Wang’s Picnic
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Weekly issue

Wang's Picnic (2026/08/29)

Updated journals
42
Articles
99

This week, 42 journals published 99 new articles.
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Journals Updated This Week

AI & Society International Political Science Review Party Politics
American Economic Review Journal of Asian and African Studies Political Behavior
American Journal of Political Science Journal of Conflict Resolution Political Communication
American Journal of Sociology Journal of Contemporary China Political Research Quarterly
American Sociological Review Journal of Elections Public Opinion and Parties Politics & Gender
Big Data & Society Journal of Information Technology & Politics Politics and Religion
China Quarterly Journal of Political Economy Public Opinion Quarterly
Comparative Political Studies Journal of Political Science Education Quarterly Journal of Political Science
Contemporary Political Theory Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (Statistics in Society) Representation
Democratization Legislative Studies Quarterly Social Forces
East European Politics Local Government Studies Social Science Quarterly
Electoral Studies Nations and Nationalism The International Journal of Press/Politics
Field Methods Nature Reviews Psychology West European Politics
Gender & Society Parliamentary Affairs 問題與研究

📚 AI & Society

📄 Beyond harm reduction: dignity, burden, and the genuine advantage of AI caregiving

No abstract was provided by the RSS feed or Crossref API.please use the Read the article link above.

📄 Jungian analysis of the algorithmic unconscious: From archetypal theory and projection to ethical risks in human-AI relations

  • Author(s): Duc-Hung Nguyen, Manh-Tung Ho, Thi-Quynh Pham, Dang-Toan Ngo, Hong-Kong T. Nguyen
  • Link: Read the article
No abstract was provided by the RSS feed or Crossref API.please use the Read the article link above.

📚 American Economic Review

📄 Presidential Address: Neighborhood Effects and Missing Markets for Opportunity

Experimental and quasi-experimental studies show that childhood neighborhoods have substantial causal impacts on children's adult earnings and other long-term socioeconomic outcomes. Several market failures are likely to lead to excessive residential segregation by parental income and to an undersupply of mixed-income neighborhoods. Missing markets for opportunity originate in capital market imperfections for borrowing on children's future earnings, neighbor spillovers, behavioral biases, and housing search frictions. Customized housing mobility services combined with subsidized housing vouchers can help low-income families move to higher-opportunity areas. Place-based policies that create mixed-income neighborhoods appear to increase long-term outcomes for less-advantaged children. (JEL I12, I32, I38, J13, J15, R23, R38)

📄 Rationing by Race

We document how deepening resource scarcity results in rationing on the basis of race in a high-stakes setting: health care. Using detailed, time stamped data on 107,000 inpatient admissions to a large health system, we find that in-hospital mortality increases for Black but not White patients as hospitals reach capacity. These findings are not explained by differential patient selection. We identify rationing by wait times as a mechanism, documenting that sicker Black patients wait longer for care than healthier White patients at almost all capacity levels. Text analysis of unstructured clinical notes reveals rationing of provider effort as another mechanism. (JEL I11, I12, I14, J15)

📄 Defying Distance? The Provision of Medical Services in the Digital Age

Digital platforms reduce geographic frictions, enabling better matching between service providers and users. I quantify reallocation gains in Swedish online health care, using nationwide time-conditional random assignment between patients and physicians. Matching high-risk patients with doctors effective at reducing Emergency Room visits lowers such visits by 4.4 percent (SE 1.3); reallocations also reduce Counter-Guideline antibiotics by 3.1 percent (1.4). I find limited trade-offs in matching; horizontal differentiation among doctors and varied patient needs allow improvement in multiple outcomes simultaneously. Efficiency-enhancing reallocations also affect equity. The findings highlight the potential for care reorganization aligning provider heterogeneity with patient needs when geographic constraints are lifted. (JEL C78, H51, I11, I13, I14, I18)

📄 The Environmental Bias of Corporate Income Taxation

  • Author(s): Luigi Iovino, Thorsten Martin, Julien Sauvagnat
  • Link: Read the article
We study the relationship between corporate income taxation and carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions in the United States. We show CO 2 -intensive firms benefit more from the tax advantage of debt and pay lower income taxes on their capital income. Building on these new facts, we provide evidence that a cut in the corporate income tax rate leads to a larger expansion of clean firms. We develop a multisector general equilibrium model that accounts for our evidence and quantify the impact of corporate tax reforms on aggregate emissions. A policy that eliminates the tax advantage of debt could reduce aggregate emissions without affecting GDP. (JEL D22, G32, H25, H32, Q52, Q54, Q58)

📄 Optimal Public Transportation Networks: Evidence from the World's Largest Bus Rapid Transit System in Jakarta

  • Author(s): Gabriel Kreindler, Arya Gaduh, Tilman Graff, Rema Hanna, Benjamin A. Olken
  • Link: Read the article
Designing public transport networks involves trade-offs between coverage, service frequency, and direct service. We use the expansion of the bus system in Jakarta, Indonesia, to study these trade-offs. We analyze how new direct connections, changes in bus travel time, and wait-time reductions affect bus ridership and aggregate flows and estimate a transit network demand model by matching the route launch events. Commuters in Jakarta are 2–3 times more sensitive to wait time than bus time and inattentive to long routes. We develop a flexible framework to characterize optimal networks. A less concentrated network would increase ridership and commuter welfare. (JEL L92, L98, O18, R41, R42, R48)

📄 Manipulation-Robust Prediction

  • Author(s): Daniel Björkegren, Joshua E. Blumenstock, Samsun Knight
  • Link: Read the article
An increasing number of decisions are guided by machine learning algorithms. But when consequential decisions are encoded in algorithms, individuals may strategically alter their behavior to achieve desired outcomes. This paper develops an empirical approach that adjusts decision algorithms to anticipate manipulation. By explicitly modeling incentives to manipulate, our approach produces decision rules that are stable under manipulation, even when the rules are fully transparent. We stress-test this approach through a large field experiment in Kenya. When implemented, linear strategy-robust decision rules outperform standard linear models such as LASSO. (JEL C45, C93, D12, D91, G51, O12, O16)

📄 Contextually Private Mechanisms

A designer employs a dynamic protocol to elicit private information. Protocols produce a set of contextual privacy violations—information learned that may be superfluous given the context. A protocol is maximally contextually private if there is no protocol that produces a proper subset of the violations it produces, while implementing the choice rule. Contextual privacy violations arise when a choice rule makes some agents collectively, but not individually, pivotal. In auctions, designing for contextual privacy requires choosing an initial question posed to each agent and the order for querying agents. Ascending-join protocols are maximally contextually private for k-item Vickrey auctions. (JEL D44, D82)

📄 Corporate Tax Cuts, Firm Growth, and Workers' Earnings

  • Author(s): Patrick J. Kennedy, Christine L. Dobridge, Paul Landefeld, Jacob Mortenson
  • Link: Read the article
We study the effects of the largest corporate income tax cut in US history on firms and workers. To identify causal effects, we use employer-employee matched tax records and event studies comparing similarly sized firms in the same industry that faced divergent tax changes due to their preexisting legal status. Tax cuts cause increases in firms' investment, sales, profits, employment, and payrolls, with earnings gains concentrated among highly paid workers. In the short run, 87 percent of private income gains flow to the top 10 percent of the income distribution. (JEL D22, D31, G31, H25, H32, J23, L25)

📄 Risk-Sharing Tests and Covariate Shocks: Drought, Floods, and Pests in Uganda

Efficient risk sharing implies a simple factor structure for marginal utilities of expenditure (MUEs): Pareto weights divided by a common price. The standard approach infers MUEs from total expenditures, implicitly assuming homothetic preferences, unitary income elasticities, and identical price elasticities. Risk-sharing tests using total expenditures work for idiosyncratic shocks (budgets change, but not prices), but not “covariate” shocks (prices change). I describe all preferences that permit one to infer MUEs from expenditures and estimate nonhomothetic MUEs to test whether covariate shocks are shared efficiently in Uganda. This delivers sensible results; the standard approach suggests that droughts, floods, and pests are beneficial. (JEL D12, D81, O12, O13, Q12)

📄 Intergenerational Impacts of Secondary Education: Experimental Evidence from Ghana

  • Author(s): Esther Duflo, Pascaline Dupas, Elizabeth Spelke, Mark Walsh
  • Link: Read the article
We provide experimental evidence on the intergenerational impacts of secondary education subsidies in a low-income context, leveraging a randomized controlled trial and 15-year longitudinal follow-up. Secondary school scholarships delay fertility, reduce unwanted pregnancies, and change partner selection. Under-one mortality is reduced by half. We also document cognitive development gains of 0.24 standard deviations of test scores by age five among children of female scholarship recipients. Means-tested secondary school scholarships are a high-return investment, with a conservatively estimated US$4.1 in benefits for each US$1 the policy would cost the government in the long run. (JEL H52, I12, I21, I26, J13, J16, O15)

