We develop a theory of distributive competition under redistricting that explains both electoral outcomes and the equilibrium allocation of policy benefits by endogenizing voter pivotality. In a multi-district model with primaries, general elections, and group-targeted transfers, districting shapes political influence through two channels: a selection channel for descriptive representation (who wins office) and a competition channel for substantive representation (who receives policy benefits). District composition alters candidate matchups, shifting voter responsiveness and political leverage, and each channel alone yields distinct predictions about whether packing or cracking voters is optimal. For minority voters, the welfare effects of districting depend on electoral leverage, preferences over descriptive versus partisan representation, primary rules, and competitiveness. The channels align on packing when minorities are electorally weak and value descriptive representation, and align on cracking when minorities are electorally pivotal and prioritize partisan outcomes. When the channels diverge, or when endogenous feedback reshapes electoral leverage, minority welfare can be nonmonotonic in voter concentration. Our results identify when majority-minority districts enhance minority welfare and when dispersion strengthens political influence.
Frederik J. Zuiderveen Borgesius, Judith Möller, Sanne Kruikemeier
et al.
Online political microtargeting involves monitoring people's online behaviour, and using the collected data, sometimes enriched with other data, to show people-targeted political advertisements. Online political microtargeting is widely used in the US; Europe may not be far behind. This paper maps microtargeting's promises and threats to democracy. For example, microtargeting promises to optimise the match between the electorate's concerns and political campaigns, and to boost campaign engagement and political participation. But online microtargeting could also threaten democracy. For instance, a political party could, misleadingly, present itself as a different one-issue party to different individuals. And data collection for microtargeting raises privacy concerns. We sketch possibilities for policymakers if they seek to regulate online political microtargeting. We discuss which measures would be possible, while complying with the right to freedom of expression under the European Convention on Human Rights.
Muhammad Hassan Bin Afzal, Paula Daniela Ganga, Oindrila Roy
et al.
We investigate the determinants of voting behavior by focusing on the direct effect of educational attainment, sociodemographic characteristics, partisan identity, and political ideology on the intention to vote, registration, and turnout. We use the cumulative CCES dataset to explore voting behavior for the 2014 and 2018 midterm elections and the 2016 and 2020 general elections. We propose a new Voting Engagement Index (VEI) to assess these factors' cumulative impact on electoral participation. Our analysis shows that education consistently motivates voting behavior, while gender, race, and ethnicity significantly shape engagement levels. Mainly, Black and Middle Eastern Americans exhibit higher voting engagement, whereas Native Americans and females display lower odds of voting engagement. Although Native Americans and women express a clear intention to vote in upcoming elections with increased attainment, the intention is not fully realized in voter registration and voting during midterms and general elections. Income and home ownership also become apparent as strong predictors of voter engagement. This research contributes to understanding the changing aspects of voter motivation and participation, with implications for grassroots-level mobilization, including unheard voting voices in U.S. elections, more inclusive and just voting policies and future electoral studies.
El artículo analiza cómo un sector del radicalismo de San Francisco (Córdoba) integró en una sola identidad repudiable al comunismo y al fascismo para desprestigiar al intendente, también radical, Serafín Trigueros de Godoy durante 1932-1936. Desde una mirada local se busca contribuir a la comprensión del impacto que tuvieron en Argentina las polarizaciones ideológicas internacionales. En particular, cómo y por qué fue posible para un sector del radicalismo combinar discursos circulantes aparentemente antagónicos como el anticomunista y el antifascista. También, cómo impactó la orientación frentepopulista del Partido Comunista en una localidad donde este tenía una relevante inserción social.
1789-, Labor in politics. Political activity of the working class
Increasingly online platforms are becoming popular arenas of political amplification in India. With known instances of pre-organized coordinated operations, researchers are questioning the legitimacy of political expression and its consequences on the democratic processes in India. In this paper, we study an evolved form of political amplification by first identifying and then characterizing political campaigns with lexical mutations. By lexical mutation, we mean content that is reframed, paraphrased, or altered while preserving the same underlying message. Using multilingual embeddings and network analysis, we detect over 3.8K political campaigns with text mutations spanning multiple languages and social media platforms in India. By further assessing the political leanings of accounts repeatedly involved in such amplification campaigns, we contribute a broader understanding of how political amplification is used across various political parties in India. Moreover, our temporal analysis of the largest amplification campaigns suggests that political campaigning can evolve as temporally ordered arguments and counter-arguments between groups with competing political interests. Overall, our work contributes insights into how lexical mutations can be leveraged to bypass the platform manipulation policies and how such competing campaigning can provide an exaggerated sense of political divide on Indian social media.
