Tom Bidewell, Artemis Deligianni, Tuğrulcan Elmas
et al.
The influence of gender on online political communication remains contested, with existing scholarship providing mixed evidence as to whether gender shapes political messaging in digital environments. However, this debate has largely centred on mainstream platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), leaving the dynamics of alt-tech social media underexamined. This paper addresses this gap by analysing gendered patterns of political communication on Truth Social, a hyper-partisan platform that functions as a hub for the most committed followers of the American far right, a community closely associated with hegemonic masculine norms. To address this gap, we present the first large-scale analysis of political elite communication on Truth Social, using a novel dataset of 107k posts from 129 U.S. political figures. We examine the extent to which gender influences rhetorical style, topic framing, and audience engagement. We find that many gendered communication patterns documented on mainstream platforms persist on Truth Social. In particular, women political elites tend to express more joy and less anger than men and receive significantly higher levels of audience engagement. At the same time, more nuanced differences emerge. Although men and women political elites discuss largely similar conservative themes, they differ in how these issues are framed and in the rhetorical strategies employed. Notably, posts associated with women political elites contain higher levels of fear-based rhetoric, potentially suggesting selective adaptation in communicative style to navigate gender norms on the platform. These findings suggest that on Truth Social, an alt-tech platform with distinct ideological characteristics, mainstream gendered constraints persist, but are expressed through platform-specific communicative patterns shaped by its partisan orientation and sociotechnical environment.
As large language models (LLMs) become deeply embedded in digital platforms and decision-making systems, concerns about their political biases have grown. While substantial work has examined social biases such as gender and race, systematic studies of political bias remain limited, despite their direct societal impact. This paper introduces a general methodology for constructing political bias benchmarks by aligning model-generated voting predictions with verified parliamentary voting records. We instantiate this methodology in three national case studies: PoliBiasNL (2,701 Dutch parliamentary motions and votes from 15 political parties), PoliBiasNO (10,584 motions and votes from 9 Norwegian parties), and PoliBiasES (2,480 motions and votes from 10 Spanish parties). Across these benchmarks, we assess ideological tendencies and political entity bias in LLM behavior. As part of our evaluation framework, we also propose a method to visualize the ideology of LLMs and political parties in a shared two-dimensional CHES (Chapel Hill Expert Survey) space by linking their voting-based positions to the CHES dimensions, enabling direct and interpretable comparisons between models and real-world political actors. Our experiments reveal fine-grained ideological distinctions: state-of-the-art LLMs consistently display left-leaning or centrist tendencies, alongside clear negative biases toward right-conservative parties. These findings highlight the value of transparent, cross-national evaluation grounded in real parliamentary behavior for understanding and auditing political bias in modern LLMs.
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.
ABSTRACT Do populist politicians increase the number of political appointments when they assume power? While the existing literature identifies politicization and political appointments as leading populist strategies, empirical evidence remains limited. Given the elusive nature of political appointments, it is challenging to assess their true extent in various contexts. Our research highlights how exemptions from a merit‐based process are a major indicator of politicization. Through a systematic analysis of all exemptions from competition or a merit‐based selection process in the Israeli civil service from January 1, 2000, to April 30, 2024, we provide empirical evidence linking populism and political appointments, suggesting deep and widespread politicization within the Israeli civil service. Our empirical evidence implies that Israel is probably among the leaders in this regard among developed democratic countries. In discussing our findings, we argue that, given the current global populist trend, public administration scholars should adopt a more critical stance toward political appointments.
Вишневская Нина Тимофеевна, Зудина Анна Алексеевна
Poverty remains one of the pressing social problems of the modern world, and Russia is no exception. The most common cause of poverty is a shortage of income; however, employment and wages do not always guarantee that a family will escape poverty. The purpose of this paper is to systematize foreign and Russian scientific research devoted to the study of the causes and mechanisms of the emergence of the “working poor”. It presents a comprehensive view of poverty as a labor market problem, which is based on both the lack of jobs and their poor quality. Special attention is paid to the relationship between poverty and certain labor market institutions – employment protection legislation and minimum wages. In countries where the level of employment and involvement of households in employment is traditionally high (including Russia), the quality of employment and, above all, the reduction of low-paid employment becomes a fundamental issue of poverty reduction policy. However, in this case it should be taken into account that many low-paid employed people live in “non-poor” households. The opposite is also true: many poor households do not have low-paid workers, their poverty is due to other reasons not related to the labor market (first of all, the composition and size of the household). Therefore, as the experience of many countries shows, raising the minimum wage, as a rule, cannot be the only tool to reduce poverty.
