Hasil untuk "Political institutions and public administration - Asia (Asian studies only)"

Peter Kyungtae Park

Shift-share designs are gaining popularity in political science. This article introduces what shift-share designs are, reviews their application in the literature, synthesizes recent methodological developments, and discusses their potential utility in the field. Although shift-share designs have a long historical use in economics, their causal properties only recently began to be understood. Articles in political science tend to be aware of these developments, but do not fully discuss and test identifying assumptions and sometimes apply the methods incorrectly. Most articles rely on the share exogeneity framework, suggesting that the shifter exogeneity framework is underutilized despite its comparable prevalence in economics. I illustrate shifter exogeneity framework and develop auxiliary theoretical results that are potentially useful in applying the framework in political science settings.

Daria Boratyn, Dariusz Stolicki

Research on the causes of political polarization points towards multiple drivers of the problem, from social and psychological to economic and technological. However, political institutions stand out, because -- while capable of exacerbating or alleviating polarization -- they can be re-engineered more readily than others. Accordingly, we analyze one class of such institutions -- electoral systems -- investigating whether the large-party seat bias found in many common systems (particularly plurality and Jefferson-D'Hondt) exacerbates polarization. Cross-national empirical data being relatively sparse and heavily confounded, we use computational methods: an agent-based Monte Carlo simulation. We model voter behavior over multiple electoral cycles, building upon the classic spatial model, but incorporating other known voter behavior patterns, such as the bandwagon effect, strategic voting, preference updating, retrospective voting, and the thermostatic effect. We confirm our hypothesis that electoral systems with a stronger large-party bias exhibit significantly higher polarization, as measured by the Mehlhaff index.

Nicholas Caputo

Since 1887, administrative law has navigated a "capability-accountability trap": technological change forces government to become more sophisticated, but sophistication renders agencies opaque to generalist overseers like the courts and Congress. The law's response--substituting procedural review for substantive oversight--has produced a sedimentary accretion of requirements that ossify capacity without ensuring democratic control. This Article argues that the Supreme Court's post-Loper Bright retrenchment is best understood as an effort to shrink administration back to comprehensible size in response to this complexification. But reducing complexity in this way sacrifices capability precisely when climate change, pandemics, and AI risks demand more sophisticated governance. AI offers a different path. Unlike many prior administrative technologies that increased opacity alongside capacity, AI can help build "scrutability" in government, translating technical complexity into accessible terms, surfacing the assumptions that matter for oversight, and enabling substantive verification of agency reasoning. This Article proposes three doctrinal innovations within administrative law to realize this potential: a Model and System Dossier (documenting model purpose, evaluation, monitoring, and versioning) extending the administrative record to AI decision-making; a material-model-change trigger specifying when AI updates require new process; and a "deference to audit" standard that rewards agencies for auditable evaluation of their AI tools. The result is a framework for what this Article calls the "Fourth Settlement," administrative law that escapes the capability-accountability trap by preserving capability while restoring comprehensible oversight of administration.

Tabitha Speelman

As part of a geopolitical competition for talent, China is often portrayed as especially proactive in its state efforts to attract skilled migrants from around the world. In contrast to this outside view of technocratically executed talent schemes, this article investigates the contested implementation of China's skilled migration reforms in Shanghai, the country's top immigrant destination. It investigates the selective implementation of Shanghai's “new talent regime,” a set of experimental policies focused on improving skilled migrant attraction. The analysis shows that while Shanghai has built an ambitious skilled migration programme on paper, the extent of its implementation has been mixed. Specifically, state actors differentiate between policies deemed in line with longstanding policy goals, which they implement proactively, and more innovative policies, which they implement mainly on a performative level. I argue that this risk-averse policy attitude can be traced to policy centralization and an emerging (re-)politicization of immigration policy.

