Emanuele Mendicelli, Georg Bergner, Masanori Hanada
Simulating lattice gauge theories on quantum computers presents unique challenges that drive the development of novel theoretical frameworks. The orbifold lattice approach offers a scalable method for simulating SU($N$) gauge theories in arbitrary dimensions. In this work, we present three improvements: (i) two new simplified Hamiltonians, (ii) an encoding of the SU(2) theory with smaller number of qubits, and (iii) a reduction in the requirement for large scalar masses to reach the Kogut-Susskind limit, achieved via the inclusion of an additional term in the Hamiltonian. These advancements significantly reduce circuit depth and qubit requirements for quantum simulations. We benchmarked these improvements using Monte Carlo simulations of SU(2) in (2+1) dimensions. Preliminary results demonstrate the effectiveness of these developments and further validate the use of noncompact variables as a promising framework for scalable quantum simulations of gauge theories.
In this expository article, we summarize what is known about maximum likelihood thresholds of Gaussian models, paying special attention to connections with rigidity theory.
The idea of forming the Yugoslav National Front was the reaction of supporters of national and state unitarism to the gradual federalization of the first Yugoslav state initiated by the government of the Yugoslav Radical Union. The concept of a national front arose in the ranks of the senatorial club of the Yugoslav Radical Peasant Democracy party, and over time, other Yugoslav integralist political organizations accepted it - the Yugoslav People's Party, the YNM Zbor, and several political factions that arose in the process of the disintegration of Bogoljub Jevtić's political group. Contrary to the thesis put forward by socialist historiography that the leading cause of the failure of the concept of the Yugoslav National Front was the struggle for primacy between the leaders of the Yugoslav integralist parties, a detailed analysis shows us that behind the failure was the continuous work of the government of M. Stojadinović on preventing the unification of supporters of integral Yugoslavism. The radical methods used by the regime to achieve this goal (corruption, police repression, negative campaign in the media, construction of false affairs) eloquently testify to the political potential that the idea of gathering all supporters of national and state unitarism had and also to the danger that its implementation represented for the government of M. Stojadinović. There is a paradox in the fact that the concept of the Yugoslav National Front was ultimately implemented by Milan Stojadinović - a person against whose politics the idea itself was directed and who devoted most of the time he spent at the head of the Yugoslav government to the fight against the unification of the Yugoslav integralist forces. At the same time, this paradox (in addition to the instability of Stojadinović's political principles) clearly illustrates the role of the theory of integral Yugoslavism as the last line of defense for the integrity of the Yugoslav state in moments of crisis.
Francesco Bilotta, Alberto Binetti, Giacomo Manferdini
This paper studies the supply and effects of causal rhetoric in U.S. politics. We define causal rhetoric as assigning responsibility for political outcomes, via claims of blame and merit. Training a supervised classifier, we detect causal rhetoric in over a decade of congressional tweets, finding that its supply has risen rapidly and pervasively, displacing affective messaging. We show that the production of causal rhetoric involves a trade-off between revenues and costs. First, quasi-random variation in Twitter adoption shows that blame increases small-donor revenues by expanding donor count, while merit raises average donation size. Second, fine-grained legislative data suggest that policy ownership determines relative costs: blame is cheaper for opponents, merit for proposers. Finally, causal rhetoric has downstream effects on societal outcomes, fostering protest activity and shaping polarization and institutional trust.
A perennial question of political thought is how to stabilize a just regime in the face of disagreement. The importance of this question has been heightened with the Weberian state that monopolizes the power of coercion and anchors society under a single governance structure. This political form has given us both liberal democracy and totalitarianism. The stakes could not be higher in ensuring stability without dismantling pluralism. This paper provides a novel solution to the stability problem by focusing on dynamic stability reached through polycentric democracy. Plural and overlapping centers of governance characterize such democracy. This renders a polycentric system more resilient to changing views than a monocentric one and superior on political risk-management grounds by diffusing decision-making risks. A polycentric system also fosters antifragility in society by avoiding seeking a single and fixed point equilibrium, thereby eluding the pitfalls currently afflicting liberal democracy.
Drawing on the costly signaling theory (CST), this study examined the need for status as a hidden motive to increase organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and result in the focal employee’s overall evaluation. Moreover, as the activating cues, this study considered political skill as an individual characteristic and task visibility as a situational factor in the relationship between the need for status, OCB, and overall evaluation. To test these predictions, we obtained and analyzed 299 questionnaire responses from pairs of subordinates and supervisors in various South Korean industries. The analytical results supported our hypotheses that the need for status increased OCB, resulting in high performance appraisal. Moreover, task visibility positively moderated the relationship between the need for status and overall evaluation, which was mediated by OCB. However, political skill exhibited a negative moderation effect on this mediation process. These findings have important theoretical and practical implications, and they also highlight directions for future research.
