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本週期刊簡報(2026/07/11)

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本週更新目錄

American Politics Research Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (Statistics in Society) Politics and Religion
American Sociological Review Latin American Politics and Society Post-Soviet Affairs
Big Data & Society Legislative Studies Quarterly Public Choice
Comparative Political Studies Local Government Studies Public Opinion Quarterly
Contemporary Political Theory Minds and Machines Qualitative Sociology
Democratization Nations and Nationalism Representation
Economic Sciences Research in PNAS Parliamentary Affairs Research & Politics
Field Methods Party Politics Social Forces
Government and Opposition Philosophy & Public Affairs Social Problems
International Political Science Review Policy & Internet Social Science Computer Review
Journal of Asian and African Studies Political Analysis Sociological Methods & Research
Journal of Contemporary China Political Communication The Quarterly Journal of Economics
Journal of East Asian Studies Political Psychology Theory and Society
Journal of Elections Public Opinion and Parties Political Research Quarterly West European Politics
Journal of Experimental Political Science Political Science Research and Methods 問題與研究
Journal of Information Technology & Politics Political Studies
Journal of Political Science Education Political Studies Review

📚 American Politics Research

📄 Measuring Judicial Appeasement of the United States Supreme Court

The interpersonal dynamics of political elites remain somewhat shrouded within extant literature. In this paper, we propose a new measure of “appeasement,” using analyses of Supreme Court opinions. Appeasement operationalizes the level of strategic concession-making that individual justices display in their responses to majority opinions. Analyzing a corpus of over 9,000 non-majority opinions between 1946 and 2011, we use a machine learning model to detect the number of concessions versus non-concessions made by individual justices. This ratio of concessions to non-concessions is used to create our appeasement measure. We suggest that appeasement varies as a result of interpersonal relationships, external pressures, and personal characteristics of justices. Conciliatory speech is a tool that may be wielded by political elites in all manner of political rhetoric. As such, appeasement represents an important potential avenue for categorizing and demystifying the interpersonal dynamics of governmental institutions.

📚 American Sociological Review

📄 Religion Unbundled: Toward a Twenty-First-Century Paradigm for the Sociology of American Religion

  • 作者: Ruth Braunstein, Jaime Kucinskas, Brian Steensland, Daniel Winchester
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
Much recent sociological work on religion in the United States is written outside the field’s two established paradigms: secularization theory and the 1990s “religious economy” approach. Drawing together strands of recent theoretical innovation and contemporary religious developments that challenge the existing paradigms, we introduce elements of a twenty-first-century paradigm for the sociology of American religion. We argue that the shape-shifting nature of American religion (and secularity) can be productively conceptualized as an effect of unbundling—that is, a process by which religious goods once offered as a package by institutionalized religious authorities are now offered individually or repackaged into various hybrid and contested forms by a wide array of suppliers. We demonstrate the value of our approach by showing how two major religious traditions, Christianity and Buddhism, have become unbundled. In both cases, our approach positions us to apprehend a range of phenomena beyond traditional organized religion, as well as how organized religion adapts to fit this new de facto unbundled landscape. We offer criteria for delimiting the scope of this broader unbundled religious landscape, and discuss the implications of our approach for scholarship on religion, meaning making, and social change.

📚 Big Data & Society

📄 Routinized data activism: Citizen data practices and everyday data citizenship in South Korea

Based on ethnographic research with a grassroots civic hacking community in South Korea, this article examines how civic hackers enact data citizenship under the temporal and labor pressures of datafied societies. Drawing on a practice-oriented framework, it analyzes how civic hackers integrate data work with everyday practices to secure autonomy and navigate limited time and resources. The study develops the concept of routinized data activism to describe data-mediated civic engagement shaped through habitual participation, peer learning, and coordination. Routinization operates as a strategy under constraint, enabling civic hackers to cultivate data citizenship not through technical competence or data access alone, but through the interplay of everyday practices, collective identities, and sociopolitical conditions.

📄 What counts as harm? Feminist experiments with AI-driven visual content moderation to detect misogynistic violence in mainstream pornography

This paper offers a feminist critique of algorithmic systems of harm-detection by evaluating the visual recognition capabilities of Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) tools and their effectiveness in detecting misogynistic violence within online pornography. It asks what counts as harm in commercial artificial intelligence (AI) moderation systems and what happens when these are used to identify misogynistic violence in pornography. While previous research has examined gender bias in AI-based moderation, the detection of male violence against women (MVAW) in visual pornography remains unexplored. This study addresses this gap through an analysis of 100 pornographic thumbnails, combined with visual transitivity analysis. It shows that MLaaS tools miss acts such as strangulation but flag guns as violent, demonstrating that they are ineffective in classifying harm as defined by feminist scholars. From a feminist standpoint, pornography is structured by misogyny. Thus, it functions as a site to test technology's understanding of the structural nature of MVAW, showing that this failure is not a technical oversight but evidence of a broader issue within digital technologies. A combination of training datasets shaped by sexist assumptions, male-centred moderation standards, and biased developers creates a system that sees violence and pornography as mutually exclusive, failing to recognise harm. Without a feminist intervention, the technology defaults to norms that normalise and eroticise pornography as legitimate entertainment. This study contributes to debates on AI bias, technology-facilitated image-based MVAW, and pornography regulation. It provides insights for researchers, policymakers, and platforms seeking an informed basis for adopting a feminist approach to harm-detection.

📄 Cloud assets and the “unit of compute”: Market dominance in commercial computing

We offer a genealogy of recent artificial intelligence infrastructure investment, situating it within a longer-term strategy by Big Cloud firms to construct and dominate the cloud computing market. Based on an analysis of 12 years of financial data and earnings calls from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, we introduce the concept of “cloud assets” to help elucidate their dominance. Neither strictly tangible nor intangible, this is a new hybrid asset form wherein digital infrastructure gets configured through accounting practices and market devices to generate what we call the “unit of compute.” Our constructivist perspective seeks to avoid the binary framing within current debates on whether Big Cloud's dominance derives from their control of physical infrastructure, or of data and platforms. Instead, we trace the techno-economic procedures that define and quantify the temporality of access, pricing structures, and processor types that generate revenue streams from endlessly resellable “units of compute.” We describe a “digital Jevons effect” which further consolidates control over compute, with implications for the future of algorithmic innovation and regulation.

📄 Narrow surveillance: Preserving privacy in AI-based safety monitoring in public spaces

  • 作者: Joachim Wiewiura, Jeppe Agger Nielsen
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
This article examines AI-based video surveillance systems in public spaces. We investigate a case of AI-based camera technology designed to detect falls into the water and prevent drowning accidents at the harbor front of a large Scandinavian city. This case confronts a common state-citizen tension between safety enhancement and privacy intrusion, and illustrates how involved actors strived to balance this through technological design choices such as thermal imaging. Building on these empirical insights and approaches that seek to deal with the complex safety-privacy tension, we draw out the notion of narrow surveillance as a general approach to safety monitoring in public spaces, aiming to minimize privacy intrusion through three criteria: (i) non-identification, (ii) purpose limitation, and (iii) alignment of interests. By implication, our study contributes new insights to interdisciplinary debates in surveillance studies by providing a framework for evaluating current AI-based surveillance systems and guiding future implementations of such systems.

📚 Comparative Political Studies

📄 Who Rules? Support Coalitions and Regime Survival, 1789–2020

  • 作者: Carl Henrik Knutsen, Sirianne Dahlum, Magnus Bergli Rasmussen, Tore Wig
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
All political regimes rely on coalitions of supporters to govern and remain in power. We discuss, specify, and test arguments pertaining to how the numerical size as well as social diversity of regime support coalitions influence regime longevity. We use recently collected data on support coalition characteristics, with global coverage and time series exceeding 230 years, and find that larger as well as more diverse regime support coalitions are positively related to regime longevity. Both patterns hold up in different time periods and in sub-samples including only autocratic regimes. We also discuss and find indications that increased coalition size may limit certain types of regime breakdown (e.g., from popular uprisings) but not others (e.g., coups). Coalition diversity is negatively related to different types of regime breakdown, and these patterns may reflect that diverse coalitions offer regimes access to variegated power resources that enable them to mitigate different threats.

📄 Social Capital in North Korea: Shadow Economy, Shared Norms and Social Networks

  • 作者: Taehee Whang, Young Jun Choi, Wooseon Choi, Hyung-min Joo
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
Since the collapse of the command economy in the 1990s, North Korea has experienced profound changes driven by bottom-up marketization. This paper examines the impact of informal marketization on “social capital” (defined as shared norms and social networks) in North Korea. Our study investigates whether and to what extent the shadow economy has influenced social capital in the region. We gathered data through a survey of 1309 defectors, interviews with approximately 100 defectors, and in-depth interviews with 24 former high-ranking North Korean officials. Both quantitative tests and qualitative analyses indicate a significant transformation of social capital in North Korea. The traditional “old” social capital, which was previously centered around official workplaces, has diminished. In its place, a “new” social capital has emerged, primarily revolving around marketplaces in recent years. The shadow economy has been instrumental in fostering this new type of social capital, influencing both the “bonding” (shared norms) and “bridging” (social networks) aspects. Despite the emergence of a new social capital facilitated by bottom-up marketization, its evolution into a civil society remains uncertain due to two critical limitations: a lack of both civic engagement and social autonomy.

📄 Crises and Ideological Change in Authoritarian Regimes: Evidence From the July 2016 Coup Attempt in Turkey

In this study, I investigate how crises affect the ideological claims of authoritarian regimes. While existing studies emphasize the significance of ideological legitimation claims for the consolidation of authoritarian regimes, they do not examine whether the intensity and usage of these claims change after a crisis. I address this gap by utilizing the competitive authoritarian regime of Turkey before and after the July 2016 coup attempt. I use a novel dataset of President Erdoğan’s speeches and combine various text-as-data tools, including word embeddings, dictionary-based measures, and topic modeling, with an interrupted time series analysis. The results suggest that the coup attempt led to a short-term increase in the intensity of ideological claims and a long-lasting increase in the ideological framing of regime outsiders in Erdoğan’s speeches. These results demonstrate that crises transform the ideological claims of authoritarian regimes by reshaping how and to what extent such claims are used.

📄 Missionary Activity, Education, and Long-Run Political Development: Evidence Across Regime Types in Africa

  • 作者: Soeren J. Henn, Horacio Larreguy, Carlos Schmidt-Padilla
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
In Africa, missionaries used schooling to gain adherents. We study how historical missionary activity shaped long-run education and political development across regime types. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to Catholic missionaries generated by their territorial administration system. Using a regression discontinuity design, we show that proximity to historical diocese headquarters generally led to an increased presence of Catholic missionaries, as well as long-term positive effects on Catholic identity and educational outcomes. The effects on political outcomes vary by regime type. Only individuals exposed to greater historical missionary activity in open anocracies—relative to those in democracies and closed anocracies—are more likely to participate in politics. Moreover, they are also the only ones who are more engaged, supportive of democratic institutions, and disenchanted with the state of democracy and incumbent in their countries.

📄 Indigenous Community Recognition and Identity: Evidence from Peru

Collective recognition of indigenous claims to land and traditional authority has advanced rapidly in recent decades in many countries. How do these processes impact identity and decision-making among individuals within communities themselves? I examine this in Peru, where the government has recognized thousands of indigenous communities covering one-third of the national territory. I leverage spatial and temporal variation in community recognition paired with detailed household survey data and find, using age cohort analysis, that the effects vary by generation in ways shaped by land access and scarcity. Experiencing recognition increases community self-identification and community membership. But the effects are strongest among adults and near-adults at the time of recognition, who are best positioned to win greater access to scarce community land and invest in community life immediately post-recognition. Younger generations born into recognized communities are less tied to their communities but also fare better economically, suggesting shifting intergenerational effects.

📄 The State and the Monopolization of Violence: Castles in Europe, 1000–1700

  • 作者: Christoffer Cappelen, Jacob Gerner Hariri
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
The defining characteristic of the modern state is its monopoly on violence. Yet, despite broad scholarly agreement on the definition, there are no empirical measures of the monopolization of violence. We introduce the first such measure: the share of castles controlled by the Crown. Taking the canonical definition as its point of departure, the measure allows us to trace the origins of the modern state in the power struggle between monarchs and societal actors when, where, and as it actually happened. The Castles Data are based on random samples from 17 modern European countries and record the ownership of more than 5,400 unique castles across most of Europe from 1000 to 1700. To validate the measure, we show that it tracks historiographical accounts of state formation and correlates strongly with independent coding by historians. We illustrate its use in applications at both the polity and micro levels.

