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Wang's Picnic (2026/08/22)

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This week, 42 journals published 83 new articles.
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Journals Updated This Week

AI & Society Journal of Information Technology & Politics Political Studies
American Journal of Political Science Journal of Political Economy Political Studies Review
Big Data & Society Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology Political Theory
British Journal of Sociology Journal of Theoretical Politics Post-Soviet Affairs
Comparative Political Studies Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (Statistics in Society) Public Opinion Quarterly
Contemporary Political Theory Legislative Studies Quarterly Qualitative Sociology
Discourse & Society Local Government Studies Representation
East European Politics Nations and Nationalism Social Forces
Electoral Studies Nature Reviews Psychology Social Problems
European Sociological Review Party Politics Social Science Computer Review
Gender & Society Policy & Internet Social Science Quarterly
Journal of Asian and African Studies Political Communication The International Journal of Press/Politics
Journal of Elections Public Opinion and Parties Political Psychology West European Politics
Journal of Human Rights Political Research Quarterly 人文及社會科學集刊

📚 AI & Society

📄 Two political imaginaries of AI in Western philosophy

In AI Mirror , Shannon Vallor argues that we find ourselves in what she calls the techno-moral bootstrapping problem. In short, our ethical and political systems are ill-suited for the new technological worlds we find ourselves in; however, we can only build new or better notions out of what we already have. In this paper, I want to move towards addressing this problem by surveying some of the resources on hand and to show how they are lacking. I will argue that there are effectively only two political imaginaries of AI in the Western tradition, and that both are unsuited for liberatory political projects. The earliest is found in Aristotle’s references to Homer in the Politics . Here Aristotle notes that if the autonomous, intelligent creations that Hephaestus is said to employ in his forge in the Illiad were to actually exist, then masters would no longer desire slaves. This is the artificial slave imaginary. Second is found in Hobbes’s Leviathan , where the leviathan is described as an “artificial man” who is produced by the collective action and rational agreement. We then become the subjects of this artificial sovereign as its necessity for our flourishing is unchallengeable despite it being produced by us. This is the artificial god imaginary. I argue that these remain the two dominant imaginaries that shape the political horizons of AI today, as is clearly seen in various AI hype campaigns, tech industry ideology, and related cults. I take it that designing AI for slave masters or to enforce the submission of human beings are both undesirable. I then argue that the figure of liberatory technological imagination, Prometheus, does not amount to a political imaginary for AI. If so, then our cultural resources for imagining better ways of living together partially mediated through AI are severely lacking. This then suggests two avenues forward: first, moving beyond the Western tradition, and second, a concerted effort of collective, liberatory political imagination. Imagining better ways of living together with AI is not enough to solve the techno-moral bootstrapping problem, let alone to bring about greater justice, but it is a fundamental first step.

📚 American Journal of Political Science

📄 A theory of political divergence and gradual institutional change

Why do some societies succeed in breaking away from historical traditions while others remain trapped? This paper proposes a formal theory to investigate the interaction between short‐run and long‐run political dynamics, highlighting a co‐evolution of political institutions and social structures. A society consists of various social groups, such as the rulers, the elites, and the commoners. Short‐run strategic considerations give rise to different coalitions among these groups, which determine not only political regimes but also redistribution policies. In the long run, these policies shape the accumulation of wealth and power, where small initial differences can lead to divergent paths of development. Finally, the paper examines three historical case studies on medieval Europe, imperial China, and the medieval Muslim world to illustrate potential pathways of long‐run political development.

📄 Captured participatory institutions: Theory and evidence from Venezuela's Consejos Comunales

Can participatory institutions (PIs) facilitate development when captured by the government? We propose an original theoretical framework to investigate how changing incumbent priorities can shape the developmental and political effects of captured PIs. While patrons concerned with survival can force PIs to specialize in political activities, those pursuing regime consolidation may incentivize PIs to multitask, delivering developmental gains and political rewards. We deploy our framework to study Venezuela's Communal Councils. Leveraging difference‐in‐differences analyses, an original survey of Council participants, and 51 interviews with government officials and grassroots Communal Council members, we find that Councils yielded both economic and political returns during an early period marked by political stability and regime consolidation. However, as Venezuela's economic collapse pushed the government into an authoritarian survival mode, Councils became politically specialized. While showing that captured PIs can foster development under certain circumstances, our findings cast doubt on PIs’ development‐enhancing potential under autocracy.

📚 Big Data & Society

📄 AI fear of missing out (AI FOMO): Desire without action under social pressure

Fear of missing out (FOMO) is known to drive engagement. But does this apply to AI FOMO, the fear of falling behind with artificial intelligence (AI)? This commentary argues that it does not. Many people feel this fear intensely yet still do not act. Unlike social media FOMO, where fear is quickly discharged through participation, AI FOMO produces desire without action, a paralysis rooted in the asymmetry between perceiving AI as indispensable (high response efficacy) and feeling incapable of mastering it (low self-efficacy). When this tension goes unresolved, it may be redirected toward human–human relations, appearing as envy of AI-proficient peers and as biased attribution that discounts others’ accomplishments as merely “AI-driven.” These dynamics are not only individual. The asymmetry is also shaped by structural disparities in training, time, resources, and support, and by sociotechnical imaginaries that frame adoption as urgent and inevitable. As AI competence becomes a symbolic marker of merit, non-adoption risks being read solely as individual failure, obscuring the unequal conditions that also shape it. Understanding AI FOMO as a distinct emotional and sociotechnical condition suggests how technological change compounds inequality without requiring widespread adoption, and how FOMO, unaccompanied by the capacity to act, deepens divisions rather than bridges them.

📄 Demystifying big data in China: Infrastructure, labour and social change

To date, much of the discussion of big data in China remains caught between fears of authoritarian threats and dreams of developmental alternatives. Such mythifications reduce China's techno-development to a monolithic, state-led master plan, and conceal the labour, frictions and relations of power these data infrastructures depend on. Drawing on infrastructure studies, this Special Theme approaches data infrastructures as relational, contingent and socio-material arrangements through which datafication sustains capital accumulation, governance and power. Bringing together seven fieldwork-informed empirical articles and a commentary, the collection examines data infrastructures, data labour and data for social change in and from China, ranging from the artificial intelligence annotation industry to smart farming, rural governance and environmental activism, as well as the expansion of Chinese networks and platforms into the Global South. Reading across these contributions, this editorial argues that framing these related processes via the concept of infrastructural capitalism moves the debate beyond a singular ‘China model’ by specifying how power is produced, exercised and contested through infrastructures at home and abroad. Using China as a case and starting point, this Special Theme also lays the groundwork for more broadly theorising the politics of infrastructural capitalism across techno-developmental regimes.

📄 Scams all the way up: The scam as vernacular analytic of digital capitalism

  • Author(s): Courtney T. Wittekind, Elizabeth Resor, Jovanna Rosen, Hilary Faxon, Kendra Kintzi, Julien Migozzi, Luis F. Alvarez León, Desiree Fields
  • Link: Read the article
Scams have proliferated under digital capitalism; so too have stories of scams and allegations of scamming. In this commentary, we focus on the latter to situate the scam as a “vernacular analytic:” an everyday mode of critique invoked to question the normative systems and institutions that rule our lives, but are experienced as exploitative or rigged. While this vernacular analytic is a powerful and pervasive means to highlight inequality, we argue that it obscures what is unique about scams amid capitalism's digitalization. In response, we develop a systematic approach to study this vernacular analytic as it circulates under digital capitalism. We propose three features of the scam as a vernacular analytic: critique at scale, the fallout of digital mimicry, and the exploitation of affect. This threefold framework provides a common foundation for empowering us to counter inequitable and exploitative systems by reimagining and rebuilding institutions and our trust in them. We argue that recognizing the power and pervasiveness of the scam as a vernacular analytic, and interrogating how scams operate under digital capitalism, are essential steps toward a future less vulnerable to digitally mediated exploitation.

