Gabriela Juncosa, Saeedeh Mohammadi, Margaret Samahita
et al.
Social media platforms face increasing scrutiny over the rapid spread of misinformation. In response, many have adopted community-based content moderation systems, including Community Notes (formerly Birdwatch) on X (formerly Twitter), Footnotes on TikTok, and Facebook's Community Notes initiative. However, research shows that the current design of these systems can allow political biases to influence both the development of notes and the rating processes, reducing their overall effectiveness. We hypothesize that enabling users to collaborate on writing notes, rather than relying solely on individually authored notes, can enhance their overall quality. To test this idea, we conducted an online experiment in which participants jointly authored notes on political posts. Our results show that teams produce notes that are rated as more helpful than individually written notes. We also find that politically diverse teams perform better when evaluating Republican posts, while group composition does not affect perceived note quality for Democrat posts. However, the advantage of collaboration diminishes when team members are aware of one another's political affiliations. Taken together, these findings underscore the complexity of community-based content moderation and highlight the importance of understanding group dynamics and political diversity when designing more effective moderation systems.
In Bolivia, indigenous grassroots organisations have developed a historical journey for territorial restoration and the establishment of their autonomy. This qualitative, descriptive, multiple-case comparative study, carried out in two indigenous towns in Bolivia – Charagua (Chaco-Guarani) and San Pedro de Totora Marka (Altiplano-Aymara) –, gives an account of the process carried out by their respective grassroots organisations and their systematic struggle and orientation towards territorial recovery and the establishment of their own governments. Both communities began and completed their process of conversion to self-government on the same date and under the same procedures, although the results were dissimilar: Charagua accepted its conversion and Totora rejected it. The analysis reveals the multiple tensions, struggles and agreements of the original grassroots organisations as promoters and mediators of the achievement of – or resistance to – autonomy, thanks to the exploitation or undermining of the structures of identity and political and governmental opportunities. At the same time, these organisations are presented as the appropriate instruments for the connection between identity-territoriality and State power.
Political institutions and public administration (General), Social Sciences
Bridget Irene, Elona Ndlovu, Palesa Charlotte Felix-Faure
et al.
Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are vital to economic growth, innovation, and job creation across Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Women entrepreneurs are key contributors to this sector, yet they face persistent barriers to accessing finance, which constrain their business growth and broader economic participation. This study investigates the role of financial institutions in closing the financing gap for women-owned SMEs and assesses the effectiveness of various financing mechanisms, including traditional banking, micro-finance, fintech innovations, and government-backed credit schemes. Adopting a quantitative approach, this study utilises structured surveys with women SME owners across multiple SSA countries. Supplementary secondary data from sources such as the World Bank and national financial statistics provide additional context. Econometric modelling and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) are employed to identify key factors influencing loan accessibility, such as collateral requirements, interest rates, financial literacy, and the regulatory environment. Findings reveal that high collateral demands and interest rates remain major obstacles, particularly for smaller or informal women-led enterprises. Financial literacy emerges as a critical enabler of access to credit. While fintech solutions and digital lending platforms show promise in improving access, issues around infrastructure, regulation, and trust persist. Government-backed schemes also contribute positively but are hindered by implementation inefficiencies. This study offers practical recommendations, including the need for harmonised regional credit reporting systems, gender-responsive policy frameworks, and targeted financial education. Strengthening digital infrastructure and regulatory support across SSA is essential to build inclusive, sustainable financial ecosystems that empower women entrepreneurs and drive regional development.
Political institutions and public administration (General)
Juan de Dios Martínez Villarreal, Rosa Ariana Cantillano, Gloria Elena Martínez Pérez
Internet y las redes sociales representan un nuevo paradigma dentro de la comunicación política, que permite la interacción entre sus usuarios y que, a su vez, incide en diferentes elementos que conforman una cultura política que estaría representada por el conjunto de valores, actitudes y comportamientos que se presentan de manera general en una colectividad. En relación con lo anterior, el presente estudio cuantitativo se planteó como objetivo identificar si Internet y las redes sociales inciden en la cultura política, además se buscó determinar a qué tipo de cultura política se aproxima la ciudadanía del Estado. Los principales hallazgos indicaron que es el consumo de contenido político online el que presenta un mayor impacto en la cultura política. Respecto del tipo de cultura política, se podría indicar que se aproxima a una cultura política de súbdito con ligeros tintes participativos, en transición hacia una cultura cívica.
