In October 2023, the US withdrew its proposals on cross-border data flows at the World Trade Organization (WTO), reversing its long-held position on binding commitments against data localization. Concurrently, it has orchestrated the creation of several informal data governance initiatives, including the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity, which are all characterized by fluid commitments on data flows. This article demonstrates that the US’ turn toward informal data governance is influenced considerably by geoeconomic statecraft. Confronted with the prospect of China leveraging global data flows to undermine American interests, both in terms of national security and economic competitiveness, the US executive has sought to restrict outbound data flows. In parallel, it has developed informal, like-minded coalitions to promote norms around “trusted data flows,” that similarly restrict data collection by Chinese actors globally. Having withdrawn from formal WTO discussions on cross-border data, its informal initiatives give the US ample regulatory space to implement coercive domestic measures against Chinese actors. Informal initiatives simultaneously allow the US to develop norm-setting coalitions with states that may otherwise be wary of binding commitments on restrictive data flows. Drawing on an analysis of seven international data governance initiatives, alongside US domestic policies and official statements, we trace the US’ turn toward informality to its geoeconomic considerations. We contribute to theoretical debates on the evolution and shift in geoeconomic statecraft, particularly the shift away from formal sanctions-based regimes to informal agreements, as well as to the empirical literature on international cross-border data governance.
Abstract South Africa joined BRICS with the aim of benefiting from enhanced trade with the grouping, which encompasses four of the largest economies in the world. This article undertook an empirical review to determine an answer to the following research question (RQ): whether South Africa’s exports to the original four BRIC/BRICs member countries had grown and diversified following its membership over the first fourteen-year timeframe (2010–2024)? Across these, decline was identified in the findings, demonstrating that South Africa’s participation in the group has performed below its potential and stated rationale. The article notes a growing trade deficit and lack of industrialised imports from South Africa, especially when compared with the EU and the US. This is shown to be mainly due to South Africa’s asymmetrical openness towards the BRICs, including having the single-lowest tariff rates towards the other four members at 4.9 to 5.3%, while the next lowest BRICs’ general tariff is at 10.3%. Against these findings, the article makes the case for a BRICS Plus treaty in order to eliminate any tariff and non-tariff barriers, as well as formulate realistic expectations and obligations for internal cohesion and external engagement based on credible commitment.
Political institutions and public administration - Asia (Asian studies only), Economic growth, development, planning
We present a critical discourse analysis of the 2024 U.S. presidential debates, examining Donald Trump's rhetorical strategies in his interactions with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. We introduce a novel annotation framework, BEADS (Bias Enriched Annotation for Dialogue Structure), which systematically extends the DAMSL framework to capture bias driven and adversarial discourse features in political communication. BEADS includes a domain and language agnostic set of tags that model ideological framing, emotional appeals, and confrontational tactics. Our methodology compares detailed human annotation with zero shot ChatGPT assisted tagging on verified transcripts from the Trump and Biden (19,219 words) and Trump and Harris (18,123 words) debates. Our analysis shows that Trump consistently dominated in key categories: Challenge and Adversarial Exchanges, Selective Emphasis, Appeal to Fear, Political Bias, and Perceived Dismissiveness. These findings underscore his use of emotionally charged and adversarial rhetoric to control the narrative and influence audience perception. In this work, we establish BEADS as a scalable and reproducible framework for critical discourse analysis across languages, domains, and political contexts.
Francesco Bilotta, Alberto Binetti, Giacomo Manferdini
This paper studies the supply and effects of causal rhetoric in U.S. politics. We define causal rhetoric as assigning responsibility for political outcomes, via claims of blame and merit. Training a supervised classifier, we detect causal rhetoric in over a decade of congressional tweets, finding that its supply has risen rapidly and pervasively, displacing affective messaging. We show that the production of causal rhetoric involves a trade-off between revenues and costs. First, quasi-random variation in Twitter adoption shows that blame increases small-donor revenues by expanding donor count, while merit raises average donation size. Second, fine-grained legislative data suggest that policy ownership determines relative costs: blame is cheaper for opponents, merit for proposers. Finally, causal rhetoric has downstream effects on societal outcomes, fostering protest activity and shaping polarization and institutional trust.
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.
