Governance theory has always presumed cognitive comparability between governors and governed. This paper identifies that unstated assumption, constructs a framework that makes it testable, and shows that it is load-bearing. The framework specifies necessary conditions along six dimensions (legitimacy, accountability, corrigibility, non-domination, subsidiarity, and institutional resilience), synthesized from political legitimacy theory, principal-agent models, republican political theory, and AI alignment research. Applied first to existing institutions and then to a prospective case of bounded superintelligent authority where capability asymmetry is radical, the framework finds structural failures on four of six dimensions. Among these, two are design-tractable and two are theory-requiring: the public reason problem under cognitive incomprehensibility and the non-domination problem under permanent capability asymmetry demand genuinely new normative frameworks, not better institutional design. A further finding is that dimensions which function as independent checks under bounded asymmetry become correlated failures under radical asymmetry. The analysis contributes to political theory by exposing foundational assumptions that have gone unexamined because, until now, they have always been satisfied.
This article examines the transformative role of public relations in government institutions as a fundamental mechanism for political culture formation during periods of societal transformation, with particular focus on the Ukrainian context in 2025. The research analyzes how contemporary public relations strategies in state governance contribute to democratic consolidation, transparency enhancement, and citizen engagement within the framework of Ukraine's European integration process and post-conflict reconstruction efforts. Through comprehensive analysis of public administration reform initiatives, digital transformation programs, and citizen-government communication patterns, the study reveals significant correlations between effective public relations practices and the evolution of democratic political culture. The findings demonstrate that strategic implementation of public relations mechanisms in government institutions serves as a critical catalyst for political culture transformation, particularly in contexts of democratic transition and institutional modernization. The study identifies key challenges and opportunities in leveraging public relations tools for sustainable political culture development, including the integration of digital platforms, community engagement strategies, and transparency initiatives. The research contributes to understanding how public relations functions as both a technical instrument of governance and a foundational element in democratic political culture formation during transformational periods.
Tarek Naous, Anagha Savit, Carlos Rafael Catalan
et al.
As Large Language Models (LLMs) gain stronger multilingual capabilities, their ability to handle culturally diverse entities becomes crucial. Prior work has shown that LLMs often favor Western-associated entities in Arabic, raising concerns about cultural fairness. Due to the lack of multilingual benchmarks, it remains unclear if such biases also manifest in different non-Western languages. In this paper, we introduce Camellia, a benchmark for measuring entity-centric cultural biases in nine Asian languages spanning six distinct Asian cultures. Camellia includes 19,530 entities manually annotated for association with the specific Asian or Western culture, as well as 2,173 naturally occurring masked contexts for entities derived from social media posts. Using Camellia, we evaluate cultural biases in four recent multilingual LLM families across various tasks such as cultural context adaptation, sentiment association, and entity extractive QA. Our analyses show a struggle by LLMs at cultural adaptation in all Asian languages, with performance differing across models developed in regions with varying access to culturally-relevant data. We further observe that different LLM families hold their distinct biases, differing in how they associate cultures with particular sentiments. Lastly, we find that LLMs struggle with context understanding in Asian languages, creating performance gaps between cultures in entity extraction.
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.
Ali Salloum, Dorian Quelle, Letizia Iannucci
et al.
Online political discourse is increasingly shaped not by a few dominant platforms but by a fragmented ecosystem of social media spaces, each with its own user base, target audience, and algorithmic mediation of discussion. Such fragmentation may fundamentally change how polarization manifests online. In this study, we investigate the characteristics of political discourse and polarization on the emerging social media site Bluesky. We collect all activity on the platform between December 2024 and May 2025 to map out the platform's political topic landscape and detect distinct polarization patterns. Our comprehensive data collection allows us to employ a data-driven methodology for identifying political themes, classifying user stances, and measuring both structural and content-based polarization across key topics raised in English-language discussions. Our analysis reveals that approximately 13% of Bluesky posts engage with political content, with prominent topics including international conflicts, U.S. politics, and socio-technological debates. We find high levels of structural polarization across several salient political topics. However, the most polarized topics are also highly imbalanced in the numbers of users on opposing sides, with the smaller group consisting of only 1-2% of the users. While discussions in Bluesky echo familiar political narratives and polarization trends, the platform exhibits a more politically homogeneous user base than was typical prior to the current wave of platform fragmentation.
Politics today is largely about the art of messaging to influence the public, but the mathematical theory of messaging -- information and communication theory -- can turn this art into a precise analysis, both qualitative and quantitative, that enables us to gain retrospective understandings of past political events and to make forward-looking future predictions.
