purged had an average, were made up of 55% Democratic voters.

Since the data was on population, it is only known that they live in neighborhoods with those aggregate characteristics. That said, there were correlations between purges and more Democratic areas, which have more population density, lower life expectancy and more Black residents.

Recommended next steps

Outside the key findings, Sadler and Wojciechowski underscore how a majority party can disproportionately purge voters of the other party by using similar geographic techniques (i.e., focusing on certain parts of the state where they know opposing voters may live), including with higher voter purging rates during election years.

Additionally, there are also public health implications in how health and socioeconomic status can be tied to political power and voter disenfranchisement.

“Support for social programs known to make people healthier and happier and save taxpayer money should not be a political issue. Unfortunately, too much in public health has become politicized, as we saw with COVID-19,” Sadler said. “It matters who we elect to hold office because there is currently an imbalance in the value given to health and economic experts between the two major political parties.”

Importantly, this data only covered one four-year period and the reasons why people moved out of state were not known.

Sadler and Wojciechowski suggest that a review of data purging should be done in all states to determine how the party in power is operating and if discriminatory practices are in place. This would be a good first step, as well as states making sure data is accessible and does not come with costs or additional barriers.

States can also implement new election laws such as early voting periods and same-day registration that encourage people to exercise their franchise to vote, both of which have now gone into effect in Michigan.

Do close friends or casual acquaintances help you stay the most informed? Contrary to a long-standing social science theory, new research from Michigan State University suggests that having people in your life who expose you to other social circles helps you stay most informed.

“When it comes to hearing about new things, it doesn’t matter whether someone is just a casual acquaintance or your closest friend. What matters is that they can help you tap into other social circles,” said Zachary Neal, professor in MSU’s Department of Psychology and author of the study.

The study—published in Network Science—examined over 50 real social networks and 2,500 simulated social networks to understand how new ideas get shared. The real social networks came from many different settings including school and work, while the simulated networks made it possible to consider an even wider range of possibilities.

These findings suggest that one of the most influential theories in social sciences, the Strength of Weak Ties theory, needs revising. This 50-year-old theory states that casual acquaintances or “weak ties” are especially important because they expose you to new ideas.

“Although the Strength of Weak Ties theory has been very influential, it makes some assumptions about social networks that usually don’t match reality,” said Neal. “The theory focused attention on whether your connection to a person was weak or strong, but it should have focused on whether the connection is a ‘bridge’ that gets you outside of your social bubble.”

The study suggests that there’s no need to prioritize having many casual acquaintances over a few close friends just to keep up with the latest news and trends. Instead, if you want to stay in the loop, Neal suggests making sure you’re interacting with a diverse set of people, including some who run in totally different social circles.

The study focused on how certain kinds of relationships are helpful for learning about things, for example, job opportunities. But whether they are weak or strong, “having ties that bridge across gaps in the social world can also be one way to break down polarization and misunderstandings,” Neal explained. “Our bridging social ties not only connect us to new information, but also to new ways of thinking about the world.”

During the Great Resignation, the United States experienced a significant uptick in voluntary employee resignations about one year into the COVID-19 pandemic. The early stages of the pandemic, however, were plagued by high unemployment. In order to stay competitive, business leaders were compelled to identify which factors affect an employee’s decision to voluntarily leave or stay in a particular position when job insecurity is high.

To better understand this phenomenon, researchers from Hiroshima University, Texas Christian University and the University of Warwick performed two studies to better characterize the effects of job embeddedness, or factors that influence an employee’s commitment to their job, on voluntary turnover in the face of job insecurity. The research team based the framework of their study on the conservation of resources (COR) theory, which states that individuals accumulate and guard valuable resources to prevent future resource loss.

The team published their studies in the March 2024 issue of the Journal of Organizational Behavior.

“We used COR theory to consider why some employees faced with the threat of job loss respond by preemptively attempting to secure alternative employment and leave their organizations while others do not,” said Vesa Peltokorpi, professor in the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Hiroshima University in Hiroshima, Japan.

In the first study, the researchers analyzed the effect of on-the-job embeddedness between job insecurity and job search. Based on COR theory, the researchers predicted that job insecurity would positively correlate with voluntary job turnover. The team used online surveys to determine respondents’ job insecurity and on-the-job embeddedness.

