Antoine Vendeville, Hiroki Yamashita, Pedro Ramaciotti
Does polarization online reflect the state of polarization in society? We study ideological positions and attitudes on several issues in France, a country with documented issue nonalignment. We compare distributions on X/Twitter with a nationally representative sample, focusing on two key properties: ideological polarization and issue alignment. Despite significant issue-wise divergences, positions of both the X population and the nationally representative sample present a similar bi-dimensional structure along two dominant bundles of aligned issues: a Left-Right divide, and a Global-Local divide. We then study how our results vary when accounting for key structural parameters of the online public sphere: activity, popularity, and visibility. We find that the dimensionality of attitude distributions shrinks as ideological polarization increases when selecting more active users. The divergence between political attitudes on social media and in survey data is greatly mediated by the combination of activity and popularity of social media users: users benefiting from the most exposure are also the most representative of the general public. Together, our results shed light on the structural similarities and differences between political attitudes from social media users and the general public.
This article explores the competences of the Generalitat of Catalonia in relation to immigration—a responsibility traditionally reserved for sovereign states—from both legal and contextual perspectives. While it begins by outlining the framework established in the 1979 Statute of Autonomy, its primary focus is on the competences recognised in the 2006 Statute, relevant Constitutional Court jurisprudence, and the practical exercise of these competences in recent years. It also examines the failed draft organic law, launched in the Congress in March 2025, which proposed the delegation of additional competences to the Generalitat. Taken together, these elements underscore the importance not only of assessing the content and scope of the Generalitat’s competences, but also of understanding the broader conditions that determine whether these powers lead to more effective policies and improved outcomes for migrants.
Political institutions and public administration (General), Social Sciences
Social institutions are systems of shared norms and rules that regulate people's behaviors, often emerging without external enforcement. They provide criteria to distinguish cooperation from defection and establish rules to sustain cooperation, shaped through long-term trial and error. While principles for successful institutions have been proposed, the mechanisms underlying their emergence remain poorly understood. Here, we introduce the evolutionary dynamical-systems game, a framework that couples game actions with environmental dynamics and explores the evolution of cognitive frameworks for decision-making. We analyze a minimal model of common-pool resource management, where resources grow naturally and are harvested. Players use decision-making functions to determine whether to harvest at each step, based on environmental and peer monitoring. As these functions evolve, players detect selfish harvesting and punish it by degrading the environment through harvesting. This process leads to the self-organization of norms that classify harvesting actions as cooperative, defective, or punitive. The emergent norms for ``cooperativeness'' and rules of punishment serve as institutions. The environmental and players' states converge to distinct modes characterized by limit-cycles, representing temporal regularities in socio-ecological systems. These modes remain stable despite slight variations in decision-making, illustrating the stability of institutions. The evolutionary robustness of decision-making functions serves as a measure of the evolutionary favorability of institutions, highlighting the role of plasticity in responding to diverse opponents. This work introduces foundational concepts in evolutionary dynamical-systems games and elucidates the mechanisms underlying the self-organization of institutions by modeling the interplay between ecological dynamics and human decision-making.
Daniil Gurgurov, Katharina Trinley, Ivan Vykopal
et al.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in everyday tools and applications, raising concerns about their potential influence on political views. While prior research has shown that LLMs often exhibit measurable political biases--frequently skewing toward liberal or progressive positions--key gaps remain. Most existing studies evaluate only a narrow set of models and languages, leaving open questions about the generalizability of political biases across architectures, scales, and multilingual settings. Moreover, few works examine whether these biases can be actively controlled. In this work, we address these gaps through a large-scale study of political orientation in modern open-source instruction-tuned LLMs. We evaluate seven models, including LLaMA-3.1, Qwen-3, and Aya-Expanse, across 14 languages using the Political Compass Test with 11 semantically equivalent paraphrases per statement to ensure robust measurement. Our results reveal that larger models consistently shift toward libertarian-left positions, with significant variations across languages and model families. To test the manipulability of political stances, we utilize a simple center-of-mass activation intervention technique and show that it reliably steers model responses toward alternative ideological positions across multiple languages. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/d-gurgurov/Political-Ideologies-LLMs.
Jillian Fisher, Ruth E. Appel, Chan Young Park
et al.