Nadrzędnym celem niniejszego artykułu jest analiza tekstów autorstwa wybranych współczesnych polskich artystek. Utwory, które poddaję interpretacjom, charakteryzują się emancypacyjnym wydźwiękiem. Ich autorkami są kobiety, które w swojej twórczości zainteresowały się sytuacją kobiet w społeczeństwie. Założyłem, że zaproponowane teksty odwołują się do polityki, np. poprzez namysł nad systemem patriarchalnym. Autorki przywołują w nich także bieżące wydarzenia społeczno-polityczne. Dlatego przedstawione analizy cechuje także to, że teksty autorstwa współczesnych polskich artystek umieściłem w konkretnej przestrzeni. W związku z tym artykuł rozpoczyna się od objaśnienia pojęcia polityczności oraz opisu wyboru metodologii, którą, ze względu na podjęty materiał, jest krytyka feministyczna. Kolejne części artykułu to omówienia wybranych tekstów autorstwa współczesnych polskich artystek, których główny wątek twórczości stanowi emancypacja kobiet; są to Żelazne Waginy i Gang Śródmieście. Wartością dodaną artykułu jest to, że wymienione autorki realizują swoje projekty w rożnych gatunkach muzycznych, co także zauważono w niniejszym tekście.
Mexico has experienced a notable surge in assassinations of political candidates and mayors. This article argues that these killings are largely driven by organized crime, aiming to influence candidate selection, control local governments for rent-seeking, and retaliate against government crackdowns. Using a new dataset of political assassinations in Mexico from 2000 to 2021 and instrumental variables, we address endogeneity concerns in the location and timing of government crackdowns. Our instruments include historical Chinese immigration patterns linked to opium cultivation in Mexico, local corn prices, and U.S. illicit drug prices. The findings reveal that candidates in municipalities near oil pipelines face an increased risk of assassination due to drug trafficking organizations expanding into oil theft, particularly during elections and fuel price hikes. Government arrests or killings of organized crime members trigger retaliatory violence, further endangering incumbent mayors. This political violence has a negligible impact on voter turnout, as it targets politicians rather than voters. However, voter turnout increases in areas where authorities disrupt drug smuggling, raising the chances of the local party being re-elected. These results offer new insights into how criminal groups attempt to capture local governments and the implications for democracy under criminal governance.
Accurate forecasts of the impact of spatial weather and pan-European socio-economic and political risks on hourly electricity demand for the mid-term horizon are crucial for strategic decision-making amidst the inherent uncertainty. Most importantly, these forecasts are essential for the operational management of power plants, ensuring supply security and grid stability, and in guiding energy trading and investment decisions. The primary challenge for this forecasting task lies in disentangling the multifaceted drivers of load, which include national deterministic (daily, weekly, annual, and holiday patterns) and national stochastic weather and autoregressive effects. Additionally, transnational stochastic socio-economic and political effects add further complexity, in particular, due to their non-stationarity. To address this challenge, we present an interpretable probabilistic mid-term forecasting model for the hourly load that captures, besides all deterministic effects, the various uncertainties in load. This model recognizes transnational dependencies across 24 European countries, with multivariate modeled socio-economic and political states and cross-country dependent forecasting. Built from interpretable Generalized Additive Models (GAMs), the model enables an analysis of the transmission of each incorporated effect to the hour-specific load. Our findings highlight the vulnerability of countries reliant on electric heating under extreme weather scenarios. This emphasizes the need for high-resolution forecasting of weather effects on pan-European electricity consumption especially in anticipation of widespread electric heating adoption.
For almost a decade now, scholarship in and beyond the ACM FAccT community has been focusing on novel and innovative ways and methodologies to audit the functioning of algorithmic systems. Over the years, this research idea and technical project has matured enough to become a regulatory mandate. Today, the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Online Safety Act (OSA) have established the framework within which technology corporations and (traditional) auditors will develop the `practice' of algorithmic auditing thereby presaging how this `ecosystem' will develop. In this paper, we systematically review the auditing provisions in the DSA and the OSA in light of observations from the emerging industry of algorithmic auditing. Who is likely to occupy this space? What are some political and ethical tensions that are likely to arise? How are the mandates of `independent auditing' or `the evaluation of the societal context of an algorithmic function' likely to play out in practice? By shaping the picture of the emerging political economy of algorithmic auditing, we draw attention to strategies and cultures of traditional auditors that risk eroding important regulatory pillars of the DSA and the OSA. Importantly, we warn that ambitious research ideas and technical projects of/for algorithmic auditing may end up crashed by the standardising grip of traditional auditors and/or diluted within a complex web of (sub-)contractual arrangements, diverse portfolios, and tight timelines.