Political institutions and public administration (General)
Resumo Como forma de melhorar a qualidade de provisão de serviços públicos, contratos baseados em resultado vêm sendo invocados, especialmente em colaborações intersetoriais envolvendo atores públicos, privados e organizações sem fins lucrativos. Nesses arranjos, pagamentos são realizados a investidores, financiadores e/ou prestadores de serviços envolvidos caso as métricas de desempenho pactuadas sejam atingidas. Enquanto alguns desses contratos têm sucesso em alcançar suas metas, outros não conseguem atingir os resultados desejados. Este estudo investiga os fatores que contribuem para o sucesso desses contratos, considerando a disponibilidade de recursos, a complexidade dos projetos e o ambiente institucional. Utilizando uma base de dados de contratos implementados globalmente e em diversas áreas de política, a investigação é conduzida por meio da técnica de Análise Comparativa Qualitativa de conjunto difuso (fsQCA, na sigla em inglês), com uma amostra de 110 contratos. Os resultados revelam diferentes caminhos para o sucesso em ambientes institucionais diversos, destacando a importância de recursos adequados, como investimento per capita e experiência dos intermediários, e a redução da complexidade, incluindo um menor número de investidores e uma escala menor de beneficiários. Este estudo fornece insights para pesquisadores e gestores interessados no potencial de contratos baseados em resultado ao identificar as condições suficientes para o seu sucesso por meio de uma abordagem sistemática e comparativa com uma amostra diversificada de casos.
Political institutions and public administration (General)
The present article seeks to explain the backwardness of Uttar Pradesh (UP) from a political economy perspective. It argues that the upper castes have exercised a dominant and continuous impact on the politics and economics in UP as they control the economic resources and have a large presence in the bureaucracy and the government. They have ensured that the state policies protect and promote their interests. It was in their interest to see that the other backward classes (OBCs) and dalits remain in a subordinate position, and little was done to improve their economic and educational status. As a result of political fragmentation in the state, the quality of governance has rapidly declined in UP, particularly after 1991. The poor quality of governance—coupled with the poor law-and-order situation, increased corruption and misdirected and wasteful public expenditure—results in the poor implementation of programmes and leakages that hamper the development of the state and restrict benefits from reaching the intended beneficiaries. The article advocates a human development strategy for inclusive development of the state.
Alejandro De La Fuente-Cuesta, Alberto Martinez-Serra, Nienke Visscher
et al.
The use of large language models (LLMs) is becoming common in political science and digital media research. While LLMs have demonstrated ability in labelling tasks, their effectiveness to classify Political Content (PC) from URLs remains underexplored. This article evaluates whether LLMs can accurately distinguish PC from non-PC using both the text and the URLs of news articles across five countries (France, Germany, Spain, the UK, and the US) and their different languages. Using cutting-edge models, we benchmark their performance against human-coded data to assess whether URL-level analysis can approximate full-text analysis. Our findings show that URLs embed relevant information and can serve as a scalable, cost-effective alternative to discern PC. However, we also uncover systematic biases: LLMs seem to overclassify centrist news as political, leading to false positives that may distort further analyses. We conclude by outlining methodological recommendations on the use of LLMs in political science research.
Shanshan Xu, T. Y. S. S Santosh, Yanai Elazar
et al.
Recent works have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) have a tendency to memorize patterns and biases present in their training data, raising important questions about how such memorized content influences model behavior. One such concern is the emergence of political bias in LLM outputs. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which LLMs' political leanings reflect memorized patterns from their pretraining corpora. We propose a method to quantitatively evaluate political leanings embedded in the large pretraining corpora. Subsequently we investigate to whom are the LLMs' political leanings more aligned with, their pretrainig corpora or the surveyed human opinions. As a case study, we focus on probing the political leanings of LLMs in 32 US Supreme Court cases, addressing contentious topics such as abortion and voting rights. Our findings reveal that LLMs strongly reflect the political leanings in their training data, and no strong correlation is observed with their alignment to human opinions as expressed in surveys. These results underscore the importance of responsible curation of training data, and the methodology for auditing the memorization in LLMs to ensure human-AI alignment.