Roohollah Talebi Arani

Introduction Introduction: International politics is a sphere shaped by the foreign policy of individual states. Meanwhile, the foreign policy of states proceeds according to the strategy or strategies prescribed to advance it. On the other hand, the mindset of the states' decision-makers, the historical evolution of their international relations, the interactions they have had with each other, and the experiences they have accumulated through these interactions have played a significant role in the states' decision to choose and change different strategies. In this framework, states have usually used one of the strategies of "neutrality, isolationism, alliance, and non-alignment" to advance their foreign policy, strategies that are known as "traditional strategies" of states and have been formed in their historical and empirical context. Accordingly, the issue addressed in this article is to examine the differences and similarities between hedging as an emerging strategy in the foreign policy of states and other traditional strategies, such as alliances, neutrality, isolationism, and non-alignment, which have been pursued throughout the history of international relations. Thus, many works have been written throughout the life of international relations as an academic discipline focusing on state strategies. These works have either considered strategies within the framework of foreign policy, which is examined in terms of the field of "Foreign Policy Analysis" and accordingly, strategy selection is placed under policymaking, or they have been viewed during the Cold War in the field of Strategic Studies and thereafter in the newly established field of "Security Studies", and from this perspective, they are discussed in relation to the phenomenon of war and its probability of occurrence, and are placed above military operations. In this article, state strategies are considered within the framework of their foreign policy. Aim and Discussion: This article attempts to present a comparative analysis between containment on the one hand and other traditional state strategies, namely alliance, neutrality, isolationism, and non-alignment, on the other, in order to explain the position of hedging as a foreign policy strategy. Furthermore, given that hedging is very new, both as a concept in the academic world and as an explicit and prominent strategy in the foreign policymaking of states in the international system, it seems necessary to recognize its similarities and differences with other foreign policy strategies of states that, on the one hand, are prevalent in both the fields of International Relations and Foreign Policy Analysis, and on the other hand, have a long-standing history in the discourse of national and international politicians and diplomats.  Method: In doing so, the data collection method is through library and internet searches based on the use of secondary data, focusing on their theoretical and conceptual issues. We aim to show the similarities and differences between them by using a comparative method based on content analysis of qualitative data contained in texts on foreign policy analysis in order to arrive at a proper assessment on the place of hedging in Foreign Policy Analysis. Findings: Hedging has significant differences from all traditional strategies; unlike all other strategies, it is not related to threats but to risks; it can incorporate all other strategies and cover their behavioral aspects; it is a strategy for managing one's own situation, not a strategy for controlling the actions of others or external events; it involves a kind of continuous and comprehensive cooperation in the international environment; it is not conflict-generating and does not have the prospect of conflict; it has a positive view of the international arena and requires that states be proactive rather than reactive; and finally, it is never based on a mental assumption about the intentions of others; in such a way that the hedger state always calculates its circumstantial contingencies.

Benjamin Riesch

Spatial models are central to the study of political conflict, yet their empirical application often depends on text-based methods. A prominent example is the Wordfish model, which estimates actor positions from political texts. However, a key limitation of Wordfish is its unidimensionality, despite the well-established multidimensional nature of political competition. This contribution introduces Wordkrill, a multidimensional extension of Wordfish that retains the original model's interpretability while allowing for efficient estimation of political positions along multiple latent dimensions. After presenting the mathematical framework of Wordkrill, its utility through brief applications to party manifestos and parliamentary speeches is demonstrated. These examples illustrate both the practical advantages and current limitations of the approach.

Nursulu Sagimbayeva, Ruveyda Betül Bahçeci, Ingmar Weber

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.

Hasti Narimanzadeh, Arash Badie-Modiri, Iuliia Smirnova et al.

Affective polarization and political sorting drive public antagonism around issues at the science-policy nexus. Looking at the COVID-19 period, we study cross-domain spillover of incivility and contentiousness in public engagements with climate change and public health on Twitter and Reddit. We find strong evidence of the signatures of affective polarization surrounding COVID-19 spilling into the climate change domain. Across different social media systems, COVID-19 content is associated with incivility and contentiousness in climate discussions. These patterns of increased antagonism were responsive to pandemic events that made the link between science and public policy more salient. The observed spillover activated along pre-pandemic political cleavages, specifically anti-internationalist populist beliefs, that linked climate policy opposition to vaccine hesitancy. Our findings show how affective polarization in public engagement with science becomes entrenched across science policy domains.