📚 British Journal of Sociology

📄 Graduated Involution Under Compressed Modernity: Differences in the Summer Holidays as a Phase in the Public Life‐Course in Shanghai, China

This paper develops the concept of graduated involution to explain how summer holidays have been reconstituted from leisure time into an educational arena for Chinese families under conditions of compressed modernity. Based on qualitative data from 32 households in Shanghai, including interviews and child self‐recordings, we analyze how temporal acceleration, spatial reconfiguration, and institutional gradients interact to shape children's everyday lives. We show that educational responsibility has increasingly been transferred from the state to families through hukou‐based entitlements and graduated polices such as school catchment areas and “Jifen”—or points for different categories of urban citizenship, producing stratified family responses and uneven childhood trajectories. Summer holidays thus function as a microcosm of compressed modernity's contradictions, where rapid social transformation coexists with persistent familialism. The analysis advances debates on welfare retrenchment, life‐course inequality, and the governance of childhood beyond formal institutions.

📚 Comparative Political Studies

📄 Elections Increase Satisfaction With Democracy

A large literature shows that election outcomes affect satisfaction with democracy by separating voters into winners and losers. Moving beyond victory and defeat, I theorize that elections themselves boost satisfaction due to the psychosocial, representational, and economic utility they provide to citizens. I test my expectations across three separate studies. These leverage survey fieldwork that was interrupted by elections in several countries (Study 1), cross-national panel survey data (Study 2), and a survey experiment (Study 3). The timing of survey interviews in each study helps isolate the impact of elections from that of winning and losing in the sense of a voter’s party entering government. Results together show that elections increase satisfaction with democracy, and an investigation of the theoretical mechanisms suggests that this relationship is driven by the representational and economic benefits of elections.

📚 Contemporary Political Theory

📄 Constituent power in early modern political philosophy: from La Boétie to Hobbes

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📄 Fear the future: dystopia and political imagination in the twentieth century

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📄 AI and the future of selfhood: Søren Kierkegaard on faith and love

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📄 Derrida, deconstruction and political theory

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📄 Happiness in action: a philosopher’s guide to the good life

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📄 Representation and silencing: the mapuche case in the chilean constituent process

  • Author(s): Miriam Jerade, Leandro De Brasi, Fabien Le Bonniec
  • Link: Read the article
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📚 Discourse & Society

📄 Discourses of difference and equality: Representations of gay couples in Chilean parliamentary debates on the civil-partnership law (2011–2015)

This critical discourse study analyses representations of gay couples in the 2011–2015 Chilean parliamentary debates on the civil-partnership law. Examining concordances for homosexual * and mismo sexo ( same-sex ), it identifies how gay people are portrayed as vulnerable, uncommon, or unexceptional. The analysis focuses on the competing representations of gay people as fundamentally different from (Set 1) or the same as (Set 2) heterosexual people. Set 1 reveals a homophobic stance built on three biologistic and traditionalist arguments: that marriage is an exclusively heterosexual institution, that gay couples cannot parent, and that they cannot constitute a family. Conversely, Set 2 challenges these by reframing family and reappropriating opponents’ legitimation strategies (e.g. authority, morality). The study illuminates the linguistic mechanisms of exclusion during a pivotal period of legal transition, showing how equality proponents strategically redeployed discriminatory rhetoric to contest homophobia and advance social justice.

📄 Mainstreaming or marginalizing? Gender in the United Nations General Assembly discourse, 1993–2023

Gender equality is a central normative commitment in global governance, yet its discursive prominence within international political arenas remains uneven. This study examines how gender is constructed, prioritized, and integrated within the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) speeches over a 31-year period (1993–2023). Drawing on a large corpus of 171,901 speeches, and a total word count of 92.72 million, the analysis investigates three questions: (1) which themes dominate UNGA discourse, (2) how gender-related narratives have evolved over time, and (3) whether patterns of emphasis differ by speaker’s gender. Adopting a discourse-analytic approach supported by large-scale text analysis, the study identifies 20 recurring thematic clusters. The findings show that while geopolitical concerns consistently dominate UNGA debates, gender equality and women’s empowerment appear as secondary and often embedded themes rather than standalone priorities. Explicitly gender-focused agendas remain comparatively marginal, even as references to gender have increased over time. At the same time, women’s participation in UNGA speeches has risen substantially, from 4.8% in 1993 to 35.5% in 2023, though this shift does not uniformly translate into greater discursive centrality for gender issues. These findings point to a tension between the institutional commitment to gender mainstreaming and the continued marginalization of gender as a distinct political priority. The study contributes to scholarship on discourse, power, and global governance by demonstrating how gender equality is incorporated into, yet diluted within, broader development narratives.

📚 East European Politics

📄 Stability through rupture: elite splits and coalition realignment in Serbia and Montenegro

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📚 Electoral Studies

📄 When marriage ends: Divorce and the erosion of conservative political alignment

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📚 European Sociological Review

📄 Same neighbourhood, same employer? Residential proximity and workplace concentration among immigrants

Living near one another can channel immigrants toward workplaces through social connections and information flow, shared local opportunity structures, and other residentially patterned pathways, yet few studies link residential proximity to employment outcomes among immigrants and their children. Using Norwegian linked employer–employee administrative data with detailed residential locations, we study how neighbourhood co-residence is tied to workplace concentration and individual wages among coworkers of immigrant and native background. We compare observed co-employment of neighbours against a simulated baseline of random workplace allocation within municipalities and adjust for stable local geography using neighbourhood fixed effects. We find that immigrants are considerably more likely than natives living in the same neighbourhood to work with immigrant neighbours, particularly coethnics from the same country of origin. Immigrant neighbour exposure concentrates workers in low-wage, immigrant-dense establishments but is only modestly tied to wages, suggesting that such pathways may reinforce workplace segregation without clear individual economic costs or benefits. Children of immigrants, in contrast, are not overexposed to immigrant-background neighbours at work compared with natives. These patterns tie residential proximity to immigrants’ workplace concentration in ways consistent with neighbourhood-based network mechanisms, while weaker links in the second generation point to broader integration into the mainstream economy.

📚 Gender & Society

📄 Tough Princesses and Girly-Boys: Dresses as Sites of Struggle in Swedish Preschools

In this article, I examine how dresses become sites of struggle in Swedish preschools’ gender equality work. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 21 preschool teachers and 112 hours of participant observation with a subset of 10 of them, I analyze how dresses become sites where domination, individual resistance, and solidarity shape possibilities for gender subjectification. In some preschools, domination was enacted through fear, ridicule, and parody, policing boys’ proximity to femininity. In others, solidarity revalued and normalized femininity through passive and explicit permission, symbolic reimagining, and expansive invitation, enabling all children to wear dresses. I argue that when individual resistance is sustained through solidarity, meaningful differentiation emerges, making it possible to reshape what becomes socially intelligible as gender through redoing and, at times, undoing gender. Rather than a permanent achievement, meaningful differentiation is a contingent accomplishment sustained by ongoing relations of power.

