Studies of international institutions, organizations, and regimes have consistently appeared in the pages of International Organization. We review the theoretical and empirical work on international institutions and identify promising directions for the institutionalist research program. Early studies of international institutions were rich with empirical insights and often influenced by theoretical developments in other fields of political science, but lacking an overarching analytical framework they failed to produce a coherent body of scholarship. Current efforts to reinvigorate the study of international institutions draw on a new body of theory about domestic institutions. We argue that the assumptions of this new approach to institutions are more appropriate to international studies than those of earlier attempts to transfer theories across levels of analysis. We suggest that the most productive questions for future research will focus on specifying alternative mechanisms by which institutions can influence outcomes and identify particular sets of questions within this agenda that are especially promising.
Conversational AI has been proposed as a scalable way to correct public misconceptions and spread misinformation. Yet its effectiveness may depend on perceptions of its political neutrality. As LLMs enter partisan conflict, elites increasingly portray them as ideologically aligned. We test whether these credibility attacks reduce LLM-based persuasion. In a preregistered U.S. survey experiment (N=2144), participants completed a three-round conversation with ChatGPT about a personally held economic policy misconception. Compared to a neutral control, a short message indicating that the LLM was biased against the respondent's party attenuated persuasion by 28%. Transcript analysis indicates that the warnings alter the interaction: respondents push back more and engage less receptively. These findings suggest that the persuasive impact of conversational AI is politically contingent, constrained by perceptions of partisan alignment.
The present study intends to explore and investigate the contexts and semantic implications of individual conflict and fighting in Sanandaj through a structural-interpretive approach and thus analyze the process of formation of individual conflict in this city. In this study, the Grounded theory method of Strauss and Corbin was used and the data were collected using the in-depth interview technique. The participants of this study were street brawlers in Sanandaj city, 15 of whom were interviewed with the help of theoretical and purposeful sampling method. Finally, the collected information was coded and analyzed in the form of 18 central categories and one core category. The results of the study indicate that the conflict participants have engaged in individual conflicts with or without the use of cold weapons in contexts and conditions such as defamation and lowering the tolerance threshold (as causal conditions), Traffic problems, Mimicking violence and family tensions (as intervening conditions), and Norms of violence, a anomic economy, police patrols being delayed and monitored, a culture of honor-based courage, and ineffective litigation (as background conditions), which has consequences such as recognizing an ineffective judicial-security system, regret in the valley of duality, legal punishment, reduced sense of security, injury, and social punishment for them. Such results indicate that individual conflicts are not merely an individual matter, but also an individual, social, cultural, and institutional matter, but not a security matter.
Extended Abstract
1. Introduction
Today, in the Iranian society, individual conflict and struggle are known as one of the major social pathologies. Official statistics indicate an increasing prevalence of individual quarrels in the country that have been recorded in recent years. Kurdistan province is one of the provinces which in recent years the statistics of conflict and its struggle have been very high. Kurdistan is one of the provinces which in recent years the statistics of Individual Conflict and Struggle have been very high. among the townships of kurdistan province, the statistics of the individual conflict and struggle in the city of sanandaj is more than other cities, so that in the first six months of the year, the statistics of conflict and conflict in the city increased nearly 60 percent. the main question of this research is what is the motivation and purpose of this group of citizens after individual conflict and struggle? And how do they understand, meaning and represent? What are the actions and conditions (social, economic, cultural, political and so on)? The interaction between them with the conditions and the conditions mentioned in the form or form has been found. How are the consequences of this action in different fields?
The present study intends to explore and investigate the contexts and semantic implications of individual conflict and struggle in Sanandaj through a structural-interpretive approach and thus analyze the process of formation of individual conflict in this city. In the present study, the concepts of action interpretation, social anomy, social learning, natural aggression, scarce resources, social control, differences in companionship and construction of security are used as a conceptual framework. The review of empirical research indicates that individual conflict and struggle with quantitative approach has been studied and explained and the qualitative approach of this issue is very low. In the present study, it is attempted to study the formation of individual conflict and struggle in the city of sanandaj by using qualitative approach and research method.
