Hasil untuk "Political theory"

Fabrice Onana Ntsa

China-Cameroon relations are a remarkable feature of Cameroon’s international life today. The heritage of this relationship since its formalization in 1971 bears witness to the quality and vitality of this partnership. In cultural terms, the fruitfulness of the China-Cameroon relationship is equalled only by the importance of culture in an increasingly globalized world system, and in the expression of the balance of power between the world’s states. From the outset of its relations with Cameroon, the People’s Republic of China has pursued a cultural policy that has gradually evolved into a cultural offensive, a strategy of relatively appreciated charm operations. The purpose of this article is to examine the cultural heritage of relation between China and Cameroon, questioning its content and the issues at stake. Using a qualitative method grafted onto that of the historical sciences, which promotes the collection, analysis and interpretation of sources, this realistic reflection notes the immensity of the cultural heritage of China-Cameroon relations at linguistic, artistic, academic and health levels. In addition, the work certifies that this cultural heritage is more at the service of Chinese soft power, warns against a possible recolonization of Africa and calls for the imperative preservation of African identity.

Innocentus Alhamis

Public policy shapes the economic landscape, influencing everything from corporate behavior to individual investment decisions. For Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investors, these policy shifts can create opportunities and challenges as they navigate an ever-changing regulatory environment. The contrast between the Trump and Biden administrations offers a striking example of how differing political agendas can affect ESG investments. Trump's first term was marked by deregulation and policies favoring fossil fuels, which created an uncertain environment for sustainable investments. When Biden assumed office, his focus on climate action and clean energy reinvigorated the ESG sector, offering a more stable and supportive landscape for green investments. However, with Trump's return to power in his second term, these policies are being reversed again, leading to further volatility. This paper explores how such dramatic shifts in public policy influence economic strategies and directly impact ESG investors' decisions, forcing them to constantly reassess their portfolios in response to changing political climates.

Lasse F. Henriksen, Jacob Lunding, Christoph H. Ellersgaard et al.

Who represents the corporate elite in democratic governance? Prior studies find a tightly integrated "inner circle" network representing the corporate elite politically across varieties of capitalism, yet they all rely on data from a highly select sample of leaders from only the largest corporations. We cast a wider net. Analyzing new data on all members of corporate boards in the Danish economy (200k directors in 120k boards), we locate 1500 directors that operate as brokers between local corporate networks. We measure their network coreness using k-core detection and find a highly connected core of 275 directors, half of which are affiliated with smaller firms or subsidiaries. Analyses show a strong positive association between director coreness and the likelihood of joining one of the 650 government committees epitomizing Denmark's social-corporatist model of governance (net of firm and director characteristics). The political network premium is largest for directors of smaller firms or subsidiaries, indicating that network coreness is a key driver of business political representation, especially for directors without claims to market power or weight in formal interest organizations.

Jan Vávra, Bernd Hans-Konrad Prostmaier, Bettina Grün et al.

Scaling political actors based on their individual characteristics and behavior helps profiling and grouping them as well as understanding changes in the political landscape. In this paper we introduce the Structural Text-Based Scaling (STBS) model to infer ideological positions of speakers for latent topics from text data. We expand the usual Poisson factorization specification for topic modeling of text data and use flexible shrinkage priors to induce sparsity and enhance interpretability. We also incorporate speaker-specific covariates to assess their association with ideological positions. Applying STBS to U.S. Senate speeches from Congress session 114, we identify immigration and gun violence as the most polarizing topics between the two major parties in Congress. Additionally, we find that, in discussions about abortion, the gender of the speaker significantly influences their position, with female speakers focusing more on women's health. We also see that a speaker's region of origin influences their ideological position more than their religious affiliation.

Pietro Bernardelle, Leon Fröhling, Stefano Civelli et al.