AI systems often exhibit political bias, influencing users' opinions and decisions. While political neutrality-defined as the absence of bias-is often seen as an ideal solution for fairness and safety, this position paper argues that true political neutrality is neither feasible nor universally desirable due to its subjective nature and the biases inherent in AI training data, algorithms, and user interactions. However, inspired by Joseph Raz's philosophical insight that "neutrality [...] can be a matter of degree" (Raz, 1986), we argue that striving for some neutrality remains essential for promoting balanced AI interactions and mitigating user manipulation. Therefore, we use the term "approximation" of political neutrality to shift the focus from unattainable absolutes to achievable, practical proxies. We propose eight techniques for approximating neutrality across three levels of conceptualizing AI, examining their trade-offs and implementation strategies. In addition, we explore two concrete applications of these approximations to illustrate their practicality. Finally, we assess our framework on current large language models (LLMs) at the output level, providing a demonstration of how it can be evaluated. This work seeks to advance nuanced discussions of political neutrality in AI and promote the development of responsible, aligned language models.
AbstractThis study examines whether performance information affects the political agenda. I offer and test two hypotheses on performance information in politics—the attention‐allocation hypothesis, suggesting that politicians leverage performance data to devote attention to problems in service delivery, and the politicization hypothesis, stating that political concerns alter elected officials focus on performance information. I examine the hypotheses by gathering administrative data on pupils' standardized test scores combined with more than 6000 min of meetings in Danish municipal school committees, on which I leverage two‐way fixed effects models. The results show that performance shortfalls receive political attention, regardless of the politicization of the environment. In contrast to a vast literature stating how the political context alters attention to performance information, these results demonstrate that political entities leverage performance data to discover problems in need of attention in ways similar to those of other types of organizations.
As generative language models are deployed in ever-wider contexts, concerns about their political values have come to the forefront with critique from all parts of the political spectrum that the models are biased and lack neutrality. However, the question of what neutrality is and whether it is desirable remains underexplored. In this paper, I examine neutrality through an audit of Delphi [arXiv:2110.07574], a large language model designed for crowdsourced ethics. I analyse how Delphi responds to politically controversial questions compared to different US political subgroups. I find that Delphi is poorly calibrated with respect to confidence and exhibits a significant political skew. Based on these results, I examine the question of neutrality from a data-feminist lens, in terms of how notions of neutrality shift power and further marginalise unheard voices. These findings can hopefully contribute to a more reflexive debate about the normative questions of alignment and what role we want generative models to play in society.
Automated decision-making systems are being increasingly deployed and affect the public in a multitude of positive and negative ways. Governmental and private institutions use these systems to process information according to certain human-devised rules in order to address social problems or organizational challenges. Both research and real-world experience indicate that the public lacks trust in automated decision-making systems and the institutions that deploy them. The recreancy theorem argues that the public is more likely to trust and support decisions made or influenced by automated decision-making systems if the institutions that administer them meet their fiduciary responsibility. However, often the public is never informed of how these systems operate and resultant institutional decisions are made. A ``black box'' effect of automated decision-making systems reduces the public's perceptions of integrity and trustworthiness. The result is that the public loses the capacity to identify, challenge, and rectify unfairness or the costs associated with the loss of public goods or benefits. The current position paper defines and explains the role of fiduciary responsibility within an automated decision-making system. We formulate an automated decision-making system as a data science lifecycle (DSL) and examine the implications of fiduciary responsibility within the context of the DSL. Fiduciary responsibility within DSLs provides a methodology for addressing the public's lack of trust in automated decision-making systems and the institutions that employ them to make decisions affecting the public. We posit that fiduciary responsibility manifests in several contexts of a DSL, each of which requires its own mitigation of sources of mistrust. To instantiate fiduciary responsibility, a Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) predictive policing case study is examined.
Recensión del libro «Deliberación y participación ciudadana. Derechos e instrumentos en el ordenamiento constitucional, Enriqueta Expósito Gómez, publicado en 2021 por Marcial Pons.
Political institutions and public administration (General), Accounting. Bookkeeping
The purpose of (public) administrative activity is to take decisions and, within this framework, to produce certain legal effects. In order to take effective decisions, public administrations, whether they are governmental or public authorities, need information first and foremost. Today, technological progress enables public administrations to take decisions quickly, with the support of electronic tools, and to process large amounts of data at a high level. However, the impact of the use of advanced ICT tools and technology goes beyond the boundaries of public administration and raises a number of questions that need to be answered. The complexity of the problem is illustrated by the fact that legal (strategic), technological, social and financial aspects and challenges are all at stake.