📄 Marriage, Fertility, and Cultural Integration in Italy

We study cultural integration as an equilibrium outcome of marital matching along cultural and education lines and intrahousehold investment decisions regarding fertility and cultural socialization. Our model allows us to identify cultural-ethnic-group-specific investment parameters and spousal preferences for marital matching. Structural estimates reveal a strong demand to preserve cultural identity on the part of immigrants and limited acceptance of the immigrants' cultural diversity on the part of natives. Furthermore, these estimates reveal a substantial heterogeneity of the parental value of children's education across cultures. Nonetheless, our estimates simulate substantial—though heterogeneous—cultural integration rates across immigrant groups. (JEL D13, J12, J13, J15, Z13)

📚 American Journal of Political Science

📄 Partisan bias in a sorted party system: A problem of epistemic inequality

Normative and empirical scholars typically treat partisans’ distrust of their political rivals as a product of individual cognitive biases. But even if bias is inevitable, it is parties’ coalition‐building and messaging strategies that determine who bias is directed toward. This paper argues that the social sorting of party conflict exacerbates the epistemic and democratic harm of partisan distrust by generating distinctive patterns of epistemic inequality. I show that when voters associate parties with particular social groups, members of those groups suffer greater risk of testimonial injustice and related credibility deficits owing to their perceived partisanship. These dynamics are most damaging for members of marginalized groups, as party–group overlap can reinforce the prejudices they already face. Addressing these harms, I argue, requires looking beyond individual partisans to the background features of party systems that shape how elites mobilize group identities and animus in the struggle for office.

📚 American Journal of Sociology

📄 From Suites to Streets: Professional Expertise and the Organizational Pursuit of Social and Systemic Integration​

No abstract was provided by the RSS feed or Crossref API.please use the Read the article link above.

📚 American Sociological Review

📄 How Norms Depend on the Presence and Status of Observers: The Relational Contingency of Everyday Behaviors in 90 Societies

  • Author(s): Brent Simpson, Kimmo Eriksson, Irina Vartanova, Pontus Strimling, J. Paola Merchan Tamayo, Khalid Ahmed Abdi, Neta Ad, Alisher Aldashev, Habib Mohammad Ali, Maurizio Alì, Khatai Aliyev, Yasser Alrefaee, Alberth Estuardo Alvarado Ortiz, Per A. Andersson, Giulia Andrighetto, Gizem Arikan, John Jamir Benzon R. Aruta, Christian Lutete Ayikwa, Jonatan Baños-Chaparro, Davide Barrera, Birzhan Batkeyev, Azma Batool, Elizaveta Berezina, Stéphanie Ngandu Bimina, Marie Björnstjerna, Sheyla Blumen, Paweł Boski, Eva Boštjančič, Yap Boum, Marie Briguglio, Huyen Thi Thu Bui, Tomás Caycho-Rodríguez, Yanyan Chen, Manase Kudzai Chiweshe, HoonSeok Choi, Carlos C. Contreras-Ibáñez, Dinka Čorkalo, Christian E. Cruz-Torres, Andrea Czakó, Piyanjali de Zoysa, Zsolt Demetrovics, Bojana M. Dinić, Saša Drače, Rita W. El-Haddad, Jan B. Engelmann, Ignacio Escudero Pérez, Hyun Euh, Xia Fang, Celine Frank, Esteban Freidin, Marta Fulop, Vladimer Gamsakhurdia, Mauro Alberto García Jiménez, Ragna B. Gardarsdottir, Alin Gavreliuc, Colin Mathew Hugues D. Gill, Biljana Gjoneska, Andreas Glöckner, Sylvie Graf, Ani Grigoryan, Katarzyna Growiec, Brian W. Haas, Geoffrey Haddock, Stavros P. Hadjisolomou, Nina Hadžiahmetović, Mohammad Hosein Haji Mohammad Ali, Eemeli Hakoköngäs, Peter Halama, Given Hapunda, Andree Hartanto, Mahsa Hazrati, Boris Christian Herbas-Torrico, Szilárd Holka, Martina Hřebíčková, John A. Hunter, Moudachirou Ibikounle, Dzintra Ilisko, Harpa Lind Hjördísar Jónsdóttir, Zivile Kaminskiene, Hansika Kapoor, Iva Kapović, Gassemi Karim, Kerry Kawakami, Narine Khachatryan, Julian B. Kirschner, Jonah Kiruja, Toko Kiyonari, Michal Kohút, Shazia Kousar, Besnik Krasniqi, Miguel Landa-Blanco, Barbara Landon, Žan Lep, Lisa M. Leslie, Yang Li, Kadi Liik, Ming-Jen Lin, Marlon Elías Lobos Rivera, Wilson López-López, Edona Maloku, Mohona Mandal, Bernardo Ananias Manhique, Nathan Mpeti Mbende, Maria Luisa Mendes Teixeira, Linda Lila Mohammed, Schontal N. Moore, Bahar Moraligil, Nijat Muradzada, Herwin Nanda, Ekaterina Nastina, Pegah Nejat, Daniel Nettle, Orlando Julio Andre Nipassa, Martin Noe-Grijalva, Pie Ntampaka, Rodrigue Ntone, Ravit Nussinson, Milan Oljača, Nneoma G. Onyedire, Ike E. Onyishi, Penny Panagiotopoulou, Md. Shahin Parvez, Gian Luca Pasin, Ivana Pedović, Pablo Pérez de León, Lorena R. Perez Floriano, Minna Persson, Nada Pop-Jordanova, Jose Roberto Portillo, Angela Potang, Adolfo Quesada-Román, Jana L. Raver, Ricardo B. Rodrigues, Juan Diego Rodríguez-Romero, Sara Romanò, Robert M. Ross, Nachita Rosun, Selka Sadiković, Alvaro San Martin, Snežana Smederevac, Sarah Jane Smith, Natalia Soboleva, Daniel Erena Sonessa, Samantha K. Stanley, Kristina Stoyanova, Drozdstoy Stoyanov, Kosuke Takemura, John Thøgersen, Habib Tiliouine, Hans Tung, Tungalag Ulambayar, Elze Marija Uzdavinyte, Randall Waechter, Junhui Wu, Brice Martial Yambiyo, Eric Yankson, Kuang-Hui Yeh, Paul A. M. Van Lange
  • Link: Read the article
Norms are fundamental to social life, but basic questions about how they are affected by social context remain. Specifically, how do normative constraints depend on the presence and status of observers, and how do such relational contingencies vary across cultures? Using data from more than 25,000 individuals across 90 societies, we test several hypotheses linking normative constraints on everyday behaviors (like arguing, laughing, cursing, kissing, and crying), to the presence and status of observers. We find that behaviors widely viewed as appropriate in private become more constrained in the presence of others (an observer effect), and even more so when those others are higher in status (a status effect). Both observer and status effects are culturally universal, but the observer effect shows more variation across cultures. In particular, we find that observer effects are larger in societies that emphasize individualizing moral foundations, that is, avoiding harm and unfairness to others, because these societies are more permissive of actions when others are not around. The relative stability of status effects across cultural contexts suggests a universal tendency to defer in social hierarchies. These findings shed light on the relational contingency of everyday norms and underscore the role of such norms in the maintenance of social order and reproduction of inequality.

📚 Big Data & Society

📄 Value conflicts in natural language processing: A systematic literature review

Despite broad consensus among social scientists that technology embodies values, scholarship is conspicuously lacking in reflexive analysis of the value-based implications of natural language processing (NLP) technologies. To explore embedded values and potential harms in the NLP domain, a systematic literature review grounded in established value frameworks focused on how uninformed design decisions can perpetuate algorithmic biases and lead to discriminatory outcomes. Analysis applying Schwartz's theory of basic values to a sample of 60 articles indexed by the Association for Computing Machinery and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, published between 2010 and 2023, identified underrepresented values such as stimulation and tradition, and it detected the complete absence of attention to hedonism and benevolence. The omission of scholarly attention to hedonism is particularly surprising, in light of its relevance for social media services; this points to a potential oversight in enhancing personal enjoyment and quality of life. Benevolence's absence indicates unexplored areas of communal application. The study highlights a need for more comprehensive value-based analysis in NLP research, to ensure ethical and inclusive technological development. Highlighting this gap should contribute to cross-discipline dialogue among researchers, technologists, and policymakers, for NLP technologies better aligned with diverse human values.