In the context of increasing demands for public accountability and the consolidation of participatory democracy, effective institutional communication emerges as a key determinant of administrative transparency. This article examines the relationship between public communication and institutional transparency within local public administration in Romania, integrating theoretical, legislative, and empirical perspectives. The study employs a mixed-methods design (qualitative–quantitative), combining document analysis with a case study conducted on a sample of N = 108 citizens. The findings reveal a significant correlation between the clarity and accessibility of communication and the perception of transparency. Statistically significant differences were identified between urban and rural respondents (t(106) = 2.34, p = 0.021), as well as across educational levels (F(2,105) = 4.98, p = 0.009). Although digitalization is perceived as a facilitating factor, the overall level of civic participation remains limited. The study confirms the hypothesis that effective communication does not merely reflect institutional transparency but actively generates it, provided that it is strategically supported and embedded within an organizational culture grounded in openness and responsiveness.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant advances in natural language processing, yet their potential for high-stake political decision-making remains largely unexplored. This paper addresses the gap by focusing on the application of LLMs to the United Nations (UN) decision-making process, where the stakes are particularly high and political decisions can have far-reaching consequences. We introduce a novel dataset comprising publicly available UN Security Council (UNSC) records from 1994 to 2024, including draft resolutions, voting records, and diplomatic speeches. Using this dataset, we propose the United Nations Benchmark (UNBench), the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs across four interconnected political science tasks: co-penholder judgment, representative voting simulation, draft adoption prediction, and representative statement generation. These tasks span the three stages of the UN decision-making process--drafting, voting, and discussing--and aim to assess LLMs' ability to understand and simulate political dynamics. Our experimental analysis demonstrates the potential and challenges of applying LLMs in this domain, providing insights into their strengths and limitations in political science. This work contributes to the growing intersection of AI and political science, opening new avenues for research and practical applications in global governance. The UNBench Repository can be accessed at: https://github.com/yueqingliang1/UNBench.
Misinformation poses a growing global threat to institutional trust, democratic stability, and public decision-making. While prior research has often portrayed social media as a channel for spreading falsehoods, less is known about the conditions under which it may instead constrain misinformation by enhancing transparency and accountability. Here we show this dual potential in the context of local governments' GDP reporting in China, where data falsifications are widespread. Analyzing official reports from 2011 to 2019, we find that local governments have overstated GDP on average. However, after adopting social media for public communications, the extent of misreporting declines significantly but only in regions where the public scrutiny over political matters is high. In such regions, social media increases the cost of misinformation by facilitating greater information disclosure and bottom-up monitoring. In contrast, in regions with low public scrutiny, adopting social media can exacerbate data manipulation. These findings challenge the prevailing view that social media primarily amplifies misinformation and instead highlight the importance of civic engagement as a moderating force. Our findings show a boundary condition for the spread of misinformation and offer insights for platform design and public policy aimed at promoting accuracy and institutional accountability.
This article examines the complex relationship between money and political legitimacy in democracies (United States, Germany, India) and nondemocracies (China, Russia), using published empirical evidence to explore how financial resources influence governance. In democracies, US campaign finance, German party funding, and Indias electoral bonds amplify elite influence, openly eroding public trust by skewing policy toward wealthy interests. In nondemocracies, Chinas state enterprise patronage and Russias oligarch suppression strengthen legitimacy, yet hide vulnerabilities revealed by anticorruption campaigns and power struggles. The analysis argues that moneys corrosive impact is widespread but varies: democracies face evident legitimacy crises, while nondemocracies conceal underlying fragility. These findings highlight the need for reforms: increased transparency in democracies and wider power bases in nondemocracies, to mitigate moneys distorting effect on political authority.
Arthur Buzelin, Pedro Robles Dutenhefner, Marcelo Sartori Locatelli
et al.
Social media networks have amplified the reach of social and political movements, but most research focuses on mainstream platforms such as X, Reddit, and Facebook, overlooking Discord. As a rapidly growing, community-driven platform with optional decentralized moderation, Discord offers unique opportunities to study political discourse. This study analyzes over 30 million messages from political servers on Discord discussing the 2024 U.S. elections. Servers were classified as Republican-aligned, Democratic-aligned, or unaligned based on their descriptions. We tracked changes in political conversation during key campaign events and identified distinct political valence and implicit biases in semantic association through embedding analysis. We observed that Republican servers emphasized economic policies, while Democratic servers focused on equality-related and progressive causes. Furthermore, we detected an increase in toxic language, such as sexism, in Republican-aligned servers after Kamala Harris's nomination. These findings provide a first look at political behavior on Discord, highlighting its growing role in shaping and understanding online political engagement.