2. Method
In this study, the Grounded theory method of Strauss and Corbin was used and the data were collected using the in-depth interview technique. The participants of this study were street brawlers in Sanandaj city, 15 of whom were interviewed with the help of theoretical and purposeful sampling method. In this research, with reference to prison, training and rehabilitation centers, detention centers and police stations in the city of sanandaj, people who had experienced street fighting this year were identified and interviewed by a person or by telephone. In this research to achieve the reliability criteria of raw data in the research process several times were reviewed and evaluated and the results were compared and evaluated by raw data (analytical comparison). Also coding, conceptualization and extraction stages were performed by guidance and supervised teachers who were specialized in the field of qualitative research (audit technique). (Strauss and Corbin, 2012: 180 Mohammadpour, 2013: 225 & Mohammadi, 2021).
3. Findings
Finally, the collected information was coded and analyzed in the form of 18 central categories and one core category. The results of the study indicate that the conflict participants have engaged in individual conflict and struggle with or without the use of cold weapons in contexts and conditions such as defamation and lowering the tolerance threshold (as causal conditions), Traffic problems, Mimicking violence and family tensions (as intervening conditions), and Norms of violence, a anomic economy, police patrols being delayed and monitored, a culture of honor-based courage, and ineffective litigation (as background conditions), which has consequences such as recognizing an ineffective judicial-security system, regret in the valley of duality, legal punishment, reduced sense of security, injury, and social punishment for them. Data analysis using descriptive - story technique in the field of the phenomenon of individual conflict and conflict in sanandaj indicates that the core category, which other categories are related to it, is Multidimensional Anomic Conflict. This indicates that in forming of interpersonal individual conflict and struggle in the city of sanandaj, various social institutions and organiziations have a role; institutions and phenomena which have become volatile and are the context of the formation of individual conflict and struggle and its consequences. Among the institutions and organizations which are anomie and disorganization, can be mentioned to culture, law enforcement agency, and institution of economic, family institution, friends group and organizations like municipality.
4. Conclusion
Such results indicate that individual conflict and struggle are not merely an individual matter, but also an individual, social, cultural, and institutional matter, but not a security matter. It is individual because of anomic moral and inability to control behavior affect on as causal conditions in its shaping. It is social, because the group of friends can act as context. It is institutional, since family tensions, unorganized economy, inefficient hearing and delay - watch in shaping it have role as background and intervention conditions, and this indicates the weakness of family, economy, and part of law enforcement and judicial institutions. The result of this research is that despite all the negative consequences, there is no security and as an existential threat to the survival of a society or political unit is not introduced. In addition to the discovery and extraction of a local - local theory, The Cycle of Individual Conflict and Struggle, theoretically, since it shows that the inefficiency of the judiciary system and the delay and the watching of police force is one of the conditions of conflict and struggle in kurdistan province is adoption with mertons theory of anomie, since this theory based on that failure of social pressure in conformity with its cultural values lead to deviations. On the other hand, the results of the study, which represent the role of friends group in the form of individual conflict and struggle in Kurdistan province, are in conformity with social learning theory since they are based on social learning theory, abnormal behaviors, such as tendency to individual collective and quarrels, are born in social learning. Since the results of the study indicate that the inefficient and delayed trial - the supervision of police pat the results of the study indicate that the inefficient and delayed trial - the supervision of police patrols in the form of individual conflict and struggle in kurdistan province is in conformity with the copenhagen school theory.
The "Integrated Control and Prevention of Three Highs (high blood pressure/glucose/lipids) and Six Diseases (coronary heart disease, stroke, renal lesions, retinal lesions, peripheral neuropathy, and peripheral vascular lesions)" strategy is an important measure to establish and improve the integrated management service system for medical treatment and prevention of chronic diseases in Shandong province. This study uses stakeholder theory to define the stakeholders of the "Integrated Control and Prevention of Three Highs and Six Diseases" strategy, to explore the different stakeholder interests such as health care demand, supply, management and financing, and to analyze the losses and benefits of each stakeholder. From a stakeholder perspective, this study examines the drivers and barriers to implementing the integrated control and prevention of three highs and six diseases strategy. It finds that the political imperatives of health administrations and the needs of the population for quality and affordable health services are the main drivers of strategy implementation. The main obstacles to implementing the strategy are patients' own medical concepts, increased workload for medical staff in primary health care facilities, and reduced revenues for general hospitals. Based on the analysis, we propose some performance coordination measures for the "Integrated Control and Prevention of Three Highs and Six Diseases" strategy, including changing residents' inherent medical concepts through publicity and education, increasing investment in grassroots medical and health institutions and improving their health service levels, and improving incentive policies for medical personnel, in order to promote and ensure the implementation and development of the chronic disease management strategy.