Political institutions and public administration (General), Public law
Hiran H Lathabai, Abhirup Nandy, Vivek Kumar Singh
The shift from 'trust-based funding' to 'performance-based funding' is one of the factors that has forced institutions to strive for continuous improvement of performance. Several studies have established the importance of collaboration in enhancing the performance of paired institutions. However, identification of suitable institutions for collaboration is sometimes difficult and therefore institutional collaboration recommendation systems can be vital. Currently, there are no well-developed institutional collaboration recommendation systems. In order to bridge this gap, we design a framework that recognizes thematic strengths and core competencies of institutions, which can in turn be used for collaboration recommendations. The framework, based on NLP and network analysis techniques, is capable of determining the strengths of an institution in different thematic areas within a field and thereby determining the core competency and potential core competency areas of that institution. A major advantage of the system is that it can help to determine and improve the research portfolio of an institution within a field through suitable collaboration, which may lead to the overall improvement of the performance of the institution in that field. The framework is demonstrated by analyzing the performance of 195 Indian institutions in the field of 'Computer Science'. Upon validation using standard metrics for novelty, coverage and diversity of recommendation systems, the framework is found to be of sufficient coverage and capable of tossing novel and diverse recommendations. The article thus presents an institutional collaboration recommendation system which can be used by institutions to identify potential collaborators.
The social construct of our global society has been significantly impacted by the SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus (COVID-19) virus. The health risks of SARS-CoV-2 and its associated disease COVID-19 are better understood, and public health agencies, physicians, government, and health advocates continue to facilitate public access to this information. For many countries, the pandemic has resulted in failing economies, with many facing financial hardship, job loss, and nutrition insecurity. Most importantly, healthcare systems worldwide have made significant adjustments in order to care for patients diagnosed with the virus, as well as maintaining health and preventing disease within our worldwide community. As of December 11, 2020, the Johns Hopkins University of Medicine Coronavirus Resource Center [1] which has been tasked with providing updated daily statistics regarding the international response to COVID-19 reported the following sobering statistics from 191 countries/regions: Global Cases more than 69 million; Global Deaths 1.5 million plus; US Confirmed Cases more than 15 million; US Deaths more than 292,000. The World Health Organization [2], US-based Centers for Disease Control [3], and local public health organizations worldwide have issued guidelines to inform individuals of the signs and symptoms of COVID-19, as well as identify those who are at higher risk for serious illness. Older adults, those with underlying conditions such as heart and lung disease and diabetes, patients with cancer, certain racial and ethnic minority groups, and people with disabilities and developmental and behavior disorders are among those who must take extra precautions to avoid contracting the virus. Responsible government officials have been providing detailed information, guidelines, and resources for all citizens regarding the COVID-19 virus, as well as sharing new mitigation developments, and making accurate testing available. Equally important is alerting the public with frequent and timely updates of vaccine development, of which 3 have completed clinical trial enrollment to date. Data evaluation, with potential application submissions to the US Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorization, is in progress for these vaccine candidates. The hope and expectation are that when COVID-19 vaccines become available, their validity is accepted by the general public, and will ultimately be administered worldwide. Only then can we truly anticipate that the pandemic will be controlled and prevented, with society achieving a state of normality. Patients with cancer who may be receiving a variety of treatments are at a higher risk of developing severe infections and have increased mortality, especially if they are immunocompromised and diagnosed with COVID-19 [4]. Caring for patients during the pandemic has required that changes to every aspect of what constituted standard of care be reevaluated and adapted to accommodate for the specific precautions and guidelines outlined by institutions and public health agencies. Both oncology medical and nursing professional organizations (ASCO, ONS, MASCC/ESMO, ISNCC, AMA, ANA, AACR, NCCN) have published position papers on COVID-19, in addition to a wealth of papers by clinicians that offer analyses of the impact of the virus on patient outcomes, socio-economic and socio-political factors that influence psychological morbidity [5, 6], and issues related to cancer survivorship [7]. COVID-19 symptom presentation is quite similar to symptoms experienced by patients with cancer by virtue of diagnosis, or those receiving treatment. It has therefore become increasingly important during patient education sessions with patients and caregivers to review treatment side effects and COVID-19 symptoms, with specific instructions including contact information, as to when to contact either their nurse or physician. Oncologists have equated clinical decisions regarding treatment options, while taking into account hospital resources * Rebecca A. Clark-Snow rclark_snow@yahoo.com