In this study, we explore the financial and economic integration of BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and key emerging economies (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE) using graph theory, aiming to map intersectoral connections and their impact on financial stability and market risk. The research addresses a critical gap in the literature; while political and economic linkages between nations have been widely studied, the specific connectivity between sectors within these economies remains underexplored. Our methodology utilizes eigenvector centrality and Euclidean distance to construct a comprehensive network of 106 publicly listed firms from 2013 to 2022, across sectors such as energy, telecommunications, retail, and technology. The primary hypothesis is that sectors with higher centrality scores—indicative of their interconnectedness within the broader financial network—demonstrate greater resilience to market volatility and contribute disproportionately to sectoral profitability. The analysis yielded several key insights. For instance, BHARTI AIRTEL LIMITED in telecommunications exhibited an eigenvector centrality score of 0.9615, positioning it as a critical node in maintaining sectoral stability, while AMBEV SA in the retail sector, with a centrality score of 0.9938, emerged as a pivotal player influencing both profitability and risk. Sectors led by companies with high centrality showed a 20% increase in risk-adjusted returns compared to less connected entities, supporting the hypothesis that central firms act as stabilizers in fluctuating market conditions. The findings underscore the practical implications for policymakers and investors alike. Understanding the structure of these networks allows for more informed decision making in terms of investment strategies and macroeconomic policy. By identifying the central entities within these economic systems, both policymakers and investors can target their efforts more effectively, either to support growth initiatives or to mitigate systemic risks. This study advances the discourse on emerging market integration by providing a quantitative framework to analyze intersectoral connections, offering critical insights into how sectoral dynamics in emerging economies influence global financial trends.
Heidi Tahvanainen, Liisa-Maria Voipio-Pulkki, Katri Hämeen-Anttila
et al.
Abstract Background Ensuring equal access to medicines and their appropriate and safe use at reasonable costs are core functions of health systems. Despite that, few descriptions of national medicines policies' development processes and implementation strategies have been published. This study aimed to describe the government program-based development of the Rational Pharmacotherapy Action Plan in Finland as a part of the undergoing major health and social service system reform, also covering the implementation of rational pharmacotherapy in the reformed system and processes. Methods The data of this qualitative study consisted of public reports and Steering Group meeting memos related to the development of the national Rational Pharmacotherapy Action Plan that the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health coordinated. Qualitative content analysis applying systems theory and the conceptual framework of integrated services as theoretical frameworks was used as an analysis method. Results The national Rational Pharmacotherapy Action Plan covering 2018–2022 was created in a bottom-up development process involving a wide range of stakeholders. Rational pharmacotherapy was redefined by adding equality as the fifth pillar to complement the previously defined pillars of being effective, safe, high-quality, and cost-effective. The Action Plan formed a normative framework for long-term development, with a vision and principles focusing on people-centeredness, better coordination and management of the medication use processes, the continuity of treatment paths and the flow of patient and medicines information through partnerships, and evidence-informed policies and practices. Conclusion Through intensive stakeholder participation, the bottom-up approach created a national vision and principles of rational pharmacotherapy along with strong commitment to implementing the goals and measures. The concern lies in ensuring the continuity of the Action Plan implementation and achieving a balanced long-term development aligned with the integrated and reformed national social and health services system. The development of the pharmaceutical system has several national and EU-level dependencies requiring political long-term commitment. While the Action Plan differs from the national medicines policy, it forms a good basis for long-term development covering important parts of medicine policy at the micro, meso, and macro levels of the service system.
Juan Carlos Christfandy Hutahaean, Christian H. J. de Fretes, Suryo Sakti Hadiwijoyo
This article discusses the roles of the government and the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) in handling severe human rights violation cases in Paniai, Papua. The purpose of this article is to determine whether the National Commission on Human Rights handled the severe human rights violations in Paniai optimally. The article employs a qualitative research method as a research procedure that generates descriptive data in the form of written or oral words from individuals or things observed. For gathering information, interviews were used along with different types of literature, like journals, to look at the steps that the National Commission on Human Rights took and news stories from different media outlets about how they dealt with serious human rights violations in Paniai. This article uses the theory of institutional and institutional roles to examine the roles played by the National Commission on Human Rights. The research findings indicate that handling the severe human rights violation cases in Paniai creates problematic situations between the government and civilians. First, the National Commission on Human Rights attempts to adapt to external and social expectations. Second, the formation of an order between the majority and minority in the uniformity pattern of witness elements during the investigation stage conducted by the Attorney General. Other challenges include the back-and-forth return of investigation files, which hinders the process of handling the Paniai case by the National Commission on Human Rights.
Stefan Sylvius Wagner, Maike Behrendt, Marc Ziegele
et al.
