This paper presents a longitudinal open dataset of Spanish public procurement extracted from the Official State Gazette (BOE) covering the period 2014-2024. The dataset integrates structured information on contracts, contracting authorities, suppliers, amounts, and procedures, enabling large-scale quantitative analysis of public procurement dynamics in Spain. We describe the data extraction and normalization pipeline, provide descriptive statistical analyses of temporal and sectoral trends, and discuss potential applications in transparency research, public policy evaluation, and computational social science. The dataset is released to facilitate reproducible research on public procurement and government contracting.
Crises and disasters feature high on political and public agendas around the world. Practitioners wrestle with the challenge to provide protection while maintaining legitimacy. They pine for insights that lie at the heart of public administration: designing effective institutions and preserving transparency; enabling and empowering citizens without undermining a coordinated response; balancing long‐term risks against short‐term needs; bridging the divide between theory and practice, and between the public and private sectors. But in the debates about designing institutions that protect against transboundary threats and critical infrastructure failures, the public administration community is strangely absent. It has parked itself on the sideline, concerning itself with the routine processes of governance. In this article, we argue that the time has come for public administration scholars to incorporate crisis and disaster management into the main research agendas of the field.
Електронні документи, обмін такими документами, засвідченими електронним підписом і печаткою, все частіше застосують у всіх царинах життя суспільства. У сфері приватно-правових відносин він прискорює процедуру укладання договорів. Підвищення ефективності їх підписання, своєю чергою, дозволяє прискорити виконання договірних відносин і тим самим підвищити якість обслуговування клієнтів, партнерів і постачальників. Стаття присвячена аналізові правового регулювання електронної ідентифікації та електронних довірчих послуг. Автори акцентують увагу на важливості гармонізації українського законодавства з правом Європейського Союзу у відповідній царині. Проаналізовано спроби втілити досвід міжнародних стандартів щодо електронної ідентифікації та електронних довірчих послуг у національне законодавство. Стаття присвячена вивченню змісту термінів «електронний підпис» та «електронна печатка» у межах дослідження видів указаних понять, зокрема: удосконалений електронний підпис та печатка, кваліфікований електронний підпис та печатка. Також акцентовано увагу на тих вимогах, під які суворо підпадає кваліфікація електронного підпису й печатки. У межах дослідження чинного законодавства загалом і судових практик зокрема з’ясовані правові наслідки відсутності на електронних документах електронного підпису або печатки. Для прикладу, у випадках відсутності на електронних документах електронного підпису або печатки внеможливлюється ідентифікація відправника того чи іншого повідомлення. Крім того, у такому випадку доцільно відзначити й незахищеність такого типу документа від можливості корекції тексту чи правки. Відтак констатовано, що у випадку відсутності в електронному документі електронного підпису чи печатки, такий документ не розглядають у судовому процесі як доказ. Підтримано позицію про те, що на національному рівні договір між сторонами, підписаний не з використанням кваліфікованого електронного підпису, не означатиме недійсність такого договору, тому використання звичайного та вдосконаленого електронних підписів є цілком законним і створюватиме права та обов'язки для сторін, котрі підписали такий договір.
Education (General), Theory and practice of education
The coastal commons are increasingly contested around the world, coming under pressure from competing interests. In particular, the discourses of ‘blue economy’ and ‘blue growth’ have become powerful buzzwords, giving rise to concerns about the impacts on communities depending on coastal resources, such as small-scale fishers. In Norway, aquaculture is the second-most important export industry in the country, but there are increasing conflicts with other interests, including small-scale fishers and coastal Sami. In this article, I trace how the push for gaining recognition for a State-backed fundamental right to fish for small-scale fishers in Finnmark, including coastal Sami, was modified and rescaled to become an issue of balancing competing interests at the local level through municipal planning processes. Drawing on insights from socio-spatial scholarship, I argue that more explicit attention to spatialities of coastal conflicts is important in understanding conflicts in the coastal commons. I propose the term ‘blue spatial justice’ as a means to supplement and enrich the existing concept of blue justice to encompass a sensibility to the spatial dimensions of justice struggles.