Maike Behrendt, Stefan Sylvius Wagner, Carina Weinmann
et al.
Political online participation in the form of discussing political issues and exchanging opinions among citizens is gaining importance with more and more formats being held digitally. To come to a decision, a thorough discussion and consideration of opinions and a civil exchange of arguments, which is defined as the act of deliberation, is desirable. The quality of discussions and participation processes in terms of their deliberativeness highly depends on the design of platforms and processes. To facilitate online communication for both participants and initiators, machine learning methods offer a lot of potential. In this work we want to showcase which issues occur in political online discussions and how machine learning can be used to counteract these issues and enhance deliberation. We conduct a literature review to (i) identify tasks that could potentially be solved by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to enhance individual aspects of deliberation in political online discussions, (ii) provide an overview on existing tools and platforms that are equipped with AI support and (iii) assess how well AI support currently works and where challenges remain.
Wajid Ali, Javad Mohamadichamgavi, Juan Ramirez
et al.
Vaccination against the SARS-CoV-2 disease has significantly reduced its mortality rate and spread. However, despite its availability, a considerable proportion of the public has either refused or delayed getting vaccinated. This reluctance is known as vaccine hesitancy. The aim of this paper is to present a mathematical model to investigate how social interaction can impact vaccine hesitancy. The model describes the temporal transitions between different vaccination classes of the population (those vaccinated, those who are not yet vaccinated but agree to be vaccinated, and those who refuse). We apply the model to state and national survey data from the USA to estimate model parameters that quantify the rates at which public opinion on vaccination changes. Moreover, we investigate how political trends and demographic factors, such as age and education, impact these parameters. Our results show that state-level political affiliation, age, and educational level shape opinions on vaccination and have a strong influence on the temporal dynamics of attitude changes.
Existing evaluations of political bias in large language models (LLMs) typically classify outputs as left- or right-leaning. We extend this perspective by examining how ideological tendencies vary across topics and how consistently models maintain their positions, a property we refer to as stability. To capture this dimension, we propose PReSS (Political Response Stability under Stress), a black-box framework that evaluates LLMs by jointly considering model and topic context, categorizing responses into four stance types: stable-left, unstable-left, stable-right, and unstable-right. Applying PReSS to 12 widely used LLMs across 19 political topics reveals substantial variation in stance stability; for instance, a model that is left-leaning overall can exhibit stable-right behavior on certain topics. This highlights the importance of topic-aware and fine-grained evaluation of political ideologies of LLMs. Moreover, stability has practical implications for controlled generation and model alignment: interventions such as debiasing or ideology reversal should explicitly account for stance stability. Our empirical analyses reveal that when models are prompted or fine-tuned to adopt the opposite ideology, unstable topic stances are more likely to change, whereas stable ones resist modification. Thus, treating stability as a moderating factor provides a principled foundation for understanding, evaluating, and guiding interventions in politically sensitive model behavior.
The study analyzes the specifics of women’s political leadership in the USSR and identifies the factors that predetermined the secondary role of women in Soviet, and later modern Russian politics. The purpose of this study is to identify the features of women’s activities as political leaders in the Soviet state and compare them with the features of women’s participation in political power in modern Russia. To achieve the goal, historical-chronological and comparative analysis are used as research methods. The unique experience of the women’s departments is considered in detail, as well as the personal factor of Soviet women leaders as the reason for political success. It is concluded that during the entire existence of the Soviet Union, the parity ratio of men and women at any level of power was not achieved even despite attempts to introduce various measures, such as a quota system, to achieve this goal. However, among the reasons for this situation, it was highlighted that attempts to achieve gender parity in government were primarily ideological in nature and aimed not at achieving real equality, but at demonstrating the ideology of the USSR on the world stage. The presence of women in the highest government positions in the USSR was an extremely rare phenomenon, since, in order to meet practical needs, the state, as a rule, preferred to involve women in politics at the lowest levels of the political hierarchy. A comparative analysis of women’s political leadership in the Soviet period with the present has shown that the same trend persists in modern Russia.