Dong Yang

The divergence in globalization strategies between the US (retrenchment and polarization) and China (expansion) presents a puzzle that traditional distributional theories fail to fully explain. This paper offers a novel framework by conceptualizing the globalized economy as a "Congestible Club Good," leading to a "Fractured Metropolis." We argue that globalization flows ($M$) are constrained by domestic Institutional Capacity ($K$), which is heterogeneous and historically contingent. We introduce the concept of the "Optimization Cutoff": globalization incentivized the US to bypass costly domestic upgrades in favor of global expansion, leading to the long-term neglect of Public Capacity ($K_{Public}$). This historical path created a deep polarization. "Congested Incumbents," reliant on the stagnant $K_{Public}$, experience globalization as chaos ($MC>MB$), while "Insulated Elites" use Private Capacity ($K_{Private}$) to bypass bottlenecks ($MB>MC$). This divergence paralyzes the consensus needed to restore $K_{Public}$, creating a "Capacity Trap" where protectionism becomes the politically rational, yet economically suboptimal, equilibrium. Empirically, we construct an Institutional Congestion Index using textual analysis (2000-2024), revealing an exponential surge in disorder-related keywords (from 272 hits to 1,333). We triangulate this perception with the material failure of $K_{Public}$, such as the 3.7 million case backlog in US immigration courts. Our findings suggest the crisis of globalization is fundamentally a crisis of uneven institutional capacity and the resulting political paralysis.

Nomin D. Tsyrenova, Chingis Ts. Tsyrenov

Introduction. The memory of the great Mongol conqueror and his empire still remains the focus of attention of scientists, writers and statesmen and influences modern cultural and political processes. The purpose of this article is that the article provides brief information about the history of creation and the current state of the Ordos mausoleum in honor of Genghis Khan. It is believed that this memorial contains personal belongings and symbols of the power of the great Mongol conqueror. Materials and methods. When conducting the study, a complex of heterogeneous sources was used, represented by Internet publications, journal articles and statistical data related to the Ordos Mausoleum of Genghis Khan. Analytical tools, determined by a systematic approach to the object of study, include the method of retrospective analysis, comparative historical and historical typological methods and systems analysis. The combination of retrospective and problem-chronological methods with the principles of historicism and objectivity made it possible to consider events objectively and in the context of their relationships. Results. Based on current translated data from Chinese publications, an analytical description of the studied object and its tourism potential is presented. It was revealed that the creation of a tourist complex at the Mausoleum of Genghis Khan was initiated by the private development corporation Donglian in 2001. Conclusion. The Ordos Mausoleum of Genghis Khan and the tourist complex of the same name can be considered as one of the modern forms of the cult of veneration of Genghis Khan, as well as a striking example of the pragmatic implementation of the policy of memory on the part of the official Chinese authorities in relation to the great conqueror and the Mongol Empire as a whole. Thanks to a creative approach to the practical implementation of the course of reforms and openness in the field of culture of small peoples, the central and regional Chinese authorities were able to create a completely harmonious synthesis of Chinese and Mongolian cultural traditions, commercialize and synthesize the cultural and aesthetic-symbolic potential of the memory of the Mongol Empire and modern Chinese statehood represented by Genghis Khan and the memorial complex in his honor in Ordos, relying on regional public-private partnerships. Last but not the least, constructive cooperation between the regional historical community, private business and the party-state administration of the Ordos urban district has borne fruit.

Haosen Ge

Abstract Existing studies show that regulation is a major barrier to global economic integration. Nonetheless, identifying and measuring regulatory barriers remains a challenging task for scholars. I propose a novel approach to quantify regulatory barriers at the country-year level. Utilizing information from annual reports of publicly listed companies in the U.S., I identify regulatory barriers business practitioners encounter. The barrier information is first extracted from the text documents by a cutting-edge neural language model trained on a hand-coded training set. Then, I feed the extracted barrier information into a dynamic item response theory model to estimate the numerical barrier level of 40 countries between 2006 and 2015 while controlling for various channels of confounding. I argue that the results returned by this approach should be less likely to be contaminated by major confounders such as international politics. Thus, they are well-suited for future political science research.

Daria Berg, Giorgio Strafella

Cutting across the boundaries of media, literature, visual arts, and cultural studies, this study examines the resurgence of cultural entrepreneurship in post-Mao China, focusing on how the new media have contributed to the rise of women cultural entrepreneurs as a new social phenomenon. It investigates the rise of China's women “cultural entrepreneurs” and their roles as tastemakers and cultural trendsetters, using three case studies from China's creative industries: author Anni Baobei, artist Cao Fei, and actress Xu Jinglei. The Chinese women cultural entrepreneurs are examined against the backdrop of the Reform-era history and growing importance of China's creative industries. Analysis explores how these entrepreneurs use the new media for content dissemination while spinning transmedia narratives about themselves. By examining female self-fashioning and the creation of the cultural entrepreneur as a new type of celebrity in China, the article aims to shed new light on the cultural and social negotiations in China's mediasphere.