📄 Transparency tinkering: Working with opacities in the development of medical artificial intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are increasingly researched and applied in medicine and healthcare. The high stakes of these applications have raised a particular demand for them to be, to some degree, transparent. Yet, how AI experts consider transparency and turn it into practice in the development of medical AI remains underexplored. As the notion of AI technologies as black boxes persists, more empirical and conceptual understanding is needed of how AI experts consider and practically navigate this opacity and what work goes into trying to make AI transparent, explainable, knowable and trustworthy. This article aims to increase the knowledge of how AI experts working on medical AI deal with opacity and make sense of their models. Interviews and observations with AI experts show how transparency is tinkered with across different approaches and modalities; in the trying out of models, the use of visual clues, and scoring of importance and uncertainty. Transparency practices are deployed for the experts’ own sensemaking of models and medical conditions, as well as for other actors’ understanding. This study shows that explainable AI (XAI) is met with both hope and scepticism as a solution to AI opacity, how opacity-mitigating practices are continuously adapted, and how sensemaking of medical AI is a contingent, relational and situated process. By introducing a conceptual framework of transparency tinkering , this article suggests entry points of study to make these complexities visible, move away from the algorithmic drama and gain insights into the tinkering through which transparency is enacted in practice.

📄 Mitigating algorithmic bias in the UK civil service: Challenges and implications for practice

This article examines algorithmic bias mitigation in the context of the UK's civil service, specifically the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP). Despite various algorithmic bias mitigation approaches being suggested in the literature, little research has examined how these might work in complex organisational contexts such as the DWP. In this article, I explore the perception of civil service practitioners of three sociotechnical bias mitigation methods, particularly their perceptions of the applicability of these methods and how they might be implemented. To do this I draw on data gathered through workshop series on algorithmic bias with DWP practitioners and follow up interviews. The findings suggest that: (1) it is difficult for practitioners to align technologies to the social justice values that underpin sociotechnical mitigation approaches when servicing a large heterogenous public; (2) practitioners’ perception of a lack of clarity in anti-discrimination legislation make it difficult for them to move beyond statistical framings of fairness and (3) participants perceived workforce diversity as important to algorithmic bias mitigation efforts; however, this was not considered a short-term solution.

📄 Commodifying compassion in the digital age: The promise and perils of tech for good

  • Author(s): Maha Rafi Atal, Sofie Elbæk Henriksen, Lisa Ann Richey
  • Link: Read the article
Digital and data-driven technologies are transforming the humanitarian and development sectors. With the promise of faster, more efficient and accurate aid delivery, these technologies are often designed and implemented in partnerships between aid organizations and private technology firms. Consequently, “Tech for Good” has emerged as a significant humanitarian domain, where Big Tech companies aspire to create innovative technological solutions to humanitarian problems and link their business interests and strategies to humanitarian causes. However, despite the optimism surrounding business- and data-driven aid solutions, their actual effectiveness and value remains questionable, particularly for the people who are supposed to benefit from them. This special theme examines how datafication operates within humanitarian and development settings as Tech for Good. In particular, we trace how Tech for Good initiatives commodify compassion, by reconfiguring who is authorized to act, whose knowledge counts, and whose labor becomes invisible in the pursuit of efficiency and accountability. In this introduction, we provide a brief background of the changing role of businesses and digital technology in development and humanitarian aid and introduce Commodifying Compassion as a conceptual lens to understand Tech for Good today. Building on this work and grounded in the articles of this special theme, we map how Tech for Good emerges as a particular digitalized configuration of commodified compassion.

📄 Empowering citizens in digital health data governance: Insights from an overview of reviews

  • Author(s): Cato van Schyndel, Charlotte De Clerck, Erik Laes, Karin Hannes, Nathalie Lambrechts
  • Link: Read the article
As digital technologies in healthcare expand, critical discussions on protecting privacy, securing personal health data, and governing its use have gained prominence. Despite regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation and the European Health Data Space, many citizens remain unaware of their data rights or how their data are used. This highlights the need to understand how citizens wish to participate and what meaningful participation entails. This overview of reviews synthesizes insights from 35 systematic reviews (2011–2023) on citizen participation in health data governance, including reviews in which citizens’ broader views on health data use, which influence willingness and ability to participate, are discussed. Findings are interpreted through the lens of feasibility, appropriateness, meaningfulness, and effectiveness. Findings highlight the complexity of fostering citizen participation in health data governance. While citizens often express favorable attitudes, the way they are currently involved remains largely tokenistic, limited to informing, consultation, or placation. Strengthening participation requires attention to feasibility, appropriateness, and meaningfulness of citizen-driven data governance. Findings suggest that building trust and accountability, ensuring digital and health literacy, involving trusted intermediaries, and recognizing the sensitivity of data are beneficial. Participation is most meaningful when it delivers both personal benefits (e.g. improved care) and public benefits (e.g. advancing research). Effectiveness arises when these conditions work together, enabling participation to move beyond tokenism and deliver tangible improvements for citizens and society.

📄 Introduction: Rethinking data colonialism: Local negotiations with data, postcoloniality, and power

  • Author(s): Sagnik Dutta, Suruchi Mazumdar, Kerry McInerney
  • Link: Read the article
This introduction to the special issue “Rethinking Data Colonialism: Local Negotiations with Data, Postcoloniality, and Power” examines the emergence of the term data colonialism, and its relationship to other key ideas like digital colonialism and AI colonialism. It opens by examining how the term “data colonialism” has been used primarily to designate the asymmetric, unequal, and extractive relationship of Big Tech with countries in the Global South. We argue that existing scholars have paid inadequate attention to historical specificity of colonial domination and the neocolonial and settler colonial forms of state domination in ongoing data colonialism projects. In order to address this lacuna, it is imperative to pay attention to the differences, conflicts, as well as the local forms of opposition within specific regions and countries beyond global North–South binaries. This introduction highlights the key goal of the special issue, which is to foreground how data colonialism operates with, through, and alongside local power relations, and how local actors negotiate and resist these extractive regimes. It also articulates themes––such as everyday lived experiences of data colonialism, and how people resist colonialist AI practices and the elites’ appropriation of anti-colonial rhetoric in postcolonial contexts––as addressed by the special issue articles. Finally, the Introduction, reiterating the contributions of the special issue, ponders the question of decolonizing AI and what decolonial AI futures look like beyond the epistemological and conceptual parameters of the Western academy.

📄 “From under the hatches”: Reflections on dark sousveillance and resisting carceral-care surveillance

As automated decision-making tools and surveillance become increasingly embedded within systems of care, there is an urgent need for analytical frameworks and resistance practices created and informed by those most impacted. Inspired by Dark Sousveillance , this commentary draws on a collaborative community research project with two grassroots organizations in Los Angeles to demonstrate how oppositional knowledge can be used to analyze and resist algorithmic harm and the surveillance of Black communities. The commentary introduces an analytical framework grounded in knowledge produced “from under the hatches” to examine how predictive risk assessment tools, data-sharing practices, and systems of carceral-care surveillance operate across interlocking domains of power. Rather than centering technical solutions to algorithmic harm, the framework highlights how communal study and lived experience are essential for analyzing and resisting the continued expansion of racializing carceral-care surveillance.

📄 The curation of beauty ideals through Instagram's recommender system: An interdisciplinary approach

  • Author(s): Ann-Marie Wohlfarth, Christoph Bareither, Tim Gollub, Benno Stein
  • Link: Read the article
This paper investigates how Instagram's recommender system participates in reproducing beauty ideals through an interdisciplinary approach that combines ethnographic methods with supervised machine learning. We conceptualise beauty ideals as socioculturally constructed and intersubjective perceptions and adopt the theoretical framework of ‘curatorial assemblages’ in examining how recommender systems shape feeds. Our novel methodological approach involves training a statistical classifier using an ethnographically informed and manually annotated dataset. The classifier determines whether a post reproduces beauty ideals (RBI) or does not reproduce beauty ideals (NRBI). On this basis, we analyse how the curatorial practices (liking, saving and following) affect the Explore feed composition regarding beauty ideals. Our findings show that Instagram's recommender system strongly amplifies beauty ideals when users routinely engage with such content through likes and saves. Conversely, for content not reproducing beauty ideals, we find that the Explore feed is less adaptive, resulting in feeds that feature fewer posts depicting persons. Experiments to counter-curate showed minimal impact on feed composition. We discuss our findings against the theoretical backdrop of curatorial assemblages and elaborate how both collaborative and content-based recommendation may contribute to the reproduction of beauty ideals. We conclude that Instagram's recommender system structurally entrenches beauty ideals within the platform's global curatorial assemblage. These findings highlight the need for greater algorithmic transparency to enable informed user decisions and critical media literacy regarding automated feed curation.