Las Sentencias del Tribunal Constitucional 19/2023 y 44/2023 tienen un nexo común argumental que viene a constituir su principal ratio decidendi, consistente en la creación de un nuevo derecho fundamental de autodeterminación para decidir sobre la propia muerte y sobre la interrupción voluntaria del embarazo,
que pasan a constituir nuevos derechos fundamentales a la eutanasia y al aborto, integrándolos en el derecho a la integridad física y moral (art. 15 CE), limitando así la libertad de configuración del legislador respecto de los mismos. El activismo judicial desplegado en esta operación no puede dejar de suscitar una gran perplejidad. El hasta ahora considerado «principio» de la dignidad de la persona y del libre desarrollo de la personalidad (art. 10.1 CE), en virtud de esta innovadora jurisprudencia, deja de operar como tal para convertirse, no ya en un «principio general de libertad», cuestión que distaría incluso de ser pacífica en la doctrina, sino en un verdadero «derecho fundamental general de libertad», en definitiva, como norma de clausura del sistema de libertades públicas. A diferencia de la regulación en derecho constitucional alemán, inspirador del Anteproyecto de la ponencia constitucional en España, en que el libre desarrollo de la personalidad constituye un derecho fundamental, también norma de clausura, con unos límites bien establecidos por la jurisprudencia del Tribunal de Karlsruhe, ni la dicción literal, ni la sistemática de la Constitución española permite una incorporación acrítica de la construcción alemana, ni su empleo por parte del Tribunal Constitucional español ha sido, en esta última jurisprudencia...
Law in general. Comparative and uniform law. Jurisprudence, International relations
Existing research on voting legislation argues that Republican lawmakers enact strict voting laws as part of a racialized, partisan electoral strategy—they believe that the laws will reduce minority turnout and benefit Republicans electorally. Yet, the empirical effects of strict voting laws on turnout are mixed, with some studies finding that restrictive legislation can actually increase minority turnout due to counter-mobilization effects. I leverage this empirical finding to study the foundations of public attitudes toward voting laws, specifically testing whether exposure to information that restrictive voting laws can boost minority turnout impacts Republicans’ or Democrats’ attitudes. My results show that Republican support for restrictive voting laws generally does not change in response to information about the consequences of the laws, but Democrats are significantly less opposed when they become aware of the laws’ potential impact on minority turnout. These results pose challenges for building majorities that will defend the franchise in the United States.
Este artículo sostiene que la aplicación de las políticas y mecanismos de protección estatal no han sido suficientes para detener la impunidad, agresiones y asesinatos de periodistas en México entre 2000 y 2022. Se revisan algunos informes publicados por la organización Article 19 México y Centroamérica, Reporteros sin Fronteras, la Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos y artículos de prensa; se realizan entrevistas semiestructuradas a actores claves. La poca efectividad de estas políticas se debe, en parte, por la confluencia de agentes estatales (fuerzas armadas, funcionarios públicos) y no estatales (partidos políticos, crimen organizado) que ejercen violencia y agresión sobre periodistas, lo cual profundiza la impunidad y poca efectividad de las políticas. Mecanismos como el proyecto “De la mano”, auspiciado por el Parlamento Europeo, son una posibilidad para ejercer presión internacional de manera conjunta con la sociedad civil, cuyos alcances no son cuantificables al momento.
This study examines how different types of NPOs influence local governments’ hazard mitigation efforts. Based on Marquis et al. (2013), we categorized NPOs into three types and analyzed a county-level dataset (N=1,626) with fixed-effect Poisson regression. Findings indicate that counties with a greater number of NPOs working for enhancing the overall community’s social welfare are more likely to develop hazard mitigation projects. In contrast, the prevalence of elite-oriented NPOs that focus on selective community constituents is negatively associated with local governments’ hazard mitigation project development. This study provides important implications for the critical roles of NPOs in facilitating hazard mitigation efforts in relationships with local governments.
Political institutions and public administration (General)
Five types of protein precipitate can be obtained in the course of whey and its concentrates separation, which, in turn, are divided into precipitates derived from cheese and curd whey. The main factors affecting the moisture content in the sediment are: structural properties, the magnitude of the centrifugal sealing pressure, separation temperature and compaction time. As shown by studies of sediment samples obtained during the separation of whey and its concentrates, their structural properties are quite similar. The properties of various protein sediments were experimentally determined: the dependence of humidity on sealing pressure, the influence of strain rate on the coefficient of effective viscosity valuation. The data obtained can be used for mathematical modeling of the centrifugal unloading of sediment. An experimental modeling of the sediment behavior on the conical surface of the slurry space was carried out, on the basis of which the limiting angle of inclination of the conical surfaces of the drum (slurry space, plates, etc.) to the horizontal line was determined. This result should also be taken into account for design of the separator drums for whey and its concentrates. The data obtained can be used for special whey separators elements design.