The digital landscape provides a dynamic platform for political discourse crucial for understanding shifts in public opinion and engagement especially under authoritarian governments This study examines YouTube user behavior during the Russian-Ukrainian war analyzing 2168 videos with over 36000 comments from January 2022 to February 2024 We observe distinct patterns of participation and gender dynamics that correlate with major political and military events Notably females were more active in antigovernment channels especially during peak conflict periods Contrary to assumptions about online engagement in authoritarian contexts our findings suggest a complex interplay where women emerge as pivotal digital communicators This highlights online platforms role in facilitating political expression under authoritarian regimes demonstrating its potential as a barometer for public sentiment.
This paper introduces "Making Beshbarmak", an interactive cooking game that celebrates the nomadic ancestry and cultural heritage of Central Asian communities worldwide. Designed to promote cultural appreciation and identity formation, the game invites players to learn and recreate the traditional dish Beshbarmak through an engaging step-by-step process, incorporating storytelling elements that explain the cultural significance of the meal. Our project contributes to digital cultural heritage and games research by offering an accessible, open-source prototype on p5.js, enabling users to connect with and explore Central Asian traditions. "Making Beshbarmak" serves as both an educational tool and a platform for cultural preservation, fostering a sense of belonging among Central Asian immigrant populations.
I report here a comprehensive analysis about the political preferences embedded in Large Language Models (LLMs). Namely, I administer 11 political orientation tests, designed to identify the political preferences of the test taker, to 24 state-of-the-art conversational LLMs, both closed and open source. When probed with questions/statements with political connotations, most conversational LLMs tend to generate responses that are diagnosed by most political test instruments as manifesting preferences for left-of-center viewpoints. This does not appear to be the case for five additional base (i.e. foundation) models upon which LLMs optimized for conversation with humans are built. However, the weak performance of the base models at coherently answering the tests' questions makes this subset of results inconclusive. Finally, I demonstrate that LLMs can be steered towards specific locations in the political spectrum through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with only modest amounts of politically aligned data, suggesting SFT's potential to embed political orientation in LLMs. With LLMs beginning to partially displace traditional information sources like search engines and Wikipedia, the societal implications of political biases embedded in LLMs are substantial.
Fajar Noor Ramadhian, Tengku Rika Valentina, Irawati Irawati
et al.
Pola rekrutmen kepala daerah menurut undang-undang No.5 Tahun 1974 ditentukan oleh pemerintahan pusat, sedangkan di undang-undang No.8 Tahun 2015 kepala daerah dipilih secara langsung. Perbedaan penjelasan undang-undang ini juga memperlihatkan posisi elite Jakarta dan masyarakat daerah dalam menentukan calon pemimpinnya. Kelompok-kelompok militer mendapatkan tempat yang strategis dengan besarnya pengaruh lembaga ini di era Orde Baru. Pemilihan kepala daerah hanya sekadar formalitas, karena mekanismenya diatur oleh Orde Baru. Sedangkan di undang-undang No 8 Tahun 2015 partai politik menjadi wadah rekrutmen kepala daerah sebelum dipilih oleh masyarakat secara langsung. Masyarakat sipil mendapatkan kesempatan yang lebih luas dan terbuka dalam menyuarakan aspirasi politik. Penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan studi literatur, penulis menggali informasi dari dua undang-undang tersebut lalu melihat pola rekrutmen kepala daerah di dua undang-undang ini.
Political institutions and public administration - Asia (Asian studies only)
Recent public opinion polls conducted in Europe and the United States show increasingly negative views of China. Does the Chinese public hold similar views of “the West”? Conducting a two-wave survey in China, we found great divergence and asymmetries in Chinese public perceptions. First, Chinese views of European countries and the US diverge sharply, despite these countries being typically grouped together as “the West” in mainstream English and Chinese discourses; the Chinese viewed the US much more negatively than Europe. Second, whereas the Chinese reciprocated American antipathy, there was an asymmetry in public perceptions between China and Europe, with the Chinese expressing much greater favourability towards European countries than the other way around, though the degree of favourability still varied by country. Analyses of respondent attributes also yielded insights that both confirm and challenge some of the conventional wisdom regarding age, education, and party membership in Chinese public opinion.
Political institutions and public administration - Asia (Asian studies only), Social sciences and state - Asia (Asian studies only)
Julizar Idris, Jumanah Jumanah, Iwan Setiawan
et al.
Cost and benefit analysis is carried out to assess whether the costs associated with financing a feasibility study outweigh the potential benefits. Cost refers to the financial resources used in conducting the study, while benefits cover possible risks of project failure, including opportunity costs, start-up costs, and capital costs. A comprehensive evaluation is carried out to determine whether the costs associated with funding the feasibility study outweigh the potential benefits. This research approach uses a qualitative approach, where the method focuses on research by describing the phenomena that occur. The type of research used is descriptive. Data collection with biometric mapping was carried out on the VOSViewer application, then, in the text format of the data, which was inputted and analyzed with VOSViewer, the results of research developments in the implementation of the smart city program obtained the conclusion. The results of the expansion of the regions revealed the gloomy situation of the government's performance and the development of the public in the 70 regions resulting from the expansion. In addition, the process of regional expansion is the strengthening of ethnic and religious identity politics and the rise of narrow regional insights. Regional expansion is the best solution for every problem that occurs in the region. The creation of justice and equity between the central and regional governments. The formation of new autonomous regions is expected to bring services closer to the community, the implementation of an effective and efficient government wheel and democratization at the regional level.