Three months later, the team sent a second survey to respondents to measure job search. Twenty-four months after sending the initial online survey, the research team sent a third survey to assess voluntary turnover of the study participants.

The team’s findings supported their hypotheses. “We found that job search mediates the positive relationship between job insecurity and voluntary turnover and that employees [with] higher… on-the-job embeddedness, [such as] links, fit, and sacrifices associated with leaving [the] organization, are less likely to search for jobs despite job insecurity,” said Peltokorpi.

In Study 2, the authors used a new group of full-time employee study participants to determine the effects of both on- and off-the-job embeddedness, including at-home and community commitments and relationships, between job insecurity and an employee’s turnover intentions. With this second study, the researchers were able to not only replicate the findings of the first study but also measure the effects of both types of embeddedness on turnover intentions and voluntary turnover.

“[In the second study, w]e found that [employee] turnover intention mediates the positive relationship between job insecurity and voluntary turnover, and that employees higher in on-the-job embeddedness are less likely to contemplate quitting despite job insecurity.

“However, off-the-job embeddedness, [such as] links, fit, and sacrifices associated with leaving [one’s] community had opposite interactive effects, exacerbating the relationship of job insecurity with turnover. This might be because community-based resources may provide social support and information-related benefits to individuals experiencing job insecurity,” said Peltokorpi.

Replacing employees due to voluntary turnover is expensive: by some estimates, the cost to employers may be as high as 90 to 200% of an employee’s annual salary. While the study authors are confident that this work will help business leaders and academics better understand voluntary turnover motivations, the team concedes there is more work to be done.

“We maintain that why off-the-job embeddedness moderates the relationship between job insecurity and turnover intention would benefit from further conceptual and empirical development. For example, future works can provide more fine-grained conceptualizations and empirical studies on how on- and off-the-job embeddedness alleviates or facilitates the relationships between job insecurity and outcomes,” said Peltokorpi.

David G. Allen from the Neeley School of Business at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas, United States and the Warwick Business School at the University of Warwick in Coventry, United Kingdom also contributed to this research.

Weather patterns in the tropical Pacific can help to determine the kind of winter the UK will face a year later, in “radical” new findings set to improve the accuracy of long-range forecasting.

Ocean temperatures in the tropical Pacific can trigger climate patterns with global effects. Every three to five years or so, the Pacific flips from La Niña conditions, where surface water temperatures in its equatorial region are relatively cool, to El Niño conditions, where these waters…

Yesterday the sun released a huge solar flare, and it’s heading toward Earth. It’s nothing to worry about since it’s nowhere near as large as the Carrington Event of 1859, but it is large enough to give us some amazing aurora.

Large solar flares happen periodically. Quite literally, because the sun goes through an 11-year cycle of lower and higher activity. Right now the sun is near the maximum of a cycle, so we see lots of sunspots and flares. When astronomers first studied the cycle they could only measure the number of sunspots at a given time. Solar flares were largely invisible to early telescopes.

But now with orbiting observatories such as the Solar Dynamics Observatory, we can capture images of solar flares in real time. Astronomers now categorize the strength of solar flares by the intensity of X-rays they emit, known as their x-class. The categories are numbered by power level, with each category double the previous one. So, for example, an X2 flare is twice as powerful as an X1 and half as strong as an X3.

This latest flare is rated as X9, which is much stronger than most solar flares. But stronger events have reached Earth before. In 1989 an X15 event triggered a regional blackout event in Quebec. In November of 2003 the sun released an X28 solar flare, but most of it missed Earth. The 1859 Carrington Event occurred before astronomers developed the x-class rating, but it’s estimated to have been around X45. So this flare is huge, but it won’t put our electrical infrastructure at serious risk.

What it will provide, however, is an auroral light show. As the charged particles released by the flare reach Earth’s magnetosphere, many of them will be caught by our magnetic field and spiral along the field lines to strike Earth’s atmosphere in the polar regions. The impact will trigger the subtle and beautiful light shows known as aurora.

If you happen to live far enough from the equator you might be able to see them in the next few days. To find out your chances, you can check out the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center.

