As sidewalk delivery robots become increasingly integrated into urban life, this paper begins with a critical provocation: Is robot labor labor? More than a rhetorical question, this inquiry invites closer attention to the social and political arrangements that robot labor entails. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork across two smart-city districts in Seoul, we examine how delivery robot labor is collectively sustained. While robotic actions are often framed as autonomous and efficient, we show that each successful delivery is in fact a distributed sociotechnical achievement--reliant on human labor, regulatory coordination, and social accommodations. We argue that delivery robots do not replace labor but reconfigure it--rendering some forms more visible (robotic performance) while obscuring others (human and institutional support). Unlike industrial robots, delivery robots operate in shared public space, engage everyday passersby, and are embedded in policy and progress narratives. In these spaces, we identify "robot privilege"--humans routinely yielding to robots--and distinct perceptions between casual observers ("cute") and everyday coexisters ("admirable"). We contribute a conceptual reframing of robot labor as a collective assemblage, empirical insights into South Korea's smart-city automation, and a call for HRI to engage more deeply with labor and spatial politics to better theorize public-facing robots.
This paper investigates the extent of political rent seeking in Hungary in the 2010s. Political capitalism--where powerful private interests influence public policy for private gain--creates opportunities for rent seeking that vary across sectors. The analysis is based on a theoretical model assuming rent seeking occurs in a three-stage process: changes in economic institutions granting regulatory privileges, which are enhanced by political-business networks; this leads to scarcities, and increased market power in certain markets; which then generates rents. To quantify this, the study evaluates Hungarian political capitalism by examining the impact of political decisions on firms' rents, analysing the profit trends of the 1,000 largest Hungarian firms (selected annually by net sales) and comparing their mean profit share (earnings before tax) across two periods: 2008-2012 and 2019-2023. A significant increase in a sector's mean profit share was assumed to indicate increased rent seeking. Using Welch's two-sample t-tests, three sectors were identified as potentially experiencing increased rent seeking: agriculture, construction, and financial and insurance activities. Quantitative findings include a 320% increase in mean agricultural profit share (70% in mean ROA), a more than fivefold increase in construction mean profit share (mean ROA from 3.3% to 10.1%), and a more than 6.5 times increase in financial sector mean profit share. Furthermore, a similar Czech analysis showed no significant increases in any sector's profit share, suggesting that the detected rises in Hungarian sectors are linked to domestic activities rather than external factors, which strengthens the findings.
Political biases in Large Language Model (LLM)-based artificial intelligence (AI) systems, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT or Google's Gemini, have been previously reported. While several prior studies have attempted to quantify these biases using political orientation tests, such approaches are limited by potential tests' calibration biases and constrained response formats that do not reflect real-world human-AI interactions. This study employs a multi-method approach to assess political bias in leading AI systems, integrating four complementary methodologies: (1) linguistic comparison of AI-generated text with the language used by Republican and Democratic U.S. Congress members, (2) analysis of political viewpoints embedded in AI-generated policy recommendations, (3) sentiment analysis of AI-generated text toward politically affiliated public figures, and (4) standardized political orientation testing. Results indicate a consistent left-leaning bias across most contemporary AI systems, with arguably varying degrees of intensity. However, this bias is not an inherent feature of LLMs; prior research demonstrates that fine-tuning with politically skewed data can realign these models across the ideological spectrum. The presence of systematic political bias in AI systems poses risks, including reduced viewpoint diversity, increased societal polarization, and the potential for public mistrust in AI technologies. To mitigate these risks, AI systems should be designed to prioritize factual accuracy while maintaining neutrality on most lawful normative issues. Furthermore, independent monitoring platforms are necessary to ensure transparency, accountability, and responsible AI development.
Social media broadly refers to digital platforms and applications that simulate social interactions online. This study investigates the impact of social media platforms and their algorithms on political interest among users. As social media usage continues to rise, platforms like Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) play increasingly pivotal roles in shaping political discourse. By employing statistical analyses on data collected from over 3,300 participants, this research identifies significant differences in how various social media platforms influence political interest. Findings reveal that moderate Facebook users demonstrate decreased political engagement, whereas even minimal engagement with X significantly boosts political interest. The study further identifies demographic variations, noting that males, older individuals, Black or African American users, those with higher incomes show greater political interest. The demographic analysis highlights that Republicans are particularly active on social media - potentially influencing their social media engagement patterns. However, the study acknowledges a crucial limitation - the lack of direct data regarding the content users are exposed to which is shaping their social media experiences. Future research should explore these influences and consider additional popular platforms to enhance the understanding of social media's political impact. Addressing these gaps can provide deeper insights into digital political mobilization, aiding policymakers, educators, and platform designers in fostering healthier democratic engagement.