As increasingly capable large language models (LLMs) emerge, researchers have begun exploring their potential for subjective tasks. While recent work demonstrates that LLMs can be aligned with diverse human perspectives, evaluating this alignment on downstream tasks (e.g., hate speech detection) remains challenging due to the use of inconsistent datasets across studies. To address this issue, in this resource paper we propose a two-step framework: we (1) introduce SubData, an open-source Python library designed for standardizing heterogeneous datasets to evaluate LLMs perspective alignment; and (2) present a theory-driven approach leveraging this library to test how differently-aligned LLMs (e.g., aligned with different political viewpoints) classify content targeting specific demographics. SubData's flexible mapping and taxonomy enable customization for diverse research needs, distinguishing it from existing resources. We illustrate its usage with an example application and invite contributions to extend our initial release into a multi-construct benchmark suite for evaluating LLMs perspective alignment on natural language processing tasks.

Kai Niu, Ping Zhang

The year 1948 witnessed the historic moment of the birth of classic information theory (CIT). Guided by CIT, modern communication techniques have approached the theoretic limitations, such as, entropy function $H(U)$, channel capacity $C=\max_{p(x)}I(X;Y)$ and rate-distortion function $R(D)=\min_{p(\hat{x}|x):\mathbb{E}d(x,\hat{x})\leq D} I(X;\hat{X})$. Semantic communication paves a new direction for future communication techniques whereas the guided theory is missed. In this paper, we try to establish a systematic framework of semantic information theory (SIT). We investigate the behavior of semantic communication and find that synonym is the basic feature so we define the synonymous mapping between semantic information and syntactic information. Stemming from this core concept, synonymous mapping $f$, we introduce the measures of semantic information, such as semantic entropy $H_s(\tilde{U})$, up/down semantic mutual information $I^s(\tilde{X};\tilde{Y})$ $(I_s(\tilde{X};\tilde{Y}))$, semantic capacity $C_s=\max_{f_{xy}}\max_{p(x)}I^s(\tilde{X};\tilde{Y})$, and semantic rate-distortion function $R_s(D)=\min_{\{f_x,f_{\hat{x}}\}}\min_{p(\hat{x}|x):\mathbb{E}d_s(\tilde{x},\hat{\tilde{x}})\leq D}I_s(\tilde{X};\hat{\tilde{X}})$. Furthermore, we prove three coding theorems of SIT by using random coding and (jointly) typical decoding/encoding, that is, the semantic source coding theorem, semantic channel coding theorem, and semantic rate-distortion coding theorem. We find that the limits of SIT are extended by using synonymous mapping, that is, $H_s(\tilde{U})\leq H(U)$, $C_s\geq C$ and $R_s(D)\leq R(D)$. All these works composite the basis of semantic information theory. In addition, we discuss the semantic information measures in the continuous case. For the band-limited Gaussian channel, we obtain a new channel capacity formula, $C_s=B\log\left[S^4\left(1+\frac{P}{N_0B}\right)\right]$.

Marta Lorenzon, Caroline Wallis

This contribution aims to use social history and social theory to investigate political power and compliance with authority in ancient Western Asia, through the case study of Neo-Assyrian imperial building projects. Our first aim is to discuss the realities of construction work in the Neo-Assyrian Empire, focusing on the building process both through literary sources and archaeological data. Our second goal is to understand the role played by these building sites in the strengthening of local and supra-local political orders, in the consolidation of social group boundaries, and in the construction of political subjectivities of the ancient social actors involved. Our reflection sheds light on the new interpretative possibilities – and challenges – that integrating social theories, archaeological work, and language technology may create.