📄 Are Occupations Associated with Women Devalued? A Causal Test

Empirical evidence from the labor market suggests that when an occupation is associated with women it is devalued, but without tight experimental control, these studies cannot establish that the relationship is causal. In a series of preregistered survey experiments, I test whether U.S. residents devalue three distinct occupations when they are feminine-typed rather than masculine-typed. I independently vary two gendered dimensions of each occupation: whether it is described as majority-women (vs. majority-men) and as necessitating feminine-typed communal (vs. masculine-typed agentic) traits. I find modest evidence that the gender ratio or gendered traits of an occupation independently shape its perceived value net of the other, but robust evidence that a doubly feminine-typed occupation (majority-women and typified by communal traits) is devalued relative to a doubly masculine-typed occupation (majority-men and typified by agentic traits). This study provides causal evidence that an occupation’s association with women shapes its perceived monetary value and shows that the effect is most pronounced when an occupation is feminine-typed on both dimensions. The devaluation of domains associated with women illustrates women’s limited options for evading gender bias: Although women are least likely to face gender bias in feminine-typed domains, those very domains are subject to gendered devaluation.

📄 The Eldest Daughter’s Third Shift Among Former Seasonal Farmworker Youth

Working women disproportionately experience the second shift, an additional shift of household labor. In Latine working-class families, women with limited time for a second shift depend on their children to take on this work. Scholars have referred to this as a third shift among working children in immigrant families. In these cases, eldest daughters often step up to fill care gaps for their families. I draw upon thirty-one interviews with Latine former seasonal farmworker youth to examine the unpaid labor of eldest daughters. I build upon research on the second and third shifts to highlight how the intersection of birth order, class, gender, and immigration status impacts the unequal division of labor. The eldest daughters in my study completed their first shift working in the fields, their second attending school, and their third helping with domestic labor. This study focuses on their third shift, which consisted of maintaining a household, brokering work, and multigenerational emotional work. The study highlights the critical role of the eldest daughter in financially precarious families.

📚 Journal of Asian and African Studies

📄 Democracy as ceremony: Electoral ritual and the Politics of Legitimacy in East Africa

Electoral democracy is widely regarded as central to democratic consolidation. However, in many East African states, elections increasingly assume a ceremonial character, functioning less as mechanisms of genuine competition and accountability and more as rituals that confer political legitimacy. This article examines the ritualization of electoral democracy, arguing that regular elections coexist with constrained political competition, limited institutional autonomy, and restricted prospects for alternation of power. Drawing on qualitative and interpretive analysis informed by post-structural theories of power, institutionalism, and hybrid regime scholarship, the study shows how elections are maintained through procedural compliance, symbolic participation, and managed outcomes. While emphasizing legality, order, and voter turnout, these processes often marginalize substantive democratic principles such as accountability and meaningful choice. The article concludes that although elections contribute to regime stability and political order, their ceremonial character reinforces existing power structures and calls for rethinking democratic consolidation beyond electoral formalism.

📄 “Winner Takes all”: A critical discourse study of Nyesom Wike’s media interaction

  • Author(s): David O. Esuola, Tayo Adebayo, Alimot E. Omolaja
  • Link: Read the article
Although there has been considerable research into politeness and face management in Nigerian political discourse, the ideological aspects of political language in unplanned media interaction are critically under-researched. This study seeks to fill this vacuum by investigating how Nyesom Wike, a leading political figure in Nigeria, achieves political power through discourse in media interviews. Based on a qualitative research design, this study analyzes 10 video recordings of Wike’s media interviews conducted during his governance of Rivers State (2015–2023) and while serving as the Minister of Federal Capital Territory (2023–to date) selected from the videos posted on the platforms such as YouTube channels Channels Television and TVC News. Transcripts of interviews were subject to critical discourse analysis using Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework and the socio-cognitive model by van Dijk. Three main discourses are identified. These strategies collectively construct a political identity grounded in a winner-takes-all ideology, where power belongs to those who win, and losers or critics have no legitimate right to question. The study contributes to the literature on Nigeria political discourse by moving beyond politeness to reveal how language reproduces elite power and anti-democratic ideologies in Nigeria’s mediated public sphere.

📚 Journal of Elections Public Opinion and Parties

📄 ‘The people = majority?’ Examining the relationship between populist attitudes and majoritarian decision-making preferences among adolescents

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

📚 Journal of Human Rights

📄 Sarvodaya and climate justice: Reimagining global environmental politics

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📚 Journal of Information Technology & Politics

📄 Hierarchical barriers: how media-flow networks reproduce inequality on X

  • Author(s): Mingliang Xu, Chen Xing, Qiuyi Chen, Jingtai Tang
  • Link: Read the article
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📄 The winner-loser gap and support for remote voting methods – evidence from Canadian municipal elections

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📄 Crowd-moderation of hateful content on social media: mobilizing bystanders through scalable interventions

  • Author(s): Kristoffer Skovgaard Jensen, Tanja Marie Hansen, Jesper Sommer Rasmussen, Simon Tobias Karg, John Cook, Iain Walker, Lasse Lindekilde
  • Link: Read the article
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📄 Linking politics. How political parties use online link sharing during campaign times in Belgium and Sweden

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📄 Political emotionalization in large text corpora: detecting affective cues with MORESPulse and its scientific uses

  • Author(s): Gabriella Szabó, Orsolya Ring, Veronika Patkós, Zsolt Boda
  • Link: Read the article
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📚 Journal of Political Economy

📄 Debiasing and t-Tests for Synthetic Control Inference on Average Causal Effects

  • Author(s): Victor Chernozhukov, Kaspar Wüthrich, Yinchu Zhu
  • Link: Read the article
Journal of Political Economy, Ahead of Print.

📚 Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology

📄 Assessing the Reliability of Household Sampling Using Rooftop Data in India

  • Author(s): Douglas Johnson, Anjani Balu, Poornima Ramesh, Linh Vo, Rediet Mulu, Amir Emami
  • Link: Read the article
In settings where comprehensive household lists are unavailable, surveyors typically sample households by first selecting areas as primary sampling units, then conducting a complete listing of all households in each selected area, and finally, sampling households from these household lists. Due to the need to perform a household listing, this approach is costly and sometimes infeasible. Researchers have recently explored using “pin drop” techniques to directly sample households within primary sampling units without first conducting a listing. While existing pin-drop methods are far cheaper than the household listing method, it is unclear if they generate unbiased results. We introduce “rooftop sampling” (RS), a novel method based on the pin-drop approach that samples households by first sampling rooftops using an open-source dataset of rooftops created by Google and Microsoft. We develop a framework to assess potential biases associated with alternative second-stage sampling strategies like RS. Applying this framework using Demographic and Health Survey data, a ground truth dataset from India, and various field tests, we find that RS introduces minimal bias—on the order 1 percentage point for a binary variable. We show that RS is often optimal for small to medium-sized surveys (fewer than 1,000 respondents) or when the household listing method is not feasible.