Researchers from King’s College London say that victims of state scandals feel let down and dissatisfied with current compensation schemes which have “exacerbated the harm already suffered.”

They are calling for a new public body to ensure fair and independent outcomes for victims and for compulsory guidance to be created for setting up and operation of Redress Schemes. This would include ensuring those who caused the harm are not left to administer the compensation scheme and for all schemes to take a more collaborative and victim-centered approach.

The new report, which has been shared with the Home Secretary and other ministers, is based on insights shared at a recent roundtable involving victim advocates, lawyers and academics. It also draws on recent research into the Windrush, Post Office, Lambeth Children’s Homes and Infected Blood scandals that revealed weakness and structural failings in all existing schemes that required urgent reform.

Shaila Pal, Director and a Supervising Solicitor at King’s Legal Clinic, who carried out that research and led the roundtable held at King’s in June, said victims’ voices are not currently being heard.

“These people have been failed by the state and it is unacceptable that schemes designed to compensate them are further adding to the damage already caused. Their experiences are often marginalized, schemes are inconsistent, the compensation offered feels inadequate and many told us they find the whole process traumatizing.

“We need a system that is fair, collaborative, swift and compensates people fully and appropriately for the serious harms they have suffered,” says Shaila Pal, Director and a Supervising Solicitor at King’s Legal Clinic.

“Thanks to the excellent work of Sir Robert Francis KC and Sir Brian Langstaff, fair compensation now appears in sight for victims of the infected blood scandal. However, getting to this point has taken far too long, and I have deep sympathy for all the other campaigns that continue to fight for recognition of their loss and suffering. I hope these recommendations are seriously considered to reduce the additional burdens placed upon victims who are owed compensation,” says Jason Evans, Director & Founder of Factor 8, who lost his father to the infected blood scandal at four years old.

The new report from King’s echoes findings from the National Audit Office in July whose report found there is no central coordinated approach when government sets up new compensation schemes resulting in a relatively slow, ad-hoc approach. It also follows a report by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Fair Business Banking which identified systemic issues in the administration and regulation of redress schemes.

The new King’s Legal Clinic report highlights how victims are not at the center of the mission of schemes when they are being set up—and each invents itself from the ground up rather than learning from previous schemes. The newly set up Infected Blood Compensation Scheme has sought to learn from the mistakes of previous schemes and potentially serves as a future blueprint for redress schemes.

Participants at the roundtable had differing views on how loss should be calculated but many felt non-financial redress was as important as financial compensation. They also wanted apologies that were timely, meaningful, personal and “not couched in the language of lawyers.”

They shared exasperation at the application process, said the amount of evidence expected of victims was excessive and found schemes adversarial in their approach. They agreed that accessible, good quality funded legal advice and support for victims was essential to a redress scheme. In this regard, participants from the Windrush Scandal highlighted the significant adverse impact on victims due to the absence of funded legal advice, which is the subject of an on-going legal challenge brought by Southwark Law Center.

The report recommends a new public standard body is created to act as a compensating authority to enable fair and independent outcomes.

It also recommends new compulsory guidance around the setting up and operation of redress schemes which includes ensuring they:

• are set up without delay
• have a collaborative victim-centered approach
• are administered by a body separate to and independent of the original perpetrator
• have compensation framed broadly to reflect the harms suffered and are delivered in a fair, effective, timely, transparent and proportionate manner.

Future astronauts could eat a nutritionally perfect diet made from bacteria reared on ground-up asteroids, to produce a kind of milkshake or yogurt.

While astronauts on the International Space Station have experimented with growing salad leaves, the vast majority of food consumed in space is transported from Earth. This would become impossible for more distant, longer-lasting space missions, so Joshua Pearce at Western University in Ontario, Canada, and his colleagues decided to investigate using bacteria to convert carbon-containing compounds from asteroids into edible food.

They have yet to carry out this process using real asteroids, but Pearce and his team have performed similar experiments using bacteria to break down plastic from leftover army ration packets. To do this, they heated the plastic in the absence of oxygen, a process called pyrolysis, and then fed this to a mixture of bacteria that eat carbon.