Robert-Daniel Stănescu

The continuous development of the labor market due to the swift globalization and internationalization processes, as well as the constant pursuit of economic growth, puts every country to the test with respect to global economic competition (Schmid, 1995; 2008; Bassanini and Ernst, 2002). However, economic growth should also be considered from the perspective of "efficiency" by increasing institutional capacity or efficiency, respectively by fully understanding the working cycle of an individual (Schmid, 2017). In this context, both the public and private sectors should be analyzed and approached from multiple perspectives in order to be able to understand the conjuncture and efficiently implement adequate public policies at the national level that stimulate economic growth as well as have an impact on the international level. Moreover, due to the fact that each society is constructed differently, the development of their national economic growth should also be analyzed diversely. In this context, besides the economic perspective, the Human Capital Theory (HCT) perspective, as well as a sociological perspective, could offer peculiar insights in regard to possible methods of economic development based on the idea of increasing efficiency within the coordination capacity among decision-making institutions, considering the conjuncture of each given state from population growth towards institutional development (Becker, 1960; 2009). The research is based on a theory analysis and interview comparisons with actors that activate on a technical as well as political level. Moreover, the research will focus entirely on a Romanian case study in order to comprehend the conjuncture of a given Romanian central public institution's activity that adapts and acts as a national and international entity representative. Lastly, the research concentrates on finding peculiar barriers and conjunctures that could be used for further improvements at the institutional level or for further research within this distinct area.

Dika Sri Pandanari

The research aimed to find anarchic aspects outside of the misconceptions circulating through the dialectic of anarchism theory and social theory. Anarchism had always been misconceived as an activity that correlated with chaos and brutality or anti-government activity. However, in reality, anarchism had various meanings in several paradigms, such as a system of criticism, a system of thought, moral values, aesthetic values, a way of life, political attitudes, and ideology for some people. The research was conducted through a literature approach and observations on the development of anarchism in Indonesia. In addition, the research aimed to see the potential of the anarchism movement that can influence the social paradigm and influence the development of alternative social movements in Indonesia. It applied a qualitative research methods and literature study as primary data. The results of the research indicate a perspective that the view of anarchism does not always contradict the concept of the state because, in the concept of anarchism, there is an idea of criticism and resistance to an oppressive social system. The social system becomes the real antithesis that can dialectic with the concept of anarchism to produce various criticisms and alternative movements that are effective for social struggles in society. In addition, the potential of anarchism on a small scale is to trigger a self-help movement to develop public awareness towards a better condition because the basic values contained in anarchism are respect for human nature as good, where freedom and morality are the basis of humanity.

Rainer Grübel

“The answer to the question is contained in the critique of the question it-self”: Karl Marx in the Transitive Poetic-Political Work of Dmitrii Prigov This article considers the theme of Karl Marx in the poetry and artwork of Dmitrii Prigov. It conceives of his poetic communication as a political activity, which is stressed by its performative qualities and is presented by the example of the poem “Moscow and Muscovites”. Further on, the article distinguishes four speech attitudes in relation to the term “Karl Max” in the culture of Soviet Russia: belief, condemnation, quotation, and Prigov’s technique of reading Marx’s texts literally. Thus, he interprets Marx’s sentence “The answer to a question is contained in the critique of the question itself” verbatim and, by generalization (a common device of Soviet Marxism), leads it to absurdity. Prigov does the same with the slogan “Proletarians of the World Unite” from the “Communist Manifesto”, which he transforms into a parodic epistolary poem modeled on Lermontov’s “Demon”. The article also considers the use of the name of Marx and the stereotypically connected family names of Engels, Lenin, and Stalin in Prigov’s work and argues, using the motif of the policemen (“militsaner”), that, contrary to Marx’s expectations of real Socialism, the function of power was not dying but growing. Finally, attention is drawn to the role of so-called historical and socio-economical “Marxist laws” (such as ‘dialectical’ and ‘historical materialism’), which in Prigov’s work are dethroned and become possible concepts beside others. Thus, Prigov installs freedom in place of the Marxist necessity of interpretation, which was also the basis of Mikhail Lifshitz’s anti-modernist aesthetics, the most important contribution of Soviet philosophy to aesthetic theory.