AbstractTeleworking was one of the main actions of organizations and companies around the world during the Covid 19 pandemic, which, of course, used to be done for various reasons, but not to the extent of the pandemic era.The National Library and Archives of the Islamic Republic of Iran, as one of the government agencies, has used telecommuting platform since the beginning of the signification of the telecommunications regulations in 2010 up tonow, due to the nature of its functional and quantitative nature of many of its specialized jobs. But the question is how this organization, despite having a decade of experience in implementing and managing the telecommuting process, has dealt with this issue during the Corona pandemic crisis, and in other words, what new lessons has it achieved from this emerging experience? The aim of this study was to answer this question with inductive approach and qualitative method. The target population of this study was employees and managers with a history of teleworking or decision makers in the teleworking process in the National Library and Archives of Iran. Sampling was unlike probability quota and continued until data saturation. The method of data collection was semi-structured interviews and the method of analysis was thematic analysis. Findings showed that the organization's experiences of telecommuting during the Corona pandemic are divided into five main themes and nineteen sub-themes resulting from them. In other words, to manage telecommuting in times of Corona crisis, proper confrontation was necessary in five main areas: 1. Organizational culture, 2. Organizational systems and infrastructure, 3. Perceptions, attitudes and skills of employees, 4. Adaptation of management styles and 5. Organizational strategies and functions. The requirements of each of these areas are presented in detail in the discussion and conclusion section and can add to the experience of organizations in dealing properly with the telecommuting phenomenon during the Corona pandemic.IntroductionAlthough interest in the idea of telecommuting first emerged with the oil crisis and to avoid the costs imposed in the 1970s, presently in many industries and organizations, telecommuting is even considered a competitive advantage. On the other hand, the nature of work around the world has changed dramatically due to advanced communication tools. Organizations are increasingly turning from an absolute approacha to their physical locations. They are well aware of the importance of adapting to new changes and conditions in order to reduce costs and waste of time and on the other hand increase flexibility and efficiency. Researches related to telecommuting in the world have a history around its age and in Iran, researches on telecommuting has been conducted in the last decade. But in the current context of the world, given the pandamic of the Corona virus and its consequences for organizations, we are witnessing a change in the appearance and substance of telecommuting, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The tangible research gap in this area needs to be explored. The question is, from the point of view of the staff and executors of the telecommuting process in the National Archives and Library of Iran, what are the differences between this process and the telecommuting in the normal state of the organization and how was it? The present study was conducted to answer this question with an inductive approach and a qualitative method. The knowledge-enhancing contribution of the present study is the study of telework experience in one of the major government institutions in the field of culture in the country. Although the issue of telecommuting is not a new issue, so far this issue has been considered as option and has not been addressed in the current era due to the coercion of the Corona pandemic in the country.Case studyThe National Archives and Library of Iran was identified as suitable for this study; This is because the organization has a long history of telecommuting implementation, and its review of telecommuting management during the current Covid 19 pandemic crisis will bring valuable points. Theoretical frameworkTelecommuting is used in many terms; these include: work from home, e-work, virtual work, telework, remote work, distance working, work shifting and flexible work. Of course, these different terms have many conceptual overlaps, and all of them refer in some way to the central nature of telecommuting. People use the concept in a variety of ways, extending it to a wide range of forms of work, including mobile work, work in any place other than the usual employer-accepted workplace, shared office centre or hub and home-based working. For example, Morganson, Major, Auburn, Verio, and Heelan (2010) have defined teleworking as working from anywhere, anytime. Also defined by Apgar (1998) telecommuting is doing work electronically wherever the employee chooses. This method of work is "moving the work towards the employee" instead of "moving the employee towards the work" (Ghanbari, 2011).Teleworking in Iran officially began in July 2010 with the announcement of telecommunications regulations by the government of the time to public agencies and has continued to this day. A decade after the official start of telecommuting in Iran, telecommuting is now practiced in many government ministries, organizations and departments.MethodologyThe present study is an applied research with a qualitative approach that is applied in terms of purpose and exploratory-inductive in terms of data collection. The target population of the present study was three groups of employees. Staff managers who have telecommute employees. Managers who have experience in the life cycle of telecommunicating like office of planning and supervision and general directorate of human resource, and also employees who have at least one six-month period of experience as a telecommuter. Sampling of the mentioned population was done by unlikely quota method until theoretical saturation was reached. The data collection tool in this study was semi-structured interviews and the data analysis method was thematic analysis.Discussion and ResultsBrown and Clark (2006) stepwise method was used for analysis in this study. During this process, after implementing and getting acquainted with the data and studying the information several times, the initial codes were created. Codes such as "temporary internet outages" and "telecommuting as unemployment". In the third step, the codes were matched to form potential themes, and all data related to each theme was collected. Then, by reviewing the themes and the relationship between them and the relationship between the themes and the code, the categoris were modified. In the next step, the formed themes were defined and named; Topics such as "psychological health and safety" were listed as sub-themes. Finally, 19 sub-themes were enumerated, which led to the formation of five main themes by increasing the degree of abstraction.ConclusionIn the current situation where the Crona epidemic disease has caused organizations to show more reception in telecommuting, it is necessary for government organizations to be flexible in policy-making and take appropriate measures to the current situation, while maintaining and improving the level of telecommunications capacity provide for government employees.