📄 Ideas or Strategy? The Impact of Populist Incumbents on Liberal Democracy

  • 作者: Kirk A. Hawkins, Saskia P. Ruth-Lovell, Grant A. Mitchell
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
Scholarship on populism has long identified a negative association between populism in power and the decline of democracy-sustaining institutions. However, researchers’ understanding of the theoretical links between these two phenomena differ and scholars have been hesitant to test competing approaches to populism against each other on equal footing. In this study, we address this lacuna, contrasting the theoretical predictions from the ideational and political-strategic approaches to populism side by side. To do so, we discuss the theoretical arguments undergirding the cross-case relationship between populism and democratic decline, then derive measures for each approach and compare them empirically. We use both conventional frequentist as well as Bayesian statistical methods to compare these approaches. Within both statistical paradigms, we find that measures derived from the ideational approach outperform measures derived from the political-strategic approach.

📄 When Does Party Cooperation Inform Voters Judgments of Policy Proximity? A Cross-National Analysis of Heuristic Use in Multi-Party Democracies

In complex multiparty democracies, citizens face the challenge of interpreting elite behavior to locate parties on the policy spectrum. This paper investigates when and why voters use party cooperation as a heuristic for judging the distance between their own preferences and those of an out-party. Drawing on the theory of ecological rationality, I argue that cooperation becomes an efficient heuristic when it is cheap to access, simple to apply, and accurate enough to guide inferences about policy alignment. Using original surveys from Canada, Denmark, Germany, and the United Kingdom across fifteen policy domains, I show that perceived cooperation is consistently associated with reduced policy distance. The effect is strongest among knowledgeable partisans, on polarized issues, and when the out-party is perceived to be ideologically extreme. These findings reveal how ecological rationality conditions voter reasoning, highlighting cooperation as a dynamic elite cue that shapes mass perceptions and democratic representation.

📄 The Market in Smugglers: Survey Experimental Evidence on the Choice of Coyotes in Guatemala

  • 作者: Diego Romero, Mateo Villamizar Chaparro, Erik Wibbels
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
Illicit migration is big business, involving millions of migrants each year, many of whom hire human smugglers to facilitate perilous journeys. Yet little is known about this illicit market or how potential migrants choose whom to hire. Facing high costs and uncertain prospects of success, future migrants must make complex, high-stakes decisions when selecting a smuggler. In this paper, we provide descriptive evidence on the market for coyotes (human smugglers in Latin America) and experimental evidence on the factors shaping hiring preferences. Using a forced-choice conjoint experiment, we isolate the effects of referrals, reputation, reliability, safety, and price. Our evidence draws on three original sources: a panel survey of deportees from the U.S. to Guatemala, a household survey, and in-depth interviews. We find that referrals and reputations for safe, successful journeys are central, while price has little influence—helping explain why policies that raise migration costs often fail to deter irregular migration.

📚 Contemporary Political Theory

📄 The joy of consent: A philosophy of good sex

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📄 Animals and the right to politics

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📄 Being cosmopolitan: a political approach

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📄 How to weather together: Feminist practice for climate change

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📄 Postnational constitutionalism: Europe and the time of law

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📄 Sodomy’s solicitations: A right to queerness

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📄 Anger, fear, domination: dark passions and the power of political speech

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📄 Love troubles: A philosophy of eros

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📚 Democratization

📄 The politics of debilitation: host state authoritarianism and China’s transnational repression in Turkey

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📚 Economic Sciences Research in PNAS

📄 Multiplexing in networks and diffusion

  • 作者: Arun G. Chandrasekhar, Vasu Chaudhary, Benjamin Golub, Matthew O. Jackson
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
We study multiplexing—the extent to which people have multiple, distinct types of relationships with the same others. We document empirical multiplexing patterns in Indian village data. We show that relationships such as socializing, advising, helping, and lending are correlated but distinct, while commonly used proxies for networks based on ethnicity and geography are nearly uncorrelated with actual relationships. We also show that these layers and their overlap affect information diffusion in a field experiment. On the theoretical side, we show that increased overlap in people’s different types of relationships impedes the spread of simple contagions—such as diseases or basic information that spread through a single interaction. In contrast, such higher levels of multiplexing enhance the spread of a complex contagion (e.g., a behavior or belief that requires multiple interactions for transmission) when infection rates are low, but impede complex contagion if infection rates are high. Finally, we identify empirical differences in multiplexing by gender and connectedness.

📄 The role of nonfinancial factors in the Congressional Budget Office’s health insurance coverage projections

Nonfinancial factors play an important role in people’s coverage decisions as premiums, cost sharing, and other factors that determine the financial value of health insurance cannot fully explain patterns in take-up rates. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is tasked with estimating the budgetary and coverage effects of policy and economic changes that affect health insurance markets, which includes considering the interactions between nonfinancial factors and policy design. The agency groups the nonfinancial factors it considers into three categories: ease of enrollment, awareness, and attitudes. Many recent policies have affected nonfinancial factors related to the take-up of Medicaid and marketplace insurance, such as the introduction of work requirements for Medicaid and access to zero-premium marketplace plans. This article explains how nonfinancial factors are handled and incorporated into CBO’s baseline health insurance projections and cost estimates, highlights the recent literature on the effect of these nonfinancial factors on insurance take-up decisions, and suggests future areas of research.

📄 Payment integrity in government programs: Takeaways from incorporating the behavioral sciences in US federal evaluations

  • 作者: Maya Duru, Hanna Hoover, Heather Barry Kappes, David Schwegman, Brigitte Seim, Mattie Toma, Mary Clair Turner
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
A primary way the US federal government delivers public goods and services is via monetary payments. Ensuring that these payments are calculated accurately, delivered on time, and made to the correct recipients is important for government fiscal health. Inaccurate or delayed payments can weaken public trust in the government and undermine government accountability. In this article, we examine findings from a set of impact evaluations assessing interventions designed to improve payment integrity in US federal programs. The low-cost, evidence-based interventions draw on insights from the social and behavioral sciences and include modification of forms, changes to how and when agencies request information, and altering existing communications. The evaluations were conducted by the US General Services Administration’s Office of Evaluation Sciences in collaboration with agency partners. We extract three takeaways across four representative evaluations. First, the real-world evaluations validate a key implication of the behavioral science literature: interventions that reduce burdens for individuals have small effects that meaningfully improve payment integrity at scale. Second, effects attenuate across interventions and over time, suggesting a need for iterative evaluation. Finally, bureaucratic hurdles and administrative complexity are the main barriers to translating academic insights into real-world government programs. Addressing these challenges will require close collaboration between behavioral scientists and practitioners throughout the intervention design and evaluation process.

📄 Applied behavioral and decision sciences in support of US FDA’s drug regulatory mission

  • 作者: Sara L. Eggers, Tamar Krishnamurti, Baruch Fischhoff
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) makes and communicates decisions that directly affect the health choices and well-being of the US public. Behavioral and decision scientists have long supported FDA’s pharmaceutical (medical drug) regulatory and public health mission, working alongside clinical and pharmaceutical scientists. This Perspective describes four interrelated cases illustrating these collaborations: a) creating the Benefit–Risk Framework to guide regulatory decisions regarding new drug approvals; b) launching an internal decision support service to facilitate specific regulatory decisions; c) implementing the Patient-Focused Drug Development initiative to strengthen the use of patient input to inform regulatory decision making; and d) developing FDA SOURCE, a dynamic systems simulation model to assess potential strategies to address the US opioid overdose crisis. Key to the success of these efforts has been their behavioral and decision science foundations, strategically implemented by an expert team dedicated to fostering trusted collaborations with internal and external partners. These cases offer a model for other agencies facing complex decisions of public impact.

📄 User interaction with digital platforms: A consumer protection perspective

The rapid growth of digital platforms has transformed how consumers interact with the marketplace and led to new challenges for consumer protection. This Perspective describes how the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Economics uses behavioral insights and empirical methods to support efforts to prevent unfair or deceptive business practices in digital markets. We highlight two studies that address critical knowledge gaps in digital consumer protection, including how consumers perceive and respond to advertising disclosures and how digital design choices affect the accessibility and effectiveness of consumer reporting tools. The studies illustrate how behavioral research can be used both prospectively, to evaluate potential remedies, and retrospectively, to assess the effects of past Federal Trade Commission (FTC) actions. The first study is a laboratory experiment that examines how the salience of advertising disclosures influences consumer recognition of and engagement with advertising content, where engagement is defined as the time users spend viewing ads. The second is a retrospective analysis of a redesigned consumer complaint website, using a natural experiment to evaluate the effect of usability improvements on complaint submission rates and information quality. Together, these studies demonstrate how applied research on user behavior can inform marketplace oversight and the design of consumer-facing tools. We conclude by outlining ongoing efforts to expand the role of empirical research at the FTC to strengthen the foundation for evidence-based policymaking in an increasingly complex digital environment.

📚 Field Methods

📄 Does a QR Code in the Invitation Letter Increase Participation in a Push-to-web Survey?

  • 作者: Claudia Schmiedeberg, Jette Schröder, Christiane Bozoyan
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
QR codes are increasingly used in postal invitations to web surveys to facilitate participation. We experimentally tested how a QR code in the invitation letter affects participation in a push-to-web survey of the German family panel (pairfam). The response rate was three percentage points higher with QR codes than without. The QR code effect on response did not differ by gender or education, but it was significantly higher for middle-aged than for younger individuals. Additionally, the proportion of respondents using mobile devices to complete the survey increased substantially. This increase was exclusively due to a 12-percentage-point higher proportion of smartphones, with no increase in the proportion of tablets.

📄 Revisiting the Recommended Duration of Interviews Conducted by Mobile Phone in Low- and Middle-income Countries: A Randomized Trial in Malawi

  • 作者: Orsola Torrisi, Jethro Banda, Georges Reniers, Stéphane Helleringer
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
Guidelines for conducting surveys by mobile phone calls in low- and middle-income countries suggest keeping interviews short (<20 minutes). The evidence supporting this recommendation is scant, even though limiting interview duration might reduce the amount of data generated by such surveys. We recruited nearly 2,500 mobile phone users in Malawi and randomly allocated them to 10-, 20-, or 30-minute phone interviews, all ending with questions on parental survival. Cooperation was high in all groups, and differences in completion rates were minimal. The extent of item nonresponse, age heaping, and temporal displacement of deaths in data on parental survival generally did not vary between study groups, but reports of maternal age at death were more reliable in longer interviews. Recommendations about the duration of mobile phone interviews might be too restrictive. They should not preclude additional modules, including ones on mortality, in mobile phone surveys conducted in LMICs.

📄 Comparing Name Generator Designs in Panel Personal Network Data: Implications for Alter Re-Elicitation in a Rural Field Setting

  • 作者: Marian-Gabriel Hâncean, Jürgen Lerner, Christopher McCarty
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
We conducted a two-wave personal network study in a rural Romanian community. We interviewed 68 participants twice using different name generators. The first wave used a fixed-choice generator (25 alters) focused on emotional closeness. The second wave, six months later, used a non-fixed generator based on frequent interaction. This change responded to feedback that the fixed-choice format was burdensome. The study illustrates how adapting design to respondent feedback affects data collection. It also compares alter profiles across generators and examines patterns of tie re-elicitation across waves. Alters re-elicited across waves were typically kin, co-residents, and emotionally close. Although the non-fixed generator captured weaker and more diverse ties, re-elicitation was shaped mainly by tie strength, underscoring how relational attributes shape consistency in reported ties across generators. Because name generator type and wave are confounded, observed differences should be interpreted cautiously and cannot be attributed solely to social network change.

