We develop a theory of distributive competition under redistricting that explains both electoral outcomes and the equilibrium allocation of policy benefits by endogenizing voter pivotality. In a multi-district model with primaries, general elections, and group-targeted transfers, districting shapes political influence through two channels: a selection channel for descriptive representation (who wins office) and a competition channel for substantive representation (who receives policy benefits). District composition alters candidate matchups, shifting voter responsiveness and political leverage, and each channel alone yields distinct predictions about whether packing or cracking voters is optimal. For minority voters, the welfare effects of districting depend on electoral leverage, preferences over descriptive versus partisan representation, primary rules, and competitiveness. The channels align on packing when minorities are electorally weak and value descriptive representation, and align on cracking when minorities are electorally pivotal and prioritize partisan outcomes. When the channels diverge, or when endogenous feedback reshapes electoral leverage, minority welfare can be nonmonotonic in voter concentration. Our results identify when majority-minority districts enhance minority welfare and when dispersion strengthens political influence.
Background: Deep learning has demonstrated significant potential for automated brain metastases (BM) segmentation; however, models trained at a singular institution often exhibit suboptimal performance at various sites due to disparities in scanner hardware, imaging protocols, and patient demographics. The goal of this work is to create a domain adaptation framework that will allow for BM segmentation to be used across multiple institutions. Methods: We propose a VAE-MMD preprocessing pipeline that combines variational autoencoders (VAE) with maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) loss, incorporating skip connections and self-attention mechanisms alongside nnU-Net segmentation. The method was tested on 740 patients from four public databases: Stanford, UCSF, UCLM, and PKG, evaluated by domain classifier's accuracy, sensitivity, precision, F1/F2 scores, surface Dice (sDice), and 95th percentile Hausdorff distance (HD95). Results: VAE-MMD reduced domain classifier accuracy from 0.91 to 0.50, indicating successful feature alignment across institutions. Reconstructed volumes attained a PSNR greater than 36 dB, maintaining anatomical accuracy. The combined method raised the mean F1 by 11.1% (0.700 to 0.778), the mean sDice by 7.93% (0.7121 to 0.7686), and reduced the mean HD95 by 65.5% (11.33 to 3.91 mm) across all four centers compared to the baseline nnU-Net. Conclusions: VAE-MMD effectively diminishes cross-institutional data heterogeneity and enhances BM segmentation generalization across volumetric, detection, and boundary-level metrics without necessitating target-domain labels, thereby overcoming a significant obstacle to the clinical implementation of AI-assisted segmentation.
Byunghwee Lee, Sangyeon Kim, Filippo Menczer
et al.
Due to the correlational structure in our traits such as identities, cultures, and political attitudes, seemingly innocuous preferences like following a band or using a specific slang can reveal private traits. This possibility, especially when combined with massive, public social data and advanced computational methods, poses a fundamental privacy risk. As our data exposure online and the rapid advancement of AI are increasing the risk of misuse, it is critical to understand the capacity of large language models (LLMs) to exploit such potential. Here, using online discussions on DebateOrg and Reddit, we show that LLMs can reliably infer hidden political alignment, significantly outperforming traditional machine learning models. Prediction accuracy further improves as we aggregate multiple text-level inferences into a user-level prediction, and as we use more politics-adjacent domains. We demonstrate that LLMs leverage words that are highly predictive of political alignment while not being explicitly political. Our findings underscore the capacity and risks of LLMs for exploiting socio-cultural correlates.
This article examines the complex balancing of political loyalty and meritocratic competence in the appointment of top civil servants—a pivotal aspect of public administration that is particularly relevant in developing contexts. Focusing on the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) of Iraq, this study aims to unravel how merit and patronage converge in the appointment processes of director generals (DGs). To this end, the article develops an analytical framework that conceptualizes “hybrid appointments” as a process in which merit‐based and patronage considerations are intricately interwoven. The article uses a mixed‐method research design, combining elite interviews with senior politicians and a quantitative analysis of original biographical data on top civil servants. It shows how politicians weigh merit‐based qualifications alongside political considerations in the appointment process, rather than substituting loyalty for competence. This finding challenges the traditional dichotomous understanding of merit versus patronage appointments, advancing our understanding of how top civil service appointments function in developing contexts.