Political institutions and public administration (General)
The COVID-19 (coronavirus disease) pandemic has had a significant impact on the healthcare delivery system worldwide. Many pre-pandemic norms, standards, and methods of providing medical services in most medical facilities had to be changed and re-evaluated. Many of them will likely stay changed and will probably never be provided in the same way in post-pandemic reality. The COVID-19 crisis is still ongoing and some sources say that we should be prepared for a third wave of the pandemic. The scope of the analysis conducted in this publication is related to the healthcare sector, including services and Polish healthcare professionals’ work quality during the COVID-19 crisis. The research gap, the basis for conducting new research, is the lack of clarified results analysing the quality assurance of healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is necessary to ask about healthcare professionals’ rate of personal protective equipment quality in Polish medical facilities. The result of cluster analysis will help us to know what the clusters for variables on quality assurance of protection measures for healthcare workers are. The research was carried out using a questionnaire survey on a sample of 21 medical personnel in Polish hospitals. The main findings of this publication are problems with information flow between staff and staff managers and determining appropriate zones. The quality of the personal protective equipment offered by medical facilities’ management and their availability is at an appropriate level. The publication aims to analyse the level of quality assurance of health care worker protection measures in the example of Silesian voivodeships in Poland during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Political institutions and public administration (General)
What would the inputs be to a machine whose output is the destabilization of a robust democracy, or whose emanations could disrupt the political power of nations? In the recent essay "The Coming AI Hackers," Schneier (2021) proposed a future application of artificial intelligences to discover, manipulate, and exploit vulnerabilities of social, economic, and political systems at speeds far greater than humans' ability to recognize and respond to such threats. This work advances the concept by applying to it theory from machine learning, hypothesizing some possible "featurization" (input specification and transformation) frameworks for AI hacking. Focusing on the political domain, we develop graph and sequence data representations that would enable the application of a range of deep learning models to predict attributes and outcomes of political, particularly legislative, systems. We explore possible data models, datasets, predictive tasks, and actionable applications associated with each framework. We speculate about the likely practical impact and feasibility of such models, and conclude by discussing their ethical implications.
The article is devoted to the issues of retrospective analysis of the development of the jury trial in Ukraine, starting from its actual origin in the ancient Russian state and ending with the modern period, analysis of the peculiarities of civil cases involving jurors, But both then and now, controversy over him continues. There are supporters who consider it the most democratic institution in the country, which helps to reduce cases of unilateral and biased civil cases, increase public confidence in justice, and there are opponents who advocate its complete elimination due to a number of existing shortcomings. -political institution of power. It is worth noting that the development of the institution of a jury trial in most civilized countries was based on both the English experience and their own legal traditions and national characteristics. In general, the practice of introducing juries in different countries of the world shows that acting as an indicator of national legal awareness and readiness for reform, the jury, on the one hand, reflects the characteristics of the society in which it operates, and on the other hand - affects changes in professional and everyday legal awareness. Peculiarities of consideration of civil cases with the participation of jurors are determined. Emphasis is placed on the fact that there is still a division of competence between a professional judge and jurors. The participation of jurors in civil proceedings is aimed at ensuring the tasks of civil proceedings, which include fair, impartial and timely consideration and resolution of civil cases in order to effectively protect violated, unrecognized or disputed rights, freedoms or interests of individuals, rights and interests of legal entities. persons, interests of the state. The administration of justice with their participation is aimed at the observance of civil procedural form, due process, principles of civil procedural law, and the exercise by litigants of their procedural rights and responsibilities. This will increase the personal responsibility of judges for their decisions and rulings in civil proceedings. The procedural position of jurors is regulated by the norms of the Constitution of Ukraine, laws and bylaws. In itself, the idea of such a form of justice with the participation of representatives of the people in order to control the judiciary and increase public confidence in it is quite good, because it benefits both the state and society. However, the analysis of current legislation, case law shows a lot of shortcomings and problems in the jury trial, which require their elimination. There is a need to adjust the existing practice on this issue, taking into account the position of the European Court of Human Rights. It has been found that the jury has deeper problems, which arise from the problems of other spheres of public life. Lack of clear and detailed regulation by the legislator, unwillingness to work with such a system, irresponsibility and even unprofessionalism of officials who compile lists of jurors, judges and much more lead to defects in the activities of this court. It should be noted that the study of approaches to solving the problems of civil cases by a jury indicates the need to improve existing legislation.