Estimating the political leanings of social media users is a challenging and ever more pressing problem given the increase in social media consumption. We introduce Retweet-BERT, a simple and scalable model to estimate the political leanings of Twitter users. Retweet-BERT leverages the retweet network structure and the language used in users' profile descriptions. Our assumptions stem from patterns of networks and linguistics homophily among people who share similar ideologies. Retweet-BERT demonstrates competitive performance against other state-of-the-art baselines, achieving 96%-97% macro-F1 on two recent Twitter datasets (a COVID-19 dataset and a 2020 United States presidential elections dataset). We also perform manual validation to validate the performance of Retweet-BERT on users not in the training data. Finally, in a case study of COVID-19, we illustrate the presence of political echo chambers on Twitter and show that it exists primarily among right-leaning users. Our code is open-sourced and our data is publicly available.
The purpose of this study is to analyse COVID-19 related news published across different geographical places, in order to gain insights in reporting differences. The COVID-19 pandemic had a major outbreak in January 2020 and was followed by different preventive measures, lockdown, and finally by the process of vaccination. To date, more comprehensive analysis of news related to COVID-19 pandemic are missing, especially those which explain what aspects of this pandemic are being reported by newspapers inserted in different economies and belonging to different political alignments. Since LDA is often less coherent when there are news articles published across the world about an event and you look answers for specific queries. It is because of having semantically different content. To address this challenge, we performed pooling of news articles based on information retrieval using TF-IDF score in a data processing step and topic modeling using LDA with combination of 1 to 6 ngrams. We used VADER sentiment analyzer to analyze the differences in sentiments in news articles reported across different geographical places. The novelty of this study is to look at how COVID-19 pandemic was reported by the media, providing a comparison among countries in different political and economic contexts. Our findings suggest that the news reporting by newspapers with different political alignment support the reported content. Also, economic issues reported by newspapers depend on economy of the place where a newspaper resides.
Abstract
Introduction
By the emergence of Modernity in Iran in Qajar Era many intellectuals believed in developing reformations in Iran’s Community. Besides reformations, the society of Iran should be awakened from deep sleep by thinking transformation and reach Modernity and this issue is evident in all works of intellectuals in Qajar. Undoubtedly many trips of intellectuals of this era to European countries have influenced their thoughts. Pre-constitutional intellectuals enumerated the reasons for Iran’s mustiness as despotisms, lack of legal governance, invasion of Arabs to Iran and finally religion and superstitions. So they tried to find a solution for solving these problems. They became familiar with modern government elements in West and proposed some solutions for mustiness of Iran like: reformation of governance structure, making law, reformation or changing the procedure, renewing ancient traditions, eliminating or reforming religion, etc. the thoughts of these intellectuals aren’t limited to a same realm of meaning and the method of each case is different for solving the problems of the country. However, their thought is related to modern governance. Among the pre-constitutional intellectuals is Mirza Agha Khan Kermani. He found out the reasons for Iran’s mustiness by observing western countries’ situation and comparing it with Iran. He became aware of Modern governance elements and criticized traditional situation of society of Iran and tried to find a solution for solving this crisis.
Methodology
The current paper is based on analytical-descriptive method and governance theory of Michel Foucault and examines perception of Mirza Agha Khan Kermani of nature of Modern governance on the basis of his work, seven treatises. The problem is that what are the basics of modern governance in the thought of Mirza Agha Khan Kermani? The hypothesis of this paper is that Mirza Agha Khan Kermani criticized the nature of traditional system of Iran and his different perceptions of Modernity and modern governance led to a different interpretation of mustiness. About the research literature we should say that some works have been written about thoughts of Mirza Agha Khan Kermani that the most important ones are Facing with Modernity by Abdollah Ansari, Basics of Modern Government in Thinkers’ Perspective in Constitutional Era by Shah Mohammadi, Thoughts of Mirza Agha Khan Kermani by Feridon Adamiyat. These works have examined dimensions of Mirza Agha Khan Kermani’s thought.
Discussion
Mirza Agha Khan Kermani is one of the intellectuals of Qajar Era. His thought is full of nationalism, documenting the governance right of nation, freedom, fighting with Russian and English colonialism, fighting with despotism, litigation, human rights, Islamic unity thought and criticizing social situation (Ajoudani, 2014: 79). He criticized the nature of traditional system in Iran and his different thinking tendencies have influenced his perception of Modernity and modern governance elements.