Leah R. Rosenzweig, Parrish Bergquist, Katherine Hoffmann Pham
et al.
Survey research in the Global South has traditionally required large budgets and lengthy fieldwork. The expansion of digital connectivity presents an opportunity for researchers to engage global subject pools and study settings where in-person contact is challenging. This paper evaluates Facebook advertisements as a tool to recruit diverse survey samples in the Global South. Using Facebook’s advertising platform, we quota-sample respondents in Mexico, Kenya, and Indonesia and assess how well these samples perform on a range of survey indicators, identify sources of bias, replicate a canonical experiment, and highlight trade-offs for researchers to consider. This method can quickly and cheaply recruit respondents, but these samples tend to be more educated than corresponding national populations. Weighting ameliorates sample imbalances. This method generates comparable data to a commercial online sample for a fraction of the cost. Our analysis demonstrates the potential of Facebook advertisements to cost-effectively conduct research in diverse settings.
Using the concept of commitment trap, this article makes the argument that Iran’s indirect war support to the Palestinian Hamas militant group in Gaza during the Israel-Hamas war in 2023-2024 should be explained primarily based on the Islamic Republic’s public commitment to Palestinian armed struggle against Israel. This article explains that the need to avoid the costs of abandoning its commitment to support Palestinian armed struggle compelled Iran to provide military support to Palestinian militant forces in Gaza through using its Lebanese proxy group of Hezbollah group to attack Israel from Lebanon despite the Hezbollah’s lack of preparedness to engage in a war with Israel. Thus, the defeat of Hezbollah in the resultant war with Israel weakened the Iran’s own military defense in Syria against Syrian armed opposition. As a result of this power shift, the HTS-led armed opposition succeeded in overthrowing the Iran-backed Assad government in a short war which also ended the Iran’s military-political influence in the country.
Political science (General), Political institutions and public administration (General)
Political advertising on social media has fundamentally reshaped democratic deliberation, playing a central role in electoral campaigns and propaganda. However, its systemic impact remains largely theoretical or unexplored, raising critical concerns about institutional fairness and algorithmic transparency. This paper provides the first data-driven analysis of the relationship between direct democracy and political advertising on social media, leveraging a novel dataset of 40,000 political ads published on Meta in Switzerland between 2021 and 2025. Switzerland's system of direct democracy, characterized by frequent referenda, provides an ideal context for examining this relationship beyond standard electoral cycles. The results reveal the sheer scale of digital campaigning, with 560 million impressions targeting 5.6 million voters, and suggest that greater exposure to "pro-Yes" advertising significantly correlates with referendum approval outcomes. Demographic microtargeting analysis suggests partisan strategies: Centrist and right-wing parties predominantly target older men, whereas left-wing parties focus on young women. Regarding textual content, a clear pattern of "talking past each other" is identified; in line with the issue ownership theory, parties avoid debating shared issues, preferring to promote exclusively owned topics. Furthermore, the parties' strategies are so distinctive that a machine learning model trained only on audience and topic features can accurately predict the author of an advertisement. This article highlights how demographic microtargeting, issue divergence, and tailored messages could undermine democratic deliberation, exposing a paradox: Referenda are designed to be the ultimate expression of the popular will, yet they are highly susceptible to invisible algorithmic persuasion.
Daniele Cirulli, Antonio Desiderio, Giulio Cimini
et al.
Political debate nowadays takes place mainly on online social media, with election periods amplifying ideological engagement. Reddit is generally considered more resistant to polarization and echo chamber effects than platforms like Twitter or Facebook. Here, we challenge this assumption through a case study across the 2016 US presidential election. We use statistical validation techniques to extract ideologically distinct communities of subreddits, in terms of their contributing user base and news consumption, which we use to analyze the dynamics of political debate. We thus reveal clear polarization in both interaction-based and topic-based communities, with clusters of Democratic, Conservative, and Banned subreddits. Election periods intensify cross-group engagement, align Banned and Conservative content, and reduce linguistic diversity within groups. Overall we characterize Reddit as a polarized environment marked by the presence of echo chambers, highlighting network validation as a key method for identifying behavioral and interaction patterns on online social media.