Stance detection holds great potential to improve online political discussions through its deployment in discussion platforms for purposes such as content moderation, topic summarization or to facilitate more balanced discussions. Typically, transformer-based models are employed directly for stance detection, requiring vast amounts of data. However, the wide variety of debate topics in online political discussions makes data collection particularly challenging. LLMs have revived stance detection, but their online deployment in online political discussions faces challenges like inconsistent outputs, biases, and vulnerability to adversarial attacks. We show how LLM-generated synthetic data can improve stance detection for online political discussions by using reliable traditional stance detection models for online deployment, while leveraging the text generation capabilities of LLMs for synthetic data generation in a secure offline environment. To achieve this, (i) we generate synthetic data for specific debate questions by prompting a Mistral-7B model and show that fine-tuning with the generated synthetic data can substantially improve the performance of stance detection, while remaining interpretable and aligned with real world data. (ii) Using the synthetic data as a reference, we can improve performance even further by identifying the most informative samples in an unlabelled dataset, i.e., those samples which the stance detection model is most uncertain about and can benefit from the most. By fine-tuning with both synthetic data and the most informative samples, we surpass the performance of the baseline model that is fine-tuned on all true labels, while labelling considerably less data.
Mexico has experienced a notable surge in assassinations of political candidates and mayors. This article argues that these killings are largely driven by organized crime, aiming to influence candidate selection, control local governments for rent-seeking, and retaliate against government crackdowns. Using a new dataset of political assassinations in Mexico from 2000 to 2021 and instrumental variables, we address endogeneity concerns in the location and timing of government crackdowns. Our instruments include historical Chinese immigration patterns linked to opium cultivation in Mexico, local corn prices, and U.S. illicit drug prices. The findings reveal that candidates in municipalities near oil pipelines face an increased risk of assassination due to drug trafficking organizations expanding into oil theft, particularly during elections and fuel price hikes. Government arrests or killings of organized crime members trigger retaliatory violence, further endangering incumbent mayors. This political violence has a negligible impact on voter turnout, as it targets politicians rather than voters. However, voter turnout increases in areas where authorities disrupt drug smuggling, raising the chances of the local party being re-elected. These results offer new insights into how criminal groups attempt to capture local governments and the implications for democracy under criminal governance.
Manuel Nunez Martinez, Sonja Schmer-Galunder, Zoey Liu
et al.
The unchecked spread of digital information, combined with increasing political polarization and the tendency of individuals to isolate themselves from opposing political viewpoints, has driven researchers to develop systems for automatically detecting political bias in media. This trend has been further fueled by discussions on social media. We explore methods for categorizing bias in US news articles, comparing rule-based and deep learning approaches. The study highlights the sensitivity of modern self-learning systems to unconstrained data ingestion, while reconsidering the strengths of traditional rule-based systems. Applying both models to left-leaning (CNN) and right-leaning (FOX) news articles, we assess their effectiveness on data beyond the original training and test sets.This analysis highlights each model's accuracy, offers a framework for exploring deep-learning explainability, and sheds light on political bias in US news media. We contrast the opaque architecture of a deep learning model with the transparency of a linguistically informed rule-based model, showing that the rule-based model performs consistently across different data conditions and offers greater transparency, whereas the deep learning model is dependent on the training set and struggles with unseen data.
In this article we argue that what is called today a ‘democratic backsliding’ or de-consolidation should be analysed, at least in some cases, as a liberal-constitutional backsliding for which the pandemic of Covid-19 adds a new impetus and creates the situation where violation of constitutionality of law might become a norm. In our theoretical considerations, we propose to examine this problem from two interconnected perspectives: the tension between the liberal and the democratic components of liberal democracy, often overlooked by the dominant democratic theory, and constitutionalism as the major safeguard of individual rights and liberties that limits democratic sovereignty, or the will of the people expressed by democratic representation. To better understand the nature of the current crisis of liberal-constitutional backsliding, we refer to Carl Schmitt’s concept of ‘the administrative state’ where the dominant legal act is an administrative decree which does not require constitutional legitimacy or even the guarantee that it expresses the will of the majority. Our empirical considerations focus on the case of the liberal-constitutional backsliding in Poland exacerbated by the pandemic, which provides a good illustration of how the tensions within the liberal-democratic model itself can be used to justify democratic sovereignty as the only source of political legitimacy.
Rahil Ghorbani Nia, Somayeh NooriHekmat, Reza Dehnavieh
et al.
