Samantha D'Alonzo, Rachel Chen, Weidong Zhang
et al.
Intellectual humility (IH)-a recognition of one's own intellectual limitations-can reduce polarization and foster more understanding across lines of difference. Yet little work explores how IH can be systematically defined, measured, evaluated, and enhanced in spaces that often lack it the most: online political discussions. In this paper, we seek to bridge these gaps by exploring two questions: 1) how might preexisting levels of IH influence future expressions of IH during online political discourse? and 2) can online interventions enhance IH across different political topics and conversational environments? To pursue these questions, we define a codebook characterizing different dimensions of IH and intellectual arrogance (IA) and have researchers use it to annotate several hundred Reddit posts, which we then use to develop and validate a classifier to support IH analysis at scale. These tools subsequently enable two key contributions: i) an observational data analysis of how IH varies across different political discussions on Reddit, which reveals that more/less IH environments tend to contain future posts of a similar nature, and ii) a randomized control trial evaluating strategies for nudging discussion participants to demonstrate more IH in their posts, which reveals the possibility of enhancing IH in online discussions across a range of contentious topics. Our findings highlight the possibility of measuring and increasing IH online without necessarily reducing engagement.
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) presents both challenges and opportunities across all areas of education. Facing the municipal elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, the Young AI Leaders in Dortmund asked themselves: Could GenAI be used to make political programs more accessible, in order to facilitate political education? To explore respective potentials and limitations, we therefore performed an experimental study that combines different GenAI approaches. Language models were used to automatically translate and analyze the contents of each program, deriving five potential visual appearance changes to the city of Dortmund. Based on each analysis, we then generated images with diffusion models and published all results as an interactive webpage. All GenAI models were locally deployed on a Dortmund-based computing cluster, allowing us to also investigate environmental impacts. This manuscript explores the project in full depth, discussing technical details and critically reflecting on the results. As part of the global Young AI Leaders Community, our work promotes the Sustainable Development Goal Quality Education (SDG 4) by transparently discussing the pros and cons of using GenAI for education and political agendas.
We explore the political and ideological positioning of ChatGPT, a leading large language model (LLM), by comparing its responses to political economy questions from the European Social Survey (ESS). The questions concern environmental sustainability, civil rights, income inequality, and government size. ChatGPT's self-assessed placement on a left-right political spectrum is compared to the ideological stances of individuals providing similar answers in the ESS dataset. Results highlight a significant left-oriented bias in ChatGPT's answers, particularly on environmental and civil rights topics, diverging from its same self-declared center-left stance. These findings underscore the need for transparency in AI systems to prevent potential ideological influences on users. We conclude by discussing the implications for AI governance, debiasing strategies, and educational use.
This paper studies the response of stock markets relative to the banking sector to innovation by using a panel of 75 countries from 1982 to 2021. We find that innovation increases the activity, efficiency and size of stock markets relative to the banking sector, moderated by proximity to technological frontier and institutional quality. The moderating effect of institutional quality is positive for activity and efficiency but negative for size. Moreover, the moderating effect can be nonlinear depending on specific indicators. The marginal effect of innovation on the activity is persistent over many years, but the moderating effect of institutional quality gradually fades away.
Este artículo examina la relación entre religión y política en Chile mediante un estudio de caso del Partido Republicano y sus candidatos subnacionales en las elecciones de 2024. La investigación se enmarca en la literatura sobre populismo de derecha radical (Mudde, 2007; Rovira Kaltwasser, 2023) y plantea como pregunta central si la identidad religiosa constituye un elemento relevante en sus discursos de campaña. Se adopta un diseño de caso único y un enfoque cualitativo de análisis crítico del discurso, sobre la base de 73 intervenciones de candidatos a alcaldes y gobernadores. Los hallazgos muestran que, aunque la religión aparece como un recurso simbólico significativo, ocupa un lugar secundario frente a ejes como la seguridad pública, la crítica al oficialismo y el rechazo a las élites. Se concluye que la religiosidad opera como un catalizador identitario subordinado a demandas de orden y seguridad, y que actúa como facilitador para la cohesión de los adherentes del partido.
Political institutions and public administration (General)
Maria Giovanna Brandano, Chiara Conti, Marco Modica
et al.