In the past few months, we have witnessed the “worst deal” in the history of the United States become the “best deal” in the history of the United States. The negotiation leading to the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) appeared as an “asymmetrical exchange” scenario which could have led to an unbalanced outcome for Mexico. However, Mexico stood firm on its positions and negotiated a modernized version of North American Free Trade Agreement. Mexico faced various challenges during this renegotiation, not only because it was required to negotiate with two developed countries, but also due to the high level of ambition and demands raised by the new US administration. This paper provides an account of these impediments. More importantly, it analyses the strategies that Mexico used to overcome the resource constraints it faced amidst the unpredictable political dilemma in the US and at home. In this manner, this paper seeks to provide a blueprint of strategies that other developing countries could employ to overcome their negotiation capacity constraints, especially when they are dealing with developed countries and in uncertain political environments. Introduction Many regional trade negotiations, including the recent renegotiation of North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), have shown that developing countries in such negotiations can play a defensive role and resist ambitious proposals from developed countries with stronger economies. They can also be offensive and table new proposals to promote their interests. Moreover, the Seattle Ministerial in 1999, together with the Doha Ministerial in 2001 and the Bali Ministerial in 2013 have shown that developing countries can not only negotiate powerfully and influence outcomes, but also resist and block trade negotiations. 1 Yet, developing countries face multiple challenges that impede their effective participation in international trade negotiations. With resource constraints, small trading stakes and weak negotiating clout, they often find themselves on an uneven playing field when they participate in negotiations with developed countries. There are many structural factors such as the lack of negotiating experience, inadequate knowledge and information on economic impact of trade policy decisions, and unequal bargaining power which affects the participation of developing and least Dr. Amrita Bahri, Assistant Professor of Law, Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM), CoChairholder, WTO Chair Program for México; Monica Lugo, Deputy Director General, Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Former Negotiator of USMCA. 1 Sheila Page, ‘Developing Counties: Victims or Participants, Their Changing Role in International Negotiations’, Globalisation and Poverty Programme, Overseas Development Institute 2003, https://www.odi.org/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/publications-opinion-files/2418.pdf (accessed 1 March 2019) Forthcoming in Journal of International Economic Law 23(1) 2020 2 developed countries in international trade negotiations. 2 In other words, developing countries can face “capacity-constraints” while participating in trade negotiations. The expression “capacity-constraint” in the context of this study refers to a situation where lack of required resources can impede a country’s ability to conduct effective negotiations. The problem of insufficient negotiating capacity becomes even more severe if an agreement is being negotiated between one or more developing countries on one hand and developed nations on the other. This situation can be more appropriately described as the problem of “capacity-gap” between the developing and the developed world. 3 The term “capacity-gap” in this context refers to a situation where one participant in the negotiation process may have insufficient resources that are required for negotiation as against other participants that, owing to their level of economic growth, nature of economic sectors and trading stakes, may have no difficulties in mobilizing the required resources. 4 One example that demonstrates the issue of “capacity-gap” is the United States-Central AmericaDominican Republic Free Trade Agreement. 5 During its negotiation in 2003-2004, large asymmetries were observed between the United States (US) on one hand and the Central American countries on the other. The most obvious asymmetry was the one related to the economies of these countries. 