Political institutions and public administration (General)
The aim of this study is to shed light on legal issues of proceedings in the case of granting cash benefits under social assistance in the aspect of one of the negative obligatory premises, i.e. lack of consent for a family interview (Article 107(4a) of the Social Assistance Act). This study is part two of an article whose part one focused on selected optional negative premises. The interview referred to above, carried out in particular with persons (families) applying for social assistance support, is intended to detail comprehensively the applicant’s situation, taking into account all circumstances of the case that may affect the right to a specific cash
benefit. Given this, a refusal to take part in such interview, and thus making it impossible to establish facts relating to the applicant’s situation, forces a refusal to grant a cash benefit. This article intends, inter alia, to approximate the understanding of the meaning of the phrase “lack of consent”, which belongs to the category of undefined concepts. The article attempts to answer the question of whether relevant legal measures stipulated in the Social Assistance Act are sufficiently precise and clearly formulated to facilitate and, as a result, enable social assistance authorities to make decisions on the granting of cash benefits from social assistance, and if not, whether judicial decisions of administrative courts may be helpful here. This study is based on an analysis of the provisions of the Social Assistance Act, views of legal scholars and commentators and judicial decisions of administrative courts. The provisions of the quoted legal act – given the premise in question – do not seem to be formulated clearly and precisely enough (similar to what is the case of optional negative premises) to facilitate social assistance bodies in issuing decisions in cases of granting cash benefits from social assistance. This is due to the legislator’s failure to specify the phrase cited. For purely objective reasons, it does not seem entirely possible, which does not change the fact that in practice it leads to many doubts in interpretation. Some help in determining its meaning may be provided by judicial decisions of administrative courts.
Law, Political institutions and public administration (General)
We describe the methods and technologies underlying the application Grants4Companies. The application uses a logic-based expert system to display a list of business grants suitable for the logged-in business. To evaluate suitability of the grants, formal representations of their conditions are evaluated against properties of the business, taken from the registers of the Austrian public administration. The logical language for the representations of the grant conditions is based on S-expressions. We further describe a Proof of Concept implementation of reasoning over the formalised grant conditions. The proof of concept is implemented in Common Lisp and interfaces with a reasoning engine implemented in Scryer Prolog. The application has recently gone live and is provided as part of the Business Service Portal by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Finance.
Christina P. Walker, Daniel S. Schiff, Kaylyn Jackson Schiff
This article presents the Political Deepfakes Incidents Database (PDID), a collection of politically-salient deepfakes, encompassing synthetically-created videos, images, and less-sophisticated `cheapfakes.' The project is driven by the rise of generative AI in politics, ongoing policy efforts to address harms, and the need to connect AI incidents and political communication research. The database contains political deepfake content, metadata, and researcher-coded descriptors drawn from political science, public policy, communication, and misinformation studies. It aims to help reveal the prevalence, trends, and impact of political deepfakes, such as those featuring major political figures or events. The PDID can benefit policymakers, researchers, journalists, fact-checkers, and the public by providing insights into deepfake usage, aiding in regulation, enabling in-depth analyses, supporting fact-checking and trust-building efforts, and raising awareness of political deepfakes. It is suitable for research and application on media effects, political discourse, AI ethics, technology governance, media literacy, and countermeasures.
Dongyun Han, Abdullah-Al-Raihan Nayeem, Jason Windett
et al.
Politics is the set of activities related to strategic decision-making in groups. Political scientists study the strategic interactions between states, institutions, politicians, and citizens; they seek to understand the causes and consequences of those decisions and interactions. While some decisions might alleviate social problems, others might lead to disasters such as war and conflict. Data visualization approaches have the potential to assist political scientists in their studies by providing visual contexts. However, political researchers' perspectives on data visualization are unclear. This paper examines political scientists' perspectives on visualization and how they apply data visualization in their research. We discovered a growing trend in the use of graphs in political science journals. However, we also found a knowledge gap between the political science and visualization domains, such as effective visualization techniques for tasks and the use of color studied by visualization researchers. To reduce this gap, we survey visualization techniques applicable to the political scientists' research and report the visual analytics systems implemented for and evaluated by political scientists. At the end of this paper, we present an outline of future opportunities, including research topics and methodologies, for multidisciplinary research in political science and data analytics. Through this paper, we expect visualization researchers to get a better grasp of the political science domain, as well as broaden the possibility of future visualization approaches from a multidisciplinary perspective.
