Online political divisions, such as fragmentation or polarization, are a growing global concern that can foster radicalization and hinder democratic cooperation; however, not all divisions are detrimental, some reflect pluralism and healthy diversity of opinion in a democracy. While prior research has predominantly focused on polarization in the United States, there remains a limited body of research on political divides in multiparty systems, and no universal method for comparing fragmentation across countries. Moreover, cross-country comparison is rare. This study first develops a novel measure of structural political fragmentation built on multi-scale community detection and the effective branching factor. Using a dataset of 18,325 political influencers from Brazil, Spain, and the United States, we assess online fragmentation in their Twitter/X co-following networks. We compare the fragmentation of the three countries, as well as the ideological groups within each. We further investigate factors associated with the level of fragmentation in each country. We find that political fragmentation differs across countries and is asymmetric between ideological groups. Brazil is the most fragmented, with higher fragmentation among the left-wing group, while Spain and the United States exhibit similar overall levels, with the left more fragmented in Spain and the right more fragmented in the United States. Additionally, we find that social identity plays a central role in political fragmentation. A strong alignment between ideological and social identities, with minimal overlap between ideologies, tends to promote greater integration and reduce fragmentation. Our findings provide explanations for cross-national and ideological differences in political fragmentation.
This article provides an overview of IG Parser, a software that facilitates qualitative content analysis of formal (e.g., legal) rules or informal (e.g., social) norms, and strategies (such as conventions) -- referred to as institutions -- that govern social systems and operate configurally to describe institutional systems. To this end, the IG Parser employs a distinctive syntax that ensures rigorous encoding of natural language, while automating the transformation into various formats that support the downstream analysis using diverse analytical techniques. The conceptual core of the IG Parser is an associated syntax, IG Script, that operationalizes the conceptual foundations of the Institutional Grammar, and more specifically the Institutional Grammar 2.0, an analytical paradigm for institutional analysis. This article presents the IG Parser, including its conceptual foundations, the syntax specification of IG Script, and its architectural principles. This overview is augmented with selective illustrative examples that highlight its use and the associated benefits.
Analysis of parliamentary speeches and political-party manifestos has become an integral area of computational study of political texts. While speeches have been overwhelmingly analysed using unsupervised methods, a large corpus of manifestos with by-statement political-stance labels has been created by the participants of the MARPOR project. It has been recently shown that these labels can be predicted by a neural model; however, the current approach relies on provided statement boundaries, limiting out-of-domain applicability. In this work, we propose and test a range of unified split-and-label frameworks -- based on linear-chain CRFs, fine-tuned text-to-text models, and the combination of in-context learning with constrained decoding -- that can be used to jointly segment and classify statements from raw textual data. We show that our approaches achieve competitive accuracy when applied to raw text of political manifestos, and then demonstrate the research potential of our method by applying it to the records of the UK House of Commons and tracing the political trajectories of four major parties in the last three decades.
Aishwarya Bandaru, Fabian Bindley, Trevor Bluth
et al.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate social behaviour, yet their political biases and interaction dynamics in debates remain underexplored. We investigate how LLM type and agent gender attributes influence political bias using a structured multi-agent debate framework, by engaging Neutral, Republican, and Democrat American LLM agents in debates on politically sensitive topics. We systematically vary the underlying LLMs, agent genders, and debate formats to examine how model provenance and agent personas influence political bias and attitudes throughout debates. We find that Neutral agents consistently align with Democrats, while Republicans shift closer to the Neutral; gender influences agent attitudes, with agents adapting their opinions when aware of other agents' genders; and contrary to prior research, agents with shared political affiliations can form echo chambers, exhibiting the expected intensification of attitudes as debates progress.
