While recent research has systematically documented political orientation in large language models (LLMs), existing evaluations rely primarily on direct probing or demographic persona engineering to surface ideological biases. In social psychology, however, political ideology is also understood as a downstream consequence of fundamental moral intuitions. In this work, we investigate the causal relationship between moral values and political positioning by treating moral orientation as a controllable condition. Rather than simply assigning a demographic persona, we condition models to endorse or reject specific moral values and evaluate the resulting shifts on their political orientations, using the Political Compass Test. By treating moral values as lenses, we observe how moral conditioning actively steers model trajectories across economic and social dimensions. Our findings show that such conditioning induces pronounced, value-specific shifts in models' political coordinates. We further notice that these effects are systematically modulated by role framing and model scale, and are robust across alternative assessment instruments instantiating the same moral value. This highlights that effective alignment requires anchoring political assessments within the context of broader social values including morality, paving the way for more socially grounded alignment techniques.
13 grudnia 2024 roku odbyła się II Międzynarodowa Konferencja Naukowa „Dziecko w rodzinie – dawniej i dziś”, zorganizowana przez Koło Naukowe Obrony Praw Człowieka i Obywatela Uniwersytetu Opolskiego we współpracy z Katedrą Historii Ustroju i Prawa Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego, Kołem Naukowym „Inter-Lex” przy Uniwersytecie Opolskim, Sekcją Historii Prawa Koła Naukowego Studentów Prawa Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego oraz Studenckim Kołem Naukowym Studentów Prawa Lwowskiego Uniwersytetu Narodowego im. Iwana Franki. Konferencja odbyła się w formie hybrydowej, umożliwiając uczestnictwo stacjonarne w Opolu, Lublinie i Lwowie oraz zdalne za pośrednictwem platform Google Meet i MS Teams. Wydarzenie skupiło się na analizie pozycji prawnej dziecka na przestrzeni dziejów, uwzględniając aspekty cywilne, karne, oświatowe oraz międzynarodowe. W ramach obrad wygłoszono 42 referaty, które wzbudziły ożywione dyskusje uczestników i podkreśliły znaczenie interdyscyplinarnego podejścia oraz współpracy międzynarodowej w ochronie praw dziecka.
Law, Political institutions and public administration (General)
Education and training of public leaders are critical for public administration performance and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Public leaders act as a bridge between political power and public administration, serving as catalysts for change, directly influencing public organizations and policies. Investment in leadership development is essential to prepare leaders for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity (VUCA) environments, fostering shared management language and collaborative problem-solving across organizations. This article analyzes reforms to the Portuguese leadership training model, adapting it to contemporary challenges through collaborative strategies. Using a mixed-method approach — literature review, document analysis, mega-trend analysis, expert interviews, and focus groups — the study identifies effective instructional strategies and highlights ongoing challenges in public administration training. The outcome is a legally grounded, competency-based training framework that prioritizes collaborative learning, integrating masterclasses, individual assignments, and group discussions using active pedagogies. A consortium, including the National Institute of Administration (INA) and universities, governs the program, ensuring alignment with formal education pathways, partially recognizing training within master’s programs in public administration and awarding European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) credits. Preliminary results indicate increased satisfaction among managers and organizations, alongside enhanced professionalization and perceived public value creation. The collaborative, practice-oriented model represents a change in basic assumptions in public administration training in Portugal.
Political institutions and public administration (General)
The study identifies the main social, political and economic risks associated with the “overproduction” of the elite, the reduction of the middle class, considering uncontrolled migration. To mitigate the risks, a general theoretical approach is proposed to optimize the “hyperparameters” of public administration procedures, “upgrade” the decision-making model using hybrid systems based on machine learning. The experiment was conducted for 7 regions with initially random features (the number of regions can be any). During the experiment with the MADDPG algorithm, the author shows the possibility of implementing a balanced migration, socio-economic and resource policy for an arbitrary number of regions in conditions of instability, chaotic, noise processes and interregional migration for an unlimited period while maintaining the main environmental parameters. Trained AI algorithms in joint activities showed population growth, economic growth and development of territories, rational use of available resources (without their depletion), balanced interregional migration. Further direction of the research involves the inclusion of the external migration factor and detailing the factors of interregional migration, economic growth and resource consumption in the context of the social structure of society. The prospect of application are hybrid human-machine control and decision support systems for the sphere of public political administration.
