After the end of World War II, the commitment to confine scientific activities in universities and research institutions to peaceful and civilian purposes has entered, in the form of {\it Civil Clauses}, the charters of many research institutions and universities. In the wake of recent world events, the relevance and scope of such Civil Clauses has been questioned in reports issued by some governments and by the EU Commission, a development that opens the door to a possible blurring of the distinction between peaceful and military research. This paper documents the reflections stimulated by a panel discussion on this issue recently organized by the Science4Peace Forum. We review the adoptions of Civil Clauses in research organizations and institutions in various countries, present evidence of the challenges that are emerging to such Civil Clauses, and collect arguments in favour of maintaining the purely civilian and peaceful focus of public (non-military) research.
Fact-checking in code-mixed, low-resource languages such as Hinglish remains an underexplored challenge in natural language processing. Existing fact-verification systems largely focus on high-resource, monolingual settings and fail to generalize to real-world political discourse in linguistically diverse regions like India. Given the widespread use of Hinglish by public figures, particularly political figures, and the growing influence of social media on public opinion, there's a critical need for robust, multilingual and context-aware fact-checking tools. To address this gap a novel benchmark HiFACT dataset is introduced with 1,500 realworld factual claims made by 28 Indian state Chief Ministers in Hinglish, under a highly code-mixed low-resource setting. Each claim is annotated with textual evidence and veracity labels. To evaluate this benchmark, a novel graphaware, retrieval-augmented fact-checking model is proposed that combines multilingual contextual encoding, claim-evidence semantic alignment, evidence graph construction, graph neural reasoning, and natural language explanation generation. Experimental results show that HiFACTMix outperformed accuracy in comparison to state of art multilingual baselines models and provides faithful justifications for its verdicts. This work opens a new direction for multilingual, code-mixed, and politically grounded fact verification research.
Alzheimer's Disease (AD) dementia is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that negatively impacts patients' cognitive ability. Previous studies have demonstrated that changes in naturalistic language samples can be useful for early screening of AD dementia. However, the nature of language deficits often requires test administrators to use various speech elicitation techniques during spontaneous language assessments to obtain enough propositional utterances from dementia patients. This could lead to the ``observer's effect'' on the downstream analysis that has not been fully investigated. Our study seeks to quantify the influence of test administrators on linguistic features in dementia assessment with two English corpora the ``Cookie Theft'' picture description datasets collected at different locations and test administrators show different levels of administrator involvement. Our results show that the level of test administrator involvement significantly impacts observed linguistic features in patient speech. These results suggest that many of significant linguistic features in the downstream classification task may be partially attributable to differences in the test administration practices rather than solely to participants' cognitive status. The variations in test administrator behavior can lead to systematic biases in linguistic data, potentially confounding research outcomes and clinical assessments. Our study suggests that there is a need for a more standardized test administration protocol in the development of responsible clinical speech analytics frameworks.
<p>Municipal mergers are a common administrative reform worldwide, but their effects on public employment size and citizen satisfaction remain poorly understood. This study investigates these effects by focusing on a city-county merger in South Korea after 2000. Using the synthetic control method and multivariate regression, we find that municipal mergers increase the number of public employees, primarily low-ranking officials, while negatively impacting citizen satisfaction. This suggests that the goal of enhancing administrative efficiency through local government consolidation does not yield positive outcomes for organizations’ personnel or residents’ welfare.</p>
Political institutions and public administration (General)
This article explores the transformation of the state’s role in regulating personal data in the post-GDPR world. The author analyzes the impact of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on the evolution of the global privacy protection landscape, identifying trends towards harmonization and fragmentation of national legislations. The changing functions of the state as a regulator and guarantor of personal data protection in the context of digitalization are unveiled. The potential of blockchain technologies and distributed ledgers in ensuring user control over data is investigated. The influence of the development of the data market and new business models on the regulatory approaches of states and corporations is analyzed. The consequences of the spread of decentralized services for the relationships between the state, business, and civil society are considered. Priority directions for improving Ukrainian legislation in the field of personal data protection are substantiated, taking into account the realities of Web 3.0 and the need to balance innovation and security. The key idea is that the post-GDPR world stands at a crossroads between further fragmentation of the regulatory landscape and a long path towards harmonizing privacy standards. The choice of development trajectory depends on the coordinated political will of states, corporations, and global civil society to protect personal data as a shared value that unites humanity in the digital age. The article delves into the complex interplay of technological, legal, and societal factors shaping the future of data governance, offering insights into the challenges and opportunities ahead. It highlights the need for adaptive and inclusive regulatory frameworks that balance individual rights, economic interests, and public goods in an increasingly data-driven world.