📚 Government and Opposition

📄 Winners and Losers under Proportional Representation

In elections under proportional representation (PR), proportionality between votes and seats is an ideal never achieved in reality. Discrepancies between votes and seats are most prevalent under the most widely used PR seat allocation formula, D’Hondt/Jefferson. This article provides the first comprehensive model to explain the discrepancies between the national seat allocation and the vote distribution under the D’Hondt rule. The model identifies six systematic factors that drive these deviations, ranging from the bias in the seat allocation rule to differences in the electoral rules (e.g. malapportionment) and party competition across districts. Thus, this model goes beyond the well-known rule that large parties are overrepresented under D’Hondt by providing a quantitative point estimate of this deviation and of between-district inequalities. The model identifies the (expected) beneficiaries and losers of the seat allocation and predicts the magnitude of these penalties and benefits. At the level of political parties, the model predicts the gains and losses in terms of seats, relative to the parties’ proportional share of seats. Empirical tests on 156 elections from 23 democracies, covering 3,653 political parties and 2,139 constituencies, are used to assess its validity and to calculate the resulting substantial effects.

📄 Transnational Authoritarianism

  • 作者: Alexander Cooley, Alexander Dukalskis
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
In a globalised world, authoritarian politics does not stay within state borders. Autocrats and their allies reach abroad to influence their international environment to, at a minimum, protect authoritarianism at home or, more ambitiously, to promote pro-authoritarian norms and practices abroad. A rich stream of political science literature – comparative, international and area studies – has mapped the contours of this ‘transnational authoritarianism’ in an increasingly permissive international environment. This review article argues that transnational authoritarianism is facilitated by the rise of authoritarian powers and deepening globalisation. It first examines the drivers of contemporary transnational authoritarianism before identifying and categorising its central actors. The review then organises the literature on this topic into two strands, each enabled by autocracies’ ascendance in a globalised era. First, official channels of transnational authoritarianism see mostly state actors advance regime goals with familiar instruments such as security cooperation agreements, but with renewed vigour and support. Second, unofficial channels feature a mix of state and non-state actors exerting leverage and influence within the networks and channels of global interconnectedness. By necessity, these categories traverse the fields of comparative politics and international relations, revealing how these transnational dimensions are critical to the success of contemporary authoritarian regimes. The review concludes by revisiting earlier literature on autocracy promotion considering these emergent realities, and reflecting on how recent political developments in the United States relate to these processes.

📄 Contested Ownership, Negative Tone: How Issue Ownership Competition Fuels Online Negativity in Belgium

  • 作者: Lucas Kins, Laura Jacobs, Caroline Close
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
To gain support, political actors must be visible on issues where they are seen as credible and advance these issues on the agenda. Direct online communication and negative messaging can amplify this by gaining traction on social media. While prior research assumes parties attack competitors on issues they ‘own’, we test that assumption in a highly fragmented multi-party system where ownership is fiercely contested. Here, attacks may aim to compete for ownership rather than defend it. Analysing 27,266 posts on X by Belgian party actors over two-and-a-half years, we find that sender issue ownership alone does not predict issue-based attacks. Instead, competition over ownership, especially at the target level, shapes attack patterns. During campaigns, issue-based attacks are significantly more likely to target issue owners than during routine periods. By linking issue competition and negative campaigning, we offer new insights into communication dynamics in fragmented party systems across the electoral cycle.

📚 International Political Science Review

📄 Theory before method: The case for methodological pluralism in political science

  • 作者: H. Zeynep Bulutgil, Harris Mylonas
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
Political science is undergoing a pronounced methodological shift toward causal identification and design-based inference, increasingly marginalizing qualitative and observational approaches. We argue that this shift rests on the flawed premise that methods can be ranked in the abstract, independently of the research question and the theories at stake. Drawing on a Popperian understanding of scientific progress, we develop a framework of comparative theory testing in which method choice is derived from the competing theories themselves. When rival theories generate observationally non-equivalent implications—causal, correlational, or descriptive—any form of evidence capable of adjudicating between them has epistemic standing. This grounds methodological pluralism not in a normative appeal for inclusivity, but in the internal logic of rigorous theory testing. We illustrate the framework through canonical examples, propose criteria for evaluating the rigor of comparative theory tests, and show that design-based methods earn their place within—not above—this framework. The result is a unified perspective that preserves our capacity to engage big-picture questions while maintaining the standards of falsifiability and theoretical precision that scientific inquiry requires.

📄 Manufacturing compliance: How pariah autocracies strategically engage with international human rights mechanisms

  • 作者: Sanghoon Park, Chun-Young Park, Hyunkyu Kim
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
Why do pariah autocracies engage with international human rights institutions? This study explores how pariah autocracies, states that are isolated from the international community and domestically unresponsive autocracies lacking democratic institutions, use the United Nations’ Universal Periodic Review to shape their international reputations. We argue that these autocracies craft diplomatic strategies that create an image of compliance while protecting their essential political structures. Our findings show that such participation aims less at improving human rights and more at securing legitimacy and crafting a facade of international responsiveness. Pariah autocracies are deliberate actors that navigate international norms to serve their interests. The study sheds light on the strategic ways international pariah autocracies interact with international human rights mechanisms for themselves.

📚 Journal of Asian and African Studies

📄 Managing insecurity through institutionalized militarization: The Eritrean garrison police state model

Eritrea represents a distinctive model of a garrison police state under the personalized totalitarian rule of President Afwerki since 1993. The regime prioritizes executive authority over the rule of law and relies on pervasive surveillance and militarized governance, consistent with Garrison State theory. Unlike conventional garrison or police states, Eritrea lacks strong formal institutions, electoral legitimacy, and ideological mobilization. Instead, repression is institutionalized through mechanisms such as indefinite military conscription, embedding coercive authority within state structures. This study argues that repression serves both governance and the management of insecurity. External efforts to halt Eritrea’s actions have largely failed to alter the regime’s stance.

📄 Making climate-smart agriculture “plan-able”: Evidence from district-level adaptation planning in Tanzania

  • 作者: Theresia Willy Massoy Amon, Lucy Willy Massoi
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) has emerged as a central policy response to the impacts of climate change on agriculture in Tanzania. However, its effectiveness depends less on the availability of appropriate practices than on how it is embedded within decentralised planning systems. This paper examines how CSA policies are translated into district-level adaptation planning, using Mvomero District as a case study. The findings show that although CSA is strongly articulated within national policy frameworks, its operationalisation remains uneven due to sector-based budgeting, limited institutional capacity and weak coordination. It introduces “plan-ability” to explain how institutional arrangements shape policy translation and local prioritisation.

📄 Retraction: “Exploring Water Supply Challenges to Selected Villages of Greater Giyani Municipality in Limpopo Province, South Africa”

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📚 Journal of Contemporary China

📄 Chinese State-Owned Enterprise Workers at the Margins: Evidence from a Sichuan Case Study

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📄 “Top-Down Communitarianism”: The Purposes and Limitations of China’s Point System Governance

  • 作者: Alexander Trauth-Goik, Carolyn L. Hsu, Jian Lu, H. Christoph Steinhardt
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
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📚 Journal of East Asian Studies

📄 Homeownership and Public Pensions in East Asia: Is the Trade-Off Real?

  • 作者: Inhoe Ku, Chung-Yang Yeh, Yong-Chang Heo, Atsushi Yuyama, Dongjin Kim
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
This study examines whether homeownership has a trade-off relationship with public-pension development in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Relying on a comparative historical approach, we find that while the three governments pursued homeownership societies, their interventions in housing provision and distribution varied in timing and intensity, contributing to different levels of homeownership. Historically, middle-class families in these countries have preferred asset accumulation through home purchases over reliance on public pensions. In particular, the early introduction of mandatory savings as a form of lump-sum retirement payments, combined with widespread homeownership aspirations, led to heavy reliance on private homeownership and, in turn, contributed to establishing underdeveloped, small-scale public-pension systems. Homeownership is unlikely to serve as a cornerstone of old-age economic security systems in East Asia, where asset-based welfare developed as a substitute for collective welfare provision and social rights.

📚 Journal of Elections Public Opinion and Parties

📄 Trust in paper and convenience voting methods: evidence from the 2022 municipal elections in Ontario, Canada

  • 作者: Holly Ann Garnett, Nicole Goodman
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
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📄 Ethical distance and electoral accountability: voters punish politicians whose ethical views diverge from societal consensus

  • 作者: Md Mujahedul Islam, Peter John Loewen
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
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📄 Social retrospection: conversation networks, performance evaluations, and candidate support

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📄 COVID-19 and performance voting: evidence from the 2021 state assembly elections in India

  • 作者: Subhasish Ray, Holli A. Semetko, Kiran Arabaghatta Basavaraj, Pahi Saikia, Anil M. Varughese
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
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📄 Implementing the mail ballot: gauging voter preferences using a discrete choice experiment

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📄 Such a question, such an answer? An experimental study of wording effects in opinion surveys using the Swedish abortion law as a case

  • 作者: Henrik Friberg-Fernros, Elina Lindgren, Nora Theorin
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
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📄 Misinformation and threats to self-interest

  • 作者: Mathieu Turgeon, Alessandro Freire
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
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📚 Journal of Experimental Political Science

📄 How Durable Are Experimental Increases in Women’s Representation?

  • 作者: Alejandra Gimenez Aldridge, Christopher F. Karpowitz, J. Quin Monson, Jessica Robinson Preece
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
Do field experimental interventions produce durable changes in gender representation? We examine the persistence of experimental treatment effects in Karpowitz, Monson, and Preece (2017), where a single letter from Republican Party leaders significantly increased women’s election to state delegate positions. Two years later, differences between treatment and control conditions evaporated. Treated precincts largely retained earlier experimental gains, but the treatment effect size was smaller because of increases in the control condition. We examine four possible explanations for this pattern. First, we find considerable evidence of an incumbency effect among women in one treatment condition. Second, increases in women’s representation in the control condition appear to be related in part to larger turnout during the 2016 election cycle. Finally, we find little evidence of lasting attitude changes about women’s representation and few traces of post-experimental spillover.

📚 Journal of Information Technology & Politics

📄 Integrating corrective action theory into the social identity model of collective action to explain U.S. Latinos/as’ social media political expression

  • 作者: Alcides Velasquez, Gretchen Montgomery-Vestecka
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
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📄 Factors that influence a country to exercise its capacity for digital repression

  • 作者: Georgiana Clarke, Donavon Johnson
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
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📚 Journal of Political Science Education

📄 World-Ready Political Science Graduates: A 21st-Century Capstone Model

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📄 Beyond Resilience: Teaching Political Science During War as a Practice of Care, Resistance, and Reckoning

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

📄 A Boltzmann generator framework for modelling and forecasting international trade networks

  • 作者: Costanza Bosone, Alessandro Spelta
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
This paper introduces a Boltzmann Generator-inspired framework for modelling and forecasting the global trade network. Departing from traditional econometric gravity models, the proposed method employs a conditional deep generative architecture that maps macroeconomic and geographic covariates to full probabilistic distributions of bilateral trade flows. Its energy-based formulation bridges statistical physics and international economics, enabling realistic simulations that capture both dyadic dependencies and higher-order network effects. Using data on 206 countries from 2001 to 2020, the model achieves superior in-sample and out-of-sample predictive accuracy relative to standard econometric and machine learning benchmarks, with formal statistical tests confirming robust predictive dominance across time and country pairs. Beyond forecasting, the framework facilitates counterfactual policy analysis: simulations reveal distinct propagation mechanisms of GDP shocks through the trade network, highlighting China’s central role in transmitting global disturbances.

📄 Estimating global HIV prevalence in key populations: a cross-population temporal hierarchical modelling approach

  • 作者: Jiahao Zhang, Keith Sabin, Le Bao
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
Key populations at high risk of HIV infection are critical for understanding and monitoring HIV epidemics, but global estimation is hampered by sparse, uneven data. We analyse data from 199 countries for female sex workers (FSW), men who have sex with men (MSM), and people who inject drugs (PWID) over 2011–2021, and introduce a cross-population temporal hierarchical model that borrows strength across countries, years, and populations. The model combines region- and population-specific means with country random effects, temporal dependence, and cross-population correlations in a Gaussian Markov random-field formulation on the log-prevalence scale. In fivefold cross-validation, the approach outperforms a regional-median baseline and reduced variants (65% reduction in cross-validation mean squared error) with a well-calibrated posterior predictive coverage (93%). We map the 2021 prevalence and quantify the change between 2011 and 2021 using posterior prevalence ratios to identify countries with substantial increases or decreases. The framework yields globally comparable and uncertainty-quantified country-by-year prevalence estimates, enhancing evidence for resource allocation and targeted interventions for marginalized populations where routine data are limited.