📄 Remaking the landscape of scientific expertise: The emergent research program of total automation in science

  • Author(s): David Peterson, Bernard Koch, Ramya Natarajan, Aaron Panofsky
  • Link: Read the article
This article examines an emergent research program aimed at the complete automation of science, analyzing how various automation projects funded by DARPA and others are working to replicate traditionally human scientific competencies. Rather than directly attempting to create fully autonomous robot scientists, these projects break down complex scientific work into discrete, automatable “tasks.” While individual projects often preserve some role for human scientists, collectively they reveal a comprehensive blueprint for scientific automation. Through interviews with 26 DARPA contractors, program managers, and others involved in scientific automation, the authors demonstrate how automation efforts target three key domains of human scientific expertise: insight (hypothesis generation and pattern recognition), embodied knowledge (experimental procedures and techniques), and judgment (evaluation of scientific claims). Instead of simply trying to replicate human capabilities, these initiatives are actively reshaping scientific practice to be more amenable to machine intervention through initiatives like standardized ontologies and machine-readable data formats. Although full automation faces significant technical and institutional challenges, this emergent program portends major changes in scientific practice and careers while raising important questions about the future role of human knowledge in scientific discovery. The article contributes to ongoing debates about artificial intelligence in science while challenging existing sociological accounts about purportedly uniquely human scientific abilities.

📚 China Quarterly

📄 Subversive Amplification: Online Dissent and the Limits of Information Control in China

Intensified information control severely constrains digital contention in China, yet online mass events occasionally occur. Using a dataset of 274,721 Weibo messages, this study examines mobilization, coordination and grievance articulation during a two-day episode of online dissent in the aftermath of the 2022 Urumqi residential building fire, which preceded the White Paper protests. It argues that users were activated by public communication failures that transformed manifold grievances into outrage, and that the associated hashtags provided anchors to which criticism could be attached. In a process this study terms “subversive amplification,” concentrated engagement amplified the hashtags’ visibility, and with it the critical content attached to them. However, absent the unifying function of opinion leaders, grievance articulation remained fragmented and did not converge on unified demands. The case illustrates the inherent vulnerabilities of information control but also the conditions and limits of their exploitation.

📚 Comparative Political Studies

📄 Strategic Inclusion Without Transformation: How Populist Radical Right Parties Engage With Women’s Interests

  • Author(s): Bonnie M. Meguid, Hilde Coffé, Ana Catalano Weeks, Miki Caul Kittilson
  • Link: Read the article
Despite their Männerparteien reputation, populist radical right (PRR) parties have recently expanded their agendas to include women’s interests. When do they embrace these interests, and what shapes their stance? We propose a theory of strategic window dressing: electorally struggling PRR parties, seeking to gain voters, showcase women’s interests superficially without shifting core gender ideologies. Using original text analysis of PRR party manifestos across 30 European countries (1984–2022), we find that parties emphasize gender-related rights when electorally vulnerable—but avoid adopting more gender-egalitarian positions. Instead, they promote risk-averse, femonationalist stances. While having a woman leader increases attention to gender-based violence, a higher share of women MPs has no impact on either the salience of or position on women’s interests. These findings suggest that the PRR’s nod to women’s interests is largely a tactical move, not a genuine commitment to substantive representation of women’s interests.

📚 Contemporary Political Theory

📄 The subject of intelligence: AI as existential risk and the government of the human and the future

This article analyses discourses on artificial intelligence (AI) in the field of existential risk studies. AI appears as a key theme in existential risk circles, not only as a source of risk, but also as a resource for risk prevention and as the enabler of a glorious future for humanity. However, what is it about AI that brings together utopian and dystopian imaginaries? Why is a discourse on AI so tied to questions regarding the human, and what forms of humanity does it produce? What forms of governing does it enable? This article argues that the concept of ‘intelligence’ is fundamental regarding both how AI is construed as an existential risk, as well as how humanity is conceptualised as that which needs to be protected. Existential risk discourses on AI appear as a governmental rationality which reproduces exclusionary conceptions of humanity, as intelligence is mobilised as grounds for teleological conceptions of history and technological development, utilitarian ethics, and concerns for the long-term future. Consequently, existential risk prevention appears as a governmentality that mobilises uncertainty and the future of intelligence as ethical grounds for disciplining the concept of humanity and governing populations in the present.

📚 Democratization

📄 Demagogues and Despots: Democracies on the Brink

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📄 Violence when flush: commodity windfalls and the autocrat’s repertoire of repression

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📄 More mobilisation, same targets: party system institutionalisation and party outreach in Africa

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📚 East European Politics

📄 Invoking the EU: civil society’s response to autocratisation in Georgia

No abstract was provided by the RSS feed or Crossref API.please use the Read the article link above.

📚 Electoral Studies

📄 The nature of party cues: A theoretical and empirical investigation

No abstract was provided by the RSS feed or Crossref API.please use the Read the article link above.

📄 The impact of using a voting advice application on young voters’ motivation to turn out: A randomized survey experiment and observational panel study

No abstract was provided by the RSS feed or Crossref API.please use the Read the article link above.

📄 Votes against voting: Recall escalation as behavioural evidence of electoral (mis)confidence in Taiwan’s “Great Recall”

No abstract was provided by the RSS feed or Crossref API.please use the Read the article link above.

📚 Field Methods

📄 Cognitive Cultural Domains as Common Understandings: A Research Protocol

  • Author(s): Michael C. Robbins, Zhuping (Zoe) Li, William W. Dressler
  • Link: Read the article
Common Understanding (CU) is the shared awareness that a cultural domain exists as a category that labels some phenomenon of interest in the world within a particular social group, and this domain is described by a set of terms that set certain boundaries around it. This article deploys a research protocol using: (1) free lists to investigate variation both within and between group CU, and (2) a greedy algorithm to partition CU into covering subsets, or non-redundant configurations of listed terms, to enhance both interpretative meaning and advance further study. An American, ethnographic example from the domain of fabrics is used to illustrate the concept and method. Other potential applications, and an R program for computing the greedy algorithm, are also included.

📚 Gender & Society

📄 Healers, Not Dealers: Women Navigating Controlling Images in the U.S. Cannabis Industry

Through sixty in-depth interviews with women workers, executives, and entrepreneurs in the postprohibition U.S. cannabis industry, this article examines how they frame and discuss themselves in relation to controlling images of criminality and drug use. Stigmatic images of slacker “stoners” and violent “drug dealers”—primarily depicted as low-income, Black or Latina/x/o, and/or men—have long served to justify cannabis prohibition and disparities in criminalization. I observe how women in the cannabis industry differentiate themselves from these images by crafting an occupational identity of distance characterized by white bourgeois femininity. Three discursive strategies constitute this identity of distance: aesthetic distancing , résumé distancing , and maternal distancing . These strategies legitimize women’s participation in legal cannabis markets. However, in relying on hegemonic femininities, these strategies also perpetuate controlling images and reinforce intersecting inequalities among differently racialized women in the industry. Findings illuminate the occupational identity of distance as a mechanism of intersectional inequality for women in the workplace, especially in contested or stigmatized fields.

📚 International Political Science Review

📄 Being seen or being endorsed: Institutional and individual voices in China’s public diplomacy on Twitter

Since the 2010s, China’s public diplomacy rhetoric has undergone the shift from a traditionally restrained approach to a more assertive and confrontational style known as ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy. This paper discusses these developments within the broader context of digital diplomacy, where social media platforms like Twitter have become essential arenas for international discourse and influence. While previous research has largely defined social media success as visibility metrics such as likes and replies, this paper argues that visibility does not necessarily translate into endorsement. Combining LLM-based stance detection with network topology analysis, this paper reveals a structural paradox. While institutional accounts successfully use ‘wolf warrior’ rhetoric to close the visibility gap with individual diplomats, they struggle to convert attention into endorsement. Individual accounts, by contrast, demonstrate higher mobilization capacity, cultivating denser supporter networks. In the attention economy of global social media, being seen is not equivalent to being endorsed.

📄 The Shia factor: Intra-Islamist dynamics and the growth of armed Islamism

  • Author(s): Raphaël Lefèvre, Jeroen Gunning, Morten Valbjørn
  • Link: Read the article
Conflict research is increasingly interested in grasping the exponential growth of armed Islamist groups in armed conflict over the past 50 years. Yet a crucial flaw of existing scholarship is that it misses the Shia factor – it overwhelmingly focuses on Sunni Islamists, with adverse empirical and theoretical implications. This article introduces the first comprehensive dataset of 228 major armed Sunni and Shia Islamist groups that have operated in armed conflict between 1945 and 2021 – DASSIG (Dataset of Armed Sunni and Shia Islamist Groups). The analysis shows the importance of including the Shia factor, by pointing to similarities and differences in the patterns, timings and locations of the evolution of armed Shia and Sunni Islamisms and by arguing that cross-sect interactions (positive and negative) between armed Islamist groups have significantly fuelled the growth of the phenomenon over time. More broadly, these findings call for further disaggregation in studies of the role of ideology/religion and how it intersects with other factors in conflicts.

📚 Journal of Asian and African Studies

📄 Good governance can promote vaccination intention even among conspiracy believers: An analysis of survey data from four countries

An analysis of 2021 data from South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and the United States reveals that citizens’ conspiracy beliefs undermine their intention to vaccinate against COVID-19, whereas their positive evaluations of governmental countermeasures promote it. Importantly, among respondents with the most negative evaluations, those with the strongest beliefs in conspiracy theories are significantly less willing to get vaccinated than those who do not believe in conspiracy theories. However, this difference decreases as the evaluations become more positive and becomes negligible in the group with the most positive evaluations. These results suggest the importance of good governance.