Political institutions and public administration (General), Social sciences (General)
Retailers have traditionally prioritised younger customers, often overlooking the distinct needs of older consumers. As this demographic grows, it is increasingly important to cater to their shopping preferences. This study explores the behaviours, needs, and challenges of Croatian consumers aged 60+ through qualitative semi-structured interviews. Findings indicate that older urban customers in Croatia prioritise quality over price, are brand-loyal yet discerning, and balance price consciousness for necessities with the willingness to spend on desired items. The study contributes to consumer behaviour theory by highlighting older consumers’ selective brand loyalty and self-directed decision making. It expands on ageing population theories by challenging assumptions that older consumers are passive shoppers, emphasising their preference for informed, self-directed purchasing. From a retail strategy perspective, it emphasises experience-based retailing, advocating for enhanced customer service, clear store navigation, and tailored marketing. Practically, our research provides actionable insights for retailers to optimise service, enhance operational efficiency, and improve profitability. Adapting retail environments to better serve older customers can foster a more engaging and rewarding shopping experience, benefiting both consumers and businesses.
Political institutions and public administration (General)
Guy Mor-Lan, Naama Rivlin-Angert, Yael R. Kaplan
et al.
Political language is deeply intertwined with social identities. While social identities are often shaped by specific cultural contexts and expressed through particular uses of language, existing datasets for group and identity detection are predominantly English-centric, single-label and focus on coarse identity categories. We introduce HebID, the first multilabel Hebrew corpus for social identity detection: 5,536 sentences from Israeli politicians' Facebook posts (Dec 2018-Apr 2021), manually annotated for twelve nuanced social identities (e.g. Rightist, Ultra-Orthodox, Socially-oriented) grounded by survey data. We benchmark multilabel and single-label encoders alongside 2B-9B-parameter generative LLMs, finding that Hebrew-tuned LLMs provide the best results (macro-$F_1$ = 0.74). We apply our classifier to politicians' Facebook posts and parliamentary speeches, evaluating differences in popularity, temporal trends, clustering patterns, and gender-related variations in identity expression. We utilize identity choices from a national public survey, enabling a comparison between identities portrayed in elite discourse and the public's identity priorities. HebID provides a comprehensive foundation for studying social identities in Hebrew and can serve as a model for similar research in other non-English political contexts.
Charlott Jakob, David Harbecke, Patrick Parschan
et al.
Large Language Models are increasingly used in applications requiring objective assessment, which could be compromised by political bias. Many studies found preferences for left-leaning positions in LLMs, but downstream effects on tasks like fact-checking remain underexplored. In this study, we systematically investigate political bias through exchanging words with euphemisms or dysphemisms in German claims. We construct minimal pairs of factually equivalent claims that differ in political connotation, to assess the consistency of LLMs in classifying them as true or false. We evaluate six LLMs and find that, more than political leaning, the presence of judgmental words significantly influences truthfulness assessment. While a few models show tendencies of political bias, this is not mitigated by explicitly calling for objectivism in prompts. Warning: This paper contains content that may be offensive or upsetting.
Building on recent work studying content in the online advertising ecosystem, including our own prior study of political ads on the web during the 2020 U.S. elections, we analyze political ad content appearing on websites leading up to and during the 2024 U.S. elections. Crawling a set of 745 news and media websites several times from three different U.S. locations (Atlanta, Seattle, and Los Angeles), we collect a dataset of over 15000 ads, including (at least) 315 political ads, and we analyze it quantitatively and qualitatively. Among our findings: a prevalence of clickbait political news ads, echoing prior work; a seemingly new emphasis (compared to 2020) on voting safety and eligibility ads, particularly in Atlanta; and non-election related political ads around the Israel-Palestine conflict, particularly in Seattle. We join prior work in calling for more oversight and transparency of political-related ads on the web. Our dataset is available at https://ad-archive.cs.washington.edu.
