Antoine Vendeville, Jimena Royo-Letelier, Duncan Cassells
et al.
Studying political activity on social media often requires defining and measuring political stances of users or content. Relevant examples include the study of opinion polarization, or the study of political diversity in online content diets. While many research designs rely on operationalizations best suited for the US setting, few allow addressing more general political systems, in which users and media outlets might exhibit stances on multiple ideology and issue dimensions, going beyond traditional Liberal-Conservative or Left-Right scales. To advance the study of more general online ecosystems, we present a dataset pertaining to a population of X/Twitter users, parliamentarians, and media outlets embedded in a political space spanned by dimensions measuring attitudes towards immigration, the EU, liberal values, elites and institutions, nationalism and the environment, in addition to left-right and liberal-conservative scales. We include indicators of individual activity and popularity: mean number of posts per day, number of followers, and number of followees. We provide several benchmarks validating the positions of these entities and discuss several applications for this dataset.
The purpose of the research is to examine the mechanisms of influence of the South Korean Christian nationalist organization “Unification Church”2 in Japan. Particular attention is paid to its influence on the socio-political aspects of internal Japanese processes. It is argued that, through the hierarchical discipline inherent in religious structures, organized voting blocs can be created during election campaigns that are capable of influencing their outcome. It is concluded that, despite the discontent of the Japanese population, it is not possible to disband the Japanese branch of the organization. Firstly, the connections of this religious structure with Japanese political figures have been revealed more than once, so it can be concluded that there are systematic contacts. Secondly, since the organization became a topic of public debate after the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, committed by a victim of its activities, in the event of a positive decision to disband the Japanese branch, radical groups and individuals will, in essence, be given a signal that they can convey their demands to the government by force. This could negatively affect public order in the country.
This paper investigates how political campaigns engaged UK football fan communities on Twitter in the aftermath of the Brexit Referendum (2016-2017). Football fandom, with its strong collective identities and tribal behaviours, offers fertile ground for political influence. Combining social network and content analysis, we examine how political discourse became embedded in football conversations. We show that a wide range of actors -- including parties, media, activist groups, and pseudonymous influencers -- mobilised support, provoked reactions, and shaped opinion within these communities. Through case studies of hashtag hijacking, embedded activism, and political "megaphones", we illustrate how campaigns leveraged fan cultures to amplify political messages. Our findings highlight mechanisms of political influence in ostensibly non-political online spaces and point toward the development of a broader framework in future work.
Italo Alberto Sousa, Mariana Carvalho da Silva, Jorge Machado
et al.
This research examines how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can improve participatory budgeting processes within smart cities. In response to challenges like declining civic participation and resource allocation conflicts, the study explores how online political participation can be improved by AI. It investigates the state capacity governments need to implement AI-enhanced participatory tools, considering technological dependencies and vulnerabilities. It analyzes technological and administrative structures, actors, interests, and strategies to understand the dynamics of online political participation technologies in the case of Sao Paulo, Brazil. The study contributes to understanding how technological advancements can reshape participatory budgeting processes. In a broader sense, the research highlights how AI can transform participatory institutions by offering new tools for citizens and also for government officials in charge of participatory processes within smart cities.
Amir Mohammad Rezaei, Esmaeil yaghoubi, zahra Omidvar
Despite Iran’s rich biodiversity and recent policy support, the medicinal plants industry still holds a minor share of global markets and remains largely focused on raw-material production. This study aims to design and develop a localized, flexible business model for knowledge-based firms in the medicinal plants domain to help them move from commodity sales toward technology-driven value creation, market development, and exports. An exploratory–sequential mixed-methods approach was used. In the qualitative phase, content analysis of documents and semi-structured interviews with 17 participants—including managers of knowledge-based firms, technology experts, and science and technology park specialists—identified six key dimensions: (1) capital and financial resources, (2) technological linkages and infrastructure, (3) regulation and policy, (4) market and marketing, (5) open innovation and network collaboration, and (6) business model flexibility. Based on these findings, a survey instrument was developed and the quantitative data were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) in SmartPLS 3. Results show that all six dimensions significantly influence the design of business model components—value proposition, customer segments, key resources, and channels—which, in turn, improve firms’ innovation performance, market development, and export capability. Theoretically, the proposed model integrates causation and effectuation perspectives in entrepreneurship while emphasizing open innovation and network interaction, offering a comprehensive, context-specific view of business model development.