📄 Summarizing mortality data with a time-dependent beta latent variable model

  • 作者: Pedro Menezes de Araújo, Isobel Claire Gormley, Thomas Brendan Murphy
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
Age-specific probabilities of death provide a snapshot of population mortality at the country level at a given point in time. Due to the high dimensionality of the data, summarizing mortality information is essential for various analyses, such as visualization and clustering. We propose the use of beta latent variable (BLV) models to summarize mortality information without data transformation. A time-dependent version of the BLV model is developed by incorporating an autoregressive prior for the latent effects. This model aims to represent mortality data with a small set of K latent effects while accounting for time dependence between these effects. Inference is performed using Bayesian methods, with posterior samples generated via Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. The BLV model is applied to probabilities of death from the Human Mortality Database, covering 41 countries and 23 age-specific probabilities of death over several periods. The time-dependent BLV model with K=6 latent effects accurately reconstructs observed mortality data, and the model parameters have intuitive and insightful interpretations. The time-dependent BLV outperforms the standard Gaussian factor analysis model applied to logit probability of death, and demonstrates that BLV models can effectively summarize mortality data.

📚 Latin American Politics and Society

📄 The Mobilization of Public Sector Unions: A Theory with Qualitative, Subnational Evidence from Argentine Teachers

  • 作者: Sebastián Etchemendy, Germán Lodola, Oriana Peretti
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
The increase in the mobilization power of public sector unions is one of the most puzzling features of twenty-first-century labor politics in both advanced and emerging market democracies. We posit that public labor mobilization is driven by economic, institutional, and political factors. Mobilization decreases during the expansionary phase of the economic cycle, when incumbents can placate public unions with state resources; when collective bargaining is mandatory; and when governments share a common partisan identity with a unified labor leadership, facilitating a “political exchange” in which union moderation is traded for wage and non-wage concessions. Based on a qualitative, subnational comparative case-study approach, we trace union organizational dynamics and coalition building process in Argentina’s education sector, and seek to identify their effects on teacher union militancy or moderation across the country’s provinces between 2006 and 2019. We illuminate the causal mechanisms and temporal sequences of union mobilization/moderation by examining both “typical” and “deviant” cases of our general theory

📚 Legislative Studies Quarterly

📄 The House Appropriations Committee Surveys & Investigations Staff and the Arc of Congressional Competence

This article follows the arc of congressional competence through the development and decline of the House Appropriations Committee (HAC) Surveys & Investigations (S&I) staff, an enduring oversight unit whose investigations were unobserved by design. S&I was quietly reorganized out of existence in December 2024. Why? What, if anything, is lost? Drawing on committee reports, archival materials, and interviews, this study shows how Chairman Clarence Cannon's design for S&I shaped its distinctive nonpartisan, under‐the‐radar oversight, filling a once‐powerful niche made untenable in recent decades by partisan conflict. Time‐series analysis of S&I study activity (1975–2024) indicates divided government and partisan disagreement constrained bipartisan S&I oversight. The conclusion situates S&I's history in research on congressional oversight, grounding abstract models, tracing institutional change, and revealing unexpected consequences.

📚 Local Government Studies

📄 Bridging or bonding? A two-mode network study in top-down and bottom-up inter-municipal environmental collaborations in China

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📄 Partisanship within city limits: explaining employment policy outcomes in Danish municipalities

  • 作者: Mads Peter Klindt, Rasmus Lind Ravn, Andrej Christian Lindholst
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
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📚 Minds and Machines

📄 Problem of (In)Explainability in Testing Fully Autonomous Weapon Systems for International Humanitarian Law Compliance

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📄 A Limit of AI, II: A Continuous Rate–Distortion Proof of the Certainty–Scope Conjecture

  • 作者: Yiyang Jia, Luciano Floridi, Fernando Tohmé, Alberto Messina
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
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📚 Nations and Nationalism

📄 Remembering Independence, Debating the Nation: Ghana's National Days

In Ghana, Independence Day is the most important national day and has been annually observed since the attainment of independence in 1957. Additional national days that various military governments introduced to commemorate their ascension to power have been rather short‐lived. Other holidays like Republic Day or Founder's Day have been longer lasting but continue to be contested. Independence Day, by contrast, is recognised by all citizens despite discussions about the best way to celebrate it. ‘Independence’ is an attractive concept that can accommodate a broad range of interpretations. It offers points of identification even for competing political orientations and provides a forum for debates about the nation's history, self‐image, current challenges and desired future course. The article explores the history of Ghana's national days as a window into processes of nation‐building as well as its challenges, namely political cleavages, social confrontations and ethnic tensions.

📚 Parliamentary Affairs

📄 Flag politics: explaining the meaning, failure, and persistence of the proposal for a new flag in Northern Ireland

Public debate regarding whether Northern Ireland should get a new flag, like other polities which have undergone major political transitions, has persisted since the 1990s. This is the first scholarly article to examine the politics and comparative dimensions of the issue. It begins by reviewing the multidisciplinary literature on flags before tracing the new flag question from the start of the peace process until 2026. Public and political perspectives are analysed. The Discussion notes four interwoven ideological themes in the proposals—civic nationalism, regionalism, post-nationalism, and reconciliation. Reasons why the new flag proposition has both failed and recurred are explained.

📄 Representation of the unenfranchised: The parliamentary representation of EU citizens in the UK after Brexit

Parliamentary democracies are increasingly characterized by diverse constituencies with high levels of net migration. With the rise of anti-migrant sentiment, the question of how migrant communities are able to secure representation, despite their limited voting rights, has become an increasingly important question for representation scholars. We use the case study of EU citizens in the UK after 2019 to explore three different channels for unenfranchised migrants to secure representation—direct representation, mediated selection, and surrogate representation. Drawing on thirty-one interviews with MPs and their staff, combined with statistical analysis of Written Parliamentary Questions in the 2019–2024 parliament, we conclude that, while voting rights are preferable, unenfranchised groups are still able to access some form of parliamentary representation. MPs are both directly responsive to EU constituents’ interests in their behaviour, and the presence of EU citizens increases the likelihood of voters selecting pro-EU candidates. However, most of the representative activity comes from MPs who are already engaged in parliamentary policy networks on immigration and migrant rights.

📄 Issue congruence between candidates' Twitter communication and constituencies in an MMES: Migration as an exemplary case

  • 作者: L Constantin Wurthmann, Marius Sältzer
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
How responsive are individual politicians to their constituents’ issue priorities? While parties compete nationally, candidates must navigate varying local issue salience. We investigate whether candidates adjust their emphasis on migration to district-level priorities in Germany’s mixed-member electoral system. Using survey data on voter issue salience and over a million candidate tweets from the 2017 Bundestag election, we apply supervised classification to assess issue congruence. Our findings reveal that MPs elected by their district are significantly more responsive to their constituents’ migration concerns than candidates elected via party lists. However, overall, candidates do not systematically align their communication with district-level preferences, suggesting that party strategies and electoral incentives shape responsiveness. These results underscore the role of electoral mandates in structuring political representation, highlighting the varying degrees of accountability in mixed-member systems.

📄 Voices heard and unheard: Analizing legislative amendment proposals on underprivileged groups in Spain

  • 作者: Luz Muñoz, Anna M Palau, Andreu Rodilla
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
This paper explores the circumstances under which parliamentary groups reference underprivileged groups—specifically, women, immigrants and people with disabilities –in their legislative amendment proposals. Drawing on a comprehensive dataset covering all executive bills passed in Spain between 1996 and 2023, we find that the presence of interest groups in parliamentary hearings significantly increases the visibility of the underprivileged in the amending activity of political parties, thereby enhancing their representation. Similarly, a higher proportion of women Members of Parliament (MPs) in a parliamentary group is associated with more frequent amendments referencing women and people with disabilities, while there is some evidence, albeit less conclusive, of a similar effect for immigrants. Media coverage boosts attention to women and people with disabilities, but has no significant impact on references to immigrants. Surprisingly, partisan preferences have no influence on references to women and immigrants in amendment proposals; however, right-wing parties are more likely to reference people with disabilities. These findings contribute fresh insights into the dynamics of legislative behavior, representation, and the presence of interest groups in parliamentary processes.

📄 Electoral context matters: why undecided voters in elections and referendums are different

During general election and referendum campaigns, many voters will know how they are going to vote far in advance, while a smaller group of undecided voters will make up their minds closer to polling day. These undecided voters emerge as important actors in democratic politics. Their choices can be swayed during the campaign, and their behaviour can explain how election and referendum outcomes differ from polling results. In this paper, we address two questions concerning undecided voters: (1) are there differences in the proportions of undecided voters in referendums and elections; and (2) how do the vote choices of these undecided voters vary between referendums and elections? To investigate these questions, we compare voting in two contiguous pairs of Australian referendums and general elections using national surveys. We find that the degree of indecision is similar across elections and referendums, although the behaviour of undecided voters varies across the different electoral contexts. In referendums, undecided voters are more likely to vote no, while in general elections, these voters are more likely to vote for minor parties.

📄 Shaping reform: the role of experts in the constitutional revision process. The case of Italy

  • 作者: Claudio Cozzi Fucile, Pietro Ferretti
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
Draft Law no. 935, together with Draft Law no. 830, proposes a constitutional revision of Italy’s system of government, advocating for the direct election of the Prime Minister. The two constitutional draft laws were jointly analyzed by the Senate’s First Constitutional Affairs Committee from November 2023 to April 2024. Informal hearings with experts contributed to revising the government’s text. While key provisions, such as the direct election of the Prime Minister, have been retained, many others were modified, reflecting the experts’ contributions. This paper explores the role of experts in the reform process, examining the initially proposed legislative measures, the opinions expressed during the informal hearings, and the text approved by the Senate. By analyzing the contributions that influenced the amendments to the reform, we conclude that experts could have played a significant role in the informal hearings process of Italy’s constitutional revision.

📄 Media coverage of feminine policy issues and electoral consequences: an analysis of mixed electoral system

This research examines the electoral consequences of media coverage of legislators in relation to feminine policy issues like the environment, social welfare, education, and minority rights. For this goal, the paper utilizes 16,831 hand-coded newspaper articles published between 2005 and 2020 that depict elected legislators in Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan. The results demonstrate that the more the media portrays a legislator in connection to feminine policy issues, the lower the legislator’s re-election chances become. Going further, leveraging Taiwan’s mixed electoral system, the paper finds that the media’s negative impact was considerably mitigated for party list legislators compared to district legislators. Findings in this paper shed light on a hitherto understudied aspect of the relationship between legislators, feminine policy issues depicted in the media, and electoral prospects.

📄 The House of Commons Modernisation Committee: Revisiting past experience

In 2024, the UK House of Commons established a new ‘Modernisation Committee’, modelled on a previous 1997–2010 committee of the same name. This article revisits the record of that earlier committee, to re-examine a series of prominent claims about its work from existing literature. We make several new contributions by developing quantitative indicators of various aspects of the committee’s work, studying the full lifetime of the committee, and comparing it to the Commons’ other main vehicle for developing procedural reforms, the Procedure Committee. Our evidence echoes some previous claims about the Modernisation Committee’s successes, but suggests that some past criticisms of its record could also be levelled at the Procedure Committee. We thus shed new light on past procedural reform efforts at Westminster, and provide fresh context for the approach (re-)adopted in 2024.

📄 Questions to the Prime Minister in the Canadian House of Commons: Transformation or tweak?

Parliamentary questions are important democratic accountability instruments, but little is known about how these procedures are reformed, and with what consequences. This paper uses the introduction of Prime Minister’s Question Period (PMQP) in the Canadian House of Commons in 2017 as a case study of questioning procedure reform. Under PMQP, the Prime Minister would answer all questions once a week, diverging from the traditional Question Period where the Prime Minister answered a few questions daily alongside ministers. As this is a way in which other parliaments have reformed questioning procedures, the case has wider comparative relevance. Using quantitative analysis of prime ministerial attendance and questions, as well as interviews, this paper explores the effects of the reform. Findings indicate that PMQP is similar to other individualized questioning procedures such as the UK’s Prime Minister’s Questions, but retains features of Question Period such as party control, and a confrontational style.

