Ask your chatbot to impersonate an expert from Russia and an expert from US and query it on Chinese politics. How might the outputs differ? Or, to prepare ourselves for the worse, how might they converge? Scholars have raised concerns LLM based applications can homogenize cultures and flatten perspectives. But exactly how much does LLM generated outputs converge despite explicit different role assignment? This study provides empirical evidence to the above question. The critique centres on pretrained models regurgitating ossified political jargons used in the Western world when speaking about China, Iran, Russian, and US politics, despite changes in these countries happening daily or hourly. The experiments combine role-prompting and similarity metrics. The results show that AI generated discourses from four models about Iran and China are the most homogeneous and unchanging across all four models, including OpenAI GPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, and DeepSeek, despite the prompted perspective change and the actual changes in real life. This study does not engage with history, politics, or literature as traditional disciplinary approaches would; instead, it takes cues from international and area studies and offers insight on the future trajectory of shifting political discourse in a digital space increasingly cannibalised by AI.
As the digital economy grows increasingly intangible, traditional productivity measures struggle to capture the true economic impact of artificial intelligence (AI). AI systems capable of cognitive work significantly enhance productivity, yet their contributions remain obscured within the residual category of Total Factor Productivity (TFP). This paper explores whether it is time for a conceptual shift to explicitly recognize "digital labor," the autonomous cognitive capability of AI, as a distinct factor of production alongside capital and human labor. We outline the unique economic properties of digital labor, including scalability, intangibility, self-improvement, rapid obsolescence, and elastic substitutability. By integrating digital labor into growth models (such as those by Solow and Romer), we demonstrate strategic implications for business leaders, including new approaches to productivity tracking, resource allocation, investment strategy, and organizational design. Ultimately, treating digital labor as an independent factor offers a clearer view of economic growth and helps organizations manage AI's transformative potential.
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.
Toxic and uncivil politics is widely seen as a growing threat to democratic values and governance, yet our understanding of the drivers and evolution of political incivility remains limited. Leveraging a novel dataset of nearly 18 million Twitter messages from parliamentarians in 17 countries over five years, this paper systematically investigates whether politics internationally is becoming more uncivil, and what are the determinants of political incivility. Our analysis reveals a marked increase in toxic discourse among political elites, and that it is associated to radical-right parties and parties in opposition. Toxicity diminished markedly during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic and, surprisingly, during election campaigns. Furthermore, our results indicate that posts relating to ``culture war'' topics, such as migration and LGBTQ+ rights, are substantially more toxic than debates focused on welfare or economic issues. These findings underscore a troubling shift in international democracies toward an erosion of constructive democratic dialogue.
Yuan Zhang, Michael Amsler, Laia Castro Herrero
et al.
Incivility refers to behaviors that violate collective norms and disrupt cooperation within the political process. Although large-scale online data and automated techniques have enabled the quantitative analysis of uncivil discourse, prior research has predominantly focused on impoliteness or toxicity, often overlooking other behaviors that undermine democratic values. To address this gap, we propose a multidimensional conceptual framework encompassing Impoliteness, Physical Harm and Violent Political Rhetoric, Hate Speech and Stereotyping, and Threats to Democratic Institutions and Values. Using this framework, we measure the spread of online political incivility in Brazil using approximately 5 million tweets posted by 2,307 political influencers during the 2022 Brazilian general election. Through statistical modeling and network analysis, we examine the dynamics of uncivil posts at different election stages, identify key disseminators and audiences, and explore the mechanisms driving the spread of uncivil information online. Our findings indicate that impoliteness is more likely to surge during election campaigns. In contrast, the other dimensions of incivility are often triggered by specific violent events. Moreover, we find that left-aligned individual influencers are the primary disseminators of online incivility in the Brazilian Twitter/X sphere and that they disseminate not only direct incivility but also indirect incivility when discussing or opposing incivility expressed by others. They relay those content from politicians, media agents, and individuals to reach broader audiences, revealing a diffusion pattern mixing the direct and two-step flows of communication theory. This study offers new insights into the multidimensional nature of incivility in Brazilian politics and provides a conceptual framework that can be extended to other political contexts.