📄 Going Online With a Telephone Employee Survey: Effects On Coverage, Nonresponse, and Total Selection Bias

Telephone surveys have historically been a popular form of data collection in labor market research and continue to be used to this day. Yet, telephone surveys are confronted with many challenges, including imperfect coverage of the target population, low response rates, risk of nonresponse bias, and rising data collection costs. To address these challenges, many telephone surveys have shifted to online and mixed-mode data collection to reduce costs and minimize the risk of coverage and nonresponse biases. However, empirical evaluations of the intended effects of introducing online and mixed-mode data collection in ongoing telephone surveys are lacking. We address this research gap by analyzing a telephone employee survey in Germany, the Linked Personnel Panel (LPP), which experimentally introduced a sequential web-to-telephone mixed-mode design in the refreshment samples of the fourth and fifth waves of the panel. By utilizing administrative data available for the sampled individuals with and without known telephone numbers, we estimate the before-and-after effects of introducing the web mode on coverage and nonresponse rates and biases. We show that the LPP was affected by known telephone number coverage bias for various employee subgroups prior to introducing the web mode, though many of these biases were partially offset by nonresponse bias. Introducing the web-to-telephone design improved the response rate but increased total selection bias, on average, compared to the standard telephone single-mode design. This result was driven by larger nonresponse bias in the web-to-telephone design and partial offsetting of coverage and nonresponse biases in the telephone single-mode design. Significant cost savings (up to 50 percent per respondent) were evident in the web-to-telephone design.

📄 Using Web Survey Paradata to Analyze Response Quality, Respondent Characteristics, and Survey Estimates: a State-of-the-Art Review and Typology

In the context of web surveys, the term paradata primarily refers to digital traces of the response process. With the increasing prevalence of web surveys, paradata are often perceived as vital for analyzing the methodological and substantive aspects of web surveys. We evaluated these claims through a state-of-the-art literature review. An extensive search process yielded 3,436 screened abstracts and 173 empirical publications that addressed web survey paradata. The results showed that empirical research on such paradata remains relatively limited, characterized by stable publication levels and quite narrow scopes. Specifically, paradata were primarily employed to examine response quality (92 percent of publications), with respondent characteristics (25 percent) and substantive issues (6 percent) being addressed less frequently. In terms of indicators, response times dominated (83 percent), followed by device type (38 percent), while navigation (9 percent), answer changes (8 percent), multitasking (8 percent), and other advanced indicators were used less frequently. In this article, we discuss these results and provide an operational framework that addresses the complexities of integrating paradata into survey design, thereby facilitating the formulation of realistic expectations in survey research practice.

📚 Journal of Theoretical Politics

📄 Distributive consequences of plurality voting versus proportional representation

Employing a game-theoretic model of electoral competition, Myerson (1993, American Political Science Review 87 ( 4 ): 856–869) finds that both single-winner plurality voting (PV) and proportional representation (PR) lead to identical equilibrium campaigning strategies, with platform inequalities increasing as the number of political competitors rises. Using the same model, this paper derives and compares the resulting post-election income distributions and associated Gini coefficients. Key findings include: (1) The identical campaigning strategies under PV and PR lead to considerably different post-election income distributions. (2) For any given number of competing parties, PV exhibits comparatively higher inequality. (3) Inequality rises with the number of parties in both electoral systems but increases more rapidly under PV. Notably, when PV is fixed at two parties (Duverger’s law), once the simulated number of parties exceeds five, PR exhibits slightly higher inequality, challenging the belief that PR is inherently the more equal electoral system.

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

📄 Spatial vertical regression for spatial panel data: evaluating the effect of the florentine tramway’s first line on commercial vitality

  • Author(s): Giulio Grossi, Alessandra Mattei, Georgia Papadogeorgou
  • Link: Read the article
Synthetic control methods are commonly used in panel data settings to evaluate the effect of an intervention. In many cases, the treated and control units correspond to spatial units such as regions or neighborhoods. Our approach addresses the challenge of understanding how an intervention applied at specific locations influences the surrounding area. Traditional synthetic control applications do not address how to define the effective area of impact, the extent of treatment propagation across space, and how effects vary with distance from the treatment sites. To address these challenges, we introduce spatial vertical regression (SVR) within the Bayesian paradigm. SVR predict the missing potential outcomes in varying proximities to the treatment sites, while accounting for the spatial structure inherent in the data. Rooted in the vertical regression framework of the synthetic control method, SVR employs a Gaussian process to ensure that the imputation of missing potential outcomes is spatially coherent, reflecting the expectation that nearby treated areas have similar relationships to control areas and experience similar outcomes. This approach is particularly pertinent to our study on the Florentine tramway’s first line construction. We study its influence on the local commercial landscape, focusing on how business prevalence varies at different distances from the tram stops.

📚 Legislative Studies Quarterly

📄 Federalism, Geography, and the Representation of Cities in the US Congress

How elections impact the behavior of legislators is one of the most fundamental questions in the study of representation, yet little is known about the role of electoral geography. In a federal system like the United States, national resources often flow to cities. However, members of Congress represent congressional districts, which do not align with city boundaries. Using spending data from 1967 to 2019 and a within‐city research design, I show that the same city is represented differently depending on how it aligns with electoral maps. Cities benefit from having more representatives provided city residents still make up a substantial portion of each congressional district. These findings contribute to our understanding of representation within a federal system and illustrate how electoral geography can create inequalities in representation and the distribution of resources.

📚 Local Government Studies

📄 Gender and urban fiscal governance: evidence from female leadership in Indian municipal corporations

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📄 Contingencies or institutions? Drivers of venture philanthropy initiation for nonprofit sector growth by local governments

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📚 Nations and Nationalism

📄 Imagining a Nation: A Social Representation Analysis of the ‘Idea of India’ in Contemporary Times

The present research explored how different age cohorts conceptualize the ‘Idea of India’ through the lens of the social representations theory (SRT). Data were collected for three age cohorts—young adults (18–24 years), working adults (25–50 years) and older adults (50 + years). In total, 300 participants were asked to perform a free association task, in which they provided five spontaneous ideas relating to India. Analysis using the structural approach was used as well as prototypical analysis to reveal both common core items and unique peripheral representations between generational groups. Findings showed a shared aspirational core across generations, with national prestige, modernization, social justice and cultural appreciation as the core concerns. There were, however, notable inter‐generational differences in both central and peripheral representational themes. Young adults stressed technological progress and international positioning, working adults economic progress and institutional solidity and older adults historical continuity and traditional values. This research contributes three important findings: (1) It presents exploratory evidence, within an urban middleclass sample from two Indian cities, of how national identity may be both shared and differentially constructed across age cohorts; (2) it illustrates the value of prototypical analysis in charting changing social representations of nationhood; and (3) it identifies particular points of convergence that may amplify inter‐generational dialogue. These findings offer a contextually bounded contribution to understanding national identity formation within educated urban populations and may inform social cohesion strategies that take into account generational perspectives, though broader applicability requires further research with more diverse samples.

📄 Making Boundaries: Polish Memory, Identity and the Ukrainian Other

Political elites use historical references abundantly when drawing national boundaries. Despite the prominence of such language, we know little about the ways in which ordinary citizens internalise historical narratives of the Other to construct their national identity. Drawing on focus group discussions conducted in Poland, this article highlights the significance of family memories and experiences in the making of national boundaries and how these memories and experiences are transmitted across generations independently of state‐initiated narratives. When a significant number of Ukrainians sought refuge in Poland following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, with the majority of Poles expressing solidarity with those fleeing a war of aggression, the Ukrainian Other became an integral part of Polish society, yet still remained symbolically external. Comparing focus group discussions in two cities and among two generations allows to assess the importance of generational factors relative to sociopolitical orientation and local dynamics for the reception of history and the construction of identity.

📚 Nature Reviews Psychology

📄 A process model of stress generation in internalizing disorders

  • Author(s): Lisa R. Starr, David J. A. Dozois, Katerina Rnic, Angela C. Santee, Joelle LeMoult
  • Link: Read the article
No abstract was provided by the RSS feed or Crossref API.please use the Read the article link above.