This paper addresses the challenge of automatically classifying text according to political leaning and politicalness using transformer models. We compose a comprehensive overview of existing datasets and models for these tasks, finding that current approaches create siloed solutions that perform poorly on out-of-distribution texts. To address this limitation, we compile a diverse dataset by combining 12 datasets for political leaning classification and creating a new dataset for politicalness by extending 18 existing datasets with the appropriate label. Through extensive benchmarking with leave-one-in and leave-one-out methodologies, we evaluate the performance of existing models and train new ones with enhanced generalization capabilities.
Ask your chatbot to impersonate an expert from Russia and an expert from US and query it on Chinese politics. How might the outputs differ? Or, to prepare ourselves for the worse, how might they converge? Scholars have raised concerns LLM based applications can homogenize cultures and flatten perspectives. But exactly how much does LLM generated outputs converge despite explicit different role assignment? This study provides empirical evidence to the above question. The critique centres on pretrained models regurgitating ossified political jargons used in the Western world when speaking about China, Iran, Russian, and US politics, despite changes in these countries happening daily or hourly. The experiments combine role-prompting and similarity metrics. The results show that AI generated discourses from four models about Iran and China are the most homogeneous and unchanging across all four models, including OpenAI GPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, and DeepSeek, despite the prompted perspective change and the actual changes in real life. This study does not engage with history, politics, or literature as traditional disciplinary approaches would; instead, it takes cues from international and area studies and offers insight on the future trajectory of shifting political discourse in a digital space increasingly cannibalised by AI.
Political misinformation, particularly harmful when it aligns with individuals' preexisting beliefs and political ideologies, has become widespread on social media platforms. In response, platforms like Facebook and X introduced warning messages leveraging fact-checking results from third-party fact-checkers to alert users against false content. However, concerns persist about the effectiveness of these fact-checks, especially when fact-checkers are perceived as politically biased. To address these concerns, this study presents findings from an online human-subject experiment (N=216) investigating how the political stances of fact-checkers influence their effectiveness in correcting misbeliefs about political misinformation. Our findings demonstrate that partisan fact-checkers can decrease the perceived accuracy of political misinformation and correct misbeliefs without triggering backfire effects. This correction is even more pronounced when the misinformation aligns with individuals' political ideologies. Notably, while previous research suggests that fact-checking warnings are less effective for conservatives than liberals, our results suggest that explicitly labeled partisan fact-checkers, positioned as political counterparts to conservatives, are particularly effective in reducing conservatives' misbeliefs toward pro-liberal misinformation.
Why do Social Media Corporations (SMCs) engage in state-linked information operations? Social media can significantly influence the global political landscape, allowing governments and other political entities to engage in concerted information operations, shaping or manipulating domestic and foreign political agendas. In response to state-linked political manipulation tactics on social media, Twitter and Meta carried out take-down operations against propaganda networks, accusing them of interfering foreign elections, organizing disinformation campaigns, manipulating political debates and many other issues. This research investigates the two SMCs' policy orientation to explain which factors can affect these two companies' reaction against state-linked information operations. We find that good governance indicators such as democracy are significant elements of SMCs' country-focus. This article also examines whether Meta and Twitter's attention to political regime characteristics is influenced by international political alignments. This research illuminates recent trends in SMCs' take-down operations and illuminating interplay between geopolitics and domestic regime characteristics.
Early internationalization and success in foreign markets play an important role in both a firm’s growth and its impact on the global economy. We conducted a study on Japanese high-tech startups to investigate the factors that derive early internationalization in firms founded in countries with a large domestic market, despite the absence of strong incentives to operate overseas. Quantitative data were collected from 71 startups and analyzed with PLS-SEM (Partial least squares path modeling). Our result showed that the factors we extracted from the previous studies on the internationalization process in small-size markets would also apply in countries with large domestic markets. In addition, considerations and the types of technology, which we extracted from qualitative research, verified the effect. According to our mediator analysis, an entrepreneur’s international orientation explains certain conditions related to a domestic market that affect a firms’ decision to pursue early internationalization. Our study makes contributions at multiple levels, benefiting entrepreneurs who are considering overseas expansion as well as policymakers who aim to promote early internationalization efforts.