Political institutions and public administration (General), Social sciences (General)
Khoirunurrofik Khoirunurrofik, Faris Abdurrachman, Utomo Noor Rachmanto
Government interventions to limit the spread of the COVID-19 disease have decreased mobility, which, in turn, impacts aggregate economic activity. Understanding mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic may serve as a proxy for understanding its economic impact. This study aims to examine the relationship between pre-existing socioeconomic factors and the economic impact of COVID-19 using aggregate mobility data, particularly from emerging economies with a dominance of informal workers within economic activities. This study will utilize the public mobility dataset to provide an exploratory picture of the socioeconomic and policy determinants of mobility during the pandemic, focusing on Indonesia. The exploratory analytical findings indicate that the impact of COVID-19 on the economy, as indicated by mobility data, is highly correlated with various prior socioeconomic determinants. Moreover, more prosperous and urbanized areas have a larger formal sector, employ more people in manufacturing and/or tourism, possess a more educated labor force, and are more digitally connected; they tend to experience more significant decreases in mobility. The study has provided lessons to developing countries with a vast informal sector size and the gap in access to digital technology to design a more effective, timely, and well-targeted policy response in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Urbanization. City and country, Political institutions and public administration (General)
This article is focused on sources of financing for cultural institutions, for which the Authors recognize economic activity (services, trade, property management), allocating free funds and sponsorship. The text is narrowed to sources of financing which supplement subsidies. Considerations in individual parts of this article intend to answer the following questions: can these funds constitute a significant source of financing for cultural institutions? Is the legal regulation concerning these funds transparent enough to make their effective use trouble-free for the people managing these institutions? Could these funds offset the financial impact of a pandemic, and perhaps even replace the primary source of funding for culture, such as subsidies? The authors show that the above-mentioned supplementary sources of financing for cultural institutions may constitute important sources of financing for cultural activities. However, these funds absolutely do not release the state and local governments from their obligation to take care of the development of Polish culture, and in most cases these funds will not offset the negative financial effects of the pandemic. In addition, the legal regulation concerning them is scattered and sometimes excessively complicated.
Comparative law. International uniform law, Political institutions and public administration (General)
In the judgment in question, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) for the first time ever carried out such broad interpretation of Article 9 (2) (2) (e) of Directive 2011/95/EU in the context of non-formalized refusal to perform military service by a young Syrian who escaped from his country of origin. The paper analyses the impact of the CJEU judgment on the functioning of the guarantee of the right to conscientious objection to military service within the EU asylum law. It also asks two key questions. First, in the light of the analysed judgment, should any potential Syrian conscript who in reality does not support the government (non-opportunist) and who evades military service be granted protection? Secondly, do all Syrian conscripts who join the army make themselves subject in the future to automatic exclusion from protection?
Law, Political institutions and public administration (General)
Az 1953-ban útjára indult, immáron hetvenéves Belügyi Szemle tudományos folyóirat jubileumi „70 év, 70 gondolat” című kiadványában megjelent tanulmány olvasható a felkért szerzőktől.
Political institutions and public administration (General)
The detections of gravitational-wave (GW) signals from compact binary coalescence by ground-based detectors have opened up the era of GW astronomy. These observations provide opportunities to test Einstein's general theory of relativity at the strong-field regime. Here we give a brief overview of the various GW-based tests of General Relativity (GR) performed by the LIGO-Virgo collaboration on the detected GW events to date. After providing details for the tests performed in four categories, we discuss the prospects for each test in the context of future GW detectors. The four categories of tests include the consistency tests, parametrized tests for GW generation and propagation, tests for the merger remnant properties, and GW polarization tests.
Joana das Flores Duarte, Patrícia Krieger Grossi, Eliane Moreira de Almeida
This article is the result of a research that began in 2015 and is currently underway, whose objective was to understand the social experiences of quilombola women in the context of public policies, considering the intersectionalities of gender, race/ethnicity, social class and generation in Rio Grande do Sul. This is a qualitative and exploratory research. The techniques used were data collection and semi-structured interviews. The data were subjected to content analysis from the perspective of Bardin. Results show that these women experience violations in accessing public policies due to structural racism, and to real estate and land exploitation, and the narratives reveal the challenges in the sense of being a quilombola in the face of the permanent denial of access to citizenship rights, as well as the struggles and resistance of these communities.
Political science, Political institutions and public administration (General)