Under the threat of climate change, the world has become increasingly unsafe, with extreme weather events causing devastation and high economic costs. These impacts are heterogeneous because of the interaction between different regional climate changes and the varying socio-economic characteristics of affected places. Climate change also impacts the management of cultural heritage sites. We then propose a method to identify heritage sites at risk from climate change issues, considering the single components of risk, namely both the natural hazard and the resilient/vulnerable local characteristics that may increase or mitigate the potential damage. The link between the natural and human spheres is, in fact, crucial for the development of suitable mitigation and prevention strategies, particularly relevant for developing countries that suffer from scarce economic resources. Overall, this work aims to provide a method to detect heritage sites at risk and a decision support tool for strategically managing cultural sites. We focus on Italy since it is one of the countries with a higher endowment of cultural heritage. However, thanks to its high replicability, this tool might be exported and adopted in different contexts and scenarios.
Urbanization. City and country, Political institutions and public administration (General)
Pietro Bernardelle, Leon Fröhling, Stefano Civelli
et al.
The analysis of political biases in large language models (LLMs) has primarily examined these systems as single entities with fixed viewpoints. While various methods exist for measuring such biases, the impact of persona-based prompting on LLMs' political orientation remains unexplored. In this work we leverage PersonaHub, a collection of synthetic persona descriptions, to map the political distribution of persona-based prompted LLMs using the Political Compass Test (PCT). We then examine whether these initial compass distributions can be manipulated through explicit ideological prompting towards diametrically opposed political orientations: right-authoritarian and left-libertarian. Our experiments reveal that synthetic personas predominantly cluster in the left-libertarian quadrant, with models demonstrating varying degrees of responsiveness when prompted with explicit ideological descriptors. While all models demonstrate significant shifts towards right-authoritarian positions, they exhibit more limited shifts towards left-libertarian positions, suggesting an asymmetric response to ideological manipulation that may reflect inherent biases in model training.
Bolei Ma, Berk Yoztyurk, Anna-Carolina Haensch
et al.
In recent research, large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly used to investigate public opinions. This study investigates the algorithmic fidelity of LLMs, i.e., the ability to replicate the socio-cultural context and nuanced opinions of human participants. Using open-ended survey data from the German Longitudinal Election Studies (GLES), we prompt different LLMs to generate synthetic public opinions reflective of German subpopulations by incorporating demographic features into the persona prompts. Our results show that Llama performs better than other LLMs at representing subpopulations, particularly when there is lower opinion diversity within those groups. Our findings further reveal that the LLM performs better for supporters of left-leaning parties like The Greens and The Left compared to other parties, and matches the least with the right-party AfD. Additionally, the inclusion or exclusion of specific variables in the prompts can significantly impact the models' predictions. These findings underscore the importance of aligning LLMs to more effectively model diverse public opinions while minimizing political biases and enhancing robustness in representativeness.
Web search engines arguably form the most popular data-driven systems in contemporary society. They wield a considerable power by functioning as gatekeepers of the Web, with most user journeys on the Web beginning with them. Starting from the late 1990s, search engines have been dominated by the paradigm of link-based web search. In this paper, we critically analyze the political economy of the paradigm of link-based web search, drawing upon insights and methodologies from critical political economy. We draw several insights on how link-based web search has led to phenomena that favor capital through long-term structural changes on the Web, and how it has led to accentuating unpaid digital labor and ecologically unsustainable practices, among several others. We show how contemporary observations on the degrading quality of link-based web search can be traced back to the internal contradictions with the paradigm, and how such socio-technical phenomena may lead to a disutility of the link-based web search model. Our contribution is primarily on enhancing the understanding of the political economy of link-based web search, and laying bare the phenomena at work, and implicitly catalyze the search for alternative models.
Xiao Ao, Danae Sánchez Villegas, Daniel Preoţiuc-Pietro
et al.
Parody is a figurative device used for mimicking entities for comedic or critical purposes. Parody is intentionally humorous and often involves sarcasm. This paper explores jointly modelling these figurative tropes with the goal of improving performance of political parody detection in tweets. To this end, we present a multi-encoder model that combines three parallel encoders to enrich parody-specific representations with humor and sarcasm information. Experiments on a publicly available data set of political parody tweets demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.
Polarization in America has reached a high point as markets are also becoming polarized. Existing research, however, focuses on specific market segments and products and has not evaluated this trend's full breadth. If such fault lines do spread into other segments that are not explicitly political, it would indicate the presence of lifestyle politics -- when ideas and behaviors not inherently political become politically aligned through their connections with explicitly political things. We study the pervasiveness of polarization and lifestyle politics over different product segments in a diverse market and test the extent to which consumer- and platform-level network effects and morality may explain lifestyle politics. Specifically, using graph and language data from Amazon (82.5M reviews of 9.5M products and product and category metadata from 1996-2014), we sample 234.6 million relations among 21.8 million market entities to find product categories that are most politically relevant, aligned, and polarized. We then extract moral values present in reviews' text and use these data and other reviewer-, product-, and category-level data to test whether individual- and platform- level network factors explain lifestyle politics better than products' implicit morality. We find pervasive lifestyle politics. Cultural products are 4 times more polarized than any other segment, products' political attributes have up to 3.7 times larger associations with lifestyle politics than author-level covariates, and morality has statistically significant but relatively small correlations with lifestyle politics. Examining lifestyle politics in these contexts helps us better understand the extent and root of partisan differences, why Americans may be so polarized, and how this polarization affects market systems.