This has caused that he has a different perception to lagging behind. One of the modern governance factors in his thoughts is national government. He considers the reason of the emergence of government the human being’s requirement to meet his needs and necessity of cooperation with others in meeting them. In his opinion (Kermani, 1945: 69) establishing a society and necessity of leader I the factor of people’s solidarity and prevents disunion in society and it is considered as main motivation of community to modernity. Kermani considers government a necessary tool for society progress (Kermani, 280). His attitude to government represents establishing a legal system based on Modernity because it is “legally bound” and its nation enjoys freedom rights (Kermani, 1933:162). He reprimands despotic traditional government as the people finally make a revolution. It doesn’t seem that he wants to transform all political structure and make a revolution in it but conversely, he is reformist and tries to avoid despotism. In his opinion the existence of law is the main technique for modern governance. Kermani focuses on law as the main element in reaching democracy in Iran and believes that it has been from the beginning and it has been eliminated by Arab attacks and their dominance to Iran (Kermani, 285). Mirza Agha Khan considers lawlessness of this event as the origin of all misfortunes of Iranians.
One of the structural components in the transformation of Mirza Aga Khan's thought is the unpreparedness of the society and the illiteracy of the majority of the society. In this regard, he considers the basis of life and the basis of human civilization in science and knowledge and considers science impossible without education (Kermani, 1945: 16). He did not believe that Iran was useless in science; But with the invasion of this land by the Arabs, they destroyed their sciences and technologies and burned the books of Iran out of jealousy and ignorance and trampled on the sciences of Iran for several thousand years (Kermani, 1989: 23). The intense attacks that Mirza Aga Khan repeatedly pays attention to the ignorant Arabs and their customs and traditions in his works show his attention to the political system that ruled the situation in Iran at that time.
In the face of the modern government in the West, Kermani considers the ruling tyranny as one of the reasons for the backwardness of the governments in Iran, which seeks power and has not paid attention to the development and education of the nation and deprives the people of their rights and freedoms. Kermani gives people legal rights (Kermani, Bita b: 74-73). According to him, the people should be aware of their rights and the nation should form a great force for itself against the strength of the government. His emphasis on the concept of the nation and the granting of equal rights demonstrates his efforts to involve the people in the political life of the country in order to achieve a modern government in society.
Kermani has a broad view of women's rights among intellectuals before him, so much so that he pays special attention to women in all his works. In the field of women's rights, she believes that they should have equal rights with men: "Women should have equal rights with men and learn them from any science, technology and industry, and be aware of good and bad, and women should not wear hijab and not speak. He is not forbidden from having sex with a foreign man so that he does not produce any sins and obscene acts at all ”(Kermani, 1933: 10). Therefore, he considers women to have equal rights with men as a condition for the perfect progress of the human world.
Conclusion
Mirza Aga Khan Kermani is one of the pioneers of modern government in Iran, who at the same time has tried to look at tradition in its historical context. His efforts to critique the past as an important component of his thought are influenced by the West. He can be considered an admirer of the ancient religion and cultural values of Iran, which he tried to revive and to take the political foundations of the West, such as the establishment of national government, the expansion of social and political freedoms and finally the absolute separation of political institutions from religion. He emphasized. He brought government and religion together and considered the rule of law to be appropriate for Iranian society. Mirza Aga Khan's legacy not only reduced the role of tradition to advising the ruling system, but he also opposed and rejected the authoritarian system in the political sphere. Mirza Aga Khan Kermani, as one of the progressive intellectuals, called on the people to participate in the government and demanded the overthrow of the authoritarian government by the people.
Organizational behaviour, change and effectiveness. Corporate culture, Fine Arts
Ying Sheng, Yoni Zohar, Christophe Ringeissen
et al.
We make two contributions to the study of polite combination in satisfiability modulo theories. The first contribution is a separation between politeness and strong politeness, by presenting a polite theory that is not strongly polite. This result shows that proving strong politeness (which is often harder than proving politeness) is sometimes needed in order to use polite combination. The second contribution is an optimization to the polite combination method, obtained by borrowing from the Nelson-Oppen method. In its non-deterministic form, the Nelson-Oppen method is based on guessing arrangements over shared variables. In contrast, polite combination requires an arrangement over \emph{all} variables of the shared sort (not just the shared variables). We show that when using polite combination, if the other theory is stably infinite with respect to a shared sort, only the shared variables of that sort need be considered in arrangements, as in the Nelson-Oppen method. Reasoning about arrangements of variables is exponential in the worst case, so reducing the number of variables that are considered has the potential to improve performance significantly. We show preliminary evidence for this in practice by demonstrating a speed-up on a smart contract verification benchmark.