📄 The privilege of feeling talented

Nature Reviews Psychology, Published online: 19 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s44159-026-00609-3The privilege of feeling talented

📄 Approaches to differentiating the dimensions of social class

In this Review, Laurin describes three approaches to studying social class and how each approach might help to account for conflicting findings.

📚 Party Politics

📄 When opposition leaders speak: personalisation and question time in Australia

Question Time is a highly visible and adversarial parliamentary arena central to executive accountability, yet increasing personalisation may redirect scrutiny from collective party actors to individual leaders. This article analyses personalisation in Australian Question Time using more than 21,500 opposition questions asked between 1981 and 2025. We examine two dimensions of centralised personalisation: who asks opposition questions and whom those questions target, theorising variation through party structure (single-party vs coalition opposition) and institutional reforms to leadership selection rules. The findings challenge claims of a uniform rise in elite behavioural personalisation. While opposition questioning has become increasingly Prime Minister-centred over time, who asks questions follows a distinct pattern. Leader dominance varies across parties and institutional periods, rising in single-party oppositions but remaining lower and declining in coalitions, and falling further after leadership reforms. These results show that parliamentary personalisation is multi-dimensional and contingent on party organisation and institutional rules.

📄 AI and the party: The three faces of party organization and artificial intelligence

  • Author(s): Şebnem Yardımcı-Geyikçi, Patricia Correa, Giulia Sandri, Philipp Darius, Jasmin Fitzpatrick, Anne Goldmann, Fabio Lupato, Erdem Yörük, Kristina Weissenbach
  • Link: Read the article
This Research Note explores the emerging intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and party politics by applying Katz and Mair’s “three faces” framework to analyze the role of AI in reshaping party organization. While AI is not yet uniformly transforming parties, its growing use in campaigning, policymaking, membership engagement, and internal management introduces new dynamics of centralisation, personalisation, and automation. The note highlights both the opportunities AI offers for efficiency and responsiveness, and the risks it poses to transparency, accountability, and democratic representation. It argues that the incorporation of AI into party life is uneven, contested, and mediated by broader political and institutional configurations, and require closer empirical and conceptual scrutiny. In doing so, the paper outlines a new research agenda for understanding how technological change intersects with party transformation in contemporary democracies.

📄 Public support for cordons sanitaires against the radical left and radical right

  • Author(s): Alexander Davenport, Jørgen Eikvar Axelsen, Aleš Kudrnáč
  • Link: Read the article
Though radical parties have often been excluded from government by mainstream elites (the ‘cordon sanitaire’), little is known about how voters evaluate such practices. Using data from the Czech Republic, where radical left and radical right parties have both been excluded, we examine voters’ support for the cordon sanitaire, and whether they differentiate between parties in this regard. We find considerable popular support for the cordon sanitaire, with less than a quarter of respondents rejecting this idea outright. Notably, left-wing voters are more likely to oppose cordons sanitaires against both the radical left and right, while right-wing voters are highly supportive of excluding both parties from government, with limited support among the electorate for excluding only one side of the ideological spectrum. The results indicate that where the cordon sanitaire has been established at the elite level, it may garner substantial popular support for excluding a range of radical parties.

📄 Ballots and battlefields: Assessing the impact of the war in Ukraine on voting in the 2022 Italian general election

  • Author(s): Claudio Cozzi Fucile, Luciana Fazio, Pierangelo Isernia, Sergio Martini, Paolo Bellucci
  • Link: Read the article
Research on the electoral impact of foreign policy has largely focused on the United States. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine offers an opportunity to reassess this question in a European context. This article examines the role the war in Ukraine played in shaping electoral behaviour in Italy during the September 2022 general elections. Relying on the ITANES pre- and post-electoral survey, we assess whether attitudes toward supporting Ukraine contributed to explaining Italian voter choices. The results indicate that orientations toward the Ukraine war, operationalised as support for both economic sanctions against Russia and military assistance to Ukraine, were associated with voter choice, even though domestic issues, such as immigration, remained more influential in structuring electoral preferences. We argue that this pattern reflects the strategic behaviour of parties in addressing a politically sensitive and potentially divisive issue. The article contributes to the ongoing debate on the electoral relevance of foreign policy by providing new evidence from a critical moment for the European continent.

📚 Policy & Internet

📄 Whose Digital Future? Civil Society and Alternative Imaginaries in Transnational Digital Governance

This article investigates different visions of digital futures, examining how desired futures are discursively constructed within civil society in transnational digital governance. The analysis builds on discourse theory and a growing body of research on imaginaries in digital governance. Through a discourse‐theoretical analysis of submission papers to the United Nations' Global Digital Compact, the article examines how different collective actors within civil society construct and mobilise desired futures in the institutional context of the UN. The study finds discursive elements that articulate three distinct digital futures: technological progress, societal balance and transformative change. While their objectives, obstacles and enablers are constructed in diverse ways, in all three, digital technologies are considered necessary. By illuminating different normative values and the affective potential through which individuals and collectives are positioned in relation to desired futures, these findings show a variety of articulations within civil society and offer insights into its normative and political roles. In doing so, this study contributes to an understanding of the possibilities and limitations of alternatives in digital governance.

📚 Political Communication

📄 Rethinking Assumptions About Moral Content Selection: Moral-Emotional Content May Be Less Appealing Than Assumed

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📄 Hold That Thought: Enhancing the Durability of Fact-Checking Effects Through Low-Cost Accuracy Reminders

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📄 Assessing Civic Journalism Training: A Mixed-Method Applied Research Study

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📄 Reclaiming Place Through Symbolic Geographies: Visual Resistance on Palestinian Instagram

  • Author(s): Insyirah Mujtahid, Nurul Huda Rashid, Kokil Jaidka
  • Link: Read the article
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📄 Enemies Abroad, Animosity at Home: Media Influence on U.S.-China Policy and Anti-Asian Sentiment

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📚 Political Psychology

📄 Not‐so‐great expectations: Outgroup indifference facilitates conflict resolution in negatively interdependent contexts

  • Author(s): Smadar Cohen‐Chen, Garrett L. Brady, Gerben A. van Kleef, Eran Halperin
  • Link: Read the article
We examined how responses to outgroup indifference in conflict are shaped by the perceived nature of interdependence, which changes expectations of outgroup emotions toward the ingroup. Unlike conflicts perceived as positively interdependent, we hypothesized that in conflicts perceived as negatively interdependent, outgroup indifference would constitute a positive expectancy violation, thereby inviting favorable responses. Moreover, we examined affective and inferential processes as mediators across four studies ( N  = 2521). In Study 1, outgroup indifference (vs. anger and hatred but not hope) reduced negative emotions (but did not affect expected collaboration), subsequently increasing support for cooperation. Study 2 added qualitative measures and showed that outgroup indifference (vs. anger) increased support for cooperation through decreased negative emotions and increased expected collaboration. Study 3 provided correlational evidence that perceptions of interdependence predict participants' expectations of outgroup emotions. Lastly, in Study 4, outgroup indifference increased expected collaboration and emotions when interdependence was perceived as negative.

📄 Does disability trump family background? Determinants of electoral participation among young individuals with intellectual disability

  • Author(s): Björn Boman, Jonas Hultin Rosenberg, Johan Wejryd
  • Link: Read the article
Systematic differences of electoral participation between various social groups indicate crucial constraints of comprehensive democratic inclusion. Yet, there is a dearth of research on electoral participation among individuals with intellectual disability (ID), whose participation rates are considerably lower than among non‐ID citizens. This study examines determinants of electoral participation among individuals with ID based on administrative records covering five cohorts of individuals from the Swedish upper‐secondary school for pupils with ID ( N  = 8438), and their parents. Our main results indicate that the severity of the disability and parents who have voted are the strongest predictors of voting among individuals with ID. The latter suggests that family background is vital. However, the socioeconomic status of the families, such as parents' level of education, income, and occupation, are less pivotal factors.