The article analyzes the organizational and legal principles of staffing the civil service. It is established that the civil service is a public, professional, politically impartial activity in the practical implementation of the tasks and functions of the state. It is emphasized that in Ukraine the civil service has become a fundamental element of the functioning and existence of the state. The professional and responsible activities of persons holding positions in state bodies, institutions and organizations are of extremely great importance. The changes taking place in the country, as well as the foreign political and economic situation, require reform and modernization of state authorities and management, as well as increased requirements for managerial personnel. The formation of a highly qualified corps of professionals in state bodies is one of the priority areas of modern personnel policy. It has been found that personnel policy is a general direction of personnel activity, which includes a system of principles, methods, forms and organizational mechanisms aimed at achieving goals and objectives related to the creation, preservation and development of the state. Such a direction is of strategic importance for the country, as it contributes to the creation of a professional staff capable of operating effectively in conditions of economic, legal and political instability. The issues of professionalism and competence of civil servants are critically important for ensuring the effectiveness of state policy. One of the main tasks of government bodies is the training of highly qualified personnel, whose activities should be aimed at the further development of Ukraine. Personnel policy is a powerful tool for reforming state and local self-government, as well as public administration in general. In turn, personnel management is the basis for the effective work of public authorities. It is a key element of the country’s socio-economic development, since the activation and professionalism of managerial personnel in the state power system, as well as the effective use of human resources, have a positive impact on the development of social and economic spheres.
Blockchain technology has attracted attention from public sector agencies, mainly for its perceived potential to improve transparency, data integrity, and administrative processes. However, its concrete value and applicability within government settings remain contested, and real-world adoption has been limited and uneven. This raises questions regarding the conditions that promote or impede adoption at the institutional level. Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis is employed in this research to explore how the combined effects of national-level regulatory clarity, financial provision, digital readiness, and ecosystem engagement shape patterns of blockchain adoption in the European public sector. Rather than identifying any single factor as decisive, our findings reveal a plurality of institutional paths leading to high adoption intensity, with regulatory certainty and European Union funding appearing most frequently on high-consistency paths. In contrast, digital readiness indicators and national research and development budgets are substitutable, challenging resource-based perceptions of technology adoption and supporting a configurational understanding that accounts for institutional interdependence and contextuality. We argue that policy strategies cannot look for overall readiness but should place key institutional strengths relative to local conditions and public value objectives.
Information technology, Political institutions and public administration (General)
Inconsistent political statements represent a form of misinformation. They erode public trust and pose challenges to accountability, when left unnoticed. Detecting inconsistencies automatically could support journalists in asking clarification questions, thereby helping to keep politicians accountable. We propose the Inconsistency detection task and develop a scale of inconsistency types to prompt NLP-research in this direction. To provide a resource for detecting inconsistencies in a political domain, we present a dataset of 698 human-annotated pairs of political statements with explanations of the annotators' reasoning for 237 samples. The statements mainly come from voting assistant platforms such as Wahl-O-Mat in Germany and Smartvote in Switzerland, reflecting real-world political issues. We benchmark Large Language Models (LLMs) on our dataset and show that in general, they are as good as humans at detecting inconsistencies, and might be even better than individual humans at predicting the crowd-annotated ground-truth. However, when it comes to identifying fine-grained inconsistency types, none of the model have reached the upper bound of performance (due to natural labeling variation), thus leaving room for improvement. We make our dataset and code publicly available.
Italo Alberto do Nascimento Sousa, Jorge Machado, Jose Carlos Vaz
This research examines the role of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in enhancing citizen engagement in participatory budgeting. In response to challenges like declining civic participation and increased societal polarization, the study explores how online political participation can strengthen democracy and promote social equity. By integrating Generative AI into public consultation platforms, the research aims to improve citizen proposal formulation and foster effective dialogue between citizens and government. It assesses the capacities governments need to implement AI-enhanced participatory tools, considering technological dependencies and vulnerabilities. Analyzing technological structures, actors, interests, and strategies, the study contributes to understanding how technological advancements can reshape participatory institutions to better facilitate citizen involvement. Ultimately, the research highlights how Generative AI can transform participatory institutions, promoting inclusive, democratic engagement and empowering citizens.
Carolina Torreblanca, William Dinneen, Guy Grossman
et al.
How has the credibility revolution shaped political science? We address this question by classifying 91,632 articles published between 2003 and 2023 across 156 political science journals using large language models, focusing on research design, credibility-enhancing practices, and citation patterns. We find that design-based studies -- those leveraging plausibly exogenous variation to justify causal claims -- have become increasingly common and receive a citation premium. In contrast, model-based approaches that rely on strong modeling assumptions have declined. Yet the rise of design-based work is uneven: it is concentrated in top journals and among authors at highly ranked institutions, and it is driven primarily by the growth of survey experiments. Other credibility-enhancing practices that help reduce false positives and false negatives, such as placebo tests and power calculations, remain rare. Taken together, our findings point to substantial but selective change, more consistent with a partial reform than a revolution.