Political institutions and public administration - Asia (Asian studies only)
Kazuki Nakajima, Ruodan Liu, Kazuyuki Shudo
et al.
Gender imbalance in academia has been confirmed in terms of a variety of indicators, and its magnitude often varies from country to country. Europe and North America, which cover a large fraction of research workforce in the world, have been the main geographical regions for research on gender imbalance in academia. However, the academia in East Asia, which accounts for a substantial fraction of research, may be exposed to strong gender imbalance because Asia has been facing persistent and stronger gender imbalance in society at large than Europe and North America. Here we use publication data between 1950 and 2020 to analyze gender imbalance in academia in China, Japan, and South Korea in terms of the number of researchers, their career, and citation practice. We found that, compared to the average of the other countries, gender imbalance is larger in these three East Asian countries in terms of the number of researchers and their citation practice and additionally in Japan in terms of research career. Moreover, we found that Japan has been exposed to the larger gender imbalance than China and South Korea in terms of research career and citation practice.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is currently in the throes of redefining itself as not just China's ruling party, but also as the dominant political force of global China. Following the path of Chinese globalisation, this project overlaps with – but is different from – China's much maligned strategy of influencing and interfering in the society and politics of other countries. The principal aim of the CCP's global extension is not to meddle in the affairs of other countries, but tying Chinese people, goods, money, business, and institutions that have ventured abroad back into the strategy and domestic system of China and the CCP. The article shows that China's emerging superpower is informed both by China's unique pattern of globalisation and the CCP's own understanding of the nature, aims, and modalities of its rule, which can only partially be compared to those of earlier superpowers.
Political institutions and public administration - Asia (Asian studies only), Social sciences and state - Asia (Asian studies only)
Polarization and echo chambers are often studied in the context of explicitly political events such as elections, and little scholarship has examined the mixing of political groups in non-political contexts. A major obstacle to studying political polarization in non-political contexts is that political leaning (i.e., left vs right orientation) is often unknown. Nonetheless, political leaning is known to correlate (sometimes quite strongly) with many lifestyle choices leading to stereotypes such as the "latte-drinking liberal." We develop a machine learning classifier to infer political leaning from non-political text and, optionally, the accounts a user follows on social media. We use Voter Advice Application results shared on Twitter as our groundtruth and train and test our classifier on a Twitter dataset comprising the 3,200 most recent tweets of each user after removing any tweets with political text. We correctly classify the political leaning of most users (F1 scores range from 0.70 to 0.85 depending on coverage). We find no relationship between the level of political activity and our classification results. We apply our classifier to a case study of news sharing in the UK and discover that, in general, the sharing of political news exhibits a distinctive left-right divide while sports news does not.
suggests, however, rather than decreasing the number of asylum seekers, deterrent measures only contribute to exacerbate the dangers travelers face in and around border zones, while doing little to discourage the movement of those who feel pressured to leave their homes worrying about the consequences later. The political death of asylum may sound as the theoretically most engaging of the three, evinced by the general populace accepting and abetting the politics of exclusions. It is now accepted that the journey a person shall endure to obtain asylum may entail precarity, exclusion, liminality and legal struggle, over many months of limbo during which the “normal” is suspended and the body becomes the border. Asylum seekers are quietly cast aside socially, while a mixture of law, geography and psychology is astutely used to strategically undermine certain people from landing on sovereign soil where asylum is customarily assured but tacitly denied. When the general public turns a blind eye; when we uncritically buy the crisis rhetoric that criminalizes certain arrivals for their mode of traveling; when we deny violence in the face of evidence; when we, intentionally or subconsciously, feel that certain lives are more grievable than others, then the institution of asylum is weakened and its political death assured. The vast evidence collected in this book certainly supports, and visually maps, the many advances this monograph makes for scholars and students in the criminology of mobility, state crime and citizenship studies. Asylum seekers are made precarious by geographical design and the death of asylum does not occur simply on islands and in remote borderlands of the enforcement archipelago, but more acutely in the treatment of people as islands, within law and geopolitical machinations in the interstitial spaces between states. If a limitation can be noted in this book, it would be its emphasis on the Global North and the costly and perilous journey asylum seekers undertake to reach North America, Europe and Australia. More than a weakness, this may indeed sound like a suggestion to expand the enforcement archipelago to include geographies such as in Asia that may not traditionally appear as prominent and yet are often turned into literal and existential carceral spaces. Here, life and the personal histories of certain individuals are grossly devalued, while the asylum process is seldom treated as more than a loophole in legislation if not a magnet for ill-intended migrants displaced by geographical shifts in migration enforcement and new configurations of power. Their immobility in these spaces threatens their identity and morphs territorial borders to cause the death of asylum.