The article is devoted to the characterization of the relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian state in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the digitalization of society, with an emphasis on the technological aspect. The context of church-state relations during the pandemic period in the works of foreign and domestic authors is not the same: in Western liberal publications, attention is focused on the restrictions on democratic norms and liberal freedoms in the countries of the world, and in the works of Russian scientists, on the adaptation of state-confessional relations to the conditions of the pandemic, as well as on the processes of internal church life. To achieve this goal, the work uses institutional, culturological and constructivist approaches that allow scientifically arguing the author’s position. It was found that representatives of almost all religious denominations recognized the existential threat to humanity posed by the coronavirus and sided with the actions of state and municipal authorities to combat the pandemic. From the very beginning of the fight against the pandemic, the ROC built its policy on the basis of the recommendations of the secular authorities, even in cases where the possibility of performing religious rites and holding services was seriously limited. The internal conservative opposition did not radically influence the official policy of the church, while at the same time there is an increase in the social and civic activity of the ROC. The attitude to digitalization is associated with an understanding of the danger posed by technological capabilities in connection with the strengthening of state control over citizens and the restriction of rights and freedoms, including in the confessional sphere. At the same time, the church seeks to use the possibilities of modern technology to expand its influence, including among young people.
Political institutions and public administration (General)
Márta Fekete, Judit Hegedűs, Katalin Molnár
et al.
Cél: Tanulmányunk célja bemutatni, hogy a rendészeti felsőoktatásban a kompetenciafejlesztésen alapuló képzés fejlődésének milyen főbb állomásai voltak. Humánspecifikus szempontokból érintjük a választott témát: kitérünk a magatartástudomány feladataira, jelentőségére, szerepére a rendészeti képzésben, és jó gyakorlatokkal rámutatunk a kompetenciafejlesztés lehetséges útjaira.
Módszertan: Dokumentumelemzés és tíz félig strukturált oktatói interjú, valamint óramegfigyelések segítségével megvizsgáltuk, hogy a kompetenciafejlesztéssel kapcsolatban milyen jó gyakorlatok léteznek a rendészeti felsőoktatásban.
Megállapítások: Vizsgálódásunk alapján egyértelműen megfogalmazható, hogy a kompetenciafejlesztés iránti törekvések a rendészeti felsőoktatásban már a 2000-es évek elejétől tetten érhetők. Az Európai Felsőoktatási Térséghez való kapcsolódást követően az ez iránti igény egyre inkább felerősödött, melynek eredményeként egyrészt a tantervekben is megjelennek a kompetenciafejlesztésre irányuló módszertani megközelítések, másrészt az interjúk során is egyértelművé vált, hogy az oktatók igyekeznek ugyan reagálni a megváltozott igényekre, ugyanakkor nehézségként fogalmazták meg a pedagógiai tudás hiányát, a megváltozott hallgatói populációra jellemző specifikumokhoz való igazodást. A jó gyakorlatok elemzése során arra a következtetésre jutottunk, hogy azokban az interaktivitás, a tapasztalati tanulás közös elemként jelenik meg.
Érték: Vizsgálódásunkkal arra kívánunk rámutatni, hogy a rendészeti felsőoktatással szembeni elvárásokra miként reagál a képzés, milyen eredményeket értünk el idáig, illetve melyek azok a kihívások, fejlesztendő területek, amelyekre még megoldandó feladatként kell tekintenünk.
Political institutions and public administration (General)
Political expression through social media has already taken root as a form of political participation. Meanwhile, democracy seems to be facing an epidemic of incivility on social media platforms. With this background, online political incivility has recently become a growing concern in the field of political communication studies. However, it is less clear how a government's performance is linked with people's uncivil political expression on social media; investigating the existence of performance evaluation behavior through social media expression seems to be important, as it is a new form of non-institutionalized political participation. To fill this gap in the literature, the present study hypothesizes that when government performance worsens, people become frustrated and send uncivil messages to the government via social media. To test this hypothesis, the present study collected over 8 million posts on X/Twitter directed at US state governors and classified them as uncivil or not, using a neural network-based machine learning method, and examined the impact of worsening state-level COVID-19 cases on the number of uncivil posts directed at state governors. The results of the statistical analyses showed that increases in state-level COVID-19 cases led to a significantly higher number of uncivil posts against state governors. Finally, the present study discusses the implications of the findings from two perspectives: non-institutionalized political participation and the importance of elections in democracies.