Social media has reshaped political discourse, offering politicians a platform for direct engagement while reinforcing polarization and ideological divides. This study introduces a novel topic evolution framework that integrates BERTopic-based topic modeling with Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) to analyze the longevity and moral dimensions of political topics in Twitter activity during the 117th U.S. Congress. We propose a methodology for tracking dynamic topic shifts over time and measuring their association with moral values and quantifying topic persistence. Our findings reveal that while overarching themes remain stable, granular topics tend to dissolve rapidly, limiting their long-term influence. Moreover, moral foundations play a critical role in topic longevity, with Care and Loyalty dominating durable topics, while partisan differences manifest in distinct moral framing strategies. This work contributes to the field of social network analysis and computational political discourse by offering a scalable, interpretable approach to understanding moral-driven topic evolution on social media.
Reseña de Jacinto Cerdá, Negras tormentas. La FORA anarquista en la ciudad de Buenos Aires (1930-1943), Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Grupo Editor Universitario, 2023, 133 pgs.
1789-, Labor in politics. Political activity of the working class
O presente artigo busca apresentar como são socializados e mediados os saberes e conhecimentos dentro de um Terreiro de Candomblé, localizado na cidade de Jequié/BA, bem como apresentar a forma de mediação do conhecimento que acontece nele como antipedagógica, uma vez que sua estrutura está amparada nos saberes e nas práticas ancestrais e são ressemantizados e ressignificados. Por mais que apresentemos o tema como antipedagógico, percebemos que os conhecimentos são passados por meio de uma organização, que media o saber a partir de uma prática personalizada, fornecendo ao aprendiz a condição de um aprendizado singular proveniente de conhecimento pertencente ao grupo. Este artigo se lastreia teoricamente nas obras dos autores: Olivio (2016), Quijano (2005), Dore e Souza (2018), Gauthier (1998), Lima (2003), Prandi (2001), Braga (1998) e outros.
Social Sciences, Labor in politics. Political activity of the working class
A lot of business and research effort currently deals with the so called decentralised ledger technology blockchain. Putting it to use carries the tempting promise to make the intermediaries of social interactions superfluous and furthermore keep secure track of all interactions. Currently intermediaries such as banks and notaries are necessary and must be trusted, which creates great dependencies, as the financial crisis of 2008 painfully demonstrated. Especially banks and notaries are said to become dispensable as a result of using the blockchain. But in real-world applications of the blockchain, the power of central actors does not dissolve, it only shifts to new, democratically illegitimate, uncontrolled or even uncontrollable power centers. As interesting as the blockchain technically is, it doesn't efficiently solve any real-world problem and is no substitute for traditional political processes or democratic regulation of power. Research efforts investigating the blockchain should be halted.
As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly embedded in civic, educational, and political information environments, concerns about their potential political bias have grown. Prior research often evaluates such bias through simulated personas or predefined ideological typologies, which may introduce artificial framing effects or overlook how models behave in general use scenarios. This study adopts a persona-free, topic-specific approach to evaluate political behavior in LLMs, reflecting how users typically interact with these systems-without ideological role-play or conditioning. We introduce a two-dimensional framework: one axis captures partisan orientation on highly polarized topics (e.g., abortion, immigration), and the other assesses sociopolitical engagement on less polarized issues (e.g., climate change, foreign policy). Using survey-style prompts drawn from the ANES and Pew Research Center, we analyze responses from 43 LLMs developed in the U.S., Europe, China, and the Middle East. We propose an entropy-weighted bias score to quantify both the direction and consistency of partisan alignment, and identify four behavioral clusters through engagement profiles. Findings show most models lean center-left or left ideologically and vary in their nonpartisan engagement patterns. Model scale and openness are not strong predictors of behavior, suggesting that alignment strategy and institutional context play a more decisive role in shaping political expression.