Political institutions and public administration (General)
José Ramón Chaves García, Juan José Rastrollo Suárez
A lo largo de la presente sección presentamos una síntesis de la jurisprudencia casacional sobre empleo público más significativa durante el segundo período del año 2023.
Law, Political institutions and public administration (General)
The Canadian Northern Corridor (CNC) program integrates formal academic research and a strategy of engagement with potentially impacted communities (Fellows et al. 2020). Finding common ground among Indigenous peoples, governments and industry on engagement and consultation practices is imperative to the future of resource development and the Canadian economy, and ultimately to the reconciliation of the relationships between Indigenous Peoples and Canada (Boyd and Lorefice 2018). In this paper, we focus on language, stressing that languages are more than just tools. Rather, all communicative systems also hold both individual and cultural identities, histories and memory, and encode knowledge in specific ways.
This article investigates how Indigenous languages can contribute to meaningful engagement particularly within the context of the CNC concept; our recommendations also work toward strengthening existing Indigenous policy initiatives in Canada, uplifting Indigenous worldviews, and potentially supporting the reconciliation process. We draw upon primarily Indigenous scholars in explaining the reasons why using Indigenous languages matters for fostering meaningful engagement during research, consultation, and community engagement activities and address methods by which they can be implemented. After examining some past/ongoing attempts at this incorporation, we identify in our policy recommendations five different ways that the entire process of community engagement can align with the usage of Indigenous languages.
Political institutions and public administration (General)
Problem setting. The article reveals the peculiarities of the introduction of e-democracy in Ukraine, highlights the main tools of activity and gives the best practices of functioning. The perception and readiness of the society for the transition to the e-platform is shown. To achieve the goal set in the work, such general theoretical research methods as analysis, synthesis, induction, deduction, comparison were used to determine the content and components of the concepts of “e-democracy” and “e-governance”; a systematic approach to generalize the main methodological approaches to the formation and essence of electronic democracy; methods of positive and normative analysis to develop recommendations for improving the e-democracy transformation model. And special (systematization, abstraction, decomposition) methods of scientific knowledge, with the help of which the article examines the theoretical foundations of the digital economy and carries out a critical comprehensive analysis and systematization of scientific and practical approaches to the interpretation of the essence of the principles and goals of e-democracy. Analysis of recent researches and publications. Problems of democracy and involvement of the public in policymaking by means of information and communication technologies were studied by C. Armstrong, Y. Harlan, S. Coleman, D. Lathrop, D. Robinson, L. Ruma, E. Felten, S. Schacht, D. Shuler and others However, the first attempts to bring politics online were made by engineer-enthusiasts at the request of the authorities in order to invent an alternative to the outdated routine practice. Such experimental projects as “E-Politics” in Minnesota (1994) and “Online Democracy for Citizens” in Great Britain (1996) were the first to build social networks and create discussion forums. Some local authorities in the Scandinavian countries, Canada, and Great Britain promoted and supported e-democracy projects, but most of them lacked legal regulation and resource provision. Тarget of the research. The article analyzes the concept of e-democracy, e-government. The international experience and developments in the field of e-democracy are determined in order to identify positive legal developments in the field of e-democracy. The actions of the Ukrainian government and parliament in the field of promoting e-democracy in Ukraine are analyzed. The activities that need to be regulated by the Ukrainian government for the further implementation of edemocracy are identified. Article’s main body. The purpose of the article is to systematize the concepts of e-democracy and e-government, to analyze international experience in the field of e-democracy in order to introduce into the domestic legal system positive legal experience in the field of regulating democratic processes, for the further development of new legal norms in the field of e-democracy and e-government , taking into account the need to form a new holistic worldview among its citizens based on global trends in the development of law, the science of public administration, etc. It was concluded that e-democracy should occupy a worthy place and enter the agenda of radical political reforms and become a component of public administration, especially at the current stage in the conditions of martial law. The study of the problem of e-democracy and e-governance, and the implementation of these institutions in Ukraine, is based on the approaches available in the Council of Europe regarding the essence, structure, features of e-democracy and its implementation. Conclusions and prospects for the development. E-democracy cannot be considered a panacea for all problems of democracy or public communications, but it undoubtedly contributes to the development of two, at the present stage, inseparable historical projects democracy and the Internet. Therefore, e-democracy should occupy a worthy place and enter the agenda of radical political reforms and become a component of public administration, especially at the current stage in the conditions of martial law.