The article is devoted to the analysis of the digitization process and cooperation between Ukraine and the member states of the European Union. The peculiarities of digitization in Ukraine are analyzed as integral components of the process of reconstruction, modernization of the Ukrainian economy and the construction of high-quality European infrastructure, with the aim of joining the state to the European and Euro-Atlantic community. An analysis of the state of reforms in Ukraine in the direction of digitization of services, their accessibility to citizens, the development of electronic governance, and ensuring the transparency of public information in the form of open data was carried out. Legislative and regulatory support in the field of functioning and development of e-government in the EU countries and in Ukraine, in particular, in the direction of digital transformation of the government and fulfillment of international obligations by Ukraine, is analyzed. The research data of European and international institutions on the development of e-governance, ICT, human potential, open data and e-services in the world and Ukraine are analyzed and systematized. It has been established that in Ukraine there is a high readiness to use digital technologies. One of the forms of direct support by EU countries for digitalization in Ukraine is the signing in September 2022 of an agreement with the European Commission on Ukraine's accession to the Digital Europe Program. It is determined that Ukrainian enterprises, organizations and public administration bodies will be able to benefit from the financing and support of the Program in such areas as artificial intelligence, supercomputing and digital skills. It has been proven that since digitization in Ukraine contributes to the technological and democratic development of the country, the modernization of its economy, the availability of public services, and the transparency of government, accordingly, Ukraine will need support and further cooperation from the world's leading technology companies in Europe and the world to implement systemic reforms and post-war reconstruction.
Political institutions and public administration (General)
Public libraries play a crucial role in disseminating knowledge to society. However, most of their users do not have the specialized knowledge to understand the new research findings. Providing plain language summaries (PLSs) in public libraries is a way to make the new research findings more accessible and understandable for the public. This article proposes a framework for providing PLSs as a new service in public libraries. Drawing from the literature on science and society, PLSs, and public libraries, a theoretical framework is developed. The findings suggest that public libraries can collect PLSs through different methods, such as professional teams, researchers, crowdsourcing, etc. Library newsletters, special publications, brochures, independent online databases, and social networks are among the most effective for making PLSs accessible to users. By proposing a framework for providing PLSs in public libraries, this study helps to bridge the gap between scientific research and the public.
Alexander Lew, Sydney Thompson, Nathan Tsoi
et al.
Deploying interactive systems in-the-wild requires adaptability to situations not encountered in lab environments. Our work details our experience about the impact of architecture choice on behavior reusability and reactivity while deploying a public interactive system. In particular, we introduce Shutter, a robot photographer and a platform for public interaction. In designing Shutter's architecture, we focused on adaptability for in-the-wild deployment, while developing a reusable platform to facilitate future research in public human-robot interaction. We find that behavior trees allow reactivity, especially in group settings, and encourage designing reusable behaviors.
Joseba Fernandez de Landa, Arkaitz Zubiaga, Rodrigo Agerri
An ability to infer the political leaning of social media users can help in gathering opinion polls thereby leading to a better understanding of public opinion. While there has been a body of research attempting to infer the political leaning of social media users, this has been typically simplified as a binary classification problem (e.g. left vs right) and has been limited to a single location, leading to a dearth of investigation into more complex, multiclass classification and its generalizability to different locations, particularly those with multi-party systems. Our work performs the first such effort by studying political leaning inference in three of the UK's nations (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), each of which has a different political landscape composed of multiple parties. To do so, we collect and release a dataset comprising users labelled by their political leaning as well as interactions with one another. We investigate the ability to predict the political leaning of users by leveraging these interactions in challenging scenarios such as few-shot learning, where training data is scarce, as well as assessing the applicability to users with different levels of political engagement. We show that interactions in the form of retweets between users can be a very powerful feature to enable political leaning inference, leading to consistent and robust results across different regions with multi-party systems. However, we also see that there is room for improvement in predicting the political leaning of users who are less engaged in politics.
Tania Andari, Vivi Ukhwatul Khasanah Masbiran, Momon Momon
et al.