Juliano Bonamigo Ferreira de Souza

Recently, Critical Theory has been revisited due to the relevance of its critique of contemporary forms of alienation. This critique allows the unveiling of structural ele- ments of contemporary ways of life, offering an accurate analysis of the material and subjective causes of the current environmental crisis. An example of this contribution is Herbert Marcuse’s book Counterrevolution and Revolt, published in 1972. This article addresses the relationship between aesthetics and political ecology established in the main theses of Marcuse’s book. The objective is to present how Marcuse employs the German philosophical tradition, more specifically elements of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment and Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, to constitute a conceptual project of emancipation based on what he calls the aesthetic dimension. The article concludes by claiming that Marcuse’s critics and formulation entail a double requirement in which the field of Aesthetics has a central role.

Carmelo Calabrò

This essay compares the ideas of Carlo Rosselli (1899-1937) with the thought of Rodolfo Mondolfo (1877-1976). It pays attention to the time span from the Great War to the advent of fascism, and in particular to the exchange of interventions published by “Critica sociale” between 1922 and 1923. The reason for this choice is based on the conviction that, placed in the context of the crisis of Italian socialism, the analysis of the dialectical duel between the young Rosselli and the already mature Mondolfo can reveal itself as the synthesis of a rift between two generations, divided not so much from irreconcilable ethical-political values, as from the authors’ opposite judgments on the past and the present, and their divergent answers to the dramatic question “What to do?”. Between Rosselli and Mondolfo the line of understanding is also broken by differences that concern the socialist theory and practice, as well as their vision and temperament.

Du Keke, Liu Hui, Kang Xiaoyue et al.

Essentially, the top priority of political theory teaching reform and innovation in military academies is to fully implement the military education strategies of the new era, and to focus on the fundamental task and core direction characterized by fostering virtue through education and training talents for warfare. In this regard, this paper explores the construction of the “main classroom+” practice teaching model of political theory course from four dimensions, encompassing “thematic practice”, “professional customization”, “comprehensive exercise”, and “practice expansion”, intending to provide feasible paths and methods for military academies to realize more effective integration of theory and practice of political theory teaching in the new era.

Bojan Evkoski, Senja Pollak

The work covers the development and explainability of machine learning models for predicting political leanings through parliamentary transcriptions. We concentrate on the Slovenian parliament and the heated debate on the European migrant crisis, with transcriptions from 2014 to 2020. We develop both classical machine learning and transformer language models to predict the left- or right-leaning of parliamentarians based on their given speeches on the topic of migrants. With both types of models showing great predictive success, we continue with explaining their decisions. Using explainability techniques, we identify keywords and phrases that have the strongest influence in predicting political leanings on the topic, with left-leaning parliamentarians using concepts such as people and unity and speak about refugees, and right-leaning parliamentarians using concepts such as nationality and focus more on illegal migrants. This research is an example that understanding the reasoning behind predictions can not just be beneficial for AI engineers to improve their models, but it can also be helpful as a tool in the qualitative analysis steps in interdisciplinary research.

Weihong Qi

Sentiment analysis, widely critiqued for capturing merely the overall tone of a corpus, falls short in accurately reflecting the latent structures and political stances within texts. This study introduces topic metrics, dummy variables converted from extracted topics, as both an alternative and complement to sentiment metrics in stance classification. By employing three datasets identified by Bestvater and Monroe (2023), this study demonstrates BERTopic's proficiency in extracting coherent topics and the effectiveness of topic metrics in stance classification. The experiment results show that BERTopic improves coherence scores by 17.07% to 54.20% when compared to traditional approaches such as Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF), prevalent in earlier political science research. Additionally, our results indicate topic metrics outperform sentiment metrics in stance classification, increasing performance by as much as 18.95%. Our findings suggest topic metrics are especially effective for context-rich texts and corpus where stance and sentiment correlations are weak. The combination of sentiment and topic metrics achieve an optimal performance in most of the scenarios and can further address the limitations of relying solely on sentiment as well as the low coherence score of topic metrics.