6 Moreover, many institutional deficiencies were felt in the Central American countries while negotiating this agreement with the US. This is because the negotiating institutions and entities in Central America were not as developed and well equipped as the ones in the US. 7 They lacked the experience of trade negotiations, and they also lacked the resources that were required for negotiation such as legal expertise, finance and an organized private sector’s support. The fact that these countries had to come together to justify having a trade agreement with the US can partly be attributed to the lack of capacity these countries had for negotiating on their own. 8 Moreover, the individual size of these economies and their markets would not have made an economic sense for the US to negotiate the deal without this association 2 Julio J. Nogues, ‘Unequal Exchange: Developing Countries in the International Trade Negotiations’ (April 2002) 4, Murphy Institute Conference on ‘The Political Economy of Policy Reform’, at http://www.tulane.edu/~dnelson/PEReformConf/Nogues.pdf (accessed 5 March 2019) 3 Amrita Bahri, Public Private Partnership for WTO Dispute Settlement: Enabling Developing Countries (Edward Elgar, 2018), 25-26 4 The resources required may include information, evidence, human resource, number of lawyers or economists or other subject matter experts, and finances. 5 Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR), US Customs and Border Protection, at https://www.cbp.gov/trade/free-trade-agreements/cafta-dr (accessed 25 March 2019) 6 Salazar-Xirinachs, Jose M. and Jaime Granados, ‘The United States-Central America Free Trade Agreement: Opportunities and Challenges’, Institute for International Economics Conference on Free Trade Agreements and U.S. Trade Policy (May 7-8, 2003, Washington DC) 227 7 Ibid, 229 8 J. F. Hornbeck, 'The U.S.-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA): Challenges for Sub-Regional Integration’, CRS Report for Congress (1 June 2004), 7, at https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20040601_RL31870_ae9714e4ecb354e669cbdd934e5050f5957aa2e9.pdf (accessed 5 January 2019) Forthcoming in Journal of International Economic Law 23(1) 2020 3 between five developing countries. Perhaps, gaining access to these five markets was also not adequate for the US as Dominican Republic was invited to join this negotiation in 2004. The recent renegotiation of NAFTA was different, as it required its members to renegotiate an agreement which had been in place for 24 years. In a typical negotiation for a new agreement, the worst-case scenario could be to not have any agreement and thus to maintain the status quo. However, in this negotiation, the worst-case scenario was to demolish a trade instrument which had accelerated free trade and liberalization in North America since the 1990s. Mexico and Canada wanted it to survive; the nationalism-struck US administration seemed ready to discard it unless it was made to work for it. This dynamic created considerable political challenges in addition to the technical complexities of modernizing this agreement. Moreover, Mexico was a developing country with certain negotiating constraints, facing two developed countries with a relatively higher political and economic clout. Hence, there was a noticeable capacity-gap between the negotiating countries. Furthermore, the fact that Mexico during this negotiation had to deal with the populist US administration and the changing political landscape at home made this experience even more challenging. This brings us to the first question that this paper seeks to answer. Can developing countries negotiate effectively with developed countries in challenging political conditions? Mexico’s experience clearly demonstrates that, with appropriate capacity-building strategies, developing countries can negotiate effectively with developed countries even amidst uncertain and hostile political environments. Mexico has a wealth of trade negotiation capacity it has built through 25 years of negotiating experience, expertise and close coordination with relevant stakeholders. Yet, the recent renegotiation of NAFTA was a major challenge for Mexico. This brings us to the second and third questions that this study seeks to answer. What barriers did Mexico face during the NAFTA renegotiation? How did Mexico approach these challenges? Can the Mexican experience guide other developing countries on how to strengthen trade negotiation capacity and negotiate effectively even in challenging political environments? This paper responds to these questions with a pragmatic approach and first-hand insights gathered through empirical research. The capacity-building strategies discussed in this article might have strengthened the negotiation-capacity of Mexico; however, they may not be as effective for other developing countries. The term “developing countries” is quite heterogeneous in nature, as it ranges from small developing countries which are predominantly based on subsistence agriculture, to large and emerging economies like China, Brazil, Mexico and India. These diversely developed countries have very different levels of development, market size, and foreign trade interests. Moreover, they have diverse experience of international trade negotiations. In this context, the findings in this article may not be relevant more generally to all developing countries but only to a specific group of developing countries that may be categorized as middle-income emerging economies with interest and som