Patrick T. Brandt, Sultan Alsarra, Vito J. D`Orazio
et al.
Conflict scholars have used rule-based approaches to extract information about political violence from news reports and texts. Recent Natural Language Processing developments move beyond rigid rule-based approaches. We review our recent ConfliBERT language model (Hu et al. 2022) to process political and violence related texts. The model can be used to extract actor and action classifications from texts about political conflict. When fine-tuned, results show that ConfliBERT has superior performance in accuracy, precision and recall over other large language models (LLM) like Google's Gemma 2 (9B), Meta's Llama 3.1 (7B), and Alibaba's Qwen 2.5 (14B) within its relevant domains. It is also hundreds of times faster than these more generalist LLMs. These results are illustrated using texts from the BBC, re3d, and the Global Terrorism Dataset (GTD).
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.
O. Tarasova, N. Prodanova, Yulia K. Kharakoz
et al.
А comprehensive analysis of the system of measures to stimulate and support the agro-industrial complex was carried out by the author; it was emphasized that such measures should be based (and are already rely to a large extent) on the principles of modern approaches to managing core industries. One of these fundamental principles is the use of the principles of the ESG agenda - green taxonomy strategies and methods. There are the principles and tools of green taxonomy in agriculture considered in detail in this paper, its current directions are presented, including on the basis of a systematic and comprehensive study of vectors of state support, resource conservation of such key components of the environment as air, water and soil. This study is important in understanding the growing global interest in reorienting public support for agriculture to transform agricultural and food systems into health-enhancing activities, Economy and planet, ensuring food safety, compliance with ESG principles. The article states that only an enabling environment with the necessary commitment to consistency of public administration in this area, a new legal framework, additional financial resources and local support structures will support the green transformation of the of the country’s agro-industrial system, which has already begun. Background. The agro-industrial complex of the Russian economy has traditionally been at the center of the political and economic agenda in our country for many years. Power and legislative institutions of various levels, including, first of all, the President and the Government of the Russian Federation, as well as the authorities of the subjects of the Federation, pay increased attention to the regulation and support of this sphere. And this is no coincidence because of the stable development issue of the agro-industrial complex is directly related to aspects of national food security – is a key factor in the functioning of the entire macroeconomic complex of the country, the well-being and stability of the population’s life. Purpose. The purpose of this work is to identify and analyze the effectiveness of a set of measures taken at the state level to stimulate and develop the “green agenda” of the Russian agro-industrial complex. Materials and methods. The legislative and regulatory acts of the Russian Federation, analytical reviews of leading Russian and international communities, Rosstat data, expert opinions of specialists in specific specialized areas, data from periodicals, works of Russian and foreign scientists in the field of agriculture were used during the preparation and writing the article. Analytical and empirical approaches to solving the tasks were used, abstract-logical methods of structuring information, systematic and complex analysis of existing information arrays of data, as well as general scientific logical approaches and methods of study were involved in the course of the research. Results. The present study revealed the current prerequisites and proved the existing potential in terms of development priorities tin order achieve the goals of sustainable development by agricultural entities, especially with the full involvement of various levels of governance and sectors of the economy.