Analysis and measurement of tax evasion is a very important issue primarily for the tax administration. The purpose of this article is first to show how to analyze tax evasion via a questionnaire. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as in the EU countries and adder countries in the region and the world, ensuring fighting tax evasion has never been important than it is today. Tax evasion can’t observe in isolation from the rest of society. Maximising the revenue collected by promoting fighting tax evasion is the main responsibility of a tax administration. According to current knowledge, it is not possible to precisely quantify the range of individual factors on the very occurrence of tax evasion and the analysis and measurement of tax evasion factors does not have an easy path and is not an easy task. There are numerous studies on the influence of certain factors of tax evasion. This study highlighted the importance of factors that determine tax evasion. The objectives of this article are to give how to analyse and measure tax evasion. Due to the financial and economic crisis, the issue of tax evasion in order to improve the state of public finances. The answer to the question is very complex for several reasons. Factors of tax evasion change dynamically over time due to economic conditions, business innovation, e-commerce development, economic crisis and today COVID pandemic, political stability, resource availability, competitive situation, quality and capabilities of state institutions, tax legislation, etc. A survey of respondents’ attitudes towards tax evasion was conducted in order to analyze and measure tax evasion factors. The primary research of the respondents has been conducted, in order to analyze and measure the factors of tax evasion. The study adopted a quantitative survey design, convenience sampling technique, and questionnaire as a data collection instrument. We found that the introduction of appropriate penalties can increase tax discipline and improve compliance with and enforcement of tax laws. Such solutions should achieve a preventive effect, and consequently a repressive one. In the end, it is necessary to raise the level of political security, because without raising and increasing political security within the state and fight against tax evasion is limited. A key point is that require legislative change to maximise the suggestions above. Starting from the presented in the paper, ie analysis and measurement of tax evasion factors, a general conclusion can be made that priority and special emphasis should be given to these factors mentioned in the research, through which measures and activities can improve the situation faster and more efficiently.Furthermore, in line accordance with economic trends, this paper can contribute to the literature by presenting the results and shows that the questionnaire can be used to recognize the observed phenomenon. Finally, it is worth recognising a need for new research questions regarding the analysis and measurement of tax evasion.
The article is devoted to the study of the nature and content of anti-corruption policy, ways to improve its formation and implementation. It is substantiated that at the present stage of social development corruption remains one of the most threatening problems of economic, political, legal, social development of states. In the context of globalization, the spread of corruption is accelerating, as economic crises go far beyond nation-states and acquire international significance, which contributes to the establishment of the view of corruption as a transnational problem. Based on the analysis of modern scientific research of domestic and foreign scholars, it is proved that in theory there are several approaches to defining the concept of "corruption" and emphasize the bilateral nature of corruption: corruption acts as a kind of "agreement" mutually beneficial for officials in with him in the appropriate relationship. It is proved that the essence of anti-corruption policy remains a debatable issue in theory. The anti-corruption policy of the state is considered as a set of multidirectional measures, as a direction of action, as a vector of building the system of public administration. It is substantiated that anti-corruption policy should be considered as a comprehensive activity that includes a variety of measures aimed at different social relations. In the content of anti-corruption policy can be divided into three blocks of measures: measures to prevent corruption, countermeasures and measures to combat corruption. A distinction is made between the means of general prevention and the means of special prevention of corruption. It is proved that the fight against corruption includes the development and implementation of effective anti-corruption legislation, building the institutional system of anti-corruption policy, ensuring proper interaction between its elements. The fight against corruption is aimed at identifying, stopping, investigating and disclosing corruption offenses, restoring violated rights and legitimate interests of citizens, as well as bringing the perpetrators to justice. The implementation of such activities is ensured by criminalizing corruption and schemes, the introduction and use of procedural procedures and actions that allow you to effectively detect and detect these crimes.