Beberapa tahun belakangan ini pemerintah sedang gencar mengajak masyarakat untuk menggunakan transportasi umum bagi seluruh penduduk daerah di Indonesia. Mattson dkk. (2021) berpendapat sudah bahwa transportasi dan aksesibilitas di desa lebih luas dan kompleks persoalan transportasinya. Oleh karena itu penelitian ini dilakukan untuk mengukur pelayanan jasa angkutan pedesaan dalam rangka meningkatkan kinerja transportasi umum di Kabupaten Pringsewu. Metode yang digunakan adalah mixed method, yakni menggabungkan data kuantitatif dan data kualitatif dalam satu waktu (Creswell, 2014). Yaitu data dianalisis secara kuantitatif dan selanjutnya dijelaskan berdasarkan kondisi existing serta dugaan sementara. Data yang digunakan adalah data primer dan sekunder. Data primer diperoleh melalui survei lapangan pada empat trayek angkutan pedesaan yang ada di Kabupaten Pringsewu untuk mendapatkan data faktor beban, kecepatan kendaraan, waktu tunggu, waktu perjalanan, frekuensi/jam, dan jumlah kendaraan yang beroperasi dari tiap rute. Selanjutnya data tersebut dievaluasi dan diberikan penilaian berdasarkan kesesuaian indikator berdasarkan standar penilaian dari Direktorat Jenderal Perhubungan Darat Kementerian Perhubungan. Data Sekunder diperoleh dari publikasi Badan Pusat Statistik, dokumen resmi, situs web resmi pemerintah. Hasil analisis menunjukkan bahwa pelayanan angkutan pedesaan di kabupaten Pringsewu, berada di bawah standar ideal (70%), dengan rata-rata faktor muat 40—50% yang termasuk dalam kategori buruk. Hal ini diestimasi dipengaruhi oleh beberapa faktor yakni tingkat rendahnya load factor dan headway. Rekomendasi yang diajukan adalah perlunya dilakukan upaya untuk penambahan headway dan peningkatan kecepatan waktu perjalanan serta mengurangi frekuensi perjalanan untuk meningkatkan kinerja angkutan.
Political institutions and public administration (General)
Targeted advertising on online social platforms has become increasingly relevant in the political marketing toolkit. Monitoring political advertising is crucial to ensure accountability and transparency of democratic processes. Leveraging Meta public library of sponsored content, we study the extent to which political ads were delivered on Facebook and Instagram in the run up to 2022 Italian general election. Analyzing over 23 k unique ads paid by 2.7 k unique sponsors, with an associated amount spent of 4 M EUR and over 1 billion views generated, we investigate temporal, geographical, and demographic patterns of the political campaigning activity of main coalitions. We find results that are in accordance with their political agenda and the electoral outcome, highlighting how the most active coalitions also obtained most of the votes and showing regional differences that are coherent with the (targeted) political base of each group. Our work raises attention to the need for further studies of digital advertising and its implications for individuals' opinions and choices.
In Ukraine, Scopus data are used to evaluate academics. Existing shortcomings in the Ukrainian evaluation system allow them to publish in titles that have been delisted from Scopus, and continue to use those papers as credible research output for evaluation. The purpose of this study was to analyse the publishing activity of Ukrainian institutions in Scopus-delisted titles (as of September 2021) in different fields between 2011 and 2020 and to attempt to appreciate how common this practice is among Ukrainian authors. Scopus was sourced to collect bibliographic and citations-related data, while SciVal was used to analyse these data. The findings suggest that for 17 Ukrainian institutions, papers from titles that have been delisted from Scopus still play an important part of the publication achievement of their employees. In particular, in the field of economics, econometrics and finance, 46.92% of Ukrainian papers were published in a title that was excluded from Scopus. Moreover, the analysis indicated that in two Ukrainian institutions, the level of citation of such papers significantly exceeds the average number of citations to Scopus-indexed papers in the same year and in the same field. Given that bibliometric indicators are also used for research assessment in other Eastern European countries, the results of this paper are applicable to a wider geographic context.
Online political advertising is a central aspect of modern election campaigning for influencing public opinion. Computational analysis of political ads is of utmost importance in political science to understand the characteristics of digital campaigning. It is also important in computational linguistics to study features of political discourse and communication on a large scale. In this work, we present the first computational study on online political ads with the aim to (1) infer the political ideology of an ad sponsor; and (2) identify whether the sponsor is an official political party or a third-party organization. We develop two new large datasets for the two tasks consisting of ads from the U.S.. Evaluation results show that our approach that combines textual and visual information from pre-trained neural models outperforms a state-of-the-art method for generic commercial ad classification. Finally, we provide an in-depth analysis of the limitations of our best-performing models and linguistic analysis to study the characteristics of political ads discourse.
Assessing the effectiveness of the internal control system in the public sector is one of the surest way to identify if public institutions are working effectively to achieve corporate objectives. The objective of the study is to assess the effectiveness of the internal control systems in the MMDA’S. The study made use of convenience and purposive sampling method to sample data. It was observed that there is an existence of internal control system in the Adenta Municipal Assembly and it is very effective in the achievement of the Assembly’s objectives. The Writer recommended that the government should employ more personnel who are members of the professional bodies such as the ICA Ghana, ACCA, and CIMA into the unit, this is because with their knowledge and in-depth study of their profession it will help to reduce the problems of internal control as highlighted in this work.
Political institutions and public administration (General), Social sciences (General)