AbstractSignificant advances in the study of the historic labor movement have entailed new work on the intersection between political parties, trade unions and subjects such as ‘race’, colonialism, sexuality, masculinity, and the reception of scientific ideas. The intersections between the labor movement and the politics of health, however, have been neglected to date both in labor studies and in social studies of health care and provision. This article builds on my on-going research into the dynamics of the Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) labor movement in the form of anarchism and syndicalism and explores, specifically, the reception of ideas on health and the attainment of healthy working conditions and lifestyles as a central aim of these working-class movements. This study examines, among other aspects, the reception of ideas on nutrition, medical care, the provision of hospitals, the responsibility of medical professionals, sexual health, the consumption of alcohol and the provision of quality housing for workers within a framework that critiqued capitalism and the state and the relations they fostered.A further dimension is incorporated into this study. This is the colonial dynamic at play between Portugal and its colonies, in this case Mozambique. What were the relations between the Portuguese syndicalist movement and the emerging trade union movement in Mozambique? To what degree did concerns in Portugal over issues of health find resonance in this African colony's labor movement? To what degree was the largely white labor movement in Mozambique attuned to local knowledge on health and racial issues surrounding health? What specific aspects of health and medicine were broached in the colony and how did these interact with an anticolonial critique and discourses and practices of ‘tropical medicine’?This study, through a detailed analysis of a range of libertarian periodicals in Portugal and Mozambique during the movement’s period of maximum influence provides responses to these questions and makes a contribution to transnational research on labour movements through the interconnecting linguistic and class dynamics of the Lusophone world.
AbstractThe essay argues that the idea of the United States as a classless society was never a faithful representation of the U.S. socioeconomic reality, but constituted a myth elaborated since the 1830s by the first generation of U.S. economists to oppose the insubordination of Northern white workers, their mobilization through strikes, their politicization of class, and their critique of wage labor. It was precisely to counter the workers’ discourse, the essay maintains, that the first U.S. economists, most importantly Henry Charles Carey (1793–1879), developed an ideological representation of U.S. society as a classless structure devoid of fixed boundaries, in which industrious individuals could improve their condition through labor and in which social positions reflected a scale of talents and merits. By studying the early writings of Carey, but also of Theodore Sedgwick (1780–1839), Francis Wayland (1796–1865), Henry Vethake (1791–1866), Alonzo Potter (1800–1865), and Francis Lieber (1800–1872), the essay shows how economists used the myth of the classless society to scientifically legitimize the coming of capitalism to the United States, as well as to delegitimize class conflict. This anti-labor reaction, the essay argues, marked the very emergence of political economy in the United States as a science aimed at justifying the order of society through a mystified representation of its power relations, while the myth of the classless society would persist as a fundamental ideological pillar in the legitimation and naturalization of American capitalism.
Henrique Carvalho Oliveira, Jaluza Maria Lima Silva Borsatto
O presente estudo tem por objetivo verificar como as ações de extensão da Universidade Federal de Uberlândia (UFU) se alinham aos Objetivos de Desenvolvimento Sustentável (ODS) e ao compromisso social na promoção do desenvolvimento sustentável. Para isso, a partir de uma análise documental, realizou-se uma análise descritiva da evolução das ações de extensão da UFU no período de 2010 a 2023, e verificou-se o alinhamento delas em relação aos ODS. Os resultados demonstraram um aumento de 348% nas ações de extensão comparando os anos de 2010 e 2023, sendo as modalidades mais realizadas: projetos, eventos, cursos/oficinas, programas e prestação de serviços, com destaque para a área temática de educação com maior número de ações. Considerando o alinhamento aos ODS, destacam-se o ODS 4 (Educação de Qualidade), seguido do ODS 3 (Saúde e Bem-Estar) e o ODS 10 (Redução de desigualdades). Esses resultados confirmam o compromisso social da universidade na promoção do desenvolvimento regional sustentável, a partir das ações extensionistas alinhadas aos Objetivos da Agenda 2030 da ONU. Além disso, a estrutura de registro, mapeamento e monitoramento das atividades de extensão apresentadas neste estudo pode servir de modelo para outras Instituições de Ensino Superior, auxiliando na adoção de práticas sustentáveis por meio da educação.
Social Sciences, Labor in politics. Political activity of the working class
Suyash Fulay, William Brannon, Shrestha Mohanty
et al.
Language model alignment research often attempts to ensure that models are not only helpful and harmless, but also truthful and unbiased. However, optimizing these objectives simultaneously can obscure how improving one aspect might impact the others. In this work, we focus on analyzing the relationship between two concepts essential in both language model alignment and political science: truthfulness and political bias. We train reward models on various popular truthfulness datasets and subsequently evaluate their political bias. Our findings reveal that optimizing reward models for truthfulness on these datasets tends to result in a left-leaning political bias. We also find that existing open-source reward models (i.e., those trained on standard human preference datasets) already show a similar bias and that the bias is larger for larger models. These results raise important questions about the datasets used to represent truthfulness, potential limitations of aligning models to be both truthful and politically unbiased, and what language models capture about the relationship between truth and politics.