📚 Political Research Quarterly

📄 Governing Party Issue Ownership and How Citizens Assess Conditions

It is well-documented that Americans perceive conditions more favorably when their preferred party is in power. This study considers a second, more subtle, but potentially impactful partisan bias: that the governing party’s policy reputations lead voters to perceive better conditions on the issues it “owns.” In US politics, voters trust Democrats more on environmental, healthcare, education, and safety net issues while Republicans are favored on immigration, crime, defense, and keeping taxes low. In two studies, I observe whether these reputations also impact perceptions when each party is in power. First, I analyze hundreds of survey toplines from Gallup Trends, dating from 1956 to the present, about public perceptions on a variety of party-owned policy areas. Second, to leverage greater variation in control of subnational government, I analyze seven surveys that ask about state-level conditions as well. While results from the former analysis are only suggestive, both approaches point toward an association between the governing party and how citizens assess conditions on the issues it owns.

📄 How Election Fundamentals and Racialized Considerations Shape Asian American Vote Choice Through the Trump Era

  • Author(s): Joyce H. Nguy, Nathan K. Chan, Jessica HyunJeong Lee
  • Link: Read the article
Racial minorities voted for Trump at higher rates in 2024 than in previous elections, prompting renewed interest in the factors driving minority vote choice. Here, we focus on Asian Americans, the fastest growing single-race group in the United States. Bridging theories of economic voting and race-centered explanations, we present a comprehensive, up-to-date account of Asian American vote choice through the Trump era. We analyze the 2024, 2020, and 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Surveys to assess indicators of Trump support over time among Asian Americans, with comparative analysis of Black, Latino, and White voters ( N = 24,061). We find that economic considerations shaped vote choice in 2024 among Asian Americans, and all other racial groups. Linked fate remained associated with lower Trump support among Asian Americans in 2024, indicating that race continued to matter even years after the peak of anti-Asian hate. In comparison, linked fate also shaped opposition to Trump among Black voters but not Latinos in 2024. Throughout the Trump era, racial resentment among non-Black racial groups and anti-immigrant sentiment among all racial groups consistently predicted greater Trump support, including Asian Americans, despite their predominantly immigrant-origin backgrounds. This research contributes to growing scholarship that addresses conservatism among minoritized communities.

📚 Political Studies

📄 Plebeian cooperativism: Reconciling workplace democracy with the iron law of oligarchy

Worker cooperatives are often lauded as the ideal institutional form of workplace democracy. While the traditional firm subjects workers to hierarchical authority, cooperatives establish workers as owners and managers of their own venture. However, since 1911 Robert Michels popularised the phrase of an “iron law of oligarchy” to argue how nominally democratic institutions, like worker cooperatives, often fall back into hierarchical patterns. I claim that this criticism against workplace democracy is based on a misreading of Michels’ philosophy and a misrepresentation of today’s empirical research on cooperative management. Both present worker cooperatives as hybrid institutions torn between oligarchic and democratic pulls. By counterbalancing tendencies towards a concentration of power at the top with countervailing institutions that help rank-and-file workers contest managerial decision-making, worker cooperatives can safeguard themselves against degeneration and the iron law of oligarchy. This proposal of instituting workplace democracy through constant anti-hierarchical conflict, I call “plebeian cooperativism.”

📄 Popular tribunate or bourgeois populism? #saccageparis and social media’s radical-democratic paradox

This article argues that the case of an idiosyncratic digital movement in Paris—#saccageparis—has much to contribute to recent debates around social media’s democratic potential. #saccageparis leaders paint themselves as contemporary tribunes of the plebs, a permanent counter-power representing the “small people” of Paris against the municipality. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, I examine in this article such claim. On the one hand, Twitter’s affordances enabled ordinary citizens to gain some of the attributes of a popular tribunate standing up to power while, on the other hand, the movement only gained this foothold because it was not itself popular. #saccageparis’s composition therefore contradicts its tactics, and the movement is best described as “bourgeois populism.” This case shows us how social media’s populist affordances can be exploited by elites and, as a result, offers precious insights for those interested in rescuing social media’s radical-democratic possibilities from elite capture.

📄 Affirming democracy: Should we exaggerate support for democracy to save it?

Democracies around the world have increasingly faced concerted efforts to dismantle democratic institutions. How should public speakers respond to such attempts at democratic backsliding? A widespread rhetorical strategy is to affirm democracy —that is, to publicly invoke the value of democracy and vigorously insist on the need to defend it. I argue that this practice gives rise to an underappreciated democratic dilemma. On one hand, distinctive features of the backsliding process seemingly require us to affirm democracy. Yet, on the other hand, this practice also poses serious dangers for democracy. For one, it risks accelerating democratic erosion. Moreover, efforts to limit this risk seemingly violate democratic requirements of truthfulness. So, both affirming democracy and failing to do so involve significant democratic pitfalls. The best way to navigate this dilemma, I contend, is not to forgo affirming democracy. Instead, it is to do so in a way that emphasises elites’ concrete attacks on democracy, while insisting that most people are strongly committed to democracy. While this approach may indeed involve some deception—insofar as it may knowingly overstate support for democracy—this is often all-things-considered justified.

📚 Political Studies Review

📄 Who holds the line? Liberalism beyond its adversaries in post-socialist Eastern Europe

Liberalism in post-socialist Eastern Europe remains understudied. Existing comparative scholarship portrays regional liberalism primarily in the negative, through its authoritarian, populist, and illiberal adversaries, both internal and external, leaving a critical gap in understanding liberalism itself: its meaning, practices, and persistence. Drawing on research in comparative politics and conceptual history, this state-of-the-art review highlights how the backsliding paradigm has narrowed attention to democratic instability and erosion and to tensions between liberal principles and local political traditions. By implication, this literature has sidelined the ideological strategies through which liberal democratic order has been built and sustained. To close this gap, the review shifts attention from liberalism’s foes to its advocates: moderate democratic parties. It underscores the need of examining the microfoundations and reactivations of various liberal scripts and their encasement in party political ideologies, bringing to light the often-overlooked role of party ideologues. The review concludes by outlining a three-pronged heuristic that provides analytical tools that can guide future research on the “really existing liberalism” and to explain not only how liberalism recedes and the language of the center dies, but also how it persists.

📚 Political Theory

📄 Benjamin Franklin and Democratic Education Beyond Schooling

Political theorists have long focused their understanding of democratic education on the institution of the school, particularly the public school, to the exclusion of broader visions of education beyond schooling. But as criticisms of schooling from outside the academy mount, it becomes imperative to examine the origins of American educational thought to determine whether opposition to schooling has an older historical source. This essay locates the roots of school skepticism in an alternative American educational tradition beginning with Benjamin Franklin that drew on Locke’s pedagogical arguments to devalue institutional schooling in favor of self-education. Franklin’s educational vision harnessed the independence of the young in early America by incentivizing learning through friendship and self-interest, and resorted to schools only as a guardrail against the abuse of freedom, incorporating them but minimizing their role in education. In this, Franklin initiated the Americanization of Lockean pedagogy, or the school-skeptical tradition in American thought.