Political institutions and public administration (General)
Farhad Moghimifar, Yuan-Fang Li, Robert Thomson
et al.
Coalition negotiations are a cornerstone of parliamentary democracies, characterised by complex interactions and strategic communications among political parties. Despite its significance, the modelling of these negotiations has remained unexplored with the domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP), mostly due to lack of proper data. In this paper, we introduce coalition negotiations as a novel NLP task, and model it as a negotiation between large language model-based agents. We introduce a multilingual dataset, POLCA, comprising manifestos of European political parties and coalition agreements over a number of elections in these countries. This dataset addresses the challenge of the current scope limitations in political negotiation modelling by providing a diverse, real-world basis for simulation. Additionally, we propose a hierarchical Markov decision process designed to simulate the process of coalition negotiation between political parties and predict the outcomes. We evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) as agents in handling coalition negotiations, offering insights into their capabilities and paving the way for future advancements in political modelling.
Suyash Fulay, William Brannon, Shrestha Mohanty
et al.
Language model alignment research often attempts to ensure that models are not only helpful and harmless, but also truthful and unbiased. However, optimizing these objectives simultaneously can obscure how improving one aspect might impact the others. In this work, we focus on analyzing the relationship between two concepts essential in both language model alignment and political science: truthfulness and political bias. We train reward models on various popular truthfulness datasets and subsequently evaluate their political bias. Our findings reveal that optimizing reward models for truthfulness on these datasets tends to result in a left-leaning political bias. We also find that existing open-source reward models (i.e., those trained on standard human preference datasets) already show a similar bias and that the bias is larger for larger models. These results raise important questions about the datasets used to represent truthfulness, potential limitations of aligning models to be both truthful and politically unbiased, and what language models capture about the relationship between truth and politics.
Accurate forecasts of the impact of spatial weather and pan-European socio-economic and political risks on hourly electricity demand for the mid-term horizon are crucial for strategic decision-making amidst the inherent uncertainty. Most importantly, these forecasts are essential for the operational management of power plants, ensuring supply security and grid stability, and in guiding energy trading and investment decisions. The primary challenge for this forecasting task lies in disentangling the multifaceted drivers of load, which include national deterministic (daily, weekly, annual, and holiday patterns) and national stochastic weather and autoregressive effects. Additionally, transnational stochastic socio-economic and political effects add further complexity, in particular, due to their non-stationarity. To address this challenge, we present an interpretable probabilistic mid-term forecasting model for the hourly load that captures, besides all deterministic effects, the various uncertainties in load. This model recognizes transnational dependencies across 24 European countries, with multivariate modeled socio-economic and political states and cross-country dependent forecasting. Built from interpretable Generalized Additive Models (GAMs), the model enables an analysis of the transmission of each incorporated effect to the hour-specific load. Our findings highlight the vulnerability of countries reliant on electric heating under extreme weather scenarios. This emphasizes the need for high-resolution forecasting of weather effects on pan-European electricity consumption especially in anticipation of widespread electric heating adoption.
