Abdul Basit Adeel

Since the founding of the Population Association of America in the early 1930s, demographic research has shifted away from a primary focus on fertility, mortality, and migration to examining a broader array of social demographic topics. Early demographic research frequently framed rapid population growth as a grave problem and promoted fertility control as a key solution. Using large language models and data from eight leading demographic journals published over the 1947 to 2025 period, we analyzed the changing topical focus of demographic research and then examined whether this shift has been accompanied by growing focus on social inequality across subfields. We also assessed whether funding patterns helped explain observed trends. Our findings confirmed that demographic research expanded its scope over the past century and that it was accompanied by a growing, cross-cutting concern with social inequality. We found little evidence that these changes are associated with funding patterns. While this intellectual shift towards inequality has clear value, it also shapes both the selection of research themes and the interpretation of findings, highlighting the importance of continued reflection and discussion within the discipline.

The intensification of science as a social institution — known as scientization — is a hallmark of post-industrial society, characterized by deepening research within primary fields and expanding into new ones. While computational analyses of large bibliometric datasets reveal historical trends in the growth of science, their scale misses underlying dynamics. Conversely, qualitative accounts of specific discoveries provide context but fail to capture broader processes driving scientization. This paper introduces a middle-range approach to studying the expansion of science, focusing on scientific responses to significant scientific events (“S-events”) within specific fields over fixed periods. By combining bibliometric data with natural language processing analyses of semantic networks and expert assessments, this approach sheds light on the development of epistemic communities and their role in deepening, broadening, and interacting to foster scientific progress. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) event generated discovery by facilitating a fluid epistemic community of interconnected scientific papers, journals, and scientists. The accumulation of PISA papers appeared not only in directly relevant journals, but also in those at cognitive distance from educational learning science. A dynamic of new ideas broadened the main conceptual core network, while other ideas formed short-lived distal conceptual cores. This case study highlights the strengths and limitations of this middle-range approach for investigating scientization processes.

Sixty years ago, Derek de Solla Price’s influential Little Science, Big Science first documented that from 1900 scientific publications doubled every 10–15 years and then predicted that limited resources would end rapid progress leading to an imminent “scientific doomsday”—a strikingly false prediction given that contemporary global mega-science annually yields 3.5 million mainline STEMM journal research papers. Nevertheless, the idea of a coming crisis persists—supposedly current expansion is stagnating quality. Argued instead is that what was missed, then and now, is a worldwide deepening of scientization—the embedding of science as a core social institution, marked by expanded research capacity, diversification into new domains, and increasing specialization. Employing sociological insights about historical institutional development, Price’s empirics are extended to explain why STEMM productivity never plateaued. Fueled by a worldwide education revolution, universities enact three institutionalizing roles: institutional entrepreneurs; main corporate units of research; and a fiduciary of the generalized symbolic medium of papers. Illustrated by analyses from a recent bibliometric study of 3.3 million papers from 1900 to 2020, it is further suggested that instead of decline, through university-driven scientization the scale and capacity of science as a mature institution reshape the dynamics of discovery supporting sustained growth and quality.

One of the core questions emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic is what it means for governments to be prepared for a major health crisis. Does the preparedness include only access to resources, or does it also include having appropriate formal political mechanisms and political traditions? India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—three South Asian countries and once parts of British India—face similar healthcare and socioeconomic challenges, share histories of health crises, and rely on somewhat similar frameworks for responding to them. Anecdotally, all these countries rely—or until very recently have relied—on versions of the Epidemic Diseases Act of 1897 as a major public health response document. These similarities in the structural conditions present us with the opportunity to study the role of politics in crisis response. In this chapter, we set out to explore the differences in the policies adopted in response to the COVID-19 crisis and the politics that produced them. We trace the nonmedical interventions at the national and subnational levels in these three countries from the early signs of the pandemic to late 2020 and examine differences and similarities in the trajectories of policymaking and subsequent policy implementation. We scrutinize the role of institutional frameworks in the formulation of this response, identify the key actors in the pandemic response, and the differences in how they interacted. As we show in this chapter, despite the similarities in the structural characteristics and toolkits of the favored policy response instruments, the politics of response to the COVID-19 pandemic significantly diverged across the countries, with different, sometimes unexpected, actors and channels involved in the public health decision-making and with varying political outcomes. We believe that this was partly because they did not inherit a common democratic political tradition of epidemic response from the British Raj and partly due to the differences in the ways their quite similar epidemic response rules fit with their different political systems. In search for a confirmation of this belief, we examine the history of current public health frameworks in these countries and situate them in the context of their political development.

This essay examines the policy response of the federal and regional governments in federations to the COVID-19 crisis. We theorize that the COVID-19 policy response in federations is an outcome of strategic interaction among the federal and regional incumbents in the shadow of their varying accountability for health and the repercussions from the disruptive consequences of public health measures. Using the data from the COVID-19 Public Health Protective Policy Index Project, we study how the variables suggested by our theory correlate with the overall stringency of public health measures in federations as well as the contribution of the federal government to the making of these policies. Our results suggest that the public health measures taken in federations are at least as stringent as those in non-federations, and there is a cluster of federations on which a bulk of crisis policy making is carried by subnational governments. We find that the contribution of the federal government is, on average, higher in parliamentary systems; it appears to decline with the proximity of the next election in presidential republics, and to increase with the fragmentation of the legislative party system in parliamentary systems. Our analysis also suggests that when the federal government carries a significant share of responsibility for healthcare provision, it also tends to play a higher role in taking non-medical steps in response to the pandemic.

We examine the roles of sub-national and national governments in Canada and the United States vis-à-vis the protective public health response in the onset phase of the global coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. This period was characterized in both countries by incomplete information as well as by uncertainty regarding which level of government should be responsible for which policies. The crisis represents an opportunity to study how national and sub-national governments respond to such policy challenges. In this article, we present a unique dataset that catalogues the policy responses of US states and Canadian provinces as well as those of the respective federal governments: the Protective Policy Index (PPI). We then compare the United States and Canada along several dimensions, including the absolute values of sub-national levels of the index relative to the total protections enjoyed by citizens, the relationship between early threat (as measured by the mortality rate near the start of the public health crisis) and the evolution of the PPI, and finally the institutional and legislative origins of the protective health policies. We find that the sub-national contribution to policy is more important for both the United States and Canada than are their national-level policies, and it is unrelated in scope to our early threat measure. We also show that the institutional origin of the policies as evidenced by the COVID-19 response differs greatly between the two countries and has implications for the evolution of federalism in each.