📚 Post-Soviet Affairs

📄 Regional economic elites in Kazakhstan as a pressure group

  • Author(s): Nurgissa Kusherov, Essenzhol Aliyarov, Bagdat Massatova, Roza Nurtazina, Agybay Zhangeldy
  • Link: Read the article
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📚 Public Opinion Quarterly

📄 An Experimental Comparison of AI-Enabled Semi-Structured Interviews and Fixed Surveys: Respondent Satisfaction, Response Patterns, Quality, and Representation

Artificial intelligence (AI) interviewing offers the potential to enhance the depth and quality of survey research, yet it may also introduce respondent fatigue and unintended consequences for the measurement of political attitudes. From the standpoint of respondents, more extensive interviews impose greater cognitive and temporal burdens, which may reduce engagement or increase satisficing. From the perspective of political behavior researchers, deeper probing may shift the subset of beliefs or arguments that respondents access when forming opinions, thereby altering the distribution and apparent stability of measured attitudes. To investigate these dynamics, we conduct a large-scale, fully randomized experiment. We find that AI-mediated interviewing significantly increases both the volume and specificity of respondents’ articulated rationales, but any decline in participant satisfaction is minuscule and we detect no increase in participant rolloff. However, AI interviews appear to shape subsequent responses: After offering justifications through AI interaction, respondents exhibit greater polarization in follow-up items. This result suggests that AI interviewing may alter the cognitive architecture of opinion formation. These findings both highlight the potential for AI interviewing and underscore the need for studies of how AI interviewing may become a source of attitudinal change.

📚 Qualitative Sociology

📄 Strategies for Localizing Gender Equality Norms: The Case of Sesame Street

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📚 Representation

📄 Populist Constitutionalism in Italy? A Comparison of the Renzi-Boschi and Meloni-Casellati Reforms

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📄 How Citizens Think About Democratic Decision-Making: A Composite Model of Democratic Preference Formation

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📄 Posting for Votes: Candidate Gender, Facebook Personalization, and Electoral Performance in Taiwan

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📚 Social Forces

📄 Defended neighborhoods, vulnerable routines: routine activities, collective efficacy, and the social ecology of discrimination

  • Author(s): Nicolo P Pinchak, Christopher R Browning, Bethany Boettner, J Brandon Carter, Catherine A Calder
  • Link: Read the article
We describe hypotheses about how features of urban settings—including location types, sociodemographic composition, and the extent of collective efficacy (CE)—are differentially related to Black and White individuals’ risks of experiencing discrimination while conducting routine activities. These hypotheses are then tested with data from a large, representative sample of caregivers in the Adolescent Health and Development in Context study (2014–2016). We find that Black individuals are twice as likely as White individuals to report experiencing discrimination in their routine activities, and this Black-White gap is further increased among workplaces, grocery stores, and businesses relative to other locations. Additionally, Black and White individuals report similarly increased probabilities of experiencing discrimination at schools. Consistent with an extension of research on “defended neighborhoods,” exposure to higher CE is positively associated with discrimination for Black individuals especially among areas high in socioeconomic status or high in proportion White population. However, for White individuals, exposure to higher CE is negatively associated with discrimination especially among areas low in socioeconomic status or low in proportion White population. This study underscores that measuring social processes at routine activity settings, rather than just in home neighborhoods, is essential for research on everyday well-being. Further, the findings complement calls to invest in the resource capacity of high-poverty and low-proportion White neighborhoods.

📄 When hazards don’t make law: structural resonance in global disaster-law diffusion, 1960–2025

This article asks why states adopt comprehensive national disaster laws. Rather than treating legislation as an automatic response to hazard exposure, we conceptualize disaster-law adoption as a process of structural resonance: regional diffusion pressures become consequential when they align with domestic governance needs and administrative capacity. Using a new country-year dataset of first adoptions across 204 states and territories from 1960 to 2025, we estimate Cox proportional hazards models with multiple imputation. Recent hazard exposure predicts adoption only in simpler specifications and loses significance once diffusion and state-structure variables are introduced. Regional adoption share strongly accelerates first adoption. Decentralization and government accountability are also associated with earlier enactment, and regional diffusion is amplified in more decentralized polities. The findings show that disaster legalization is not simply a functional response to risk. It is a sociological process in which external legal templates gain force where domestic authority is fragmented and the demand for administrative coordination is high.

📄 Beneath consensus: political framing of gender-based violence in the Italian press, 2005–2023

Discourse on gender-based violence started as a political struggle driven by feminist movements allied with progressive parties in the 1970s. However, in recent years, both progressive and conservative Italian parties have proposed and approved laws to combat gender-based violence. The combination of cross-partisan legislation and sharp cultural divisions makes Italy an interesting case for examining how polarization can persist alongside legislative consensus. This study draws on a large corpus of newspaper articles (7,978) from progressive, moderate, and conservative national outlets to address the following questions: How did the distribution of frames of gender-based violence vary across the political spectrum between 2005 and 2023 (ideological polarization)? Did newspapers make explicit adversarial claims against the opposing political side (affective polarization), and if so, around which frames? Combining Structural Topic Modeling and qualitative content analysis, this article shows that the salience of gender-based violence increased across the political spectrum. However, ideological polarization persists regarding how newspapers describe gender-based violence and which solutions they privilege, with progressives increasingly focusing on preventive, rather than punitive, interventions. At the same time, gender-based violence became a catalyst for deep partisan divisions around gender identity and immigration, two discursive overlaps that fuel affective polarization. By examining the framing process as a site of both ideological and affective polarization, this study bridges the literatures on social problems and political polarization and provides a data-driven understanding about the actual content of opposing positions.

📚 Social Problems

📄 “It is worse in the fields”: how racial capitalism disciplines Latino day laborers in California’s Central Valley

Latino immigrant day laborers in California’s Central Valley often experience poor working conditions and employer noncompliance, yet rarely report workplace abuses. This study situates rural day laborers’ experiences of labor and claims-making (e.g., reporting injuries and labor noncompliance), within the context of global racial capitalism. Drawing on 38 semi-structured interviews and six months of participant observation, this article analyzes how workers in rural geographies experience “subordinate inclusion” (De Genova 2013) in ways that discipline them to accept non-compliant working conditions. Findings suggest that workers’ legal status, socioeconomic status, prior work experience, and paternalistic relationships with employers shape decisions against claims-making—processes intended to deter employer noncompliance. Instead, Latino day laborers rely on informal agreements and acts of care from employers that reinforce paternalistic and co-ethnic ties, where loyalty, trust, and shared migration histories discourage formal claims-making. Instances of overt racism by non-Latino employers, however, rupture this arrangement and may prompt claims-making. While scholarship in the sociology of labor and immigration has often conceptualized the rise of low-wage, precarious labor with post-industrialization and fiscal austerity, this study illuminates how the persistence of pre-industrial work, through dynamics of paternalism, carry forward and contribute to the global degradation of work under racial capitalism.