📄 Constituency representation as crisis leadership: Understanding the potential of policy, service, and symbolic connection-building in response to disasters

In this paper, I investigate how Members of Parliaments’ (MPs) performance of the important job of connecting constituents to the representative system prepares them for the uncertainty and disruption caused by crises like fires, droughts or Covid-19. I contribute to understandings of the adaptability of parliamentary representation to crisis by presenting research conducted from 2019 to 2021 on the policy, service, and symbolic connections built by MPs in their electorates. I draw upon a nationwide survey of 111 MPs from every state and territory in Australia, as well as twenty-eight interviews with representatives from the state and federal levels of government in the state of Queensland. I utilize the theory of representative connection-building to assess how MPs in Australia practice their representative work in ordinary times and how this aligns with functions associated with crisis leadership. I find (1) that normally MPs engage in work which brings them into frequent contact with citizens; and (2) which holds the promise of making them well suited to tasks of coordination, information provision, communication and resilience building in the event of crisis; (3) that is however complicated by problems of distrust in politics and politicisation and better suited to responsive functions than reforming.

📚 Party Politics

📄 Bureaucratic appointments and coalition support in presidential systems – An analysis of Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies

How does the provision of political appointments influence coalition support in multiparty presidential systems? While the importance of cabinet portfolios for coalition governments is well-established, lower-tier positions have received less attention being limited to compensations for weak policy-making capabilities. In multiparty presidential systems, however, these appointments also function as bargaining chips during coalition formation. I argue that bureaucratic appointments help sustain coalition support, especially during votes on bills issued by the executive power. Analyzing roll-call data from Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies (2003–2018) across 161 bills, I find that besides ministerial portfolios, lower-tier appointments strongly increase legislative support, highlighting the strategic use of patronage under high political stakes. These findings contribute to understanding coalition management strategies in fragmented presidential systems.

📚 Philosophy & Public Affairs

📄 Something Is Okay!

The paper puts forward a novel solution to the so‐called All or Nothing Problem. Contrary to what many believe, I argue that it is permissible to go some way towards benefiting others without going all the way. Something Is Okay! If this is true, it is not the case (which would be absurd) that we should rather Do Nothing than Something if we are not going to do the Best. If my main claim is correct, this is a blow to a key tenet of Effective Altruism, namely, that if we do good (e.g., contribute to charities), we should do what is best. A side benefit of my solution is the introduction of a neglected sort of supererogation, namely, Self‐Regarding Suboptimal Supererogation (i.e., the self‐regarding equivalent of the more familiar other‐regarding notion of going halfway towards supererogation). Regarding this, my view implies that we are not obliged to do what is best for ourselves (e.g., maximize our health or looks) once we go some way towards benefiting ourselves (incurring considerable costs in doing so).

📚 Policy & Internet

📄 Measuring Governance or Wealth? Construct Validation of AI Readiness Indices

Many are the promises of artificial intelligence and the indices claiming to measure government readiness for it. This study provides the first construct validity investigation of the Oxford Insights Government AI Readiness Index, the Tortoise Global AI Index, and the IMF AI Preparedness Index, using a nine‐test battery and drawing on confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), income saturation analysis, sigma convergence analysis, architectural sensitivity testing, and criterion validation against policy and governance data (Stanford HAI, V‐Dem, and the Worldwide Governance Indicators). All three indicies are heavily income‐saturated and show weak discriminant validity, ranking countries substantially—though not exclusively—by economic development level rather than governance capacity. Decomposing the income relationship shows that the governance‐labelled dimensions retain only a modest association with administrative governance once income is removed, and their link to democratic governance can largely be explained by income. An evaluation of the Tortoise Globaly AI Index, in particular, which achieves genuine dimensional separation between capability and governance, shows that income‐independent measurement is attainable with existing data. The paper identifies four systemic measurement gaps and proposes a research agenda for achieving more valid measurements of AI readiness. The findings have direct implications for governments, development agencies, and researchers using readiness indices as measures of governance quality.

📚 Political Analysis

📄 Monotone Ecological Inference

  • 作者: Hadi Elzayn, Jacob Goldin, Cameron Guage, Daniel Ho, Claire Morton
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
We study the identification of individual-level associations when only aggregate data are available. We characterize the biases of, and relationships among, canonical ecological inference (EI) estimators. We use these results to develop a partial identification approach: monotone EI. The approach exploits information about one or both of the following conditional associations: (1) outcome differences between groups within the same neighborhood and (2) outcome differences within the same group between neighborhoods with different group compositions. We show how assumptions about the sign of these conditional associations, whether individually or in relation to one another, can yield informative sharp bounds. We illustrate our results using county-level data to study differences in COVID-19 vaccination rates among Republicans and Democrats in the United States.

📚 Political Communication

📄 Does the Method Affect the Outcome? How Measures of Partisan Slant of Media Outlets and Affective Polarization Drive Results About Polarization in the United States

  • 作者: Christian Schemer, Klara Langmann, Ariel Hasell, Brian Weeks
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
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📚 Political Psychology

📄 The mental health–politics nexus: How mental health trajectories from adolescence to midlife shape political attitudes and voting patterns

  • 作者: Sam Fluit, Kinga Bierwiaczonek, Jonas R. Kunst, Tilmann von Soest
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
With political polarization increasing, it is important to understand the development of political preferences. Previously, adolescent mental health problems have been linked to lower adulthood voting rates, while relationships between life trajectories of mental health and political attitudes and orientations remain largely underexplored. Using longitudinal data from the population‐based cohort Young in Norway ( N  = 2215) spanning three decades, we examine associations between adolescent internalizing (depression, anxiety symptoms) and externalizing problems and 12 midlife political preferences. Latent class growth analysis identified three trajectories for internalizing and two for externalizing problems. Elevated levels of either problem type demonstrated significant associations with lower political and social trust in midlife. Elevated initial internalizing problems, regardless of subsequent development, were related to more left‐wing profiles. Conversely, persistently elevated externalizing problems showed associations with stronger right‐wing profiles. These findings demonstrate that mental health trajectories from adolescence into adulthood are systematically related to distinct political preferences in midlife.

📄 Navigating social change and social harmony: Testing SIMCA in Gen Z collective action in Madagascar and its role in reconciliation processes

  • 作者: Gaëlle Marinthe, Yvana Hassim Rajabali
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
The Social Identity Model of Collective Action (SIMCA) effectively predicts collective action and social change, but has been less examined in emerging movements and non‐WEIRD contexts. This research had two aims: to test SIMCA during the Gen Z mobilization in Madagascar, a largely online movement that culminated in the overthrow of the government in October 2025; and to examine how SIMCA variables relate to post‐action activism and reconciliation. Study 1 ( N  = 959), conducted during the governmental transition, tested SIMCA—including national identification, Gen Z identification, perceived injustice, collective efficacy, and morality—on online collective action support, intention, and participation. Study 2 ( N  = 258), conducted post‐transition, examined associations with activism intention, reconciliation, and forgiveness. Gen Z identification and morality were consistently associated with collective action and activism intention, whereas perceived injustice was primarily linked to ongoing collective action. Collective efficacy showed mixed associations. In contrast, national identification emerged as a key factor of post‐action forgiveness. These findings suggest that SIMCA variables are involved not only in social change but also in post‐action social harmony. They highlight the distinct roles of politicized and non‐politicized identities, underscoring the importance of conceptualizing collective action as a temporally and contextually embedded process.

📚 Political Research Quarterly

📄 Police as Policymakers: How Experiences With Policy Implementation Shape Policy Representation

  • 作者: Sierra-Arévalo Michael, José J. Alcocer, Lauren Brown, Raquel Delerme, Brittany Friedman, Benjamin A. T. Graham, Harry G. Muttram, Jackson Trager, Nicholas Weller
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
Scholars of political representation have focused primarily on congruence between public preferences and enacted legislation, paying less attention to how policies are actually delivered by street-level bureaucrats in face-to-face encounters with citizens. This approach obscures the possibility that individuals may nonetheless have divergent perceptions of implemented policy that, in turn, inform their political attitudes. We examine this argument in the context of policing and traffic stops in Los Angeles using an integrated mixed-methods design combining an original survey ( N = 2,118) and thirty semi-structured interviews. Our survey finds limited racial variation in preferences for police behavior and in reports of officer behavior during traffic stops. At the same time, our survey reproduces well-documented racial gaps in general assessments of police legitimacy and effectiveness. Our interviews reveal that these patterns result from fundamentally different personal and vicarious experiences across racial groups. For Black and Latine residents, the desire for a professional officer reflects concern for physical safety; for White residents, it reflects a preference for courtesy. Survey instruments that record responses but not the expectations underlying them may systematically understate racial inequality in how police encounters are actually experienced.

📄 Inhabiting Different Worlds: How Partisan Attitudes Shape Americans’ Evaluation of the Black Lives Matter Protests and the January 6 <sup>th</sup> Insurrection

How does partisanship shape the ways Americans interpret major political events? We examine public evaluations of the Black Lives Matter protests and the January 6th insurrection using an original nationally representative YouGov survey alongside cross-sectional and panel data from the 2016–2024 American National Election Studies. We find that responses to both events are strongly structured by partisanship, but that this influence extends beyond party identification alone. Substantial differences exist within the two parties: MAGA Republicans and progressive Democrats diverge markedly from their co-partisans in their assessments of these episodes. Additionally, colder feelings toward the opposing party are associated with more polarized evaluations, with these relationships unfolding in opposite directions for Democrats and Republicans. Lastly, both Democrats and Republicans who perceive democracy as being under greater levels of threat also have more polarized evaluations of these key events. Although our evidence is observational, the consistency of these patterns across data sources and over time demonstrates the central role of partisanship in structuring how Americans interpret politically consequential events. The findings highlight how partisanship acts through various means, such as affective polarization, perceptions of threats to democracy, and factional identities within parties, to shape public evaluations of political conflict.

📄 Social Media and Candidate Favorability: TikTok and Support for Harris During the 2024 Presidential Election

  • 作者: Sydney Carr-Glenn, Chaya Crowder, Christine Slaughter
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
During Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential bid, there was a substantial wave of social media messaging aimed at mobilizing voters. Previous research indicates that many American voters obtain political news through social media; therefore, political candidates often use social media as a critical campaign strategy to garner widespread attention. We examine the influence of different Harris TikTok videos during the shortened 2024 presidential election to assess which affect favorability towards Harris. We demonstrate that during presidential elections with polarizing political candidates, social media messaging matters. We find that traditional campaign videos posted on the platform have greater influence than trendy TikTok “edits.” In particular, long form campaign ads posted to TikTok increased favorability for Harris. On the other hand, videos in which Harris explicitly discussed race or called out JD Vance or President Trump had limited influence on support, with some exceptions. In an increasingly digitized political environment, our findings are the first to document the effects of short-form videos on candidate favorability, the effectiveness of social media, the effectiveness of sharing social media with networks, and the use of different messages for voters.

📄 Do Americans Understand the Judicial Philosophies They Endorse? Evidence From Mass and Elite Surveys

  • 作者: Miles T. Armaly, Christopher N. Krewson, Elizabeth A. Lane
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
Although members of the mass public express support for judicial philosophies--such as originalism--and evaluate nominees and decisions accordingly, it remains unclear whether they apply these philosophies in a coherent and consistent manner. In general, the public rarely employs overarching belief systems when making political judgments. Thus, are individuals philosophically constrained in their thinking about the judiciary? To answer this, we assess philosophical constraint among the mass public and compare it to a relevant baseline: legal professionals. Using two surveys—the 2022 Cooperative Election Study (CES) and a 2025 Prolific sample of legal professionals—we evaluate constraint through multiple metrics, including attitude consistency. Our findings suggest that judicial philosophy functions as an organizing framework for only a small subset of individuals, primarily those with higher levels of political sophistication or legal training. There is a disconnect between philosophy-based support and coherence in one’s understanding of that philosophy.

📄 The Unemployed and the Restless: Protest Participation Among the Unemployed

Under what conditions do the unemployed protest? Traditionally, scholars have found that joblessness creates feelings of depression and self-blame, reducing mobilization among the unemployed. Experiences of the past 30 years, including the Great Recession, have led scholars to reconsider the influence of material deprivation on mobilization. Specifically, a growing body of literature has highlighted numerous historical instances of mobilization among the unemployed. However, much of this literature has focused on particular cases, with little attention given to cross-national comparison. This study contributes a cross-national comparative analysis of when and where the unemployed mobilize using eleven rounds of data provided by the European Social Survey (ESS). We identify a convex, curvilinear relationship in which the unemployed are most likely to mobilize under conditions of high unemployment, particularly in countries with more generous welfare provision.