Self-service machines are a form of pseudo-automation; rather than actually automate tasks, they offset them to unpaid customers. Typically implemented for customer convenience and to reduce labor costs, self-service is often criticized for worsening customer service and increasing loss and theft for retailers. Though millions of frontline service workers continue to interact with these technologies on a day-to-day basis, little is known about how these machines change the nature of frontline labor. Through interviews with current and former cashiers who work with self-checkout technologies, we investigate how technology that offsets labor from an employee to a customer can reconfigure frontline work. We find three changes to cashiering tasks as a result of self-checkout: (1) Working at self-checkout involved parallel demands from multiple customers, (2) self-checkout work was more problem-oriented (including monitoring and policing customers), and (3) traditional checkout began to become more demanding as easier transactions were filtered to self-checkout. As their interactions with customers became more focused on problem solving and rule enforcement, cashiers were often positioned as adversaries to customers at self-checkout. To cope with perceived adversarialism, cashiers engaged in a form of relational patchwork, using techniques like scapegoating the self-checkout machine and providing excessive customer service in order to maintain positive customer interactions in the face of potential conflict. Our findings highlight how even under pseudo-automation, workers must engage in relational work to manage and mend negative human-to-human interactions so that machines can be properly implemented in context.
Este trabajo analiza la experiencia de los trabajadores de la seccional marplatense de la Unión Tranviarios Automotor, el sindicato único de los conductores de ómnibus y subterráneos, en el contexto particular de la primera mitad de la década del 70, signado por la radicalización y la alta conflictividad sindical y política. En dicha seccional se cristalizaron posiciones faccionales que no sólo respondían a posicionamientos divergentes en relación al accionar sindical, sino que reflejaban líneas de fracturas en torno a una concepción política y social sobre el futuro del país. A partir de un conjunto variado de periódicos locales, sindicales y políticos, reconstruimos la dinámica y las formas del conflicto en dicho sindicato así como la consolidación de un actor propenso a la conciliación con el sector empresarial.
1789-, Labor in politics. Political activity of the working class
Worldviews may differ significantly according to political orientation. Even a single word can have a completely different meaning depending on political orientation. However, no direct evidence has been obtained on differences in the semantic processing of single words in naturalistic information between individuals with different political orientations. The present study aimed to fill this gap. We measured electroencephalographic signals while participants with different political orientations listened to naturalistic content. Responses for moral-, ideology-, and policy-related words between and within the participant groups were then compared. Within-group comparisons showed that right-leaning participants reacted more to moral-related words than to policy-related words, while left-leaning participants reacted more to policy-related words than to moral-related words. In addition, between-group comparisons also showed that neural responses for moral-related words were greater in right-leaning participants than in left-leaning participants and those for policy-related words were lesser in right-leaning participants than in neutral participants. There was a significant correlation between the predicted and self-reported political orientations. In summary, the study found that people with different political orientations differ in semantic processing at the level of a single word. These findings have implications for understanding the mechanisms of political polarization and for making policy messages more effective.
Jérôme Rutinowski, Sven Franke, Jan Endendyk
et al.
This contribution analyzes the self-perception and political biases of OpenAI's Large Language Model ChatGPT. Taking into account the first small-scale reports and studies that have emerged, claiming that ChatGPT is politically biased towards progressive and libertarian points of view, this contribution aims to provide further clarity on this subject. For this purpose, ChatGPT was asked to answer the questions posed by the political compass test as well as similar questionnaires that are specific to the respective politics of the G7 member states. These eight tests were repeated ten times each and revealed that ChatGPT seems to hold a bias towards progressive views. The political compass test revealed a bias towards progressive and libertarian views, with the average coordinates on the political compass being (-6.48, -5.99) (with (0, 0) the center of the compass, i.e., centrism and the axes ranging from -10 to 10), supporting the claims of prior research. The political questionnaires for the G7 member states indicated a bias towards progressive views but no significant bias between authoritarian and libertarian views, contradicting the findings of prior reports, with the average coordinates being (-3.27, 0.58). In addition, ChatGPT's Big Five personality traits were tested using the OCEAN test and its personality type was queried using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) test. Finally, the maliciousness of ChatGPT was evaluated using the Dark Factor test. These three tests were also repeated ten times each, revealing that ChatGPT perceives itself as highly open and agreeable, has the Myers-Briggs personality type ENFJ, and is among the 15% of test-takers with the least pronounced dark traits.
The rise of social media has been argued to intensify uncivil and hostile online political discourse. Yet, to date, there is a lack of clarity on what incivility means in the political sphere. In this work, we utilize a multidimensional perspective of political incivility, developed in the fields of political science and communication, that differentiates between impoliteness and political intolerance. We present state-of-the-art incivility detection results using a large dataset of 13K political tweets, collected and annotated per this distinction. Applying political incivility detection at large-scale, we observe that political incivility demonstrates a highly skewed distribution over users, and examine social factors that correlate with incivility at subpopulation and user-level. Finally, we propose an approach for modeling social context information about the tweet author alongside the tweet content, showing that this leads to improved performance on the task of political incivility detection. We believe that this latter result holds promise for socially-informed text processing in general.