Tatiana I. Yusupova

Introduction. In September 1959, a landmark event for Mongolian science — the First International Congress of Mongolologists Philologists — took place in Ulaanbaatar. Its aim was to promote Mongolian Studies and strengthen contacts between scholars. The forum brought together researchers from a number of countries, including those having been separated by the Cold War Iron Curtain. Purpose. The article is to examine the Congress preparation and holding, focusing on previously untouched its ideological contexts. The article is based on the materials from the Russian Academy of Sciences Archives and publications of Congress participants from the USSR, the UK and the USA. Result and conclusions. The study showed that it was important for the Congress organizers that political and ideological disagreements between representatives of different countries did not arise during its work. Mongolian scholars discussed their probability in 1958 with Yu. Roerich during his business trip to Ulaanbaatar. When forming the list of participants in the Congress, the Mongolian Committee of Science took into account the political views of scientists and consulted with the USSR Academy of Sciences on this issue. In addition, at the beginning of the Congress, the delegations of the USSR, Mongolia and China agreed not to enter into discussions among themselves in order to demonstrate the unity of friendly countries. The author concludes that the Congress in Ulaanbaatar was one of the first scientific events of Mongolian Studies during the Cold War period with a broad international representation of scholars from countries belonging to the opposing political blocs. Despite the organizers’ concerns, the Congress demonstrated the leadership of scientific internationalism. Several cases of «political-tinget» disagreements did not come to the forefront of its proceedings. The Congress also demonstrated a significant expansion of international contacts of the Committee of Science and at the time the weakening of Soviet-Mongolian scientific links.

Giulio Pecile, Niccolò Di Marco, Matteo Cinelli et al.

Social media platforms significantly influence ideological divisions by enabling users to select information that aligns with their beliefs and avoid opposing viewpoints. Analyzing approximately 47 million Facebook posts, this study investigates the interactions of around 170 million users with news pages, revealing distinct patterns based on political orientations. While users generally prefer content that reflects their political biases, the extent of engagement varies even among individuals with similar ideological leanings. Specifically, political biases heavily influence commenting behaviors, particularly among users leaning towards the center-left and the right. Conversely, the 'likes' from center-left and centrist users are more indicative of their political affiliations. This research illuminates the complex relationship between social media behavior and political polarization, offering new insights into the manifestation of ideological divisions online.

Jaihyun Park, Ryan Cordell

Warning: This paper contains examples of offensive language targetting marginalized population. The digitization of historical texts invites researchers to explore the large-scale corpus of historical texts with computational methods. In this study, we present computational text analysis on a relatively understudied topic of how Asian workers are represented in historical newspapers in the United States. We found that the word "coolie" was semantically different in some States (e.g., Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and Arkansas) with the different discourses around coolie. We also found that then-Confederate newspapers and then-Union newspapers formed distinctive discourses by measuring over-represented words. Newspapers from then-Confederate States associated coolie with slavery-related words. In addition, we found Asians were perceived to be inferior to European immigrants and subjected to the target of racism. This study contributes to supplementing the qualitative analysis of racism in the United States with quantitative discourse analysis.

Jérôme Rutinowski, Sven Franke, Jan Endendyk et al.

This contribution analyzes the self-perception and political biases of OpenAI's Large Language Model ChatGPT. Taking into account the first small-scale reports and studies that have emerged, claiming that ChatGPT is politically biased towards progressive and libertarian points of view, this contribution aims to provide further clarity on this subject. For this purpose, ChatGPT was asked to answer the questions posed by the political compass test as well as similar questionnaires that are specific to the respective politics of the G7 member states. These eight tests were repeated ten times each and revealed that ChatGPT seems to hold a bias towards progressive views. The political compass test revealed a bias towards progressive and libertarian views, with the average coordinates on the political compass being (-6.48, -5.99) (with (0, 0) the center of the compass, i.e., centrism and the axes ranging from -10 to 10), supporting the claims of prior research. The political questionnaires for the G7 member states indicated a bias towards progressive views but no significant bias between authoritarian and libertarian views, contradicting the findings of prior reports, with the average coordinates being (-3.27, 0.58). In addition, ChatGPT's Big Five personality traits were tested using the OCEAN test and its personality type was queried using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) test. Finally, the maliciousness of ChatGPT was evaluated using the Dark Factor test. These three tests were also repeated ten times each, revealing that ChatGPT perceives itself as highly open and agreeable, has the Myers-Briggs personality type ENFJ, and is among the 15% of test-takers with the least pronounced dark traits.