“When you look at the pyrolysis breakdown products that we know that bacteria can eat, and then what’s in asteroids, it matches up pretty reasonably, actually,” says Pearce. “So I think this can actually work.”

The collective bacteria end up looking “something like a caramel milkshake”, says Pearce, and the team has also experimented with drying out this substance to produce something like yogurt or even a powder.

While that might not sound particularly appetising, Pearce says the bacteria are remarkably well-suited for human needs. “We did a nutritional analysis, and it turns out to be almost a perfect food,” he says. “It turns out that the bacteria consortium that we were using, more or less, has a third each for protein, carbs and fat.”

If the idea is sound, a 500-metre-wide asteroid similar to Bennu, which NASA visited in 2020, could feed between 600 and 17,000 astronauts for a year, says Pearce. The exact amount depends on how efficiently the bacteria can digest the asteroid’s carbon compounds.

A fully operational asteroid food project would require an “industrial-sized super machine” in space, he says, but the researchers hope to begin testing the idea on a smaller scale in the coming year, starting off with coal and then moving to meteorites that have fallen to Earth, which they are currently working on a proposal for. “It’s super expensive and we have to destroy [the meteorites], so the people that collect rocks were not happy when we made these proposals,” says Pearce.

“There is definitely potential there, but it is still a very futuristic and exploratory idea,” says Annemiek Waajen at Free University Amsterdam. “It is good to think about these things, but in terms of technique, there is still quite some development necessary to be able to use these methods.”

The success of the process will depend on how many of the carbon compounds inside asteroids are suitable for bacterial food, says Waajen. Based on meteorite compositions on Earth, it is likely to be somewhere in the middle of the range the team calculated, she says.

Researchers at Oxford Brookes University have pioneered an innovative method to tackle one of the world’s most persistent environmental threats—toxic chemicals in global water supplies.

They have developed a new machine called a hydrodynamic reactor that uses bubbles which form and collapse due to changes in pressure, a process called cavitation. The reactor removes toxic per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), also known as “forever chemicals” from water. The paper is published in the Chemical Engineering Journal.

PFAS chemicals were invented in the 1930s and used in convenience products like waterproof clothing, pizza boxes, nonstick pans, and stain-resistant carpets. Concerns were raised about these chemicals being toxic in the 1970s and confirmed by scientists in the early 2000s. They have been found to be a health hazard that has infiltrated water supplies worldwide. The chemicals are associated with diseases such as ulcerative colitis, thyroid problems, elevated cholesterol, liver damage, and cancer.

Removing PFAS chemicals from water sources is a global challenge. They are released into water sources through industry wastewater, landfills containing contaminated products, domestic wastewater, sewage and agricultural run-off.

Professor Iakovos Tzanakis, who specializes in Engineering Materials at Oxford Brookes and is one of the lead researchers, said, “Once contaminated water is released into rivers, lakes and seas, it eventually infiltrates our public water supplies, including our domestic drinking water. Our challenge has been to find a way of effectively treating water to remove PFAS chemicals sustainably and at a scale.”

In the UK the Royal Society of Chemists has launched a campaign to reduce the levels of PFAS in our water supplies. The EU is planning to restrict the use of PFAS chemicals with new rules introduced in 2024. In America, legally enforceable PFAS levels have also been established to protect public safety.

Professor Tzanakis said, “Until now, methods of removing PFAS from water have been costly and time-consuming using chemicals and restricted to laboratory scale. But research I have carried out with my colleague Dr. Morteza Ghorbani has identified a potential solution.”

Professor Tzanakis and Dr. Ghorbani, a Royal Society-Newton Fellow at Oxford Brookes, collaborated with Sabanci University (Turkey), white goods manufacturer Beko (Turkey), KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden), and IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute to develop and test the hydrodynamic cavitation reactor.

The reactor uses fast-moving liquid in tiny spaces to create and pop lots of small bubbles—a process that helps to clean the water.

Professor Tzanakis said, “This technology has the potential to revolutionize wastewater treatment, making it safer and more sustainable for communities around the globe. The advancements in green hydrodynamic cavitation provide a scalable alternative to current methods, overcoming its limitations.”

When the eco-friendly and energy-efficient hydrodynamic cavitation reactor was tested at the Hammarby Sjöstad wastewater treatment plant in Sweden, the results were far better than expected.