The aim of this article is to investigate two external flexible forms of employment—the leasing of workers through Temporary Work Agencies (TWAs) and the contracted workers employed through Business Service Providers (contractors). Undoubtedly, these two forms of employment are complex and often give rise to confusion. First, this article reviews the characteristics of these types of workers and the operation of these businesses. Second, it presents the results of a mixed method of empirical research (quantitative and qualitative) regarding contracted workers. Our sample was 365 contracted workers from the cities of Athens, Thessaloniki and Patras, Greece. In particular, quantitative research is conducted using a methodology called RDS (Respondent Driven Sampling) that is innovative in the field of labour economics and labour relations. Some significant findings of our qualitative research are used to improve, extend, and interpret the quantitative results. Our research proves that contracted workers, who are employed at the premises of the banks, are leased workers, and the contracting undertakings usually operate unlawfully as TWAs. Our research proves that Banks in Greece are using “pseudo-contracting” to circumvent the European Directive 2008/104/EC and the Greek Laws 4052/2012 and 4254/2014, both of which provide institutional protection to workers leased through TWAs. In more detail, the relevant European Directive and the Greek Law 4052/2012 provide salary equality and equal labour rights for the leased workers in Greece and the EU, when they share the same qualifications as the permanent employees of the user undertakings. The employers’ aim in adopting this policy is mainly to pay lower salaries to contracted workers, who in practice have the characteristics of leased workers.
Political institutions and public administration (General)
Mirdaim Axhami, Valentina Ndou, Veronica Milo
et al.
Among major international research and practice issues, the issue of the circular economy has emerged recently as “an alternative economic paradigm” to address the current needs of the present and to search for innovative solutions for the future. The objective of this paper is to explore the initiatives and practices of the circular economy that could be actuated by tourism firms with the aim of understanding the value that could be created and its contribution to sustainable development based on decarbonization, energy efficiency, and the use of renewable sources. To achieve this objective, an in-depth, qualitative case study of a tourism resort is presented and analyzed to identify the key CE practices activated, with the aim of creating greater value and contributing to sustainable production and consumption. The results show that the main CE practices implemented focus primarily on enhancing resource efficiency, reducing emissions, and minimizing environmental impacts. This research also emphasizes the benefits that the CE provides in terms of economic, environmental, and social efficiency. The study enriches the relevance of CE and the sustainability approach for the tourism sector by highlighting the main value opportunities that tourism firms could grasp from the application of CE. Also, the paper contributes to providing practical suggestions regarding possible initiatives and practices that tourism managers could adopt for deploying CE practices.
Political institutions and public administration (General)
Private donors contributed more than $350 million to local election officials to support the administration of the 2020 election. Supporters argue these grants were neutral and necessary to maintain normal election operations during the pandemic, while critics worry these grants mostly went to Democratic strongholds and tilted election outcomes. These concerns have led twenty-four states to restrict private election grants. How much did these grants shape the 2020 presidential election? To answer this question, we collect administrative data on private election administration grants and election outcomes. We then use new advances in synthetic control methods to compare presidential election results and turnout in counties that received grants to counties with identical average presidential election results and turnout before 2020. While counties that favor Democrats were much more likely to apply for a grant, we find that the grants did not have a noticeable effect on the presidential election. Our estimates of the average effect of receiving a grant on Democratic vote share range from 0.02 percentage points to 0.36 percentage points. Our estimates of the average effect of receiving a grant on turnout range from -0.03 percentage points to 0.13 percentage points. Across specifications, our 95% confidence intervals typically include negative effects, and our confidence intervals from all specifications fail to include effects on Democratic vote share larger than 0.58 percentage points and effects on turnout larger than 0.40 percentage points. We characterize the magnitude of our effects by asking how large they are compared to the margin by which Biden won the 2020 election. In simple bench-marking exercises, we find that the effects of the grants were likely too small to have changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
In the standard Einstein's theory the exterior gravitational field of any static and axially symmetric stellar object can be described by means of a single function from which we obtain a metric into a four-dimensional space-time. In this work we present a generalization of those so called Weyl solutions to a space-time-matter metric in a five-dimensional manifold within a non-compactified Kaluza-Klein theory of gravity. The arising field equations reduce to those of vacuum Einstein's gravity when the metric function associated to the fifth dimension is considered to be constant. The calculation of the geodesics allows to identify the existence or not of different behaviours of test particles, in orbits on a constant plane, between the two metrics. In addition, static solutions on the hypersurface orthogonal to the added dimension but with time dependence in the five-dimensional metric are also obtained. The consequences on the variation of the rest mass, if the fifth dimension is identified with it, are studied.