📚 Political Science Research and Methods

📄 Backsliding under contested oversight

Citizens do not directly observe democratic backsliding and, as a result, may hesitate to respond to subversion. We develop a model of third-party oversight bodies, such as the media or courts, that detect and assess actions that may be subversive to democracy and inform citizens. Oversight deters subversion, disciplines incumbents, and enables corrective actions by providing credible information about ambiguous incumbent behavior to citizens. However, when the oversight body is contested, citizens may doubt the intent behind its criticisms. When the oversight body is cautious in its criticisms, it elicits negative inferences about its intentions, what we term a fake news effect. The consequences are severe, undermining oversight and enabling backsliding. Democratic accountability depends on reliable sources of information and elected officials’ commitment to upholding norms of conduct.

📚 Political Studies

📄 Testing political solidarity: The effect of discrimination information on groups’ immigration attitudes

  • 作者: Michael Neureiter, Ida Nørregaard
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
As Western democracies become increasingly diverse, political influence often depends on effective alliances and solidarity that cut across group boundaries. While the intergroup solidarity literature points to shared grievances as a central driver, it remains unclear exactly what kind of grievance information promotes political solidarity between which groups. To test this, we conducted a survey experiment in the United Kingdom among respondents from three distinct groups: migrants from Eastern Europe, migrants from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and natives. The treatments vary based on which immigrant group is described as experiencing discrimination, making potentially shared group grievances salient. We find that discrimination information increases support for prospective MENA immigrants among migrants from Eastern Europe, but not vice versa, and we find no effects among UK natives. Moreover, discrimination information is more effective among migrants without British citizenship. Importantly, discrimination information may not uniformly foster political solidarity or interest alignment across all population groups.

📚 Political Studies Review

📄 Eurocentrism and the construction of the ‘self’ in colonialism: The Okinawa–Japan relationality

This paper examines how Japan colonised itself through the colonisation of Okinawa. While postcolonial scholarship has primarily focused on how colonised peoples were dominated and exploited under Eurocentrism, comparatively less attention has been paid to how non-Western colonisers internalised colonial norms within the international order and ontologically constituted themselves as modern subjects. This article seeks to address this gap. By analysing the Okinawa–Japan relations during the transition from the tributary system to the Westphalian order and subsequently within the post-war US-centred East Asian security architecture, the paper demonstrates that Eurocentrism operated not merely as a geopolitical ideology but as an ontological presupposition of stable and hierarchical subjects. It shows how Japan externalised violence onto Okinawa in order to consolidate its position as a legitimate member of the liberal international order. Finally, drawing on Mahayana Buddhist thought – particularly the doctrine of dependent origination and the concept of non-self – the article proposes an alternative ontology of relationality as a way to unsettle this fixed international order. Decolonisation, it argues, must therefore be understood not only as a political project but also as an ontological reconfiguration.

📚 Politics and Religion

📄 Church services and religious change in Burundi

In Burundi, weekly services are the primary point of contact between churches and their followers, with most of the population attending. These gatherings provide churches with a strategic platform to attract and retain members. Over six months, we collected data from five churches in the rural town of Muramvya—Catholic, Anglican, Pentecostal, FECABU (Evangelical), and Adventist—analyzing 125 transcripts for structure, themes, scope, tone, and key words. We find that emerging denominations—Pentecostal, FECABU, and Adventist—pursue different strategies than traditional ones. Pentecostal and FECABU churches place greater emphasis on rituals than on scripture readings, adopt a more positive tone, and focus on the immediate concerns of their congregants rather than abstract topics. The Adventist Church, while also emphasizing rituals and using a positive tone, distinguishes itself with a stronger commitment to scripture. The Pentecostal church uniquely combines a focus on morality with references to supernatural punishment. We argue that this blend of approaches among emerging denominations strengthens group cohesion and enriches individual faith experiences, helping them attract followers. Our findings shed light on the growth of these denominations in Burundi and may help explain broader religious trends across Sub-Saharan Africa.

📚 Post-Soviet Affairs

📄 Economic and political determinants of corporate crime in Russia: the first evidence

  • 作者: Yuko Adachi, Ichiro Iwasaki, Yoshisada Shida
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
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📚 Public Choice

📄 Ranked choice voting with different elimination procedures

  • 作者: Spencer Katzman, Keith L. Dougherty
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
Ranked choice voting (RCV) is one of the fastest-growing electoral reforms in the United States, yet few scholars have considered the degree to which RCV could be improved with a different elimination procedure. This paper examines RCV with three different elimination procedures: plurality elimination, negative plurality elimination, and Borda elimination. After some analytical observations, we examine how often RCV with each of these procedures violates three criteria separately: the Condorcet winner criterion, independence of eliminated alternatives, and monotonicity using data from RCV elections in the United States as well as simulated data from the Impartial Culture condition with some trailing rankings removed. Our results show that while there are few differences in US election data, Borda elimination consistently outperforms the traditional plurality elimination by a statistically significant amount in our simulations. Nevertheless, the magnitude of those difference are often small.

📚 Public Opinion Quarterly

📄 Welfare State Deservingness in the Era of Mass Higher Education

The educational composition of labor markets has changed dramatically in recent decades. In many advanced democracies, the majority of workers now possess a university education. We currently know very little about how this transformation has influenced perceptions of welfare state deservingness, which are closely linked to support for the welfare state. This article addresses that gap in the literature by carrying out an original survey with a sample of 3,916 respondents from the United States. The survey combines a conjoint experiment with an information provision experiment. We find causal evidence that people are less inclined to provide welfare state assistance to the university educated than the non-university educated. This is primarily driven by need-based considerations: The university educated are seen as less in need of support, due to their strong labor market position in contemporary knowledge economies.

📄 Christian Nationalism as a Social Identity

Over the past decade, research on Christian nationalism in the United States has grown substantially. Some of the associated public opinion literature has described Christian nationalism as an identity, and some of it as a worldview, but scholars have not grappled with this ambiguity or its consequences. Accordingly, we make two moves to bring conceptual order to this rapidly expanding literature. First, we use well-established social identity measures to assess whether respondents think of Christian nationalism as an identity, and we compare the responses to popular measures of the Christian nationalist worldview. Second, we use multiple survey experiments to evaluate the extent to which identification with Christian nationalism is dependent on the definition of Christian nationalism. We conclude that Christian nationalist identities exist, they are strongly linked with a Christian nationalist worldview, and to some extent they depend on the definition of the identity group. In this unique case of elite contestation of an emerging identity, we find that the typical worldview measure also serves effectively as a strength-of-identity measure.

📚 Qualitative Sociology

📄 Why Ethnography?

  • 作者: Javier Auyero, Faith M. Deckard, Alex Diamond, Maricarmen Hernández, Katherine Jensen, Allison Lang, Eldad J. Levy, Águeda Ortega, Katherine Sobering, Mary Ellen Stitt
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
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📄 Generationally Mediated Dating: How Middle-Aged Gay Men Manage Changes in Technology and the Risks of Sexual Visibility Over Time

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📚 Representation

📄 Performance Voting in a Multiparty Contest: A Case Study of the 2024 Taiwan's Presidential Election

  • 作者: Chia-Hung Tsai, Ting-Wei Weng, Alexander C. Tan
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
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📚 Research & Politics

📄 Do you think David can win against Goliath? Evidence on factors affecting popular perceptions of victory in Taiwan against Chinese aggression

  • 作者: Ronan Tse-min Fu, Elaine I-lien Lee, Karyn Y. Kao
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
How do citizens form perceptions of victory in war under power asymmetry? Although scholars have extensively studied the objective determinants of war outcomes, we know far less about how citizens subjectively weigh these factors. We examine this question in Taiwan, a demanding test: extreme power asymmetry with China, an available American patron, and a politically engaged citizenry should maximize the pull of external considerations. A prevailing view holds that Taiwanese victory perceptions depend almost exclusively on American military intervention. We challenge this view using two conjoint experiments with over 2400 respondents, extending the conjoint approach to a domain it is well-suited to address but rarely studied. International military support exerts the strongest effect, yet domestic factors collectively carry comparable weight. Military readiness and public morale emerge as the second and third most influential determinants, and together with political unity, these domestic attributes account for over 40% of citizens’ decision calculus. Even where conditions should maximize the pull of external considerations, Taiwanese citizens do more than look outward. They evaluate their own society’s capacity to resist. These findings suggest that weaker states facing powerful adversaries possess meaningful levers for enhancing perceived resilience beyond securing external guarantees.

📚 Social Forces

📄 Higher education expansion and attainment gaps in meritocratic beliefs

Over the past decades, higher education has expanded dramatically worldwide, yet how this transformation shapes public beliefs in meritocracy remains underexplored. This study examines how the expansion of higher education has shaped public beliefs in meritocracy across thirty Western countries. Drawing on four waves of repeated cross-national data from the International Social Survey Programme (1987, 1992, 2009, 2019, and ISSP), three-level mixed-effects models show that the gross tertiary enrollment ratio is positively associated with overall endorsement of meritocratic beliefs. Individuals with a college degree express stronger meritocratic beliefs than non-degree holders. Furthermore, the magnitude of the attainment gap increases with gross tertiary enrollment ratios, indicating that higher education expansion (HEE) reinforces belief divides. The findings suggest that HEE diffuses meritocratic norms while simultaneously stratifying their credibility across social groups. It further reveals that mass higher education generates a dual consciousness of meritocracy, combining endorsement and skepticism among individuals. The study highlights how expanding education systems shape the ideological foundations of inequality and underscores the paradoxical role of higher education as both a universalistic script and a positional resource.

📄 Later life social interactions in community spaces

Daily social interactions provide access to key social resources, yet little research has examined how these interactions vary across geographic space—particularly in later life. Using ecological momentary assessment data from a state-representative study of older adults in Indiana, we examine how interactions with different partners vary across a continuum of municipality population density. Further, we assess whether this variation is shaped by social opportunity structures—such as number of community parks, theaters, and volunteer organizations—and whether patterns persist during leisure time, when individuals are free to choose their interaction partners. Results show that higher population density is associated with more time spent alone, more interactions with “shared-foci partners” (i.e., partners known through foci of activity, such as neighbors, professionals, congregation members—though associations are driven primarily by professionals, strangers, and “others”), and fewer interactions with kin. Adjusting for social opportunity structures does not affect the observed association between population density and aloneness, interactions with shared-foci partners, or interactions with kin, indicating that differential access to social opportunity spaces does not explain these relationships. Restricting analyses to leisure activities reveals that differences in shared-foci partner interactions by population density disappear—implying they are driven by variation in obligatory tasks—while differences in kin interactions and, to a lesser extent, time spent alone persist. By identifying population density as a structural factor that shapes everyday sociality, this study underscores the role of geographic context in structuring older adults’ access to social connection and the resources embedded in daily interaction.

📄 Paving the way: redlining and contemporary transportation emissions in US cities

We expand upon the structural human ecology tradition by recasting its classic drivers as historically racialized mechanisms operating within a system of racial capitalism. We draw on critical approaches to environmental justice to link multiscalar processes to material infrastructures, theorizing redlining and interstate-highway planning as coupled racial projects that organize the production of transportation emissions across urban space. To test this empirically, we combine Home Owners’ Loan Corporation grades with on-road carbon dioxide (CO₂) and estimate multilevel models for 9661 census tracts nested in 194 US cities (2010, 2015). Redlined areas exhibit higher on-road CO₂ net of contemporary tract characteristics. Associations between affluence, whiteness, and emissions are strong in greenlined areas but largely flat in redlined areas, and public-transit commuting shares show little relationship to emissions across grades. Together, the results indicate that spatially fixed, historically racialized transport infrastructure continues to concentrate emissions in disinvested neighborhoods regardless of who lives there now.