Search engines like Google have become major information gatekeepers that use artificial intelligence (AI) to determine who and what voters find when searching for political information. This article proposes and tests a framework of algorithmic representation of minoritized groups in a series of four studies. First, two algorithm audits of political image searches delineate how search engines reflect and uphold structural inequalities by under- and misrepresenting women and non-white politicians. Second, two online experiments show that these biases in algorithmic representation in turn distort perceptions of the political reality and actively reinforce a white and masculinized view of politics. Together, the results have substantive implications for the scientific understanding of how AI technology amplifies biases in political perceptions and decision-making. The article contributes to ongoing public debates and cross-disciplinary research on algorithmic fairness and injustice.
Social media users express their political preferences via interaction with other users, by spontaneous declarations or by participation in communities within the network. This makes a social network such as Twitter a valuable data source to study computational science approaches to political learning inference. In this work we focus on three diverse regions in Spain (Basque Country, Catalonia and Galicia) to explore various methods for multi-party categorization, required to analyze evolving and complex political landscapes, and compare it with binary left-right approaches. We use a two-step method involving unsupervised user representations obtained from the retweets and their subsequent use for political leaning detection. Comprehensive experimentation on a newly collected and curated dataset comprising labeled users and their interactions demonstrate the effectiveness of using Relational Embeddings as representation method for political ideology detection in both binary and multi-party frameworks, even with limited training data. Finally, data visualization illustrates the ability of the Relational Embeddings to capture intricate intra-group and inter-group political affinities.
Ken Kato, Annabelle Purnomo, Christopher Cochrane
et al.
The quantitative analysis of political ideological positions is a difficult task. In the past, various literature focused on parliamentary voting data of politicians, party manifestos and parliamentary speech to estimate political disagreement and polarization in various political systems. However previous methods of quantitative political analysis suffered from a common challenge which was the amount of data available for analysis. Also previous methods frequently focused on a more general analysis of politics such as overall polarization of the parliament or party-wide political ideological positions. In this paper, we present a method to analyze ideological positions of individual parliamentary representatives by leveraging the latent knowledge of LLMs. The method allows us to evaluate the stance of politicians on an axis of our choice allowing us to flexibly measure the stance of politicians in regards to a topic/controversy of our choice. We achieve this by using a fine-tuned BERT classifier to extract the opinion-based sentences from the speeches of representatives and projecting the average BERT embeddings for each representative on a pair of reference seeds. These reference seeds are either manually chosen representatives known to have opposing views on a particular topic or they are generated sentences which where created using the GPT-4 model of OpenAI. We created the sentences by prompting the GPT-4 model to generate a speech that would come from a politician defending a particular position.
Hongzhou Chen, Xiaolin Duan, Abdulmotaleb El Saddik
et al.
Harnessing the transparent blockchain user behavior data, we construct the Political Betting Leaning Score (PBLS) to measure political leanings based on betting within Web3 prediction markets. Focusing on Polymarket and starting from the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election, we synthesize behaviors over 15,000 addresses across 4,500 events and 8,500 markets, capturing the intensity and direction of their political leanings by the PBLS. We validate the PBLS through internal consistency checks and external comparisons. We uncover relationships between our PBLS and betting behaviors through over 800 features capturing various behavioral aspects. A case study of the 2022 U.S. Senate election further demonstrates the ability of our measurement while decoding the dynamic interaction between political and profitable motives. Our findings contribute to understanding decision-making in decentralized markets, enhancing the analysis of behaviors within Web3 prediction environments. The insights of this study reveal the potential of blockchain in enabling innovative, multidisciplinary studies and could inform the development of more effective online prediction markets, improve the accuracy of forecast, and help the design and optimization of platform mechanisms. The data and code for the paper are accessible at the following link: https://github.com/anonymous.
Yelena Mejova, Jisun An, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales
et al.
The United States have some of the highest rates of gun violence among developed countries. Yet, there is a disagreement about the extent to which firearms should be regulated. In this study, we employ social media signals to examine the predictors of offline political activism, at both population and individual level. We show that it is possible to classify the stance of users on the gun issue, especially accurately when network information is available. Alongside socioeconomic variables, network information such as the relative size of the two sides of the debate is also predictive of state-level gun policy. On individual level, we build a statistical model using network, content, and psycho-linguistic features that predicts real-life political action, and explore the most predictive linguistic features. Thus, we argue that, alongside demographics and socioeconomic indicators, social media provides useful signals in the holistic modeling of political engagement around the gun debate.
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.
Reliance on third-party libraries is now commonplace in contemporary software engineering. Being open source in nature, these libraries should advocate for a world where the freedoms and opportunities of open source software can be enjoyed by all. Yet, there is a growing concern related to maintainers using their influence to make political stances (i.e., referred to as protestware). In this paper, we reflect on the impact of world politics on software ecosystems, especially in the context of the ongoing War in Ukraine. We show three cases where world politics has had an impact on a software ecosystem, and how these incidents may result in either benign or malignant consequences. We further point to specific opportunities for research, and conclude with a research agenda with ten research questions to guide future research directions.