En aras de una mayor transparencia en el tratamiento de los datos personales, este artículo plantea la posibilidad de modificar el art. 22 del Reglamento General de Protección de datos de la Unión Europea para que la prohibición general que este precepto ordena no se ciña a la elaboración de perfiles que pudieran producir efectos ad personam, sino también a otra clase de prácticas que puedan afectar a toda la comunidad política, como las que tratan de manipular a segmentos enteros de la población con el objetivo de interferir en los procesos democráticos. Al efecto, recordamos que el derecho a la protección de datos debe estar dotado de garantías adecuadas y que los instrumentos de defensa que el ordenamiento jurídico contempla no están pensados para este entorno en el que las amenazas tienen otro alcance. En este nuevo marco jurídico, también sería recomendable conceder una nueva textura constitucional al derecho a la protección de datos personales y al derecho de acceso a la información pública. Estas conclusiones se apoyan en los documentos más relevantes aprobados en el seno de la UE en los últimos tres años, en la jurisprudencia del TJUE y del TEDH y en las aportaciones más recientes de la doctrina, que advierten la necesidad de reglas más claras y precisas que permitan compatibilizar el desarrollo de la tecnología con los derechos de las personas.
Political institutions and public administration (General), Accounting. Bookkeeping
Like any form of technology, social media services embed values. To examine how societal values may be present in these systems, we focus on exploring political ideology as a value system. We organised four co-design workshops with political representatives from five major parties in Finland to investigate what values they would incorporate into social media services. The participants were divided into one right-leaning group, two left-leaning groups, and one mixed group. This approach allows us to examine the differences in social media services designed by groups with different political ideologies i.e., value systems. We analysed produced artefacts (early-stage paper mockups) to identify different features and affordances for each group and then contrasted the ideological compositions. Our results revealed a clear distinction between groups: the right-leaning group favoured market-based visibility, while left-leaning groups rejected such design principles in favour of open profile work. Additionally, we found tentative differences in design outcomes along the liberal--conservative dimension. These findings underscore the importance of acknowledging existing political value systems in the design of social computing systems. They also highlight the need for further research to map out political ideologies in technology design.
Luis M. de Campos, Juan M. Fernández-Luna, Juan F. Huete
et al.
A common task in many political institutions (i.e. Parliament) is to find politicians who are experts in a particular field. In order to tackle this problem, the first step is to obtain politician profiles which include their interests, and these can be automatically learned from their speeches. As a politician may have various areas of expertise, one alternative is to use a set of subprofiles, each of which covers a different subject. In this study, we propose a novel approach for this task by using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to determine the main underlying topics of each political speech, and to distribute the related terms among the different topic-based subprofiles. With this objective, we propose the use of fifteen distance and similarity measures to automatically determine the optimal number of topics discussed in a document, and to demonstrate that every measure converges into five strategies: Euclidean, Dice, Sorensen, Cosine and Overlap. Our experimental results showed that the scores of the different accuracy metrics of the proposed strategies tended to be higher than those of the baselines for expert recommendation tasks, and that the use of an appropriate number of topics has proved relevant.
Yuwei Chuai, Jichang Zhao, Nicolas Pröllochs
et al.
Political elites play an important role in the proliferation of online misinformation. However, an understanding of how fact-checking platforms pick up politicized misinformation for fact-checking is still in its infancy. Here, we conduct an empirical analysis of mentions of U.S. political elites within fact-checked statements. For this purpose, we collect a comprehensive dataset consisting of 35,014 true and false statements that have been fact-checked by two major fact-checking organizations (Snopes, PolitiFact) in the U.S. between 2008 and 2023, i.e., within an observation period of 15 years. Subsequently, we perform content analysis and explanatory regression modeling to analyze how veracity is linked to mentions of U.S. political elites in fact-checked statements. Our analysis yields the following main findings: (i) Fact-checked false statements are, on average, 20% more likely to mention political elites than true fact-checked statements. (ii) There is a partisan asymmetry such that fact-checked false statements are 88.1% more likely to mention Democrats, but 26.5% less likely to mention Republicans, compared to fact-checked true statements. (iii) Mentions of political elites in fact-checked false statements reach the highest level during the months preceding elections. (iv) Fact-checked false statements that mention political elites carry stronger other-condemning emotions and are more likely to be pro-Republican, compared to fact-checked true statements. In sum, our study offers new insights into understanding mentions of political elites in false statements on U.S. fact-checking platforms, and bridges important findings at the intersection between misinformation and politicization.