📄 Job precarity and earnings inequality in contemporary China

Job precarity is a core mechanism of workplace inequality that underlies economic segmentation between organizational insiders and outsiders. Yet less is known about how institutional contexts affect dual employment arrangements that create differential rewards between long-term and short-term workers. Drawing on institutional distinctions between China’s state and private sectors under marketization, this study shows how compensation for employment relations differ across sectors, how sector-specific returns vary with marketization levels, and how these differential returns contribute to overall earnings inequality within sectors. In the private sector, labor flexibility helps offset the costs of maintaining long-term employment through lower pay for short-term workers. In the state sector, the socialist personnel system preserves advantages for permanent employees, whereas the economic egalitarianism norms constrain the sustainability of these advantages under dual employment relations. Analyzing data from the nationally representative China Family Panel Studies 2018 and leveraging provincial marketization variations, I find that the state sector has less employment precarity than the private sector overall but imposes a larger earnings penalty on short-term employment. This penalty is smaller in more marketized provinces, mitigating overall earnings inequality associated with employment type within the state sector. In the private sector, however, both forms of inequality are larger in more marketized provinces. These within-sector earnings penalties and their association with marketization are most pronounced among low-paid workers, and cross-sector disparities are concentrated between government and public institutions and private enterprises. The findings challenge the view that marketization uniformly worsens precarious workers’ earnings and demonstrate the institutional foundations of labor market inequality in contemporary China.

📚 Social Problems

📄 Opting in or opting out? Dilemmas for parents and administrators addressing racial inequality in urban schools

Standardized testing has long been criticized for reproducing racial inequalities, leading many scholars and advocates to view accountability and racial equity as fundamentally at odds. Yet schools pursuing racial equity may interpret the role of testing in markedly different ways. This article examines how school communities navigate the contested relationship between standardized testing and racial equity. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork (2016–2018) in two New York City public elementary schools implementing the city’s Diversity in Admissions (DiA) program, we analyze debates over whether to participate in state standardized testing. Although both schools embraced racial integration and equity goals, they reached opposite decisions. In one school, educators and parents framed testing as harmful to children and inconsistent with racial justice, leading the school community to opt out. In the other, stakeholders viewed testing as necessary for maintaining legitimacy, resources, and organizational standing, leading them to retain testing despite concerns about inequality. These contrasting responses related to differences in stakeholder values, logics, and interests, as well as community and organizational characteristics. The findings highlight the complexity of the debate over the relationship between racial inequality and testing and challenge the often taken-for-granted assumption among scholars that accountability uniformly reproduces racial inequality. The article also connects the findings to contemporary political debates.

📚 Social Science Computer Review

📄 Exploring Gender Disparities in Experiences of Being Hacked Using Twitter Data: A Focus on the Third-Level Digital Divide

Despite millions of hacked accounts fueling cybercrime, research on the hacking experience, particularly sociodemographic aspects, remains sparse. This study examines the experience of being hacked with a focus on gender disparities from the perspective of the third-level digital divide—socially constructed gaps of digital use outcomes even among users with similar digital access and skills. Analyzing 13,731 Twitter mentions of accounts being hacked, using topic modeling and classifying the gender of 12,586 users, we showed that women reported more experiences of being hacked across all types of online services except gaming. Women were more likely to experience negative consequences of being hacked, including reputational harm, money loss, and having personalized content modified. Gender differences were also found in coping strategies. Men were more likely to use active strategies like warning others, rebuilding accounts, and deducing hackers’ origins, while women were more likely to seek help from others to recover or report experiencing hacked accounts. The findings of this study imply the need for further research into the gendered experiences of being hacked from the third-level digital divide perspective, alongside the development of interventions to mitigate harm and empower users with diverse needs to cope with being hacked.

📄 Problematic use of short-video apps among elderly adults: An extension of the TAM

  • 作者: Lingnuo Wang, Guicheng Shi, Jon D. Elhai, Song Zhou, Yiqing Zeng, Lei Zheng
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
Short-form videos have become a dominant form of social media globally. While short-video apps are popular among adolescents, their ease-of-use has also attracted a growing number of elderly users. However, this accessibility can lead to problematic use, resulting in physical and mental health issues for this demographic. Therefore, our research employed the technology acceptance model (TAM) to understand the problematic use of short-video apps (PUSVA) among elderly adults. 281 elderly adults completed a three-wave survey with a 1-month interval between waves. Results showed that both perceived utilitarian-usefulness and perceived hedonic-usefulness mediated the relationship between perceived ease-of-use and PUSVA, suggesting a double-edged sword effect of ease-to-use short-video apps. Moreover, perceived susceptibility moderated the relationship between perceived ease-of-use and perceived utilitarian-usefulness, but not between perceived ease-of-use and perceived hedonic-usefulness, suggesting a moderated mediation effect of perceived susceptibility on PUSVA. Specifically, elderly adults with low perceived susceptibility tended to report higher perceived utilitarian-usefulness for easy-to-use applications, while no relationship between perceived ease-of-use and perceived utilitarian-usefulness was observed among those with high perceived susceptibility. Our findings highlight the double-edged sword effect of user-friendly short-video apps and offer valuable insights for developing interventions to mitigate problematic use among elderly adults.

📄 Minority-Owned, Claimed Status, and Profile Attributes of Businesses on Google Maps: COVID-19 Pandemic Survival

Theoretical frameworks Resource-Based View (RBV) and competitive advantages have served as conceptual foundations for investigating the role of Google Maps in business success. This research has two key findings: First, an analysis of a dataset obtained by scraping local business information from Google Maps ( N = 9,445) shows that minority-owned businesses were less likely to be claimed on Google Maps and received fewer consumer review comments compared to their non-minority counterparts. Second, a comparison of Google Maps data collected before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019 and follow-up data gathered in 2022 reveals higher survival rates among businesses that were claimed, utilized business attributes, or had more reviews. Together, these findings suggest that a stronger presence on Google Maps contributed to competitive advantages and business survival during the pandemic. This underscores the importance of Google Maps presence for the survival of businesses during a crisis.

📄 Response Times and Self-Reporting: Response Patterns Across Countries and World Regions Using Data From a Large Scale Computer-Based Assessment

  • 作者: Hana Vonkova, Ondrej Papajoanu, Martin Bosko
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
Understanding reporting behavior in questionnaires is a key issue in enhancing cross-national data comparability and policy decisions. Computers help improve the analysis of careless or insufficient effort (C/IE) responding by logging response times and other response behavior, ensuring data quality. We introduce a response-time based approach, built on an analysis of the relationship between a survey item and a related external variable, to cross-national research. Using PISA 2015 data from 58 countries/economies, we analyze patterns of correlations between the enjoyment of science and science test scores across response time. We focus on C/IE responding towards the beginning of the response time spectrum. Results indicate rather diligent responding in Eastern Asia and a part of Northern Europe. Yet in other regions (e.g., part of Latin America and the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe), C/IE responding might be distorting the data. We provide other researchers with information regarding when and to what extent C/IE responding can occur across countries. We enhance the understanding of heterogeneity in reporting behavior across countries.

📄 Online and Social Media Political Participation: Political Discussion Network Ties and Differential Social Media Platform Effects Over Time

  • 作者: Timilehin Durotoye, Manuel Goyanes, Rosa Berganza, Homero Gil de Zúñiga
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
Prior research has largely documented the overall mobilizing effects of social media news consumption and political discussion linked to citizens’ political participatory behaviors. However, limited empirical research has considered the informational and communicative effects to be contingent upon different social media platforms. Therefore, this study advances distinct theoretical affordances and effects of social media news use on online (by using online versions of legacy media outlets, blogs, and news apps) and social media political participation. Taking advantage of US comparative panel data, ordinary least squares (OLS) causal autoregressive regressions and panel autoregressive structural equation model tests cast a much-needed light on the diverse effects of Facebook, X, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, and Reddit use for news over both political discussions with weak and strong ties, and political participation online and in social media. Moreover, results from two-step algorithmic cluster analysis clarify how these social media platforms generate different information and political behavior clusters of citizens, which also provide a comparative view of how social media platforms differently contribute to people’s public and political life in US democracy.

📄 Political Gendertrolling

Online political gendertrolling is widespread, and while research shows that women are trolled more often than men, and that men troll more often than women, it is unclear if there is a difference in political gendertrolling between same- and cross-gender pairs of perpetrator-target. To address this gap, this study first examines the extent and style of gendertrolling. Then, it tests for variations based on the perpetrator’s and target’s gender and the target’s political affiliation. Using a two-by-two factorial design, with four perpetrator-target gender pairs (Women/Women, Women/Men, Men/Women, Men/Men), we performed a content analysis of 4,000 trolling comments on 40 Facebook posts that were made by 20 politicians (Men/Women, Democrats/Republicans). We found significant main and interaction effects in gendertrolling style based on the perpetrator’s and target’s genders and the target’s political affiliation. Women’s trolling styles toward men differed from the dominant trolling style, and regardless of perpetrator gender, the gendertrolling style towards women Democrats differed from the style used towards the other targets. However, we found no significant main or interaction effects in the extent of political gendertrolling in any of the four gender conditions, nor based on target’s political affiliation. Contributing to gendertrolling literature, this paper provides evidence of the complex relationships between same- and cross-gender perpetrator-target pairs.

📄 A Theory-Driven Approach to Fake News/Information Disorder Analysis and Explanation via Target-Based Emotion–Stance Analysis (TESA) and Interpretive Graph Generation (IGG)

Information disorder (IDO) presents a persistent challenge to society, necessitating innovative approaches to understanding its dynamics beyond just merely detecting it. This study introduces a theory-driven framework that integrates advanced natural language processing (NLP) with deep learning, utilizing the target-based emotion–stance analysis (TESA) approach to analyze emotion and stance dynamics within IDO content. Complementing TESA, interactive graph generation (IGG) is applied for scalable and interpretable qualitative analyses. Employing a mixed-methods approach, the study leverages TESA for target-centric emotion and stance analysis, evaluating target-based classifiers on both human-annotated and synthetic datasets. Additionally, the study explores synthetic data generation using generative AI to enrich the analysis, applying IGG to map complex data interactions. The study also found that integrating synthetic data developed from human annotations enhanced model performance, particularly for emotion classification tasks. Results demonstrate that IDO narratives significantly differ from non-IDO narratives, frequently leveraging negative emotions such as anger and disgust to manipulate public perception. TESA proved effective in capturing these nuanced variations, while IGG facilitated the triangulation of such findings via the scalable interpretation of emotional narratives, revealing that IDO content often amplifies polarizing and antagonistic perspectives. By combining TESA and IGG, this research emphasizes the importance of using NLP to extract and examine the emotional and stance nuances toward targets of interest within IDO context. This approach not only deepens theoretical insights into IDO’s persuasive mechanisms but also supports the development of practical tools for analyzing and managing the influence of IDO on public discourse.

📄 Dancing With a Loving Chatbot: Power Dynamics Between Women and Their AI Partners

With the growing prevalence and accessibility of AI companions, contemporary women are forming relationships with virtual partners. It is important to examine the relational, social, and gender-related implications of this phenomenon. Our research sheds light on the complex power dynamics in young urban Chinese women’s engagements with the AI partner Replika. By analyzing 342 relevant posts from an online chatbot community, guided by Foucault’s concept of power, we uncover inherent and actively exercised power dynamics in three typical user-bot relational pairings: customer-product, human-machine, and woman-man/woman-woman. Following the Foucauldian theories, we analyzed the interplay of truth, desire, knowledge, and power. We discovered three specific neoliberal subjectivities that both free and constrain female users in their engagement with Replika. While these female users challenge traditional gender norms through erotic roleplays with Replika, Generative AI introduces potential risks of sexual harassment and gender bias channeled from the extensive online world through AI partners to individual users.

📄 Electoral Forecasting in Volatile Party System Settings: Assessing and Improving Pre-Election Poll Predictions in Italy

This study examines electoral forecasting in volatile party systems, focusing on factors contributing to deviations between poll predictions and actual election outcomes. Using Italy as a case study, it identifies biases in polling data and proposes a method to enhance estimator accuracy in a context of stable institutions and volatile electoral dynamics. Data from three Italian general elections are analyzed to evaluate discrepancies between pre-electoral polls and results, assessing key factors such as timing of data collection, survey methodology, sample size, and party system fragmentation. Employing a Bayesian inference process via a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) adaptive Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm, the study demonstrates that pre-electoral estimates can be significantly improved using the Two-Stage Model (TSM). By consistently outperforming traditional poll predictions, the TSM offers a robust framework for addressing polling biases. These findings advance political forecasting by improving accuracy in both consolidated democracies and volatile electoral contexts, while emphasizing the need for future research on dynamic polling methods and fundamentals-based models.