Introduction. The decentralization reform and the development of the local self- government system fundamentally changed the management tasks assigned to officials of local self-government bodies. These changes were most clearly manifested after the unification of territorial communities, which actualizes the problem of professionalization of officials, their ability to effectively exercise power and management powers in the conditions of a fast-moving environment. The professionalism of a person endowed with authority is the main factor in the effective development of the community, and the dynamism of the political, social and economic factors of the environment, the acceleration of information flows and the pace of organizational changes in the legal field every day only increase the requirements for the professionalism of local self-government officials, which confirms the relevance of the chosen topic research. Officials of local self- government bodies formed as a result of decentralization faced the need to work in a new system of management and organizational relations, in which most of them had no previous experience. Therefore, there is an urgent need to find ways to increase the effectiveness of professionalization programs for local self-government officials. Materials and Methods. In-depth semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions were used, in which the heads (or deputies) of local councils of various levels and specialists of the regional training center were involved. The interviewers were chosen with the condition of ensuring the completeness of the representation of various local self- government bodies among 73 territorial communities of the Lviv region. Analysis of Literary Sources. Scientists often addressed the problem of professio- nalization in state administration and local self-government, studying its individual components. In general, the professionalization of civil servants is considered by scientists as a necessary condition for the reform of public administration, which should be carried out taking into account modern needs in professional training. The goal of professio- nalization of service in local self-government bodies is determined by scientists to ensure the training of specialists. Researchers distinguish 3 levels of professionalization – educational level, work experience and professional excellence. Scientists identify personal interest in development and deep internal motivation as necessary conditions for professionalization. Also, public administration experts consider the professionalization of public service to be a necessary condition for the formation of trust in government institutions on the part of civil society. Of special scientific interest is the study of foreign experience in the professionalization of civil servants and the possibility of implementing its best practices in Ukraine. The analysis of scientific publications indicates the absence of studies devoted to the problem of ensuring the effectiveness of the professionalization of local self-government officials. Results. The results of the survey on the advantages and disadvantages of ensuring the professionalization of officials of local self-government of territorial communities of Lviv region are summarized. Officials’ awareness of the need for professionalization, the organization of training in almost all local self-government bodies, the targeting of practice-oriented training programs on the competencies necessary for the implementation of local self-government powers was revealed. Organizational shortcomings were identified: lack of management experience among officials, insufficient professionals, lack of formalized tools for determining training needs, insufficient effectiveness of online training, financial dependence of the professionalization support system. Recommen- dations were given to local self-government bodies and regional centers of professional development. Discussion. Consideration of professionalization as a multifaceted phenomenon of the formation of an official as a community development management specialist is consistent with the conclusions of V. Lapshin that professionalism is one of the most important drivers of the social dynamics of a territorial community. Also, the statement of Antonova and L. Kozlova, that for civil servants the main signs of professionalism are regulatory and managerial competence, knowledge in the field of administration, critical attitude skills, communication skills in combination with general education and decency, is also not in doubt. The analysis of the approaches of scientists made it possible to outline the definition of professionalization as the professional development of a person in a certain field, which involves the comprehensive acquisition of specialized knowledge, competences, intellectual tools and value guidelines to ensure the qualitative effectiveness of his practical activities and demand in the socio-economic system. In addition, the recommendation of S. Selivanov regarding consideration of the professionalization of the public service as a dynamic process, at various stages of which officials should fix or change the achieved level of expertise, is taken into account. We have also confirmed the expediency of including V. Miklovda's with co-authors proposals regarding the formation and application of the competence management mechanism in the structure of ensuring the professionalization of local self-government officials in view of the similarity of the strategic goal-setting of professionalization by levels of development – personal, territorial community and state. Conclusion. Chairmen and deputy chairmen of local councils of all levels are aware of the need to increase the professionalization of officials. Internal training for officials was organized in almost all local self-government bodies. Most practice-oriented training programs are aimed at the development of competencies necessary for the implementation of the powers of local self-government. The disadvantages of ensuring professionalization are the lack of management experience among officials, the lack of professionals in the structure of local self-government bodies, the lack of formalized tools for determining the training needs of officials, the insufficient effectiveness of online training in a large part of local self-government bodies, and the significant financial dependence of the system for ensuring professionalization on external institutions. It is impractical to create highly specialized educational programs for the personal development of local self-government officials, instead, conditions for self-training and self-education of officials should be provided. In order to achieve the target level of professionalization of local self- government officials, a number of proposals have been outlined for local self-government bodies regarding the organization of the professionalization management process and for regional professional development centers regarding the organization of training courses. It is advisable to carry out further research in the direction of developing algorithms for matching professionalization training programs with the peculiarities of the development of territorial communities.