Political institutions and public administration (General)
Authority is a fundamental tool of social integration. By selecting the most laudable and exemplary patterns, behaviours, actions or events – whether real or merely imagined – from the entire range of potentialities, it creates a community capable of communal action, by transforming an undifferentiated mass of independent individuals into a somewhat cohesive social group able to find common ground on matters vital for their shared existence, thus turning mere quantity into quality. It is thus evident that the existence of a certain degree of authority is also the basis for the viability of public administration, public policy and public management – to name but a few – in any given society. This paper will examine the conditions, manifestations and correlations of authority in the various domains of its social context, in order to provide a comprehensive account of its existence, its inevitability, but also the dangers inherent in its weakening.
The article analyzes scientific research in the field of the people’s constitutional right to participate in the administration of justice to uncover the methodological foundations of studies in this area. Various methods enable scholars to eliminate theoretical gaps, refine key concepts, and improve the theory of the people’s constitutional right to participate in justice. The study of the methodology of scientific research in this field has established that the implementation of the people’s constitutional right to participate in justice remains one of the most problematic aspects of legal practice and requires further in-depth analysis. The approaches presented in the scientific literature regarding the methodology of modern constitutional law have been analyzed. It has been found that combining methodological principles with scientific methods plays a key role in the study of both specific legal phenomena and the functioning of constitutional institutions in Ukraine. It is emphasized that a stable system of methods has been established in domestic science, which is applied to the study of the people’s constitutional right to participate in justice. In particular, philosophical and ideological foundations (ontology, gnoseology, axiology), general scientific, and special legal methods are used. It is substantiated that the primary methods for studying the constitutional and legal regulation of the people’s right to justice include general scientific methods – systemic, dialectical, structural-functional; special legal methods – formal-legal, comparative-legal, historical-legal; sociological and empirical methods – sociological, statistical, and anthropological, which make it possible to examine the level of citizens’ legal awareness, the effectiveness of the jury system, and public attitudes toward it. Based on the conducted analysis, several conclusions have been formulated. The methodology for studying constitutional law is characterized by the multidimensional nature of this legal phenomenon, its connection with political processes, and the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach. The combination of general scientific, special legal, and sociological methods allows for a comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms for implementing constitutional norms, particularly regarding the functioning of the jury system in Ukraine.
The article reflects on the political war between the United States and Russia that started in 2022. The author concludes that in 2022–2023, the U.S. was maintaining a reactive and defensive approach to the conflict focused on safeguarding the American population from Russian influence by reactively deconstructing Russia’s narratives and discrediting its information sources. During the same stage of POLWAR, the concept of “domestic public diplomacy” was introduced in the United States in order to legitimize the extension of public diplomacy activities to American citizens as well as foreign audiences. In 2023–2024, the shift from reactive to proactive approach became noticeable with the U.S. building a network of alliances dedicated to countering foreign disinformation. At the same time, the American public diplomacy was being reformed in a way that enhances its effectiveness. Washington has also become more active in generating anti-Russian media-campaigns both with information and cultural instruments, revitalizing the old negative stereotypes about Russia in public opinion and portraying it as a villain in the Ukrainian conflict. To provide this approach, which is a preamble to the switch to offensive tactics, with a theoretical basis the “reputational security” concept has been developed. This concept not only elevates the issues of reputation to the category of national security issues, but also pushes for collective action in terms of protecting one’s own reputation and undermining the reputation of an adversary. Finally, the article analyzes the Trump administration public behavior towards Russia and Ukraine, its approach to public diplomacy institutions and counter-disinformation structures, as well as the general vision of American intelligence experts and the think-tanks loyal to current administration. The official conduct of the U.S. government towards the Russian Federation has become more decent, and the opposite could be said about the behavior towards Ukraine. The Trump administration has eliminated almost all elements of the system of governmental control over the internal information space, and tries to drastically cut the federal spending on public diplomacy. However, according to the publications of the U.S. intelligence and expert communities, the strategic vision of the American establishment has not changed much since 2022. It still clings to the idea of Washington’s global leadership and exceptionalism thus viewing the transformation of the world order as a threat to national interests. Since Russia, in turn, supports the rise of multipolar world order and endorses it with its foreign policies, the core reason for disagreement between two powers remains in place and so the POLWAR is likely to continue.