The identification and classification of political claims is an important step in the analysis of political newspaper reports; however, resources for this task are few and far between. This paper explores different strategies for the cross-lingual projection of political claims analysis. We conduct experiments on a German dataset, DebateNet2.0, covering the policy debate sparked by the 2015 refugee crisis. Our evaluation involves two tasks (claim identification and categorization), three languages (German, English, and French) and two methods (machine translation -- the best method in our experiments -- and multilingual embeddings).
People's participation in various avenues of local administration is crucial for strengthening decentralisation in Bangladesh, despite the fact that such participation faces significant. The main purpose of this research is to explore the most current trends in people's participation in different avenues of local government. This research also examines the realities and challenges involved in strengthening decentralisation in Bangladesh. Using a quantitative methodology, this research found that different avenues of people's participation in Union Parishads has fostered successful decentralisation since these avenues certify independent participation and enable them to share their opinions and influence decision-making processes. Since decentralisation facilitates the transfer of power from the central to the local level, people's participation is functional within Union Parishads. Moreover, this research demonstrates that most rural people are severely challenged in participating in the different avenues of Union Parishads due to political complexity, institutional corruption, poor education, and general unawareness. The authors therefore suggest that, by implementing public awareness programmes, ensuring the maximum autonomy of local government units, and confirming the accountability and transparency of service providers, people's participation can strengthen the decentralisation of rural local government in Bangladesh.
An important component of the state-building process in Ukraine is the government’s activities to ensure national security, which is an attribute of independence. The ruling political forces in Ukraine have created the necessary legal framework for national security (parliamentary resolutions, laws, decrees of the head of state). The process of ensuring the national security of Ukraine should be divided into stages: 1991−2014 (imitation) and after 2014 (essential). The peculiarities of the first stage were the wide involvement of Soviet approaches in the formation of the institutional basis for ensuring national security, the imitation of the defense activity of legitimate armed formations, and the development of the military organization of the state. It was considered that the proper level of military security of Ukraine is evidence of national security in general. At the beginning of 2014, the system of ensuring Ukraine's national security on the basis of imitation collapsed, which failed to counteract Russia's aggressive plans. Seeking to hinder the will of the Ukrainian people for a European future, Russia occupied part of Ukraine’s territory − the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol, and unleashed military aggression in eastern Ukraine. The beginning of the essential stage of ensuring the national security of Ukraine is connected with the initiative involvement of civil society in the implementation of security and defense tasks. Evidence of this were: the rapid organization of the emergence of volunteer battalions and their practical application in eastern Ukraine; active formation of local self-defense forces; powerful volunteer movement; deployment of information resistance structures to the enemy’s propaganda influences; implementation of the values of patriotism in the spiritual and cultural life of the population, etc. The violent reaction of civil society to the threats and dangers that threaten the very existence of an independent and sovereign Ukraine has become a social reality. In Ukraine, there has been a fundamental shift in emphasis in the understanding of national security. The main subject of its ensuring is the security and defense sector, which combines state authorities, state armed formations and civil society structures interested in solving security and defense tasks. In Ukraine, which seeks to become democratic, security activities have been de-ethicized, which is not the case in authoritarian countries. If earlier national security was interpreted as a state of protection of national interests, now (at the request of civil society) − as a state of protection of national interests and values. The theory and practice of creating national security of Ukraine are developing dynamically. The subject of scientific research and public discussions are methodological, institutional, public administration, social compensation aspects of national security and defense. It is a matter of practical implementation of their results with the leading participation of constitutional state structures. Key words: national security, state-building, legal framework on national security, military organization of the state, security and defense sector, civil society, security, danger.