Semantic Text Embedding is a fundamental NLP task that encodes textual content into vector representations, where proximity in the embedding space reflects semantic similarity. While existing embedding models excel at capturing general meaning, they often overlook ideological nuances, limiting their effectiveness in tasks that require an understanding of political bias. To address this gap, we introduce PRISM, the first framework designed to Produce inteRpretable polItical biaS eMbeddings. PRISM operates in two key stages: (1) Controversial Topic Bias Indicator Mining, which systematically extracts fine-grained political topics and their corresponding bias indicators from weakly labeled news data, and (2) Cross-Encoder Political Bias Embedding, which assigns structured bias scores to news articles based on their alignment with these indicators. This approach ensures that embeddings are explicitly tied to bias-revealing dimensions, enhancing both interpretability and predictive power. Through extensive experiments on two large-scale datasets, we demonstrate that PRISM outperforms state-of-the-art text embedding models in political bias classification while offering highly interpretable representations that facilitate diversified retrieval and ideological analysis. The source code is available at https://github.com/dukesun99/ACL-PRISM.
Introduction. The article examines the specifics of the development and historical legacy of the Russian party system and European democratic institutions. The root causes of the emergence of popular representation in the political sphere of life are investigated, and a comparative analysis of the experience of Western and Russian countries is carried out. The subject of the research is the Russian society and the political structure of modern Russia. The purpose of the study is to identify and substantiate the need to start considering the possibilities of reforming political institutions in order to create a new architecture of legislative power radically different from the Western model. Materials and methods. The article uses materials from domestic and foreign scientific sources. The methodological basis of the research is based on the following general scientific and special methods: comparative method; method of system analysis; analytical method; institutional method; historical method; civilizational and identitarian approaches. The results of the study. In Russia, the evolution of government institutions, starting with the Veche assemblies and Zemstvo Councils, has laid the fundamental foundations of legitimacy and legality in the public consciousness, which are radically different from the Western political culture of Great Britain and the United States of America. Contrary to popular opinion, the article draws conclusions about the fallacy of believing in the axiom of universality and the lack of alternatives to the Western democratic model of the party system, shows the impossibility of its effective implementation in Russia, due to the uniqueness of Russian civilization and culture and the peculiarities of spiritual, historical and social development. Discussion and conclusion. Attempts to transform Russian political consciousness, ignoring the prevailing historical and socio-cultural realities in building the party system, are currently not yielding the expected results. Moreover, orientation towards Western patterns has repeatedly undermined Russia's stability and unity, which means that a new crisis is likely to arise in the future if the country refuses to form its own approach to political governance. It is necessary to start discussing the possibilities of creating a new architecture of legislative power that is fundamentally different from the models of another Western civilization.
N. Nazaruddin, A. Yani, Chalirafi Chalirafi
et al.
The 2024 General Election in Indonesia marks a critical democratic milestone, with 56% of voters comprising millennials and Gen Z. However, youth political participation faces challenges such as low political literacy, apathy, and misinformation on social media. This article examines a community service initiative through a public lecture titled Millennial Contributions to the 2024 Election organized by the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences (FISIP) at Malikussaleh University for Public Administration students. The program aimed to enhance political awareness, digital literacy, and students roles as democratic agents. Methods included needs-based material preparation, expert-led lectures, interactive discussions, reflection sessions, and post-event questionnaires. Key topics covered election mechanisms, information disorders (misinformation, disinformation, malinformation), and strategies for becoming informed voters. Results indicated significant improvements in students understanding of electoral processes, the impact of misinformation, and the urgency of active participation, with 75% of participants expressing increased confidence in engaging with the 2024 election. Identified challenges included political skepticism, gaps in advanced political literacy, and reliance on unverified social media content. The initiative emphasized countermeasures such as fact-checking tools, educational campaigns, and collaborations with institutions, alongside legal frameworks like Indonesias Electronic Information and Transactions Law (ITE Law) to combat hoaxes and data breaches. The study concludes that academic forums effectively foster critical political awareness among millennials. Despite persistent barriers, enhancing political and digital literacy is pivotal to improving electoral participation quality and strengthening Indonesias substantive democracy. As future public administrators, Public Administration students hold strategic roles in disseminating democratic values and modeling informed civic engagement, contributing to a more resilient democratic ecosystem.