Political misinformation poses significant challenges to democratic processes, shaping public opinion and trust in media. Manual fact-checking methods face issues of scalability and annotator bias, while machine learning models require large, costly labelled datasets. This study investigates the use of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) as reliable annotators for detecting political factuality in news articles. Using open-source LLMs, we create a politically diverse dataset, labelled for bias through LLM-generated annotations. These annotations are validated by human experts and further evaluated by LLM-based judges to assess the accuracy and reliability of the annotations. Our approach offers a scalable and robust alternative to traditional fact-checking, enhancing transparency and public trust in media.
Building on previous work, this paper extends the modeling of political structures from simplicial complexes to hypergraphs. This allows the analysis of more complex political dynamics where agents who are willing to form coalitions contain subsets that would not necessarily form coalitions themselves. We extend topological constructions such as wedge, cone, and collapse from simplicial complexes to hypergraphs and use them to study mergers, mediators, and power delegation in political structures. Concepts such as agent viability and system stability are generalized to the hypergraph context, alongside the introduction of the notion of local viability. Additionally, we use embedded homology of hypergraphs to analyze power concentration within political systems. Along the way, we introduce some new notions within the hypergraph framework that are of independent interest.
The article reveals the specifics of using goal setting as a tool for improving the administrative and legal regulation of political service in Ukraine. It has been established that over the past thirty years, a large number of normative legal acts have been adopted in our country, which testify to the existence in Ukraine, in addition to state, patronage and other types of public service, political service. However, the administrative and legal regulation does not establish the basis of political service, in particular, there are no general requirements for entry, completion and termination of service in political positions in public administration bodies. It was found that the administrative-legal regulation of the public service in Ukraine has other defects, which are caused by deficiencies in the definition, fixation and implementation of goals, firstly, the reform of the public service as an institution of administrative law, and secondly, the administrative-legal regulation of public services in Ukraine. It is proposed to define goal setting in administrative law: 1) as a methodological technique for identifying the goals of public service reform and its administrative and legal regulation (with mandatory consideration of the principles of administrative law); 2) as a tool for improving the administrative and legal regulation of the public service in Ukraine (goals should be formed on the basis of modeling the ideal legal result of the administrative and legal regulation of the public service); 3) as a doctrine on determining the goals of administrative-legal phenomena and, including, administrative-legal regulation. It was emphasized that the political service, unlike other types of public service, has the worst administrative and legal support. Actually, goal setting, as a scientific methodological technique and a tool for improving legal regulation, helps to identify the reasons for such a situation in the modern legal system of Ukraine. It was concluded that the reasons for the insufficient administrative and legal support of the political service in Ukraine are, firstly, the lack of general goals of reforming the public service and at the same time the lack of purposeful assignment of the political service as an integral and important element of the public service in Ukraine, secondly, secondary (non-serious) attitude of politicians, officials and subjects of the legislative initiative to the administrative and legal regulation of the foundations of political service in Ukraine, which is clearly visible in the quality and quantity of legal prescriptions in this area.