Politically sensitive topics are still a challenge for open-domain chatbots. However, dealing with politically sensitive content in a responsible, non-partisan, and safe behavior way is integral for these chatbots. Currently, the main approach to handling political sensitivity is by simply changing such a topic when it is detected. This is safe but evasive and results in a chatbot that is less engaging. In this work, as a first step towards a politically safe chatbot, we propose a group of metrics for assessing their political prudence. We then conduct political prudence analysis of various chatbots and discuss their behavior from multiple angles through our automatic metric and human evaluation metrics. The testsets and codebase are released to promote research in this area.
O presente artigo tem por objetivo refletir sobre a importância, para o ensino do Direito e a promoção de direitos fundamentais, do Projeto de Extensão “Ouvidoria Acolhidas”, desenvolvido na Universidade Federal de Uberlândia (UFU). O artigo está dividido em três partes. Inicialmente, apresenta-se o surgimento do Projeto e seu escopo. Em seguida, destacam-se as principais frentes de trabalho estabelecidas em seus dois primeiros anos de atuação, enfatizando-se a consolidação das ações para a busca de soluções jurídicas, transformações institucionais e enfretamento da desigualdade, violência e agressão de gênero na comunidade interna da Instituição, bem como a sua inserção num contexto mais amplo de criação de ouvidorias e redes de enfrentamento à violência em diversas instituições públicas de ensino do país nos últimos anos. Por fim, destacam-se os pontos positivos obtidos durante o período, estabelecendo-se a importância das atividades de extensão como meio de redução das diversas formas de agressão e violência de gênero praticadas no ambiente universitário.
Social Sciences, Labor in politics. Political activity of the working class
Este artículo estudia la “gran huelga” que tuvo lugar en la ciudad de Rosario, Argentina, en agosto de 1896. Declarada en solidaridad con los ferroviarios de Tolosa, se transformó en general por la adhesión de todas las sociedades sindicales de la ciudad. Se reconstruye el episodio, se analiza la actuación de los protagonistas y la acción del Estado, proponiendo una interpretación centrada en las peculiaridades del contexto social y político en el que ocurrió.
1789-, Labor in politics. Political activity of the working class
Wandilson Alisson Silva Lima, Anne Karynne Guimarães Ramos
A transparência pública é considerada um dispositivo da gestão fiscal responsável, ligado ao princípio constitucional da publicidade. Todos temos o direito e o dever de fiscalizar a aplicação das receitas oriundas de diversas fontes, por intermédio da exposição de ações públicas. De tal modo, este texto objetiva descrever os resultados de um projeto de extensão que buscou promover a transparência do IF Sertão PE Campus Santa Maria da Boa Vista, demonstrando a importância e as principais informações institucionais para o público-alvo. A metodologia do projeto se deu em quatro etapas: preparação, divulgação, realização e avaliação, que foram executadas em 4 escolas públicas com aproximadamente 250 estudantes, em 2017. Em suma, as ações do projeto foram consideradas relevantes, os alunos revelaram que não conheciam o Instituto Federal, nem possuíam o hábito de acessas as informações públicas pelo portal. Realizaram-se visitas técnicas ao Campus a fim de incentivar uma maior aproximação entre Instituto e comunidade. Além de cumprir com aspecto legal, as visitas nas escolas e no Instituto foram caminhos viáveis à troca de saberes e conhecimentos quanto à transparência pública sobre temas relacionados ao contexto histórico, ensino, assistência estudantil, pesquisa, inovação, extensão, cultura e orçamento institucional, proporcionando também o controle social.
Social Sciences, Labor in politics. Political activity of the working class
El presente trabajo explora las repercusiones que produjo la Guerra Civil española en el movimiento anarquista argentino, exponiendo las acciones solidarias desplegadas, los vínculos asociativos entablados, la trayectoria de los voluntarios que viajaron a participar directamente del conflicto armado y los debates políticos originados como reacción al rumbo fijado por las organizaciones libertarias de España. Nos abocaremos a analizar lo actuado por las entidades más representativas del campo libertario de Buenos Aires: Federación Anarco Comunista Argentina, Alianza Obrera Spartacus, periódico La Protesta y Federación Obrera Regional Argentina, de forma de proporcionar una mirada integral de lo realizado por los anarquistas locales.
1789-, Labor in politics. Political activity of the working class
Online political advertisements have become an important element in electoral campaigning throughout the world. At the same time, concepts such as disinformation and manipulation have emerged as a global concern. Although these concepts are distinct from online political ads and data-driven electoral campaigning, they tend to share a similar trait related to valence, the intrinsic attractiveness or averseness of a message. Given this background, the paper examines online political ads by using a dataset collected from Google's transparency reports. The examination is framed to the mid-2019 situation in Europe, including the European Parliament elections in particular. According to the results based on sentiment analysis of the textual ads displayed via Google's advertisement machinery, (i) most of the political ads have expressed positive sentiments, although these vary greatly between (ii) European countries as well as across (iii) European political parties. In addition to these results, the paper contributes to the timely discussion about data-driven electoral campaigning and its relation to politics and democracy.