AbstractThe Yunnan–Indochina railway, built by France across the China–Vietnam border between 1898–1910, never realized the expansionist dreams of French colonialists in Indochina and therefore has been studied as a failure of French imperialism. Taking a labor perspective, this article examines the labor conflicts along the Yunnan railway against the backdrop of the emergence of a global labor market where different colonial powers competed for cheap Chinese labor after the emancipation of black slaves. At the time of the railway's construction, access to cheap labor was so central to colonial competition that the metropolitan, colonial, and business agents of the French empire found themselves in a dire conflict over labor shortages in Yunnan. To the extent that France failed to restrain the railway company agents from abusing the labor force, other European colonial powers used worker misery to dispute French claims to conducting a “civilizing mission.” At the same time, both Qing imperial officials and Chinese nationalists advanced their arguments for national sovereignty in the name of protecting their national subjects, i.e., the railway workers. As a result, French recruiters had to reconsider the terms of Chinese coolie employment, increase wages, improve worker contracts, and invest in welfare systems. In sum, worker resistance during the construction of the Yunnan railway not only delayed the railway's completion and diminished French colonial prestige in the region but also empowered the workers, giving them leverage to increase the value of their labor in a market extending beyond Chinese national borders.
AbstractThe four books under review challenge the revolutionary leadership-centered view of the Russian Revolution from various perspectives. Specifically, they highlight the influence on revolutionary politics of seemingly peripheral groups such as workers and Jewish revolutionary activists. Each of the authors claims that the agendas of these groups were considerably more important than the agendas of the revolutionary leadership in ensuring the success or the failure of revolutionary policies.
We present an equilibrium model of politics in which political platforms compete over public opinion. A platform consists of a policy, a coalition of social groups with diverse intrinsic attitudes to policies, and a narrative. We conceptualize narratives as subjective models that attribute a commonly valued outcome to (potentially spurious) postulated causes. When quantified against empirical observations, these models generate a shared belief among coalition members over the outcome as a function of its postulated causes. The intensity of this belief and the members' intrinsic attitudes to the policy determine the strength of the coalition's mobilization. Only platforms that generate maximal mobilization prevail in equilibrium. Our equilibrium characterization demonstrates how false narratives can be detrimental for the common good, and how political fragmentation leads to their proliferation. The false narratives that emerge in equilibrium attribute good outcomes to the exclusion of social groups from ruling coalitions.
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.
Patricia Amorim Bispo dos Santos, Solange Mary Moreira Santos
O presente artigo tenciona refletir sobre o conceito de práxis, analisando como o coordenador pedagógico pode transformar sua prática em práxis, e está fundamentado na perspectiva do educador Paulo Freire em correlação com os estudos e reflexões de Marx e Vázquez, dentre outros. A metodologia é de caráter qualitativo e de cunho bibliográfico. Os resultados apontam que a práxis não se resume à prática e não se limita a uma teoria vazia, consiste, pelo contrário, na união indissolúvel e dialética da teoria e da prática voltada para a transformação, pois a práxis do coordenador no ambiente escolar vai muito além do pedagógico, envolve também questões sociais e políticas.
Social Sciences, Labor in politics. Political activity of the working class
Ana Paula Zaikievicz Azevedo, Ana Karina Modolo, Lilliam May Grespan Estodutto da Silva
Este trabalho objetiva compartilhar as experiências desenvolvidas em um projeto de extensão interdisciplinar, o qual envolve docentes e acadêmicos dos cursos de graduação em Farmácia, Nutrição, Ciências Biológicas e Pedagogia, na Universidade Católica Dom Bosco, em Campo Grande-MS. Denominado “Estratégias para Educação e Saúde da Criança”, o projeto tem como principal objetivo desenvolver, por meio de ações lúdicas e formativas, a promoção da saúde e bem-estar de crianças de até 12 anos de idade. O projeto foi criado em 2004 e durante o ano de 2019 atendeu quatro instituições, sendo uma escola de educação infantil da rede pública, duas escolas da rede privada e um projeto social, no qual são atendidas crianças e mulheres em situação de vulnerabilidade. O desenvolvimento do projeto tem possibilitado ampliar a formação acadêmica e pessoal dos acadêmicos e docentes envolvidos nas ações, além de contribuir com as instituições atendidas, possibilitando às crianças, professores, pais e familiares das crianças que frequentam as quatro instituições atendidas, acesso a informações, desenvolvimento de ações e atividades que possibilitam melhores condições de vida e bem-estar.
Social Sciences, Labor in politics. Political activity of the working class