📄 Social Media Made Me Do It: Perceptions of Social Media Influence, Risky Behaviors, and Mental Health Among Adolescents

Adolescents may perceive that social media exert influence on their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. Past research has found that frequent social media use and fear of missing out have related to risk behavior and poor mental health outcomes. Little research has been conducted on the perception of influence of social media by adolescents on mental health outcomes and risky behavior engagement. In this study, 304 adolescents (female = 210 and male = 94) completed an online questionnaire about their use of social media, perceptions of social media influence, fear of missing out, engagement in risky behavior, and depressive and anxiety symptoms. Age, perceptions of social media influence, and fear of missing out were significant predictors of engaging in risky behaviors. Age, being female, perceptions of social media influence, and fear of missing out predicted anxiety symptoms. Being female, perceptions of social media influence, and fear of missing out predicted depressive symptoms. For adolescents, the influence of social media on mental health outcomes and risky behaviors may be based on their perception of influence of social media and fear of missing out rather than just frequency of use.

📄 Modular Polyvocality: Community Detection and Semantic Analysis of Civil Society Discourse in English-Language #MahsaAmini Twitter Networks

  • 作者: Hossein Masoudnia, Alireza Samiee Esfahani, Mohsen Forghani, Mohammad Moghimi, Hossein Samiei Esfahany
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
This study investigates how English-language Twitter discourse surrounding the #MahsaAmini protests (October 2022–February 2023) organized into distinct yet interconnected thematic communities within civil society networks. Combining Louvain community detection, sentiment profiling (via VADER), and semantic validation (Jensen–Shannon Divergence, MANOVA, cosine similarity), we map five protest “streams” reflecting modular issue alignments, from Documentation of events involving violence and On-the-Ground Mobilization to Monarchist Advocacy &amp; Diaspora Political Engagement and Anti-IRGC Campaigns. While these communities differ in topical focus, their shared affective tone and overlapping lexicons point to modular polyvocality, a discourse structure characterized by thematic differentiation within broader rhetorical and affective coherence. This pattern represents polyvocal consensus rather than fragmentation. We interpret these findings through the lens of connective action, networked publics, and digital diaspora activism, arguing that the discourse reflects a transnational, modular, and affectively aligned subset of protest-oriented civil society mobilization within constrained information environments. This work contributes to debates on hybrid dissent, algorithmic visibility, and the structure of protest discourse in controlled digital contexts.

📚 Sociological Methods & Research

📄 Micro Effects on Macro Structure: Identification, Interpretation, Mediation, and Sensitivity Analysis for Model Selection

  • 作者: Jenna Wertsching, Scott W. Duxbury
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
How do social network interactions at the micro level generate novel network structures at the macro level? While recent methodological advancements have enabled the statistical analysis of micro–macro network effects, the current literature says little about the conditions sufficient to draw causal inference, how to evaluate indirect pathways that generate macro-level structures, or how to assess the sensitivity of empirical estimates to model choice. We address each of these problems in the micro effects on macro structure (MEMS) framework for micro–macro network analysis. We first report new formal results showing that the MEMS is nonparametrically identified under the conditional ignorability assumption and that, when identified, the MEMS can be interpreted under the “causes of effects” framework. We then show that the MEMS can be decomposed into direct and indirect effects to conduct mediation analysis when the interest is in multimechanistic pathways, where micro mechanisms shape macro outcomes by acting indirectly via intervening micro mechanisms. Finally, we build on these results to introduce a simple sensitivity test for the robustness of empirical estimates to model selection. We illustrate the utility of the methods in an empirical analysis of direct and indirect pathways linking in-group preference, out-group avoidance, and triadic closure to network segregation.

📚 The Quarterly Journal of Economics

📄 In their Shoes: Empathy Through Information*

We explore the mechanics of empathy. We show that information about an outgroup can activate and magnify empathy when presented in conjunction with an experience simulating their struggles. This response increases the willingness to help the struggling group. We provide evidence for this effect in an immersive virtual reality experiment where participants (“witnesses”) experience a simulation of the struggle of unauthorized migrants (“protagonists”), then replicate these results in a series of controlled lab experiments. We show that information enhances the witnesses’ empathetic response and drives them to engage in more prosocial behavior when it increases their perceived interpersonal similarity, or relatability to the protagonist — an effect we trace to attention: eye-tracking data reveals that information provision concentrates witnesses’ gaze on the struggles of the protagonist instead of searching through peripheral elements of the scene. Conversely, only information packages that strengthen perceived relatability — an effect that can vary across subgroups with heterogeneous attributes — magnify empathy. Together, our evidence suggests that the ability to put oneself in the shoes of another person or group can be enhanced by activating empathy through simple, targeted, information provision.

📚 Theory and Society

📄 Putting forward a multidisciplinary concept of a “society:” Setting the stage for our discussion

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📄 Evolutionary biology of human societies

Humans built societies with transgenerational permanence, culturally discriminating identities, and defense of territories. These characteristics are shared with some other animals, suggesting that humans as social animals have a comparable biological basis. As an analog for early human social ability, modern foragers provide a model of elemental, small-scale units often called bands, which organize cooperative groups of @ 25 individuals. In these elemental groups, people knows each other intimately, but membership was not based on genetic closeness and so not a result of simple genetic selection. Rather, reciprocal cooperation favored an opportunistic association with selective advantages to the group in resource defense, social mobility, and cooperation. Early in human history, the marking of membership in such groups likely became culturally distinctive with distinguishing behavior, personal adornment, and material culture. The capability to form groups based on culture ultimately allowed humans to form societies of very large scales as represented by the modern age. Band-size units became embedded in village-size groups that could then be culturally embedded within regional polities and so forth. Human societies evolve as multi-scalar formations with each level retaining characteristics of societies– permanence, culturally discriminating identities, and defense of resources. In essence, human societies formed as societies (bands) within societies (villages) within chiefdoms, states, and empires.

📚 West European Politics

📄 How political parties’ youth wings are organised: comparative evidence from 57 statutes in 11 countries

  • 作者: Sofia Marini, Henrik Bech Seeberg
  • 連結: 閱讀原文
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📚 問題與研究

📄 從國際海洋法法庭第31號案諮詢意見論國家防止氣候變遷危害海洋環境之義務

title: 從國際海洋法法庭第31號案諮詢意見論國家防止氣候變遷危害海洋環境之義務 abstract: 本文分析國際海洋法法庭（ITLOS）於2024年5月發布之第31號案諮詢意見，探討國家防止氣候變遷危害海洋環境之法律義務。該諮詢意見由小島國家氣候變遷與國際法委員會提出，由ITLOS確認人為溫室氣體排放構成《聯合國海洋法公約》下的「海洋環境污染」，各國有義務採取必要措施防止、減少和控制此類污染。本文首先介紹該諮詢意見背景及主要論點，分析ITLOS對於義務性質、海洋污染定義、具體措施等議題的解釋立場。研究發現，ITLOS雖然將相關義務定性為「行為義務」而非「結果義務」，但同時也確立國家對於溫室氣體排放造成海洋污染所必須履行「相當注意」（due diligence）的嚴格標準，並確認能力與資源較佳國家的責任，且強調預警性方法（precautionary approach）在應對氣候變遷危害時的重要性。此外，本文檢視我國海洋政策與法規，發現現行架構尚未充分整合氣候變遷與海洋污染治理。因此，本文建議我國應完善相關法規、加強科學研究與國際合作，並將諮詢意見要旨納入《國家海洋政策白皮書》及《國家海洋污染防治白皮書》等相關國內政策文件及法規，以有效回應氣候變遷對海洋環境的威脅，履行國際社會成員的責任。

📄 中共對臺灣海峽海域的法律主張與實踐：灰色地帶概念的解釋

title: 中共對臺灣海峽海域的法律主張與實踐：灰色地帶概念的解釋 abstract: 美中兩國國防部長於2022年香格里拉會議時，曾就臺灣海峽是否為國際水域有不同的詮釋方式。本文主要以灰色地帶為視角，透過文獻與比較分析法，檢視中共對臺灣海峽海域相關的國內法、最高法院的司法主張、軍事演習，以及於臺灣海峽內執法的國家實踐，其主張背後之目的為本文探討重點。研究發現：首先，中共灰色地帶戰略呈現相互依存性：一為「法律領域的灰色地帶戰略」，藉由詮釋《聯合國海洋法公約》所賦予沿岸國的部分管轄權，透過模糊化的國內法與司法解釋，建立符合自身利益的法理基礎；二為「國關領域的灰色地帶戰略」，透過海上執法、軍演等國家實踐強化管轄權。中共對臺灣海峽法律主張與實踐所展現的灰色地帶戰略特性：其一，中共為避免與美國正面衝突，藉詮釋國際法，形塑有利的法律框架，此為「不對稱性」；其二，制定不抵觸國際法的國內法挑戰現狀，此為「模糊性」；其三，透過國家實踐合理化相關海域國內法的管轄權，此為「漸進性」。本文建議：美國應持續航行自由行動並深化臺美海事合作，以維護規則為基礎的海洋秩序；同時，我政府應針對中共灰色地帶戰略下之各類行動，持續進行澄清與反制說明，並培養國際法專才，完備國軍各級接戰規定，強化全民心理與法律韌性。

📄 臺灣2024年選舉的「代表性」與「多數決」爭議：總統與立法委員選舉的比較

title: 臺灣2024年選舉的「代表性」與「多數決」爭議：總統與立法委員選舉的比較 abstract: 我國於2024年1月，舉行了第16屆總統、副總統，以及第11屆立法委員的選舉。選舉結果，民進黨提名「賴蕭配」，以相對多數贏得總統，但民進黨在國會以一席之差落居第二大黨，由國民黨取得國會最大黨的地位。這個選舉結果出現了兩個爭議，其一是總統因三強鼎立，再次出現得票未過半的結果；其二是國會出現「矛盾多數」，國民黨無論是區域的黨籍立委或是不分區，得票都是落後給民進黨，卻在轉換為席次之後，成為國會第一大黨。由於總統應選名額只有一個，結果必然是贏者全拿，因此會有相對多數但不及於絕對多數的勝出，可能導致代表性不足的爭議。在立法委員選舉的部分，選制採用並立式兩票制，且小選舉區更佔總席次約2/3，比例代表的部分僅約1/3，因此也可能放大了各黨得票與總席次之間的差異，嚴重者甚至出現選票少但席次高的「矛盾多數」。本文透過既有文獻與制度面的分析指出，只要是贏者全拿的選舉制度，就必然有代表性不足的問題，只是看選制設計而有程度上的差異。另一方面，立法委員的選舉則是受到兩票制席次分配以及選區人口數巨大差異的影響，導致選舉結果不但存在代表性的問題，更可能出現「矛盾多數」的選舉困境。而矛盾多數可藉由制度改革來避免，但贏者全拿的代表性問題，透過制度雖可減緩爭議，但仍可能帶來其他問題。

📄 從交往到交惡？ 從學習理論探討兩岸交流的變化

title: 從交往到交惡？ 從學習理論探討兩岸交流的變化 abstract: 歷經近四十年的兩岸交流，究竟對兩岸關係產生了何種變化與影響？本文將從學習（learning）理論來剖析兩岸民間交流的過程與結果，並檢視自從兩岸開放交流後彼此關係的變化與所面臨的侷限。本文採取案例研究分析中國大陸在經濟發展、農村社區營造方面向臺灣學習的經驗，以及臺灣在直播帶貨、短影音方面向中國大陸學習的經驗。本文發現國內政治因素是影響兩岸交流的最主要因素，特別是中國大陸對臺灣的「選舉式民主」以及臺灣對中國大陸社群媒體傳播的疑慮，使得兩岸交流仍停留在「簡單學習」與「負面學習」的階段，因此無法進入「複雜學習」而形成具有共同目標與價值的「知識社群」。最後，中美戰略競爭升高的外在環境將會衝擊過去兩岸交流最具成果的經貿互賴與科技合作。因此，儘管經歷了近40年的兩岸交流與往來，兩岸關係的未來還是有可能再回到過去衝突與對抗的局面。