This research examines the perspectives of legal professionals on omnibus legislation in Indonesia, a legal and human rights issue. We have done data searches on hundreds of legal papers that address concerns relating to the law of copyright on the job. Using the keyword system on Google Search, several domestic and international legal periodicals are combed for data. He maintained his efforts to engage the coding system thoroughly with an in-depth examination and a high level of interpretation in order to understand how it may solve issues by emphasizing the quality and integrity of the data. On the basis of the research data and debate, the vast majority of legal professionals believe it to be a fantastic legal change. Nonetheless, the majority of them continue to dispute its efficacy and execution in light of the court's recent ruling that the Creative Economy and Work Law is unconstitutional with conditional enforcement. This conclusion will hopefully influence the legal review section in Indonesia
Political institutions and public administration (General)
Modeling the ideological perspectives of political actors is an essential task in computational political science with applications in many downstream tasks. Existing approaches are generally limited to textual data and voting records, while they neglect the rich social context and valuable expert knowledge for holistic ideological analysis. In this paper, we propose \textbf{PAR}, a \textbf{P}olitical \textbf{A}ctor \textbf{R}epresentation learning framework that jointly leverages social context and expert knowledge. Specifically, we retrieve and extract factual statements about legislators to leverage social context information. We then construct a heterogeneous information network to incorporate social context and use relational graph neural networks to learn legislator representations. Finally, we train PAR with three objectives to align representation learning with expert knowledge, model ideological stance consistency, and simulate the echo chamber phenomenon. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PAR is better at augmenting political text understanding and successfully advances the state-of-the-art in political perspective detection and roll call vote prediction. Further analysis proves that PAR learns representations that reflect the political reality and provide new insights into political behavior.
Lifestyle politics emerge when activities that have no substantive relevance to ideology become politically aligned and polarized. Homophily and social influence are able generate these fault lines on their own; however, social identities from demographics may serve as coordinating mechanisms through which lifestyle politics are mobilized are spread. Using a dataset of 137,661,886 observations from 299,327 Facebook interests aggregated across users of different racial/ethnic, education, age, gender, and income demographics, we find that the most extreme instances of lifestyle politics are those which are highly confounded by demographics such as race/ethnicity (e.g., Black artists and performers). After adjusting political alignment for demographic effects, lifestyle politics decreased by 27.36% toward the political "center" and demographically confounded interests were no longer among the most polarized interests. Instead, after demographic deconfounding, we found that the most liberal interests included electric cars, Planned Parenthood, and liberal satire while the most conservative interests included the Republican Party and conservative commentators. We validate our measures of political alignment and lifestyle politics using the General Social Survey and find similar demographic entanglements with lifestyle politics existed before social media such as Facebook were ubiquitous, giving us strong confidence that our results are not due to echo chambers or filter bubbles. Likewise, since demographic characteristics exist prior to ideological values, we argue that the demographic confounding we observe is causally responsible for the extreme instances of lifestyle politics that we find among the aggregated interests. We conclude our paper by relating our results to Simpson's paradox, cultural omnivorousness, and network autocorrelation.
Sergio Henrique Conceição, Antônio de Macêdo Mota Júnior, Gilson Barbosa Dourado
O estudo de natureza exploratória-descritiva e documental, de abordagem quantitativa, investiga a execução do Fundo de Manutenção e Desenvolvimento da Educação Básica e de Valorização dos Profissionais da Educação (Fundeb), no período 2009-2019, no contexto de cinco municípios (Camaçari, Dias D’Ávila, Lauro de Freitas, Mata de São João e Simões Filho) da Região Metropolitana de Salvador (RMS). Os resultados obtidos indicaram que o Fundeb possibilitou ampliar o volume de recursos nos sistemas municipais de educação; entretanto, aspectos relacionados à demanda reprimida na educação infantil, indisponibilidade de recursos para manutenção e desenvolvimento do ensino (MDE) e o decréscimo nas matrículas na educação de jovens e adultos (EJA) configuram-se como desafios a serem superados.
The shortage of skilled labor and the global competition for highly qualified employees has challenged Dutch companies to develop strategies to attract Highly Skilled Migrants (HSMs). This paper presents a study exploring how well-being is experienced by HSMs living in the Eindhoven region, a critical Dutch Tech Hub. Our population includes highly skilled women and men who moved to Eindhoven for work or to follow their partner trajectory. By analyzing data according to these four groups, we detect significant differences among HSMs. Given the exploratory nature of this work, we use a qualitative method based on semi-structured interviews. Our findings show that gender plays a crucial role in experienced well-being for almost every dimension analyzed. Using an intersectional approach, we challenge previous models of well-being, and we detect different factors that influence the respondents’ well-being when intersecting with gender. Those factors are migratory status, the reason to migrate, parenthood, and origin (EU/non-EU). When all the factors intersect, participants’ well-being decreases in several areas: career, financial satisfaction, subjective well-being, and social relationships. Significant gender differences are also found in migration strategies. Finally, we contribute to debates about skilled migration and well-being by including an intersectional perspective.
Political institutions and public administration (General)