Kai-Robin Lange, Jonas Rieger, Niklas Benner
et al.
From a monarchy to a democracy, to a dictatorship and back to a democracy -- the German political landscape has been constantly changing ever since the first German national state was formed in 1871. After World War II, the Federal Republic of Germany was formed in 1949. Since then every plenary session of the German Bundestag was logged and even has been digitized over the course of the last few years. We analyze these texts using a time series variant of the topic model LDA to investigate which events had a lasting effect on the political discourse and how the political topics changed over time. This allows us to detect changes in word frequency (and thus key discussion points) in political discourse.
We extend Langdon Winner's idea that artifacts have politics into the realm of mathematics. To do so, we first provide a list of examples showing the existence of mathematical artifacts that have politics. In the second step, we provide an argument that shows that all mathematical artifacts have politics. We conclude by showing the implications for embedding ethics into mathematical curricula. We show how acknowledging that mathematical artifacts have politics can help mathematicians design better exercises for their mathematics students.
Dominik Bär, Francesco Pierri, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales
et al.
Political advertising on social media has become a central element in election campaigns. However, granular information about political advertising on social media was previously unavailable, thus raising concerns regarding fairness, accountability, and transparency in the electoral process. In this paper, we analyze targeted political advertising on social media via a unique, large-scale dataset of over 80000 political ads from Meta during the 2021 German federal election, with more than 1.1 billion impressions. For each political ad, our dataset records granular information about targeting strategies, spending, and actual impressions. We then study (i) the prevalence of targeted ads across the political spectrum; (ii) the discrepancies between targeted and actual audiences due to algorithmic ad delivery; and (iii) which targeting strategies on social media attain a wide reach at low cost. We find that targeted ads are prevalent across the entire political spectrum. Moreover, there are considerable discrepancies between targeted and actual audiences, and systematic differences in the reach of political ads (in impressions-per-EUR) among parties, where the algorithm favors ads from populists over others.
Este artigo apresenta uma discussão sobre a importância da destinação correta dos resíduos sólidos, com enfoque no descarte de medicamentos e o papel que a educação ambiental tem nesse processo. A ação extensionista foi realizada no município de Francisco Beltrão, Paraná junto à Farmácia Municipal na Unidade Básica de Saúde Padre Ulrico. Após aquisição de dados, foi realizada uma campanha educativa buscando orientar a população acerca da importância do tema e dos problemas ambientais causados pela destinação incorreta dos medicamentos. Como resultado, foi elaborado um banner, que foi fixado no setor de atendimento da Farmácia Municipal, além de panfletos para distribuição à população, e divulgação do trabalho por meio de entrevistas em emissora de rádio e jornal.
Social Sciences, Labor in politics. Political activity of the working class
Labor unions influence economic outcomes not only through bargaining with employers over work contracts but also via political activities that can profoundly shape political systems. In unionized workplaces, they may mobilize and change the ideological positions of both unionizing workers and their non-unionizing management. In this paper, we analyze the workplace-level impact of unionization on workers' and managers' political campaign contributions. We link establishment-level union election data with transaction-level campaign contributions to federal and local candidates in the United States. Using a difference-in-differences design, validated through regression discontinuity tests and a novel instrumental variable approach, we find that unionization leads to a leftward shift of campaign contributions. Unionization increases support for Democrats relative to Republicans not only among workers but especially among managers, suggesting that managers converge toward workers' political preferences. The effects are stronger in settings with more cooperative union-employer interactions, such as when union elections are not contested by an unfair labor practice charge and result in a collective bargaining agreement.
AbstractThis paper focuses on the ideology and discourses of Tekstil İṣçileri Sendikası (the Textile Workers’ Union, Tekstil) in Turkey to highlight some of the specific visions of the organized labor for an emancipatory gender politics during the 1970s. This history of intersection between gender and working-class organizing has been overlooked by the Left scholarship on the one hand and liberal feminist scholarship on the other. This paper addresses this gap in the literature by highlighting gender and class concurrently throughout the history of the transformation of gender politics in labor organizations. The history of the simultaneous development of gender-related policies in Tekstil/DİSK and TEKSİF/Türk-İṣ reveals an unexplored aspect of the contentious dynamic between rival labor organizations. Between 1975–1980, the politics of gender became another pillar in trade union competition. Following the transnational influences in this transformation, this paper highlights a forgotten period of labor organizing and locates it within the history of labor and women's movements at the national and global scale.