The article aims to analyze the principal directions in the activities of Buryat-Mongolian State Institute of Culture (1929–1936) / Buryat-Mongolian State Institute of Language, Literature and History (1936–1944), the successor of the first scientific organization in Buryatia — the Buryat-Mongolian Scientific Committee (1922–1929). It focuses on the achievements and problems in the organization and implementation of scientific research in the humanities in the 1930s. Materials. The sources used are unpublished documents of the Center for Oriental Manuscripts and Xylographs of the IMBT SB RAS, such as annual plans and reports on research work, minutes of meetings of the Directorate, expedition reports, presentations, abstracts and minutes of conferences, correspondence with various organizations and offices, and other materials that were instrumental in reconstructing the history of reorganizations of the scientific institute under study, in following the changes in its scientific program, and in showing its effectiveness and efficiency. Results. In the 1930–1940s, the studies in the field of history, language, literature, and arts of the Buryat-Mongolian people were the principal directions of research in the Institute. Archaeological expeditions were useful in drawing a general picture of the ancient history of Buryatia and the first cultural-historical schemes. Historians’ work resulted in publishing a significant number of documents devoted to the history of the Buryat-Mongolian people, the publications included materials on issues of the pre-revolutionary Buryat-Mongolia, the revolutionary movement and the Civil war period, culture, and education, including monographs on the history of Buryatia recognized today as classical scientific works. Within the framework of the established ideological attitudes, there was a discussion on controversial issues of the history of Buryat-Mongolia, which accepted the one-line nature of the historical process in Buryat studies. Thanks to the successes of Buryat linguistics, a reform of the Buryat-Mongolian writing was carried out, first based on the Latin, and then on the Cyrillic alphabet. The linguists of the Institute made a decisive contribution to the elaboration of the literary Buryat language, enriching its lexical resources and standardizing spelling and grammar. Collection, systematization and study of oral folk art and musical folklore, adding to the Manuscript Department of the Institute manuscripts and woodcuts in Tibetan, Mongolian, Buryat-Mongolian languages, as well as uligers, chronicles, and other historical and literary monuments, and translation work — these and other areas of scientific research shaped the development of the humanities in Buryatia in the 1930–1940s. Throughout the period of persecutions and repressions, despite personnel shortage and everyday hardships, the Institute’s team continued their work, conducting large-scale studies of the socio-political and economic history, the culture and art of Buryat-Mongolia.
History of Asia, Political institutions and public administration - Asia (Asian studies only)
Research on online political communication has primarily focused on content in explicitly political spaces. In this work, we set out to determine the amount of political talk missed using this approach. Focusing on Reddit, we estimate that nearly half of all political talk takes place in subreddits that host political content less than 25% of the time. In other words, cumulatively, political talk in non-political spaces is abundant. We further examine the nature of political talk and show that political conversations are less toxic in non-political subreddits. Indeed, the average toxicity of political comments replying to a out-partisan in non-political subreddits is even less than the toxicity of co-partisan replies in explicitly political subreddits.
Duilio Balsamo, Paolo Bajardi, Alberto Salomone
et al.
The complex unfolding of the US opioid epidemic in the last 20 years has been the subject of a large body of medical and pharmacological research, and it has sparked a multidisciplinary discussion on how to implement interventions and policies to effectively control its impact on public health. This study leverages Reddit as the primary data source to investigate the opioid crisis. We aimed to find a large cohort of Reddit users interested in discussing the use of opioids, trace the temporal evolution of their interest, and extensively characterize patterns of the nonmedical consumption of opioids, with a focus on routes of administration and drug tampering. We used a semiautomatic information retrieval algorithm to identify subreddits discussing nonmedical opioid consumption, finding over 86,000 Reddit users potentially involved in firsthand opioid usage. We developed a methodology based on word embedding to select alternative colloquial and nonmedical terms referring to opioid substances, routes of administration, and drug-tampering methods. We modeled the preferences of adoption of substances and routes of administration, estimating their prevalence and temporal unfolding, observing relevant trends such as the surge in synthetic opioids like fentanyl and an increasing interest in rectal administration. Ultimately, through the evaluation of odds ratios based on co-mentions, we measured the strength of association between opioid substances, routes of administration, and drug tampering, finding evidence of understudied abusive behaviors like chewing fentanyl patches and dissolving buprenorphine sublingually. We believe that our approach may provide a novel perspective for a more comprehensive understanding of nonmedical abuse of opioids substances and inform the prevention, treatment, and control of the public health effects.