📄 Warming hearts, hardening identities: Affective decoupling in Taiwan–China student exchanges

Why does sustained cross-Strait contact fail to produce political convergence despite cultural proximity? This study introduces affective decoupling—a mechanism whereby interpersonal exchanges increase everyday warmth while simultaneously reinforcing political identity boundaries. Exploiting a quasi-experimental design with naturally staggered departure schedules, we compare Taiwanese students before and after semester-long exchanges in China (N = 258) and incorporate qualitative interviews to clarify underlying mechanisms. Exchange participation significantly increases emotional warmth toward living in China, yet simultaneously decreases support for conditional unification and strengthens Republic of China identification. Contact theory’s convergence prediction fails when institutional asymmetry and sovereignty denial transform interpersonal encounters into identity-consolidating experiences.

📄 A balanced regulatory model for emerging digital industries: Evidence from Thailand’s digital governance

This article examines Thailand’s digital regulatory governance in response to digital economic transformation, with a focus on personal data protection, digital assets, and artificial intelligence governance. Rather than treating these regimes as isolated sectoral regulations, the study conceptualizes Thailand’s approach as a form of state-led experimental governance characterized by a hybrid regulatory structure. Drawing on statutory analysis, policy documents, and regulatory design, the article identifies a balanced regulatory model composed of three core elements: strong entry regulation, controlled experimentation through regulatory sandboxes, and gradual legalization via secondary legislation. The findings suggest that Thailand’s regulatory architecture is designed to promote digital innovation while managing systemic risks related to data sovereignty, financial stability, and public trust. By positioning Thailand as a theoretical case within Asian digital governance, this study offers comparative insights for scholars and policymakers concerned with digital governance in Asia and other emerging economies.

📄 The art of survival: Elites and the politics of crisis in Algeria

This article explains the endurance of Algerian authoritarianism through a historical-sociological analysis of elite reconfiguration in moments of crisis. Rather than privileging the military or opposition weakness, it argues that crises create openings for regime insiders outside the decision-making core to rise by adopting reformist and democratizing language while preserving the regime’s authoritarian pillars. Tracing the legacy of Boumediene’s 1965 coup across the Bendjedid, Bouteflika, and post-Hirak periods, the article shows how elite circulation, selective displacement, and institutional conversion repeatedly reproduced authoritarian rule instead of enabling democratic rupture.

📄 From millet marginalisation to revival: Policy path dependence and agrarian change in Bundelkhand, India

Millets occupy a paradoxical position in India’s agrarian landscape. Historically embedded in dryland agro-ecologies, they were marginalised under the post-independence productivity paradigm of the Green Revolution. Drawing on historical institutional analysis and mixed-methods evidence from Bundelkhand, Uttar Pradesh, this article argues that millet decline resulted from institutional path dependence rather than farmer preferences alone. Three factors reinforced this decline: food security policies centred on rice and wheat, procurement and distribution systems favouring selected cereals and irrigation-centred technological pathways. Historical and policy analyses show that state support focused on a narrow cereal basket. Minimum support prices, public procurement and the Public Distribution System primarily favoured wheat and rice, while support for coarse cereals remained limited despite the release of the first sorghum and pearl millet hybrids in the mid-1960s. Recent initiatives, including the designation of millets as nutri-cereals, the International Year of Millets 2023 and the Uttar Pradesh Millets Revival Programme, signal a policy shift. However, their impact remains constrained by inherited institutional arrangements. A survey of 1942 farmers across three districts, supported by focus group discussions and key informant interviews, reveals uneven awareness of the Millet Mission, district-level constraints and unequal access to seeds, credit and information. The evidence indicates that durable revival will require promotional efforts to be complemented by sustained procurement, market and agronomic support that reaches marginal cultivators.

📄 Internet, political mobilisation, and state control in North Africa

Since the Arab Spring, the number of Internet users in North Africa has increased significantly, as have the mechanisms employed by governments to control online activities. Drawing on primary data from the Mo Ibrahim Foundation and secondary sources from the scientific literature, this paper argues that the underlying dynamics of Internet use for political mobilisation in North Africa remain largely similar to those observed during the Arab Spring. However, the relative absence of large-scale social protests in the region today can be explained, at least in part, by the strengthening and refinement of state mechanisms for controlling the Internet.

📚 Journal of Conflict Resolution

📄 Whataboutism in International Diplomacy: Shaping Third-Party Public Attitudes Toward U.S. Foreign Policy

How does whataboutism influence the attitudes of third-party and allied audiences during international diplomatic exchanges? States openly accused of misconduct often employ whataboutism, deflecting criticism by highlighting the accuser’s own transgressions. Although policymakers frequently discuss whataboutism, research on its effects—especially on third-party publics—is limited. This study addresses the gap by examining via survey experiments a “hard case”: the impact of whataboutism targeting the U.S. on Japanese and the British publics, two steadfast U.S. allies. Our findings reveal that whataboutism significantly undermines support for the critic’s actions and diminishes the willingness of these populations to back sanctions led by the critic against states engaging in whataboutism. These results, the first empirical evidence of whataboutism’s effects on third-party allied publics, highlight whataboutism’s potency in shaping international public opinion, even among audiences from nations closely aligned with the critic country, potentially constraining U.S. foreign policy options.

📄 Toft Response: “Getting Religion Even More Right”

Journal of Conflict Resolution, Ahead of Print.

📄 The Role of Religion in Civil War – Are We Really Getting It?

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📚 Journal of Contemporary China

📄 Embeddedness Under Fire: How Chinese Private Firms Navigate Conflict Risks in Northern Myanmar

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📄 Forgiving the Government: The Waning Effect of Citizen Grievances in China

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📄 The Virtue of Bias? China’s Stakeholder Mediation in the Iran and North Korea Nuclear Crises

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📄 China’s Soft Power Projection in the Middle East—North Africa

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📚 Journal of Elections Public Opinion and Parties

📄 A mixed-item approach to measuring political knowledge

No abstract was provided by the RSS feed or Crossref API.please use the Read the article link above.

📚 Journal of Information Technology & Politics

📄 Networked advocacy in sustainability governance: how NGOs adapt communication across stakeholder relationships on Twitter/X

No abstract was provided by the RSS feed or Crossref API.please use the Read the article link above.

📚 Journal of Political Economy

📄 The Impact of Unions on Nonunion Wage Setting: Threats and Bargaining

  • Author(s): David A. Green, Ben M. Sand, Iain G. Snoddy, Jeanne Tschopp
  • Link: Read the article
Journal of Political Economy, Ahead of Print.

📚 Journal of Political Science Education

📄 Building Methodological Skill and Confidence Through CUREs in Political Science

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📚 Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (Statistics in Society)

📄 The Energy of Data and Distance Correlation

The Energy of Data and Distance Correlation, by SzèkelyGàbor J and RizzoMaria L. Chapman & Hall/CRC. 2023. 466 pp., £ 93.74(hardcover), ISBN: 9781482242744

📚 Legislative Studies Quarterly

📄 Congressional Oversight Reports as Legislative Branch Work Product and Research Resource

  • Author(s): Grace A. Moore, David Rapallo, Sean M. Theriault
  • Link: Read the article
The Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy at Wayne State University Law School is in the process of creating the first‐ever comprehensive database of congressional oversight reports for all House and Senate Committees since the 106th Congress (1999–2000). In this article, we place these reports into the broader context of the tools Congress has to conduct oversight in service of its many legislative branch responsibilities under the Constitution. We also explain the development of the database. We conclude the article by discussing how the congressional scholars in this special issue use this database to examine how Congress conducts oversight, and we propose several additional areas for future study.

📚 Local Government Studies

📄 ‘As a woman, you’re in a different position’: violence and mayoral authority in German local executive office

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📄 Beyond administrative boundaries: accessibility of services and the role of municipal centres in Czechia

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📄 Serving the public, bearing the burden: a qualitative study of UK councillors’ perspectives on the role and mental health

  • Author(s): Aron P. Sherry, Elizabeth Orton, Lauren B. Sherar, Florence Kinnafick
  • Link: Read the article
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📚 Nations and Nationalism

📄 Nationalism and Education in the Arctic: A Study of Greenland in the Context of the Kingdom of Denmark

This article analyses the coconstitution of nationalism and education in Greenland ( Kalaallit Nunaat ) within the Kingdom of Denmark. Drawing on Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, Michael Billig and Siniša Malešević, it argues that schooling standardises language, history and civic repertoires, thereby fabricating the modern national subject. Situated in a postcolonial and settler‐colonial context, the analysis traces Greenland's trajectory from its status as a Danish‐led colony—a period during which Greenland was relatively isolated (1721–1953)—through county status and assimilation (1953–1979), to Greenlandisation under Home Rule from 1979 and Self‐Government from 2009. Despite linguistic reorientation in recent decades, a de facto hierarchy persists: Danish remains the principal medium of upper secondary education and a vector of social mobility. Against the backdrop of demographic decline and geopolitical intensification, the article contends that Arctic sovereignty is best conceived as multilayered and interdependent and that education is pivotal to nation formation and capacity building, irrespective of future constitutional choices.