En el presente artículo se propone abordar la contribución de las mujeres comunistas durante el período de la “Política de rebelión popular de masas” del Partido Comunista de Chile. Atendiendo a la ausencia historiografica sobre el estudio de las mujeres comunistas en Chile, serán analizadas fuentes orales de antiguas militantes del partido y su brazo armado, el Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez, como también de los organismos de derechos humanos, sindicatos y organizaciones populares.
1789-, Labor in politics. Political activity of the working class
Reseña de Magalí Andrea Devés, Guillermo Facio Hebequer. Entre el campo artístico y la cultura de izquierdas, Buenos Aires, Prometeo Libros, 2020, 302 pp.
1789-, Labor in politics. Political activity of the working class
The paper explores the notion of a reconfiguration of political space in the context of the rise of populism and its effects on the political system. We focus on Germany and the appearance of the new right wing party "Alternative for Germany" (AfD). Many scholars of politics discuss the rise of the new populism in Western Europe and the US with respect to a new political cleavage related to globalization, which is assumed to mainly affect the cultural dimension of the political space. As such, it might replace the older economic cleavage based on class divisions in defining the dominant dimension of political conflict. An explanation along these lines suggests a reconfiguration of the political space in the sense that (1) the main cleavage within the political space changes its direction from the economic axis towards the cultural axis, but (2) also the semantics of the cultural axis itself is changing towards globalization related topics. Using the electoral manifestos from the Manifesto project database, we empirically address this reconfiguration of the political space by comparing political spaces for Germany built using topic modeling with the spaces based on the content analysis of the Manifesto project and the corresponding categories of political goals. We find that both spaces have a similar structure and that the AfD appears on a new dimension. In order to characterize this new dimension we employ a novel technique, inter-issue consistency networks (IICN) that allow to analyze the evolution of the correlations between the political positions on different issues over several elections. We find that the new dimension introduced by the AfD can be related to the split off of a new "cultural right" issue bundle from the previously existing center-right bundle.
Milene Carrara Carmo Garcia, Michelle Marques do Vale, Jhonatan Carlos Terencio Ribeiro
et al.
Este relato objetiva descrever as experiências vividas por duas estudantes de fisioterapia participantes da oficina de “Treinamento Funcional Terapêutico” do programa de extensão “Atividade Física Funcional e Recreativa para Terceira Idade” (AFRID), oferecido na Faculdade de Educação Física e Fisioterapia da Universidade Federal de Uberlândia, no primeiro semestre de 2019. Relata o planejamento das atividades físicas propostas aos idosos, como a rotina dos encontros realizados, assim como os objetivos esperados de cada etapa e exercício proposto e a reação e feedback tanto dos participantes quanto das estudantes. Ressalta também a importância da realização de projetos de atividade física orientada para a terceira idade objetivando a manutenção da capacidade física funcional e colaborando assim para a melhoria da qualidade de vida dos idosos. Além disso, o projeto contribuiu para a vivência, construção e aplicação de conhecimentos práticos acerca da fisioterapia aplicada à geriatria, as necessidades observadas nessa população no âmbito do exercício físico, assim como os benefícios e desafios encontrados.
Social Sciences, Labor in politics. Political activity of the working class
El artículo tiene por objetivo reconstruir las actividades políticas y gremiales desarrolladas por el dirigente chileno Luis E. Recabarren en el Partido Socialista y en el movimiento obrero argentino, durante su residencia en Buenos Aires, entre 1906 y 1908. Recabarren gozó de un seguimiento de La Vanguardia por su importante trayectoria en el movimiento obrero chileno entre 1904 y 1906. Al autoexiliarse en la Argentina, sus objetivos eran estudiar en profundidad la doctrina socialista, conocer la estructura y organización del PS, su actividad política y su inserción en el movimiento obrero y, a través de esta experiencia, vincular al movimiento obrero chileno con el movimiento socialista internacional.
1789-, Labor in politics. Political activity of the working class