The rise of social media has been argued to intensify uncivil and hostile online political discourse. Yet, to date, there is a lack of clarity on what incivility means in the political sphere. In this work, we utilize a multidimensional perspective of political incivility, developed in the fields of political science and communication, that differentiates between impoliteness and political intolerance. We present state-of-the-art incivility detection results using a large dataset of 13K political tweets, collected and annotated per this distinction. Applying political incivility detection at large-scale, we observe that political incivility demonstrates a highly skewed distribution over users, and examine social factors that correlate with incivility at subpopulation and user-level. Finally, we propose an approach for modeling social context information about the tweet author alongside the tweet content, showing that this leads to improved performance on the task of political incivility detection. We believe that this latter result holds promise for socially-informed text processing in general.
Anees Baqir, Alessandro Galeazzi, Andrea Drocco
et al.
The rise of ideological divides in public discourse has received considerable attention in recent years. However, much of this research has been concentrated on Western democratic nations, leaving other regions largely unexplored. Here, we delve into the political landscape of Pakistan, a nation marked by intricate political dynamics and persistent turbulence. Spanning from 2018 to 2022, our analysis of Twitter data allows us to capture pivotal shifts and developments in Pakistan's political arena. By examining interactions and content generated by politicians affiliated with major political parties, we reveal a consistent and active presence of politicians on Twitter, with opposition parties exhibiting particularly robust engagement. We explore the alignment of party audiences, highlighting a notable convergence among opposition factions over time. Our analysis also uncovers significant shifts in political affiliations, including the transition of politicians to the opposition alliance. Quantitatively, we assess evolving interaction patterns, showcasing the prevalence of homophilic connections while identifying a growing interconnection among audiences of opposition parties. Our study, by accurately reflecting shifts in the political landscape, underscores the reliability of our methodology and social media data as a valuable tool for monitoring political polarization and providing a nuanced understanding of macro-level trends and individual-level transformations.
Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, Christelle Tessono, Arvind Narayanan
et al.
Online platforms play an increasingly important role in shaping democracy by influencing the distribution of political information to the electorate. In recent years, political campaigns have spent heavily on the platforms' algorithmic tools to target voters with online advertising. While the public interest in understanding how platforms perform the task of shaping the political discourse has never been higher, the efforts of the major platforms to make the necessary disclosures to understand their practices falls woefully short. In this study, we collect and analyze a dataset containing over 800,000 ads and 2.5 million videos about the 2020 U.S. presidential election from Facebook, Google, and TikTok. We conduct the first large scale data analysis of public data to critically evaluate how these platforms amplified or moderated the distribution of political advertisements. We conclude with recommendations for how to improve the disclosures so that the public can hold the platforms and political advertisers accountable.
Recensión con breve descripción de los contenidos desarrollados en la obra “Políticas públicas de transparencia en las democracias del sur de Europa”, dirigida por Gema Pastor Albaladejo y publicada, en 2021, por la editorial Tirant lo Blanch (PSI, Q1). La obra supone una aportación significativa a la generación de conocimiento actualizado sobre la materia, con el valor añadido de su orientación práctica derivada de la propuesta de evaluación contenida y la vocación de contribuir a las metodologías más recientes que avanzan en distinguir la importancia de la transparencia en el fortalecimiento institucional de la democracia.
Political institutions and public administration (General), Accounting. Bookkeeping
This study examines how different types of NPOs influence local governments’ hazard mitigation efforts. Based on Marquis et al. (2013), we categorized NPOs into three types and analyzed a county-level dataset (N=1,626) with fixed-effect Poisson regression. Findings indicate that counties with a greater number of NPOs working for enhancing the overall community’s social welfare are more likely to develop hazard mitigation projects. In contrast, the prevalence of elite-oriented NPOs that focus on selective community constituents is negatively associated with local governments’ hazard mitigation project development. This study provides important implications for the critical roles of NPOs in facilitating hazard mitigation efforts in relationships with local governments.
Political institutions and public administration (General)