Kecerdasan buatan telah berkembang dengan sedemikian rupa sehingga mampu menghasilkan ciptaan dan Invensi tanpa campur tangan manusia melalui pelatihan sejumlah dataset. Penelitian yuridis normatif ini bertujuan untuk melihat permasalahan AI dalam perspektif AI sebagai subjek dan hasil AI sebagai objek perlindungan hak cipta dan paten, serta mengkaji implikasi penggunaan ciptaan dalam dataset untuk melatih AI. Penelitian ini menemukan bahwa AI tidak dapat menjadi seorang Pencipta dan Inventor karena hak moral dan hak asasi diperuntukkan untuk manusia, selain itu AI juga tidak dapat memanfaatkan hak ekonomi yang didapatkan dari perlindungan ciptaan atau paten. Kajian ini turut menemukan penggunaan dataset berisi ciptaan orang lain sebagai materi pengembangan AI berpotensi menimbulkan pelanggaran hak cipta. Potensi ini dimitigasi oleh beberapa negara dengan penerapan regulasi terkait TDM atau data scraping untuk machine learning AI. Akhirnya kajian ini juga menemukan bahwa ciptaan dan Invensi hasil AI pada umumnya tidak dapat menjadi objek yang dilindungi oleh rezim hak cipta kecuali mendapat kontribusi manusia secara langsung atau diformulasikan dalam peraturan perundang-undangan seperti dalam rezim hak cipta CGW di Inggris. Penelitian ini menyarankan bahwa praktik-praktik di negara lain dalam rezim perlindungan hak cipta dan paten terkait AI dapat dijadikan acuan politik hukum di Indonesia untuk membuat regulasi AI yang menyeimbangkan hak moral dan hak ekonomi para Pencipta dan Inventor dengan laju inovasi AI.
Law in general. Comparative and uniform law. Jurisprudence, Political institutions and public administration (General)
José Aparecido da Costa, Celi Correa Neres, Ronaldo Rodrigues Moises
Este artigo objetiva promover reflexões sobre o acesso de estudantes com deficiência visual à educação superior e à ambiência universitária. Para tanto, valeu-se de entrevistas de 6 estudantes com deficiência visual, matriculados em universidades no Estado de Mato Grosso do Sul. Os dados foram analisados na perspectiva da escola justa. Verificou-se o declínio na utilização do Sistema Braille, o que dificulta a acessibilidade em ambiente virtual e que, apesar do amplo conjunto de leis tendentes à garantia do acesso aos estudantes com deficiência à educação superior, torna-se perceptível seu descumprimento, reverberando na dificuldade de acesso, na permanência e, sobretudo o êxito do estudante com deficiência.
Carlos García-Villacorta, Martha Reátegui-Reátegui, Seidy Vela-Reátegui
et al.
Fidelizar a los clientes es un factor crítico para la sostenibilidad de las instituciones que prestan servicios educativos. Está influenciada por la calidad del servicio, atención, confianza, y últimamente, por la publicidad y marketing. Esta investigación propone determinar la relación entre la eficacia publicitaria de una institución educativa inicial con la lealtad en los clientes. Se fundamentó en un estudio básico de tipo correlacional y corte transversal. Se encuestaron 50 padres de familia durante el 2018. Los cuestionarios fueron validados por expertos y confiabilizados; tuvieron una escala de respuesta tipo Likert. Para encontrar la relación entre las variables se aplicó el coeficiente de Chi-cuadrado de Pearson. Los resultados evidencian un nivel regular de la eficacia publicitaria (40%), al igual que la lealtad en clientes (48%); asimismo revelan la existencia de relación significativa (p<0,05) entre la eficacia publicitaria y lealtad en clientes (X2C > X2T) al 95% de confianza. Se concluye que la inadecuada gestión de estrategias publicitarias afecta la lealtad de los clientes, y paralelamente, en el posicionamiento de los servicios educativos.
Political institutions and public administration (General)
This article presents a right introduced to the legal system addressed to decision-making bodies of a local government to authorize wójt (a head of a commune) to change budget in relation to providing help to Ukrainian citizens. Considerations focus on determining the normative nature of a resolution adopted pursuant to Article 111 u.p.o.u. and the delineation of boundaries of matters transferred to the delegation. Particular attention in the article is devoted to a possibility of implementing the aid sub delegation into the local law system, as well as a relationship in which the resolution delegating the right included in the act to the resolution implementing this right in the scope of the activities of the decision-making body remains.