In this article, the authors attempt to characterize and analyze the problem of assessing educational losses in the school physical education system at both the state and regional levels, as well as their impact on the functioning of the educational sector. Numerous crises, instability, and growing risks in Ukrainian society during 2019–2025 (the COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences, the full-scale invasion of 2022) have negatively affected the economy, the environment, political behavior, and both global and regional processes. Among the ambitious and urgent actions at all levels of public administration in the fields of education, physical culture and sports, science, technology, and innovation is the development of effective measures to ensure the sustainable growth of the school physical education system. Drawing on established data on educational losses in the general secondary education system, the authors propose a systematic approach to developing regional-level measures for assessing losses in school physical education. These include: recognizing the influence of the physical education system on the stability of the educational sector and on the sustainable development of the state, as both a factor in preparing the younger generation and an educational tool in military, utilitarian, and health-related areas, closely tied to economic development and state policy; conducting qualitative diagnostics of student achievement at different levels, taking into account their physical condition and level of fitness; assessing the quality of physical education teacher training under new conditions; creating favorable conditions for teachers’ professional development in line with state policy in education, physical education, and sports; establishing a modern, safe, and inclusive environment for physical education classes; advancing digitalization of the educational process; developing an algorithm for assessing educational losses; creating a system for annual monitoring of losses in physical education and their impact on the broader educational process; preparing recommendations for specialists to address the consequences of educational losses for students’ physical and mental health, as well as their level of physical fitness. Thus, the effectiveness of measuring and overcoming educational losses in school physical education, in our view, can be ensured only through cross-sectoral cooperation among all stakeholders in the education system—at the state level, the level of regional communities, and the local level of secondary education institutions, including parents and teachers. One of the most effective tools is the creation of scientific and practical partnerships at the community level, the effective management of which should include high-quality programs for addressing losses in physical education, methodological support, and the development of training courses for physical education teachers, as well as the integration of this component into teacher training programs.
Galina Viktorovna Morozova, T. Nikitina, A. Nikitin
et al.
The article presents the results of a sociological study conducted by a survey in the period from March 2022 to March 2024 by the Department of Public Relations and Applied Political Science of Kazan Federal University in order to identify the level of student interest in politics, youth preferences regarding the choice of sources of political news in the QMS, including in the media, and trust in them. Thus, based on the purpose of the study, its object is the student youth, and the subject is the specifics of the media consumption of political information by the student youth. The data obtained from the study of students' requests for the consumption of political content, its impact on the attitude of young students to politics and the institution of elections in the context of digitalization of everyday media practices are described. The methodological basis of the research was based on the analysis of media consumption by young people, as well as the level of interest in political information, its sources, and forms of presentation in social networks. The empirical base is the data from a survey of KFU students in the period from March 2022 to March 2024. The increasing influence of media systems, digital industries and technologies on all processes taking place in society has actualized the problem of optimizing interaction in the communication space in all its segments, including in the field of politics, in the processes of legitimization of power. The formation of a model of interaction between the younger generation and the government, its communication with the political elite and public administration institutions is particularly difficult. This problem is connected, on the one hand, with the high integration of young people into the digital environment, the mediatized format of socialization, and the growing multi-level demand of the younger generation for social media. On the other hand, the difficulty of establishing communication between young citizens and the authorities is due to their certain detachment from the world of politics. The results obtained indicate a low level of interest among young people in it, which is largely situational in nature, usually associated with some major events. In general, a rather low social and political activity of the new generation has been revealed, which is also recorded by numerous other researchers, since there is undoubtedly a potential interest of the younger generation in politics.
Jhuly Mayara da Silva Barboza Servelin, Samara Ribeiro de Oliveira, Aline de Novaes Conceição
Apresentam-se resultados de pesquisa sobre uma temática que partiu das vivências das autoras em escolas no interior do Mato Grosso do Sul, onde questionaram: se ainda existem escolas com espaços e materiais inadequados para a Educação Infantil, o que tem sido defendido nas produções científicas? O objetivo consiste em identificar a produção científica sobre espaços e materiais para a Educação Infantil. Para isso, foi realizada revisão bibliográfica, consultando o Portal de Periódicos da Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior, a Scientific Electronic Library Online e o repositório da Universidade Federal do Mato Grosso do Sul; utilizando os descritores ‘Espaços e Materiais na Educação Infantil’ e selecionando textos publicados nos últimos cinco anos, ou seja, de 2019 (ano seguinte a implementação da Base Nacional Comum Curricular) a 2023 (ano anterior da pesquisa, por ser um ano finalizado). Foi possível selecionar 16 textos publicados nos seguintes anos: 2023 (1), 2022 (1), 2021 (5), 2020 (3) e 2019 (6), neste último, seguinte a implementação da Base Nacional Comum Curricular, foi verificada maior preocupação com o tema. Nos textos selecionados, houve o destaque para a importância da utilização intencional dos espaços e materiais, que podem auxiliar na Educação Integral da criança - sem esquecer que tanto no espaço externo quanto no interno das escolas, é possível realizar a exploração para promoverem a interação e o brincar - no entanto, a falta de recursos e planejamento, limitam o pleno desenvolvimento das crianças. Desse modo, é necessário discutir formas de melhorar os espaços e materiais na Educação Infantil, possibilitando que sejam utilizados de forma intencional e sistematizada.