Mark E.T. Horn, Peter Proudfoot

This paper is concerned with the role of human institutions as generators of architectural form, with reference to the writings and works of Peter Behrens, Jorn Utzon, and Louis Kahn. In contrast with the narrow functionalist approach promoted by some of their contemporaries, these architects regarded human institutions as living entities that ought to have a determinative influence on the design of the buildings constructed to house them. The paper considers these architects’ assumptions regarding the concept of ‘institution’ within a broad social and political context and offers some suggestions for a more systematic investigation in that respect.The paper begins with a brief outline of functionalist theory, then turns to the theatre as a primary cultural activity and the prominent place it held in Behrens’s thinking during the opening years of the 20th century. Affinities are explored between Behrens’s concept of the theatre and Utzon’s subsequent treatment of the theatre as a central civic institution in his design for the Sydney Opera House. A parallel is seen in Louis Kahn’s insistence that an architectural project should begin with a vision of the human institution which the project is to serve, a perception of their role that was present in utopian and radical schemes from the 19th century onwards. The concluding sections of the paper raise some questions about the doctrines of Behrens, Utzon, and (especially) Kahn, by considering how institutions are adapted to their socio-political settings and how they affect architectural outcomes in practice.

Hanna Tsvietkova, Olena Beskorsa, Liudmyla Pryimenko

The article's primary objective is to provide the first comprehensive retrospective examination of Canadian media education history. The authors support the periodization, identify the trends, the periodization criteria, and the three main periods of establishment and development of Canadian media education in the context of socio-political and sociopedagogical determinants based on the theoretical findings of Canadian media educators. The historical foundations for Canada's development of media education are made clear. According to pedagogical theory and practice, the core of media education is the study of theory and the development of practical skills for mastering contemporary mass media. This knowledge is seen as belonging to a distinct, independent field of knowledge. The authors conclude that media education is connected to all forms of media, including the collection of information and communication tools that each person uses on a daily basis: printed media (newspapers, magazines), auditory media (radio, audio), and screen media (movies, television, video, multimedia, the Internet, etc.); they also define the fundamental elements of media education and conclude that it is a subset of media literacy and media culture. The article describes the evolution of media education associations, approaches, and programs. It has been proven necessary to use positive Canadian experience to address issues with implementing media education in Ukraine in order to improve and humanize that country's educational system in the framework of studying the experience of Canadian media theorists and practitioners.

Jennifer Roberts, Oliver Escobar, Sara A. Mehltretter Drury et al.

When addressing socio-scientific wicked problems, there is a need to negotiate across and through multiple modes of evidence, particularly technical expertise and local knowledge. Democratic innovations, such as deliberative citizens’ juries, have been proposed as a means of managing these tensions and as a way of creating representative, fairer decision making. But there are questions around participatory processes, the utilization of expertise, and deliberative quality. This paper considers forms of argumentation in the 2013-2014 “Citizens’ juries on wind farm development in Scotland.” Through a critical-interpretative research methodology drawing on rhetoric and argumentation, we demonstrate that arguments relating to the topoi of the environment and health functioned as de facto reasoning, whereas arguments using social scientific evidence around economics more prominently interacted with local knowledge. The findings offer implications for process design to improve and promote deliberative quality in mini-publics and other forms of participatory engagement on socio-scientific issues.

K. Dixon, Alisa Chapman, F. Prochaska et al.

Valerio Di Porto

This article retraces the events of the first Conte government from its difficult birth by contract through to its foreseen death and seeks to establish a connection between the political-institutional aspects of this unprecedented government alliance and the use of legislative instruments, as well as between the devaluation of Parliament and the successes of legislative parliamentary initiatives. This reconstruc-tion also compares the first months of the 18th legislature with the first months of the preceding legis-latures of the so-called ‘Second Republic’. The conclusion will be that this legislature distinguishes itself from certain preceding long-term legislatures (the 13th, 14th, 16th and 17th) by an approach orien-tated exclusively to the present and to constitutional reforms that are very small in dimension but huge in impact (such as reducing the number of parliamentarians). Like the other legislatures, it will end with a government and a majority which are different from the original ones, but perhaps with the same prime minister. When that will happen is obviously unclear.