Comparative law. International uniform law, Political institutions and public administration (General)
The zeroth-order general Randić index $R^{0}_{a+1}$ of an $n$-vertices oriented graph $D$ is equal to the sum of $(d^{+}_{u_i})^{a}+(d^{-}_{u_j})^{a}$ over all arcs $u_iu_j$ of $D$, where we denote by $d^{+}_{u_i}$ the out-degree of the vertex $u_i$ and $d^{-}_{u_j}$ the in-degree of the vertex $u_j$, $a$ is an arbitrary real number. In the paper, we determine the orientations of cacti with the maximum value of the zeroth-order general Randić index for $a\geq 1$.
Modern scientific research of the problems of constitutional jurisdiction in Ukraine is conditioned not only by their established theoretical and practical significance for legal doctrine and law enforcement. In the context of modern global challenges and threats that inevitably affect the domestic legal order of Ukraine, taking into consideration the national problems in the field of human rights and freedoms, interaction between state and society, lawmaking, law enforcement and administration of justice, etc., the need to strengthen the institutional capacity of the Constitutional Court is an important scientific and practical task. It is aimed at strengthening the stability of the institution of constitutional jurisdiction in difficult sociopolitical situations, restoring public confidence in the Constitutional Court and the state in general, improving the legal protection of the Constitution of Ukraine and ensuring its supremacy, reviving respect for the Basic Law and the rule of law, accommodating the functioning of the Constitutional Court to the best international standards of constitutional jurisdiction. The purpose of the article is to substantiate the study of the problem of strengthening the institutional capacity of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine as a complex scientific and applied issue, which provides for its solution in the interdisciplinary scientific space. General scientific research methods, sociological method, structural-functional, as well as interdisciplinary approaches, are used. The institutional capacity of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine is considered as an institutional property of a body of constitutional jurisdiction, which reflects its organisational and functional ability to ensure the implementation of its tasks, functions, and powers under certain conditions and resources. Indicators of the institutional capacity of the Constitutional Court are efficiency, stability, and adaptability to changes. Strengthening the institutional capacity of the Constitutional Court should take place through legal support for strengthening its independence from political influence, improving mechanisms for selecting candidates for judges, modernising constitutional proceedings, developing a mechanism for the Court's interaction with the public, and so on. The main directions of the study of the institutional capacity of the Constitutional Court are determined
The article is devoted to consideration of two directions of state economic policy — maintaining economic stability and ensuring economic growth. The coronavirus pandemic has divided the world into “before and after”. In the previous period, the financial policy in Russia was based on the principle of macroeconomic stability. It would seem that the macroeconomic stability that has existed for several years has created the basis for economic growth in the country, but it has not been possible to realize the growth potential of the Russian economy. Economic stability is an important criterion for the economy. Only economic stability can be different.The economic stability of the Russian economy in the previous period is the economic stability of stagnation, because the cornerstone of the economic stabilization policy was maintaining a low inflation rate by artificially slowing down demand. N ow this economic stability of stagnation was overturned by the coronavirus epidemic due to a decrease in budget revenues and an increase in budget spending, which results in the threat of inflation.The purpose of the article is to substantiate the necessity and possibility of transition to a new form of economic stability — economic growth stability
Political institutions and public administration (General)
We examine the effects of introducing a political outsider to the nomination process leading to an election. To this end, we develop a sequential game where politicians -- insiders and outsiders -- make a platform offer to a party, and parties in turn decide which offer to accept; this process conforms the voting ballot. Embedded in the evaluation of a party-candidate match is partisan affect, a variable comprising the attitudes of voters towards the party. Partisan affect may bias the electorate's appraisal of a match in a positive or negative way. We characterize the conditions that lead to the nomination of an outsider and determine whether her introduction as a potential candidate has any effect on the winning policy and on the welfare of voters. We find that the victory of an outsider generally leads to policy polarization, and that partisan affect has a more significant effect on welfare than ideology extremism.
Digital news outlets rely on a variety of outside contributors, from freelance journalists, to political commentators, to executives and politicians. These external dependencies create a network among news outlets, traced along the contributors they share. Using connections between outlets, we demonstrate how contributors' publishing trajectories tend to align with outlet political leanings. We also show how polarized clustering of outlets translates to differences in the topics of news covered and the style and tone of articles published. In addition, we demonstrate how contributors who cross partisan divides tend to focus on less explicitly political topics. This work addresses an important gap in the media polarization literature, by highlighting how structural factors on the production side of news media create an ecosystem shaped by political leanings, independent of the priorities of any one person or organization.