📄 The Enemy Who Never Went Away: Memory, Nationalism and China's Japan Policy During the Cold War

This study reassesses the relationship between war memory, nationalism and Sino–Japanese relations during the Cold War. Contrary to the dominant view in existing scholarship that China's nationalist remembering of the war emerged during the 1980s and 1990s, this article, drawing on an extensive survey of the People's Daily , demonstrates that war memory was actively employed in China's foreign policy discourse on Japan from 1949 to 1972. It challenges the ‘collective amnesia’ and ‘communism‐over‐nationalism’ theses by showing that foreign policy discourse functioned as a key arena for the production of memory and nationalist narratives during the Mao era. It contributes to the literature by uncovering a long‐neglected side of memory, nationalism and Sino–Japanese relations.

📄 Gendered Bordering and the Politics of Absence: Mothers of the Missing in Divided Cyprus

In Cyprus, the unresolved issue of missing persons—particularly in relation to women—presents a complex narrative shaped by gender, memory and reconciliation. This article examines how the discovery of missing soldiers' remains disrupts nationalist narratives, challenging portrayals of mothers as passive victims in a deeply divided society. It considers cross‐community initiatives, including the investigative and humanitarian reporting of journalist Sevgül Uludağ, alongside networks such as the Cyprus Women's Bi‐Communal Coalition (CWBC).

📄 What Is ‘African Music’? Musical Categorization and Nation Building in Post‐Colonial Mozambique

What is meant by ‘African music’ in a newly independent African country, and who holds the authority to define it? Focusing on Mozambique after independence, this article examines how musical categorization became a central political and ideological concern within FRELIMO's nation‐building project. Through an analysis of a highly polarized public debate surrounding the musical programming of the national radio station (1981), this article argues that music functioned not only as a vehicle for promoting revolutionary values but also as a contested site where racialized, territorial and historical imaginaries of ‘Africanness’ were negotiated. Drawing on an ‘ethnography of the past’, combining archival analysis of listeners' letters with interviews with key radio workers and cultural agents, this study situates these debates within broader discussions on nation‐building and musical categorization. Ultimately, it demonstrates how disputes over ‘African music’ both reflected unresolved issues in FRELIMO's history, while foreshadowing changes that would only materialize in later years.

📄 Nativism, Sons of the Soil and Autochthony: On Internal Migration and the Politics of Belonging

  • Author(s): Isabelle Côté, Matthew I. Mitchell, Catherine Xhardez
  • Link: Read the article
There is a longstanding and global history of fierce opposition to internal migration across regions. Yet despite the salience of this issue, there is a relative dearth of scholarship on the politics around domestic population movements. This paper critically engages three interrelated concepts in conversation: nativism, sons of the soil and autochthony. This comparative conceptual analysis considers how varied expressions of hostility towards internal migrants can manifest across diverse geographical and sociopolitical contexts in the Global North and Global South. The analysis highlights the need to bridge parallel literatures and empirical worlds as this reveals the diverse ways in which internal migration dynamics can fuel contentious politics of belonging. Though conceptually distinct, we argue these concepts similarly describe how exclusionary language targets internal migrants by emphasizing a hierarchy of belonging based on place‐based identities when ‘natives’ fear future marginalization vis‐à‐vis migrant ‘outsiders’.

📚 Nature Reviews Psychology

📄 From static disorders to dynamic phase transitions in psychopathology

Nature Reviews Psychology, Published online: 27 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s44159-026-00615-5From static disorders to dynamic phase transitions in psychopathology

📄 Towards personalized psychological care

Nature Reviews Psychology, Published online: 26 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s44159-026-00613-7Towards personalized psychological care

📄 Programming education in the AI era

  • Author(s): Yun-Fei Liu, Siamak Ardekani, Kwame Kutten, Sara More, Marina Bedny
  • Link: Read the article
However, programming relies more on reasoning than linguistic abilities. Programming education remains essential but should emphasize computational reasoning rather than syntax and train aspiring software engineers to work with generative AI.

📄 How economic scarcity shapes cognition

Nature Reviews Psychology, Published online: 25 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s44159-026-00611-9How economic scarcity shapes cognition

📚 Parliamentary Affairs

📄 The inner cabinet: how mental health impacts political decision-making

Politicians’ decisions have far-reaching societal impacts, but the mental health of representatives taking decisions remains overlooked. This article addresses this critical gap by theorizing and analyzing the link between common symptoms of poor mental health and political decision-making. Utilising data from two empirical studies involving 85 UK Members of Parliament (MPs) and a broader group of 128 international MPs, we demonstrate that poor mental health correlates with negative self-evaluations of decision-making, increased risk aversion, and heightened susceptibility to framing effects. Far from questioning the competence of those experiencing mental ill-health, these results highlight an urgent need for institutional reforms and support systems to improve job design, increase the sustainability of political careers, and assure the quality of political outcomes.

📄 Asymmetric contagion: the radical right and the erosion of parliamentary civility

Does party system fragmentation erode parliamentary civility? Analyzing 130,000 Spanish legislative speeches (1996–2023) using a transformer-based model (BETO), this article identifies an “asymmetric contagion” effect. While the 2015 entry of “new politics” mainstream challengers did not alter the chamber’s tone, the 2019 arrival of the radical right coincided with a structural break, characterized by high intrinsic negativity and a subsequent spillover among established parties. These results demonstrate that rhetorical polarization is not an automatic byproduct of fragmentation, but is specifically associated with the strategic entry of radical right actors who alter the communicative equilibrium of representative assemblies.

📄 Wimbledon windows: Tactical messaging in the 2024 general election

The use of tactical messages reached unprecedented levels during the 2024 General Election campaign, driven by high levels of uncertainty in races across the country. In this paper, we use an original dataset of local campaign communications from the OpenElections Project to explore how and where these messages were used, including the type of data they used, the appearance of the (in)famous bar charts and the focus of the message. We find evidence that tactical messaging reached unprecedented levels in 2024, which we argue was driven by the uncertainty over electoral outcomes that resulted from the collapse of support for the Conservative Party, boundary changes and long-standing electoral volatility. We find evidence of significant heterogeneity across parties, not only in the volume of tactical messages, but also in their content. Our findings have implications for how campaigns shape voter behaviour, as well as wider implications for voters’ perceptions of politics and political elites.

📚 Party Politics

📄 Community-minded communists: A field experiment on party member propensity for community activism in rural Vietnam

  • Author(s): Paul Schuler, Eitan Paul, Quynh Nguyen, Markus Taussig, Mai Truong
  • Link: Read the article
In single-party and dominant-party regimes, do party members and non-party members at the grassroots level respond differently to party-linked collective action? This paper examines how different framings of party-linked collective action shape participation among party members and non-party members in Vietnam – one of the world’s most enduring single-party regimes – using a preregistered field experiment involving more than 7000 rural women. Contrary to assumptions that party members engage in party-linked collective action for selective or ideological reasons, we find that party members are also more responsive to collective, community-oriented framings. Using a field experiment and interviews, we show that grassroots party members are more community-minded than their non-party counterparts. These findings suggest that, in addition to careerism or ideological loyalty in authoritarian party membership, altruistic and community-minded engagement is an important additional dimension. The presence of community-oriented grassroots party members has important implications for the legitimacy and durability of dominant-party regimes.

📄 Different baselines, different outcomes: Reassessing the representative promise of within-party sortition

Cowley, Webb and Bale’s critique of within-party sortition argues that lotteries among party members cannot produce a socially representative UK Parliament because party memberships are unrepresentative. Drawing on Party Members Project data, they show that random selection would produce only mixed improvements in descriptive representation. While their empirical contribution is significant, this article argues that the broader sceptical conclusion rests on a narrow modelling baseline. Cowley et al. effectively test only one institutional configuration—unstratified random selection from static party memberships—while extrapolating broader claims about sortition as a reform. This article develops three lines of critique. First, their simulations treat party membership as exogenous and unaffected by institutional change, ignoring evidence that candidate selection rules shape recruitment and participation. Second, their analysis evaluates only a single design variant, despite evidence that modern lottery-based institutions employ stratification and corrective mechanisms. Third, their evaluation relies on implicit ‘mirror of society’ standards without specifying formal metrics for aggregating representational trade-offs. Drawing on scholarship on sortition, deliberative democracy, and party organisation, the article proposes a dynamic and design-sensitive framework for evaluating within-party lotteries. Once alternative institutional baselines are considered, the representational potential of within-party sortition appears considerably less constrained than Cowley et al.’s analysis suggests.