The reactor achieved nearly a 36% degradation rate of 11 common PFAS variants in just 30 minutes and didn’t need additional chemicals.

Dr. Ghorbani, who is also affiliated to Sabanci University, said, “The results were impressive. We didn’t expect that level of PFAS processing in such a short space of time. We are now exploring the fundamental mechanisms of PFAS removal in depth at Oxford Brookes University to better control and optimize the process.

“Our next step is scaling up our reactor to treat larger volumes of wastewater containing PFAS. We are aiming to treat wastewater containing PFAS volumes up to 20 liters. The reactor for this has already been built. After that, our target is to treat volumes up to 200 liters in a wastewater treatment plant in Sweden.

“Our goal is to boost this promising approach by unveiling the intricate physics that drive the technology through the use of various reactors in different countries. We want to ensure this technology is ready for actual wastewater treatment in the near future and as set by EU 2035 strategy when all PFAS-containing waste must be treated.”

The days are getting longer and in Australia, the switch to daylight saving time is almost upon us (for about 70% of the population, anyway).

But why do we have longer days in summer and shorter days in winter?

It’s all about the tilt

Earth goes around the sun in an almost circular orbit. But not everything is lined up perfectly. Earth’s axis is tilted by 23.44 degrees relative to its orbit around the sun.

Imagine Earth’s orbit as a flat frisbee with the sun in the middle and Earth as a ball on a stick going around the edge.

If Earth’s axis wasn’t tilted (if its tilt was zero degrees) the stick would be exactly perpendicular to the frisbee. If you grab that perpendicular stick and tip it 23.44 degrees sideways, that’s what Earth’s tilt looks like now.

As Earth orbits the sun, the tilt of the stick does not rotate relative to the sun. If you were in outer space looking at the sun and you watched from the exact same position for a whole year, you would see Earth go around the sun while the stick stayed tilted the same direction.

In other words, if the top of the stick was pointing to the right when you started watching Earth go around the sun, it would stay pointing to the right the whole way around.

This tilt gives us longer days in summer and shorter days in winter. Let’s set up the scenario so the Northern Hemisphere is the top of the planet and the Southern Hemisphere is the bottom of the planet.

When Earth is on one side of the sun, the top of the stick is pointed towards the sun. This is summer in the Northern Hemisphere and winter in the Southern Hemisphere. Six months later, when Earth is on the other side of the sun, the bottom of the stick is pointed towards the sun—and the seasons are reversed.

Solstices and equinoxes

Those two points, when the top of the stick is pointing directly towards the sun or directly away from the sun, are the solstices. They are the longest and shortest days of the year, depending on your hemisphere.

The shortest day of 2024 in Australia was June 21. Looking forward to sunnier times, the longest day of the year in 2024 will be December 21.

In between the summer and winter solstice, we have the equinoxes—when days and nights are almost exactly the same length. Those are the days when the stick through Earth is “side-on” to the sun. The equinox is also the day when the sun passes directly over Earth’s equator. In 2024 this happened on March 20 at 2:06pm AEDT and September 22 at 10:43pm AEST.

That means that since September 22, days have been getting longer than nights in the Southern Hemisphere.

What does daylight saving do?

Earth’s tilt means the sun both rises earlier and sets later as we head towards summer. When the clocks (in some states) switch to daylight saving time, people in these states all get one hour less of sleep. However, the total length of the day doesn’t change just because we changed our clocks.

For me, daylight saving means I need an extra cup of coffee in the morning for about a week before I adjust to the daylight saving-lag (like jet lag, but without the fun of travel).

What it really gives us is more daylight in the evening, instead of more daylight in the morning. If you’re already a morning person, this isn’t the way to go. But if you prefer to have a long dinner in the summer sun, it’s ideal.

Has it always been this way?

Earth’s axis hasn’t always been tilted at 23.44 degrees. It cycles from a minimum 22.1 degree tilt to a maximum 24.5 degree tilt and back again once every approximately 41,000 years.

Earth’s axis also “precesses,” where the stick through it draws a circle once every approximately 26,000 years. You can see this in the animation below.