Political institutions and public administration (General), Social sciences (General)
Метою дослідження є розробка концепції впровадження інноваційних європейських практик диджиталізації як ключовий чинник забезпечення соціально-економічної безпеки в умовах глобальних викликів. За допомогою методів ризик-орієнтованого підходу, системного аналізу та моделювання розглянуто шляхи використання інноваційних європейських практик диджиталізації. Результати досліджень: 1. Здійснено діагностику проблем, які виникають при сучасному аналізі взаємозв’язку диджиталізації та соціально-економічної безпеки. 2. Проаналізовано напрями розвитку технологій, які можуть значно підвищити соціально-економічну безпеку. Глобальні виклики, такі як пандемії, економічні кризи, зміни клімату, можуть суттєво впливати на процеси диджиталізації та їхній вплив на соціально-економічну безпеку. Наукова новизна дослідження полягає в тому, що європейські практики диджиталізації виступають важливим інструментом забезпечення соціально-економічної безпеки в умовах глобальних викликів, у зв’язку з чим важливо дослідити новітні підходи, які можна запропонувати для сталого розвитку.
Доведено, що ШІ може аналізувати великі обсяги даних для прогнозування економічних криз, природних катастроф або соціальних конфліктів, що дозволяє урядам і компаніям заздалегідь підготуватися до можливих викликів; використання ШІ для оптимізації виробництва, логістики та управління ресурсами допомагає зменшити витрати й підвищити економічну стійкість. Хмарні рішення надають доступ до важливих ресурсів і послуг із будь-якої точки світу, що забезпечує безперебійну роботу бізнесу та державних установ у разі надзвичайних ситуацій. Хмарні платформи забезпечують ефективне управління великими обсягами даних, що необхідно для ухвалення стратегічних рішень. Практичне значення дослідження полягає в подоланні ключових викликів і використанні можливостей для подальшого впровадження інноваційних європейських практик диджиталізації як ключовий чинник забезпечення соціально-економічної безпеки в умовах глобальних викликів. Використання інноваційних європейських практик має значний потенціал, щоб прискорити досягнення ЦСР, але потребує врахування можливих ризиків і викликів.
Education (General), Theory and practice of education
Social media platforms play a pivotal role in shaping public opinion and amplifying political discourse, particularly during elections. However, the same dynamics that foster democratic engagement can also exacerbate polarization. To better understand these challenges, here, we investigate the ideological positioning of tweets related to the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. To this end, we analyze 1,235 tweets from key political figures and 63,322 replies, and classify ideological stances into Pro-Democrat, Anti-Republican, Pro-Republican, Anti-Democrat, and Neutral categories. Using a classification pipeline involving three large language models (LLMs)-GPT-4o, Gemini-Pro, and Claude-Opus-and validated by human annotators, we explore how ideological alignment varies between candidates and constituents. We find that Republican candidates author significantly more tweets in criticism of the Democratic party and its candidates than vice versa, but this relationship does not hold for replies to candidate tweets. Furthermore, we highlight shifts in public discourse observed during key political events. By shedding light on the ideological dynamics of online political interactions, these results provide insights for policymakers and platforms seeking to address polarization and foster healthier political dialogue.
Ho-Chun Herbert Chang, Benjamin Shaman, Yung-chun Chen
et al.
Visual content on social media has become increasingly influential in shaping political discourse and civic engagement. Using a dataset of 239,526 Instagram images, deep learning, and LLM-based workflows, we examine the impact of different content types on user engagement during the 2024 US presidential Elections, with a focus on synthetic visuals. Results show while synthetic content may not increase engagement alone, it mediates how political information is created through highly effective, often absurd, political memes. We define the notion of generative memesis, where memes are no longer shared person-to-person but mediated by AI through customized, generated images. We also find partisan divergences: Democrats use AI for in-group support whereas Republicans use it for out-group attacks. Non-traditional, left-leaning outlets are the primary creators of political memes; emphasis on different topics largely follows issue ownership.