📚 Political Behavior

📄 Cool Citizens? How Affectively Unpolarized Citizens View and Participate in Democracy

  • Author(s): Peter Luca Versteegen, Joseph B. Phillips, Lilliana Mason
  • Link: Read the article
Does affective polarization change how citizens view and participate in democracy? We posit that the answer to this crucial question depends on how affectively un polarized citizens view and participate in democracy. Yet, the most common operationalization of affective polarization––measuring sympathy ratings for one party relative to another––does not differentiate between people’s absolute sympathy ratings for the parties, which may mask essential heterogeneity among unpolarized citizens. This paper theorizes the methodological origin of this heterogeneity, describes it, and highlights its implications. Cluster analyses and regressions from three nationally representative surveys in the US provide three conclusions. First, substantial shares of the US population are affectively un polarized. Second, unpolarized citizens cluster into two groups: one feeling lukewarm and one feeling cold toward both parties. Third, these unpolarized groups report diverging democratic attitudes and participation patterns. We discuss the methodological implications and the need for future research on affectively unpolarized citizens.

📄 Coincidental Representation: How Congruence and Influence shape Public Satisfaction with Government

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📚 Political Communication

📄 Social Media Savvy? The Use and Effectiveness of Political Parties’ Issue Strategies Across Platforms in the German Federal Election Campaign 2025

  • Author(s): Christoph Ivanusch, Simon M. Luebke, Anna-Katharina Wurst, Jörg Haßler
  • Link: Read the article
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📚 Political Research Quarterly

📄 Beyond the Average: Revisiting How District Magnitude Shapes Party Systems

We argue that district magnitude shapes the number of electoral parties through two mechanisms: district permissiveness, which influences incentives for electoral coordination within districts, and variation in district magnitude across districts within a country. When district magnitude varies within countries, larger districts tend to support a greater number of parties. Small parties that succeed in these districts are subsequently incentivized to compete in smaller districts, thereby weakening overall electoral coordination. Using cross-sectional data from 54 democracies and longitudinal evidence from 30 European countries between 1945 and 2019, we find that within-country variation in district magnitude increases the number of electoral parties in permissive electoral systems and erodes electoral coordination over time. We further examine the contamination mechanism from larger to smaller districts using district-level data from legislative elections in Portugal and Spain, both of which employ simple Proportional Representation systems with varying district magnitudes.

📚 Politics & Gender

📄 Compliant Women, Constitutive Violence: Rethinking the VAWIP Counterfactual

The literature on violence against women in politics (VAWIP) has made substantial contributions to understanding how gender shapes political exclusion. Foundational work by Krook and Restrepo Sanín (2016; 2020) defined VAWIP as a form of hate crime and as systematic backlash against women’s entry into political life. This conceptual scaffolding informs Krook’s (2022) subsequent attention to semiotic and symbolic harm, extending the VAWIP framework beyond physical violence to encompass the representational strategies through which female politicians are delegitimized. Bjarnegård and Zetterberg’s (2023) edited volume extends the framework further, recognizing that gender-based political violence operates across a broader range of contexts and along a “psychological-physical continuum” (7) that is neither temporally nor institutionally confined to election cycles or legislative chambers.

📄 Violence Against Feminist Advocates: Political Violence and Anti-Gender Politics

Research on violence against women in politics (VAWIP) and research on violence against women activists have made crucial contributions by conceptualizing violence as a gendered phenomenon that targets women in response to their political participation. In these approaches, violence operates as a mechanism to discipline, silence, or expel women from political and public life. Alongside these developments, a growing body of scholarship has examined anti-gender politics as a structured and transnational political project, paying particular attention to its actors, discourses, and strategies.

📄 VAWIP in a State-Monopolized Political Field: The Case of Chinese Feminist Activism

The literature on violence against women in politics (VAWIP) implicitly treats such violence as boundary enforcement: a political field already exists; the violence women encounter marks the edge they are not permitted to cross; and the state stands as the guarantor of protection and redress under the rule of law, whether or not it delivers (Krook 2020; Krook and Restrepo Sanín2016). In high-capacity authoritarian states like China (Johnston 2019), the premise of this framing does not hold. The political field itself is monopolized and policed by the state, which determines what counts as politics, who is recognized as a legitimate political subject, and what forms of political action are permitted.

📚 Politics and Religion

📄 Believing like a state? Official Islam and public opinion in Kyrgyzstan

Scholars of Muslim-majority countries (MMCs) have paid renewed attention to government efforts to impose an “official Islam” (OI) to combat what they regard as religious extremism. Yet, understanding when OI resonates with the public has received less scrutiny. We bridge the literature on OI with the broader literature on state narratives to derive a set of hypotheses, which we test using an original survey with an embedded experiment in Kyrgyzstan—an MMC that has promoted an OI since the 2010s. Our results suggest that OI’s resonance is limited and potentially counterproductive. The state promotes traditional Kyrgyz Islam as the only version that is compatible with both national identity and personal piety. While the narrative concerning identity resonates with most of the population, key constituencies appear to reject the narrative concerning personal piety—the ethnic majority (Kyrgyz), largest ethnic minority (Uzbeks), and those with high degrees of religiosity and political trust.

📚 Public Opinion Quarterly

📄 Larry M. Bartels and Katherine J. Cramer. The Politics of Social Change: From the Sixties to the Present Through the Eyes of a Generation

BartelsLarry M. and CramerKatherine J.. The Politics of Social Change: From the Sixties to the Present Through the Eyes of a Generation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2026. 480 pp. $115 (cloth). $24 (paper).

📚 Quarterly Journal of Political Science

📄 Social learning behind closed doors: evidence from seniority voting in the US Supreme Court

We analyze the implications of seniority voting on Supreme Court decision-making. We provide reduced-form evidence consistent with justices learning from the votes of their senior colleagues as determined by the voting mechanism. To explain this evidence, we develop and estimate a model of sequential voting with social learning. In the model, justices weigh spatial payoffs against the appropriateness of their disposition and consider their preferences, private information and the choices of senior justices. We recover estimates of judicial preferences, expertise and learning and use them to assess the quality of Supreme Court dispositions relative to alternative voting mechanisms. We find that the quality of the Court’s dispositions would have improved under an anti-seniority rule, in which junior justices are allowed to vote first.

📄 Checks, Balances, and Presidential Ambitions

This study investigates the relationship between running for president and members’ contributions to the core legislative functions that impact Congress’s standing relative to the presidency. This study finds some evidence that ambitious legislators attend roll call votes and oversight hearings at lower rates, but at the same time, they are more legislatively productive, conduct just as much informal oversight and are equally informational in their public oversight. When Congress votes on an issue that affects the balance of power between Congress and the president, they are more likely to side with Congress than legislators without presidential ambitions are. These behavioral differences persist even after their presidential runs, which suggests they are not driven by a strategic effort to audition for the presidency.

📚 Representation

📄 A Half-Century Analysis of Female Representation and the Rise of Populist Radical Right in Nordic Parliaments

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📄 Does Local Representation Matter? The Impact of Independent Parties on Citizens’ Political Efficacy at the Municipal Level

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📄 Disability Representation in Germany: The Role of Shared Experiences in District Disability Representatives

No abstract was provided by the RSS feed or Crossref API.please use the Read the article link above.

📚 Social Forces

📄 Beyond hiring: the dynamics of ethnic disparities in unemployment

Many ethnic and racial minorities experience higher unemployment rates than majority populations. Recent research in this area has largely focused on inequalities in getting a job—through employer discrimination in hiring—using field experiments. While these studies typically identify significant levels of discrimination, they rarely examine or discuss how hiring discrimination contributes to ethnic employment penalties at the aggregate level. Our study draws attention to the role of ethnic and racial inequalities in getting a job but also in remaining employed and avoiding unemployment as factors contributing to aggregate ethnic employment penalties. Our analysis employs population register data from Sweden to estimate unemployment entry and exit rates for the majority and ten groups of children of immigrants (the second generation, G2). Based on counterfactual scenarios we conclude that the substantially higher unemployment rates among the G2 are driven by their higher risk of becoming unemployed rather than their lower chances of becoming employed. Our findings indicate that hiring discrimination and other reasons for inequalities in getting a job play a less significant role than sometimes assumed in explaining ethnic employment penalties—at least in the context of Sweden.