Despite widespread concerns about the risks of AI-generated content (AIGC) to the integrity of social media discourse, little is known about its scale and scope, the actors responsible for its dissemination online, and the user responses it elicits. In this work, we measure and characterize the prevalence, spreaders, and emotional reception of AI-generated political images. Analyzing a large-scale dataset from Twitter/X related to the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election, we find that approximately 12% of shared images are detected as AI-generated, and around 10% of users are responsible for sharing 80% of AI-generated images. AIGC superspreaders--defined as the users who not only share a high volume of AI-generated images but also receive substantial engagement through retweets--are more likely to be X Premium subscribers, have a right-leaning orientation, and exhibit automated behavior. Their profiles contain a higher proportion of AI-generated images than non-superspreaders, and some engage in extreme levels of AIGC sharing. Moreover, superspreaders' AI image tweets elicit more positive and less toxic responses than their non-AI image tweets. This study serves as one of the first steps toward understanding the role generative AI plays in shaping online socio-political environments and offers implications for platform governance.
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.
The subject of the article is the problem of the application of participatory democracy in the mutual relations between Poland as a Member State and the European Union. The author points out that the instruments of participatory democracy are not homogeneous in nature, and that, depending on the legal and institutional context adopted, they may take various forms, ranging from apparent to real participation of citizens in the decision-making process. Whether a given mechanism is merely a façade or actually allows for co-determination depends on a number of factors, including both the specific legal arrangements concerning, inter alia, the way in which citizens’ will is enforced vis-à-vis state bodies, as well as the cultural and political contexts of a given environment. Undoubtedly, the personality traits of the decision-makers responsible for their implementation also have a significant impact on the way in which these mechanisms are used. The aim of this article is to determine whether the participatory instruments currently in place at the EU level do in fact give EU citizens a real direct influence on the shaping of EU policy, as well as to determine whether participatory democracy mechanisms at the national level (using Poland as an example) can influence the shaping of national policy towards the EU, and if so, to what extent, if at all. The author concludes that the question posed in the title should be answered in the affirmative. However, it is necessary to critically assess the nature of individual participatory mechanisms in terms of their degree of effectiveness. Both the solutions for implementing Art. 11 of the EU Treaty and the national solutions in Poland are currently inadequate. First and foremost, innovative tools of deliberative democracy should be more widely used, as participation without deliberation and without real redistribution of power can easily become an empty and frustrating process, allowing those in power to maintain the appearance of involving citizens in important decision-making processes. Innovative deliberative tools such as citizens’ panels should become a permanent feature of political practice at both national and European level.
Raoul Merlin NDONBOU, David Guimolaire NKOUATHIO, Ghislain ZANGMO TEFOGOUM
et al.
Mass movements are natural phenomena that cause the most damage in the West Cameroon Highlands (WCH). The severity of this damage is linked to the essentially random nature of these mass movements. The Southern Escarpment of the Bamileke Plateau is a region located on the WCH and is constantly affected by mass movements. The goal is to assess the susceptibility to mass movements along the SEBP in order to circumscribe through a susceptibility map the potential areas at risk of mass movement. The methodological approach is based on the study of susceptibility factors through the application of Multicriteria Hierarchical Analysis or Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). A total of 10 susceptibility factors were identified, analyzed and weighted as being the factors that cause the occurrence of mass movements in the study area. Slope, soil, direction of slopes, curvature of slopes, density of watercourses, proximity to roads, geomorphology, land cover, lithology and proximity to roads. By introducing these factors into the weighting matrix, we see that the slope is the factor with the greatest weight (21.27%) of responsibility for mass movements. On the susceptibility map, 16.95% represents low susceptibility areas, 43.39% represents moderate susceptibility areas, 29.77% represents high susceptibility areas and 9.89% represents very high susceptibility areas. Some factors such as slope, soil, direction of slopes, curvature of slopes are the significant factors which have large percentages compared to other factors and are thus counted as the factors which have a strong influence on the occurrence of mass movements in the region.