Giordano Paoletti, Lorenzo Dall'Amico, Kyriaki Kalimeri et al.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, fears grew that making vaccination a political (instead of public health) issue may impact the efficacy of this life-saving intervention, spurring the spread of vaccine-hesitant content. In this study, we examine whether there is a relationship between the political interest of social media users and their exposure to vaccine-hesitant content on Twitter. We focus on 17 European countries using a multilingual, longitudinal dataset of tweets spanning the period before COVID, up to the vaccine roll-out. We find that, in most countries, users' endorsement of vaccine-hesitant content is the highest in the early months of the pandemic, around the time of greatest scientific uncertainty. Further, users who follow politicians from right-wing parties, and those associated with authoritarian or anti-EU stances are more likely to endorse vaccine-hesitant content, whereas those following left-wing politicians, more pro-EU or liberal parties, are less likely. Somewhat surprisingly, politicians did not play an outsized role in the vaccine debates of their countries, receiving a similar number of retweets as other similarly popular users. This systematic, multi-country, longitudinal investigation of the connection of politics with vaccine hesitancy has important implications for public health policy and communication.

Kazuko Kojima

This paper examines what kind of political, institutional arrangements and the behavior of political actors under these arrangements become the stabilizing or destabilizing factors of a country’s diplomatic balancing between the United States and China. Specifically, I describe the domestic politics of Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Singapore in terms of their responses to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) promoted by the Xi Jinping administration. The analysis reveals the following points. First, in all of these countries, the growing presence of China has increased the number of stakeholders in policymaking toward China, and domestic politics regarding policymaking toward China have become more contentious. Second, as a result, each country faces the risk of internalizing its foreign policy toward China, especially on issues related to sovereignty and domestic corruption, thereby destabilizing previously balanced diplomacy between the United States and China. Third, in dealing with such risks, countries with winner-takes-all presidential systems (e.g., South Korea and Indonesia) face difficulties in controlling the internalization of diplomacy, while countries with institutional frameworks that can control destabilizing factors, such as public opinion and corruption (e.g., Japan, Vietnam, and Singapore) are characterized by the relative ease with which they can maintain balanced diplomacy.

William J. Norris

This article focuses on one of the most fascinating features of contemporary Chinese foreign policy, namely the use of economics as a tool of national power. This article seeks to provide a foundational context for the study of China's economic statecraft. The first portion of this article builds upon existing work to frame the phenomenon of China's post-Cold War economic statecraft. I then offer a rough periodization of this post-Cold War era highlighting key events and strategic turning points for China. I distinguish three major periods: integration into the global economic system following the post-Tiananmen isolation (1989–1997), a decade of win-win diplomacy (1998–2008), and emerging great power economic statecraft (2008–2017). The piece concludes with a proposition that we may be witnessing the early stages of a fourth phase as well as some considerations for the future study of Chinese economic statecraft.

Endah Titi Wigati, Samodra Wibawa, Faizal Madya

Bureaucratic reform is needed to make the government more efficient and effective. Purworejo District Attorney has implemented this bureaucratic reform since 2008. This study aims to describe the process of implementing Bureaucratic Reform at the Purworejo District Attorney in five aspects, institutional and organizational effectiveness, management, human resources, accountability and service. The method used is descriptive research with a qualitative approach. Interview data through interviews. The implementation of Bureaucratic Reform at the Purworejo District Prosecutor's Office was carried out in several stages, namely Phase I (2008-2009), Phase II (2010-2014), Phase III (2015-2019) and current conditions. Bureaucratic Reform at the Purworejo District Attorney has implemented the Integrity Zone to restore public trust, empower functional prosecutors to improve law enforcement, provide contact for public complaints, implement one stop sevices, use Information Technology to support their duties and functions. However, there are still some weaknesses, namely organizational organizations, organizations consisting of a combination of control functions and functions, responsible organization, and unsuitable employee placement.