Nathan Schneider, Primavera De Filippi, Seth Frey
et al.
Governance in online communities is an increasingly high-stakes challenge, and yet many basic features of offline governance legacies--juries, political parties, term limits, and formal debates, to name a few--are not in the feature-sets of the software most community platforms use. Drawing on the paradigm of Institutional Analysis and Development, this paper proposes a strategy for addressing this lapse by specifying basic features of a generalizable paradigm for online governance called Modular Politics. Whereas classical governance typologies tend to present a choice among wholesale ideologies, such as democracy or oligarchy, Modular Politics would enable platform operators and their users to build bottom-up governance processes from computational components that are modular and composable, highly versatile in their expressiveness, portable from one context to another, and interoperable across platforms. This kind of approach could implement pre-digital governance systems as well as accelerate innovation in uniquely digital techniques. As diverse communities share and connect their components and data, governance could occur through a ubiquitous network layer. To that end, this paper proposes the development of an open standard for networked governance.
Hillary Smith, Xavier Basurto, Lisa Campbell
et al.
Scale is a powerful concept, a lens that shapes how we perceive problems and solutions in common-pool resource governance. Yet, scale is often treated as a relatively stable and settled concept in commons scholarship. This paper reviews the origins and evolution of scalar thinking in commons scholarship in contrast with theories of scale in human geography and political ecology that focus on scale as a relational, power-laden process. Beginning with early writings on scale and the commons, this paper traces the emergence of an explicit scalar epistemology that orders both spatial and conceptual relationships vertically, as hierarchically nested levels. This approach to scale underpins a shared conceptualization of common-pool resource systems but inevitably illuminates certain questions and relationships while simultaneously obscuring others. Drawing on critiques of commonplace assumptions about scale from geography, we reread this dominant scalar framework for its analytic limitations and unintended effects. Drawing on examples from small-scale fisheries governance throughout, we contrast what is made visible in the commons through the standard approach to scale against an alternative, process-based approach to scale. We offer a typology of distinct dimensions and interrelated moments that produce scale in the commons coupled with new empirical and reflexive scale questions to be explored. We argue that engaging with theoretical advances on the production of scale in scholarship on the commons can generate needed attention to power and long-standing blind spots, enlivening our understanding of the dynamically scaled nature of the commons.
Political institutions and public administration (General)
The aim is to determine the content and essence of such a property of the norms of administrative law as their truth on the basis of analyzing the opinions of individual legal scholars. Methods. The validity of the theoretical claims, recommendations for further academic research into the topic, the reliability of the results are ensured by the use of a set of philosophical, general and special scientific methods applied in legal research. The dialectical method of scientific knowledge is used as the main general scien tific method. Results. It is noted that the truth of the norm of administrative law is a condition for its effectiveness. It is pointed out that the degree of effectiveness of the administrative-legal norm depends on the completeness and accuracy of reflection in it of the material and spiritual social conditions. The more adequately the rules of the administrative law reflect the combination of social and personal interests, the processes of social development, the higher the effectiveness of administrative-legal norms is. Taking into consideration the fact that efficiency is the property of the norm of administrative law, which is based on its truth, the author has assumed that the criterion of such truth will be the degree of effectiveness of the legal norm, and indicators will be specific statistical data, confirming or refuting its effectiveness and, respectively, the truth. The opinion is expressed that the truth of the norms of administrative law, as a an absolutely evaluative category, does not have to imperatively reflect the interests of a particular citizen. This does not mean that in this case the author refuses the principle of the rule of law or interprets it somehow differently than other authoritative scholars. It is suggested when defining the essence of this category to start from identifying if the norm satisfies the needs of social development. The author has determined the truth of the administrative-legal norm in terms of the initial data, which reveal the social needs at a certain stage of development of society, namely: the level of development of economic and industrial relations, the state of the natural environment and ecology in general, the state of social and political institutions (family, education and science, medicine, judicial and law enforcement systems, public administration system, etc.), the status of an individual in the society and the level of protection of their rights and interests by the state, mentality, consciousness, worldview of the society, etc. Conclusions. Based on the results of the analysis performed, the author proposes to understand the truth of the norm of administrative law as its property, which characterizes the degree of compliance of the norm with the needs of social development, the full reflection in it of the public relations, regulated by administrative law