Polityka energetyczna i zróżnicowanie źródeł energii wiążą się z kwestią znaczenia energetyki jądrowej w miksie energetycznym. W związku z tym ważna staje się odpowiedź na pytanie, jak aktorzy polityczni postrzegają energetykę jądrową. W tekście omówiono medialny obraz energetyki jądrowej prezentowany w wypowiedziach kandydatów na prezydenta w wyborach z 2020 r. Najpierw przeprowadzono analizę dokumentów prawnych Unii Europejskiej dotyczących redukcji dwutlenku węgla, co ściśle wiąże się z produkcją energii. Następnie opracowano model postrzegania energii jądrowej godzący wyzwania ekologiczne z rosnącymi potrzebami energetycznymi. W ramach tego modelu omówiono wypowiedzi kandydatów poruszające ten temat. W analizie zebranych przypadków wykorzystano narzędzia kognitywistyki, semiotyki oraz retoryki. Pozwoliły one ukazać typowe konceptualizacje energetyki jądrowej, w tym m.in. cliché oraz sprzeczne z faktami schematy myślowe obecne w dyskursie aktorów politycznych.
Political science (General), Political institutions and public administration (General)
Hong Shen, Ángel Alexander Cabrera, Adam Perer
et al.
This position paper offers a framework to think about how to better involve human influence in algorithmic decision-making of contentious public policy issues. Drawing from insights in communication literature, we introduce a "public(s)-in-the-loop" approach and enumerates three features that are central to this approach: publics as plural political entities, collective decision-making through deliberation, and the construction of publics. It explores how these features might advance our understanding of stakeholder participation in AI design in contentious public policy domains such as recidivism prediction. Finally, it sketches out part of a research agenda for the HCI community to support this work.
Ozioma Collins Oguine, Kanyifeechukwu Jane Oguine, Hashim Ibrahim Bisallah
The term Big Data has been coined to refer to the gargantuan bulk of data that cannot be dealt with by traditional data-handling techniques. Big Data is still a novel concept, and in the following literature, we intend to elaborate on it in a palpable fashion. It commences with the concept of the subject in itself, along with its properties and the two general approaches to dealing with it. Big Data provides an opportunity for educational Institutions to use their Information Technology resources strategically to improve educational quality, guide students to higher completion rates and improve student persistence and outcomes. This paper explores the attributes of big data that are relevant to educational institutions, investigates the factors influencing the adoption of big data and analytics in learning institutions, and seeks to establish the limiting factors hindering the use of big data in Institutions of higher learning. A survey research design was adopted in conducting this research, and Questionnaires were the instrument employed for data collection.
The Nigerian state as a governance template has been dominated by the vexatious problem of underdevelopment since post-colonial history. Good governance and development as an intertwine concept have largely been elusive, rather, poor governance has dominated the Nigerian society, resulting from leadership problems, pervasive corruption, the existence of multiple centres of loyalty base regime, ethnic and religious interest among others, all indicative of weak, underperforming or non-performing institutions of government. This paper made an in-depth inquiry into the correlation between weak institutions and poor governance, highlighting the Nigerian situation. It critically analyzed the concept of good governance as the opposite of poor governance. This paper found that unless the Nigerian state cures itself of the malaise of weak institutions and procures a situation where both the leaders and the led imbibe the ethos of good governance, it will continue to struggle with the burden of poor governance and the concomitant lack of social development it breeds in the society.