📄 Sex differences in academic achievement in US adolescents: the role of maturation and impulse control

This study investigates mechanisms underlying girls’ academic advantage over boys by examining the role of physical and pubertal maturation. Using longitudinal data from the Add Health study, we analyzed whether sex differences in maturation explain girls’ higher grade 10 GPAs, and whether these associations are mediated by planfulness or impulse control. Path analysis revealed that females’ higher GPAs were partially explained by their advanced physical maturation as rated by the interviewer (explaining 2.4 percent) and greater impulse control (explaining 7.7 percent), controlling for cognitive ability and other potential confounders. Still, a significant direct effect of biological sex on GPA remained, suggesting additional unexplained mechanisms. Planfulness predicted GPA but did not vary by sex, and neither planfulness nor impulse control were associated with perceived relative maturation.

📄 Reproduction, rejection, or adoption of indigeneity? Intergenerational patterns of ethnic classification in contemporary Mexico

This paper examines the intergenerational transmission of Indigenous classification in Mexico, focusing on how respondents reproduce, reject, or adopt Indigenous identification in relation to how they classify their parents. Drawing on data from a novel, nationally representative survey, I analyze factors associated with two key trajectories: de-indigenization, in which respondents who classify at least one parent as Indigenous do not self-classify as Indigenous, and indigenization, in which individuals who claim no Indigenous parentage come to identify as Indigenous. The findings show that roughly 16 percent of the population differs from how they report their parents’ Indigenous status. Reports of the loss of Indigenous language across generations are primarily associated with de-indigenization. In contrast, perceived phenotypical features commonly linked to Indigenous belonging and reports of Indigenous language proficiency are more strongly associated with indigenization. Additionally, a notable subset (10 percent) identifies as both Indigenous and mestizo, a classification path correlated with higher levels of education. These patterns reveal the fluidity of ethnoracial boundaries in Mexico and illustrate how processes of cultural transmission, racialization, and stratification shape the social production of Indigenous identity through different pathways.

📚 Social Science Quarterly

📄 Beauty, Strategy, and Jury Votes: Physical Attractiveness and Winning in Survivor

Objective This study examines whether physical attractiveness is associated with winning in the US version of Survivor, a competitive setting in which outcomes depend on both observable performance and evaluation by informed peers, allowing us to assess whether appearance remains associated with success when decision‐makers directly observe contestants' behavior. Methods Using data on 129 finalists, attractiveness is measured with a symmetry‐based score derived from pre‐game portrait photographs. Guided by the game's “Outwit, Outplay, Outlast” framework, a sequence of logistic regression models distinguishes physical performance, strategic behavior, and social positioning, with robustness checks for player‐level clustering, functional form, and institutional changes across eras. Results Attractiveness is positively associated with winning and remains robust across model specifications after accounting for performance, strategy, social ties, and era differences. Among game‐related variables, hidden immunity idols emerge as the most consistent predictor of success, whereas challenge wins are not statistically significant in the full model. Conclusion Physical attractiveness remains associated with success even in a high‐stakes environment where performance is directly observable and decisions are made by informed peers, suggesting that appearance can influence outcomes even when evaluators have access to extensive information about individual performance.

📚 The International Journal of Press/Politics

📄 Narratives of Power: AI, Agency and the EU AI Act

Public debate around AI has been characterised by hegemonic narratives that delineate the scope of the conversation, suppressing different voices and limiting nuanced discussion of the technology’s harms and benefits. Scholars have identified technological or enchanted determinism, the arms race mentality and the utopia versus dystopia debate as key narratives around AI. These ideas saturate the conversation, driven primarily by the tech industry, which positions itself as the (only) expert voice. The industry’s capacity to drive these narratives is facilitated by its established institutional authority and dominant presence in public discourse, as well as the knowledge asymmetry inherent in the proprietary, ‘black-box’ nature of AI systems. Tech firms leverage the technical opacity of AI and their powerful societal position to define the contours of public debate, assigning agency to AI itself and the tech industry; constructing users and civil society as passive observers or recipients; and establishing a frame for debate that focuses on extreme consequences or hyperbolic benefits. This study, conducted early in 2024, investigates the effects of this interpretive frame on the policy choices and communications of the EU AI Act, through a mixed-methods computational and critical discourse analysis. Within EU governing body texts, the same discursive patterns that map agency and erase the middle ground of debate in AI are found, helping to marginalise alternative perspectives from other stakeholders and prevent nuanced understandings of potential harms. In the context of the Act itself, these patterns reverberate in the assignment of agentic roles and the scope of the regulation.

📄 Incivility Among Politicians: Driven by Rational Minds or Personal Drives?

There is growing concern about politicians engaging in incivility by mocking and insulting each other. While prior research often explains such discourse through rational choice, emerging work highlights the role of politicians’ individual traits, such as their personality. Yet, a unified theoretical account of how rationality and individual predispositions interact to shape harmful elite discourse is lacking. Drawing on foundational insights from psychology, we argue that politicians’ discourse reflects primarily rational considerations, which are moderated by their individual predispositions, leading to uncivil communication between politicians. We test this notion using elite survey data, unobtrusive measures of their individual traits, and direct observations of politicians’ social media communication in Belgium – a rare integration of psychological and behavioral evidence at the elite level. The results show that politicians’ use of uncivil discourse responds to rational considerations, but that the strength of this response depends on their individual predispositions. These findings demonstrate that individual traits moderate how politicians translate rational incentives into harmful discourse, providing a more nuanced account of the causes of elite incivility.

📄 An Effort Made for Whom? Exploring Ministers’ Public Approval and Name Recognition in Relation to Their Media Activity

  • Author(s): Mads Fuglsang Hove, Jonas Krogh Madsen, Peter Heyn Nielsen
  • Link: Read the article
In many democracies, cabinet ministers find themselves in a difficult situation, juggling a demanding administrative job with political responsibilities and the need to communicate and campaign to secure reelection. With the rise of social media, this balance is becoming increasingly unstable. However, the tangible benefits of media visibility outside election campaigns remain unclear, making it difficult to determine whether such efforts yield meaningful political returns. This study examines and compares whether Danish ministers’ media activities—both in traditional and social media—impact their name recognition and popularity in the Danish population. We utilize thirty-two nationally representative opinion polls conducted between March 2020 and May 2024 and merge these with extensive records of all Danish ministers’ Facebook activity and appearances in traditional media outlets throughout the same period. Overall, our findings show that ministers’ activity in traditional media is associated with only minor gains in name recognition, while social media activity has either zero or minimal gains in popularity. Moreover, breaking down these correlations across different types of Facebook interactions and traditional media outlets suggests a trade-off between reaching and being perceived favorably by voters, showing the multifaceted nature of (social) media activity. Consequently, while we do not rule out any significant effects of social media on voters’ perceptions, we argue that social media activity is no panacea for politicians to improve their public popularity and name recognition.

📄 Policy Window as a Trapdoor: Rethinking the Multiple Streams Framework through the Defunding of U.S. Public Media

  • Author(s): Hilde Van den Bulck, Christopher Ali, Jonathan Kropko
  • Link: Read the article
This article analyses the 2025 defunding of U.S. public media as a critical case to revisit Kingdon’s multiple streams framework (MSF). While MSF offers a useful heuristic for understanding policy change through the convergence of problem, policy, and political streams, its explanatory power is limited by assumptions of contingency, pluralism, and stakeholder inclusion. Under growing illiberalism, the “policy window” functioned less as an accidental opening than as a trapdoor, built through ideological persistence, institutional erosion and coordinated policy design. Drawing on critical discourse analysis of congressional hearings, executive orders, political communication, and media coverage, alongside survey data on public broadcasting system audiences, this study shows how conservative actors sustained a politicized definition of public media bias and institutionalized policy solutions. The survey highlights a disjuncture between audience trust and the construction of public media as a policy problem. Rather than spontaneous convergence, the case reflects coordinated restructuring of the public media system. More broadly, it suggests that MSF becomes less effective when stream independence is undermined by executive dominance and ideological alignment, requiring approaches that foreground power, discourse, and exclusion.

📚 West European Politics

📄 Political trust revisited: theoretical and empirical insights into political distrust and mistrust

  • Author(s): Matthijs Gillissen, Silke Goubin, Viktor Valgarðsson, Steven Van de Walle
  • Link: Read the article
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📚 問題與研究

📄 Taiwan’s Public Diplomacy Efforts in Thailand Under the New Southbound Policy

This study analyzes why the government of Taiwan should engage in smart public diplomacy with the Kingdom of Thailand. It also examines Taiwan’s public policy across the two dimensions of culture and people-to-people engagement for the purpose of sustainable and constructive relations. This is supported by highlighting Taiwan’s public diplomacy efforts toward Thailand, concluding that direct engagement with Taipei has significantly enhanced Bangkok’s recognition of the island. Specifically, Thai students and alumni, Thai migrant workers, and marriages between Taiwanese and Thai citizens are crucial in disseminating a positive image of Taiwan within Thailand. By aligning Taiwan’s strengths with Thailand’s needs, both nations can create mutually beneficial opportunities and foster a sustainable, constructive relationship through Taiwan’s innovative approach to public diplomacy. Such a strategy could provide substantial advantages for both countries.