Background: The present study investigated the possibility of implementing quaternary prevention using family physicians in Iran’s health system.Methods: The present study was a qualitative study conducted with a grounded theory approach. Thirty-four participants, who were faculty members and experts, were selected by purposive and theoretical sampling using the snowball approach until data saturation. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews. The interviews took 20 to 60 minutes each, based on the circumstances and the participant’s willingness to continue. Data analysis was performed along with data collection by Strauss and Corbin’s constant comparative analysis. Using Lincoln and Guba criteria, the accuracy and strength of this research were confirmed.Results: The dimensions model of quaternary prevention using family physicians in Iran were specified in six axial categories: causal conditions, contextual conditions, intervening conditions, strategies, and outcomes. The phenomenon was the promotion of quaternary prevention, including defining quaternary prevention, family physicians, the philosophy of quaternary prevention, and the philosophy of family physicians—social, political, economic, cultural, and technological conditions as contextual and intervening conditions. Causal conditions were doctors, patients, and the health system. Two main strategies were intersectoral administration and intra-sectoral governance. Outcomes included efficiency and the provision of security for society.Conclusion: For quaternary prevention promotion and to offer ethically and rationally acceptable scientific services to the people, it is necessary to promote the position of the family physician as the primary implementer of quaternary prevention in healthcare. Getting to the PHC umbrella is achieved through intra-sectoral leadership and inter-sectoral governance, which supports the patient and reduces unnecessary care.
Carefully standardized facial images of 591 participants were taken in the laboratory, while controlling for self-presentation, facial expression, head orientation, and image properties. They were presented to human raters and a facial recognition algorithm: both humans (r=.21) and the algorithm (r=.22) could predict participants' scores on a political orientation scale (Cronbach's alpha=.94) decorrelated with age, gender, and ethnicity. These effects are on par with how well job interviews predict job success, or alcohol drives aggressiveness. Algorithm's predictive accuracy was even higher (r=.31) when it leveraged information on participants' age, gender, and ethnicity. Moreover, the associations between facial appearance and political orientation seem to generalize beyond our sample: The predictive model derived from standardized images (while controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity) could predict political orientation (r=.13) from naturalistic images of 3,401 politicians from the U.S., UK, and Canada. The analysis of facial features associated with political orientation revealed that conservatives tended to have larger lower faces. The predictability of political orientation from standardized images has critical implications for privacy, the regulation of facial recognition technology, and understanding the origins and consequences of political orientation.
Using polysystem theory, the article examines the conceptions of literary researchers in Vietnam in establishing main standards in the process of literary evaluation. As a result, researchers often choose two basic and
common standards: political and humanity. In particular, since the Renew (1986) until now, humanity standards have been considered by some researchers as a valuable category in the literary studies in Vietnam.
The paper analyzed the challenges of poverty in Montenegro. It provided an overview of the structure and scope of UN action in Montenegro and general sustainable development policies and their national implementation. The objective was to research the contributions of the UN system to the sustainable development of Montenegro while focusing on the role of the UNDP in eradicating poverty. The methodology consisted of the literature overview and the case scenario analysis of integrated social protection and employment policies. In addition, secondary data analysis has been employed to complement the research findings. The paper has identified the national socio-economic situation and the contributions of the UNDP in eradicating poverty through the design and implementation of integrative policies. The research proved the importance of the UNDP in fighting poverty in Montenegro and the effective role of the UN in achieving sustainable development.
Based on unpublished sources and emigrant memoirs, the work analyzes the issue of
social adaptation to the conditions of emigration in Manchuria by representatives of
the «Omsk group», which consisted of former members of the anti-Bolshevik Siberian
governments during the Civil War. Based on the theory of social adaptation and
the anthropological approach, the article focuses on such aspects of the biography
of this category of figures as behavioral strategies, service on the Chinese Eastern
Railway, and the choice of citizenship. The study of the destiny of the “Omichi” in
Harbin is necessary to present the activities of Russian public and political figures
after the Civil War, to understand the problems of emigration in Manchuria and the
peculiarities of the existence of the liberal intelligentsia.
History (General) and history of Europe, Economics as a science
Matthew Groh, Aruna Sankaranarayanan, Nikhil Singh
et al.
Recent advances in technology for hyper-realistic visual and audio effects provoke the concern that deepfake videos of political speeches will soon be indistinguishable from authentic video recordings. The conventional wisdom in communication theory predicts people will fall for fake news more often when the same version of a story is presented as a video versus text. We conduct 5 pre-registered randomized experiments with 2,215 participants to evaluate how accurately humans distinguish real political speeches from fabrications across base rates of misinformation, audio sources, question framings, and media modalities. We find base rates of misinformation minimally influence discernment and deepfakes with audio produced by the state-of-the-art text-to-speech algorithms are harder to discern than the same deepfakes with voice actor audio. Moreover across all experiments, we find audio and visual information enables more accurate discernment than text alone: human discernment relies more on how something is said, the audio-visual cues, than what is said, the speech content.