The length of a day on Earth hasn’t always been the same, either.

At the moment, the length of a day is nearly exactly 24 hours. But it’s shifting all the time by tiny amounts. This is tracked very closely by a system of telescopes and satellites. These systems measure “Earth orientation parameters” that describe Earth’s exact orientation compared to the position of stars in the sky.

These are important to astronomers because the exact location of our telescopes is important for creating accurate maps of the sky. On top of all of this, the gravitational drag from the moon causes days to become longer by around 2.3 milliseconds every 100 years. A few billion years ago, Earth’s day was a lot shorter—only 19 hours long.

Even though some of us are losing an hour of sleep this weekend, at least we get to enjoy 2.3 milliseconds longer every day than our great—and great-great—grandparents did.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The success and legacy of major economic reforms in Ecuador and El Salvador has depended on the will of the people, analysis shows. The strength of political party ideology and support of unions, workers and the financial sector has hugely influenced decision-making.

In both countries, administrations led by left-wing parties tightened capital flow management, while their right-wing successors took the opposite approach. The extent of this depended on how much popular support the party had.

In Ecuador, extensive protests and strikes prevented left-wing governments extensively liberalizing the economy and meant successor right-wing governments had to take a more gradual approach. In El Salvador, left-wing governments went unchallenged as they implemented economic reforms. Successive right-wing administrations faced little resistance to implementing a radical agenda that included even the adoption of bitcoin as legal tender alongside the United States dollar.

Dr. Pedro Perfeito da Silva, from the University of Exeter, examined economic policies in Ecuador and El Salvador since the late 2000s.

In Ecuador, the strength of the bottom-up pressure against marketization led the Correa administration to reshape the country’s relationship with capital flows, deploying encompassing outflow controls and restrictive macroprudential regulations. During the following presidencies of Lenín Moreno, Guillermo Lasso, and Daniel Noboa pressure from indigenous movements and labor unions slowed down the adoption of neoliberal policies, contributing to watering down the deregulation of capital flows.

In El Salvador, the fragility of the bottom-up resistance against reforms led the presidencies of Mauricio Funes and Salvador Cerén to embrace a moderate left-wing agenda, taking far less intrusive initiatives to mitigate the negative effects of capital mobility. This weakness of popular organizations also explains why Nayib Bukele’s authoritarian neoliberalism and his adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender have faced few obstacles.

Dr. Perfeito da Silva said, “The case of Ecuador shows that states can still challenge global financial markets. If even a country that does not issue its currency can impose capital account restrictions, this calls into question the inevitability of neoliberal financial policies in advanced economies.

“As observed in El Salvador, dollar-centered, rule-based globalization may not be the end of the road as domestic elites turn peripheral countries into laboratories for the riskiest financial innovations. The experience of Ecuador also demonstrates macroeconomics is not condemned to depoliticization. Even something highly technical like capital controls can become an issue of mass politics when social movements consider them a necessary condition for achieving their demands.”

Moves from the early 1990s in Ecuador led to the removal of capital controls, the deregulation of the banking sector, and the constitutional approval of central bank autonomy. This culminated in the late 1990s banking crisis and a massive currency devaluation.

The administration led by Jamil Mahuad adopted the US dollar as the sole legal tender in January 2000. This continues to be divisive in the country.

As a result of this, Ecuador experienced a political stalemate. Indigenous movements and labor unions were not strong enough to revert dollarization but toppled three presidents in one decade.

The Correa government’s restrictions to capital mobility met expected business resistance but the countervailing force from indigenous organizations and labor unions kept the government committed to this agenda.

The deterioration of the economy meant Lenín Moreno struggled to defeat the right-wing opposition in the 2017 presidential election, winning the second round by a narrow margin. His proposals for economic reform were withdrawn following massive protests.

In El Salvador, the right wing Nationalist Republican Alliance reforms included the deregulation of the banking sector, capital account liberalization, and the concession of vast incentives to foreign investors. In January 2001, the US dollar was adopted as the sole legal tender.

Popular organizations did not offer strong resistance as protests were canceled due to a devastating earthquake only 13 days after the start of dollarization. El Salvador did not experience any general strikes during the two decades of the ARENA administration.