📚 Social Science Computer Review

📄 Managing Conti: Temporal Dynamics of Managerial Communication in a Ransomware Group

  • Author(s): Giovanni Radhitio Putra Sadewo, David Bright, Chad Whelan, Jürgen Lerner
  • Link: Read the article
Ransomware groups are frequently described as structured enterprises with defined managerial hierarchies, yet most empirical research adopts cross-sectional designs that treat leadership positions as static. This study asks: How do upper- and middle-management actors in a ransomware organisation adjust their communication patterns over time, particularly in balancing coordination and concealment? Focusing on the Conti ransomware group, we examine whether managerial centrality and rank-based communication preferences remain stable or shift across different operational phases. We analyse leaked Jabber chat logs comprising 95,134 cleaned message events exchanged among 287 unique user IDs between June 2020 and March 2022. Actors were classified into upper management ( n = 9), middle management ( n = 9), staff ( n = 81), and affiliates/unassigned ( n = 188). The data were divided into four temporal periods. Using relational event models (REMs) estimated via Cox proportional hazard models with sampled non-events, we model rank-based sending, receiving, and homophily/heterophily effects, interacting these mechanisms with time to capture period-specific dynamics. The findings indicate that upper management was highly active in sending and receiving messages during the early stage of operations, but subsequently withdrew from routine communication. Despite reduced visibility, upper managers consistently exhibited cross-rank (heterophilous) communication rather than insulating themselves through same-rank ties. Middle management, by contrast, remained consistently active across most periods and alternated between cross-rank and same-rank communication patterns, reflecting a flexible intermediary role. Overall, managerial centrality did not persist uniformly over time. This study contributes to the literature by advancing a dynamic, longitudinal perspective on ransomware governance. It demonstrates that managerial embeddedness is temporally contingent and tier-specific, underscoring the importance of event-level and rank-based network analysis. The findings also inform disruption strategies by identifying when and which managerial tiers are most structurally central, highlighting stage-specific vulnerabilities in ransomware organisations.

📚 Social Science Quarterly

📄 Distinctions Between the Morality and Legality of Abortion: Compartmentalized Versus Aligned Attitudes Across Political Affiliation and Abortion Identity

  • Author(s): Ronna C. Turner, Kristen N. Jozkowski, Elizabeth E. McElroy, Brandon L. Crawford
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Introduction Despite commonly conceptualizing and operationalizing attitudes toward abortion through the dimensions of legality and morality, research examining alignment between these dimensions is limited and dated. Method Using a nationally representative sample of US adults, we investigated attitudes toward the morality and legality of abortion across 15 circumstances (health/medical, social/economic, and selective) and for subgroups with varying political and abortion ideologies. We compared aligned attitudes—similar views on the morality and legality of abortion—with compartmentalized attitudes, different views of abortion morality and legality. Results The results indicated that endorsement of legal abortion is common among those who do not believe abortion is moral (a compartmentalized attitude). Aligned attitudes were also common (i.e., belief that abortion is moral and should be legal, or is both immoral and should be illegal). People identifying as pro‐life, Republican, or with no political party had more compartmentalized views in health‐related circumstances, whereas people identifying as pro‐choice, Democrat, or Independent had more compartmentalized views for social circumstances. People identifying as both pro‐choice and pro‐life had compartmentalized views for multiple circumstances. Conclusion Recognizing how alignment and compartmentalization vary across ideological subgroups provides a more robust depiction of abortion sentiment and may facilitate more productive discourse in policy deliberations.

📄 Understanding Translation and Cultural Meaning‐Making in Cross‐Language Qualitative Research: Methodological Innovations and Challenges

Objective This article explores that translation in cross‐language qualitative research is not merely a technical procedure applied to already‐collected data but an interpretive, ethical, relational, and power‐influenced practice that shapes every stage of knowledge production. It establishes how culturally and religiously embedded concepts resist adequate interpreting into English academic prose, and it offers methodological strategies and trustworthiness criteria for preserving meaning. Methods The analysis draws on a qualitative study of Pakistani immigrant women in the Dallas‐Fort Worth metropolitan area of Texas, examining how they navigate employment decisions, multigenerational household obligations, and cultural expectations within South Asian Muslim communities. Six Urdu and Islamic concepts, including izzat, barakah, tawakkul, qibla, bhai chara, and matawazan, were analyzed in depth. For each, the article specifies the literal translation, the cultural and religious meaning, why literal rendering is insufficient, and the strategies used to preserve meaning. Results Literal translation systematically compressed the moral, spiritual, and relational meanings these terms carry. Meaning was treated through strategies, including thick description, reflexive translation memos, bilingual checking, iterative forward/backward translation, participant clarification, field note triangulation, and a living codebook. The article proposes trustworthiness criteria suited to cross‐language work: credibility, authenticity, coherence, reflexive accountability, contextual fidelity, and reciprocity. Conclusion Integrating research from qualitative sociology, linguistics, feminist epistemology, and postcolonial theory, the article foregrounds the power relations structuring cross‐language fieldwork and closes with a framework of 10 methodological recommendations.

📚 The International Journal of Press/Politics

📄 How Recipients Compose Their News Sources Online: Utilizing Tracking Data to Investigate Digital News Media Repertoires

  • Author(s): Robin Leuppert, Jule Scheper, Nico Spreen, Elena Link
  • Link: Read the article
Today’s high-choice media environment offers various opportunities for interest-driven news exposure, resulting in highly diverse and fragmented news usage patterns, especially in the digital media environment. Media repertoires provide a suitable theoretical framework for considering these circumstances and investigating the entirety and interrelatedness of individuals’ news sources, rather than focusing on singular news offerings. We explore media repertoires focusing on news by relying on behavioral tracking data from 805 German respondents over eleven weeks (November 2022–January 2023). Conducting a latent class analysis based on news usage frequencies across seventeen news categories, we identified eight digital news media repertoires with distinct usage patterns. Repertoire comparisons via analysis of variance (ANOVA) further revealed differences in the news topics used, users’ diversity of news outlets, news concentration, and news usage duration. Implications for future research on investigating media repertoire compositions are discussed.

📄 The Policy Umwelt: How AI Problem Representations Render Governance Alternatives Unthinkable

This paper investigates how AI narratives actively constrain the horizon of conceivable governance options. Moving beyond the established finding that narratives influence policy, we argue they fundamentally prefigure the scope of the politically thinkable by creating what we term “Policy Umwelten.” Adapting Jakob von Uexküll’s concept, a Policy Umwelt describes the perceptible and actionable landscape of interventions available within a given narrative, which systematically renders alternatives invisible. We analyze three competing narratives: Existential Risk, Accelerationism, and Critical AI. We do so through a “What’s the Problem Represented to Be?” analysis of their foundational manifestos. Each constructs a distinct Umwelt: Existential Risk makes global technocratic containment imperative; Accelerationism legitimizes only deregulation and market liberation; and Critical AI centers structural reform. Despite their overt conflict, these narratives converge in constructing Policy Umwelten that render a pragmatic approach to governance difficult to perceive: one that emphasizes iterative learning from empirical feedback and institutional flexibility over grand visions or predetermined certainties. The paper concludes that the most significant constraint on AI policy is not a lack of options but a collective failure of political perception. The Policy Umwelt concept thus provides a diagnostic tool for mapping ideological deadlock and identifying pathways toward more adaptive and less deterministic technological futures.

📚 West European Politics

📄 From sanctions to incentives: the impact of NextGenerationEU on the European Semester

  • Author(s): Igor Guardiancich, Mattia Guidi, Enrico Borghetto, Lucia Quaglia
  • Link: Read the article
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📚 人文及社會科學集刊

📄 【預刊】（39卷）“Ethical Imperialism” and Territorialization: Revisiting Ukita Kazutami’s Discourses on Sovereignty and Area

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📄 【預刊】（39卷）Elder Care Preferences and the Partial Development of Taiwan’s Tax-Based LTC System: Policy Challenges Beyond LTC 2.0

  • Author(s): 黃芳誼 Fang-Yi Huang, 周怡君 Yi-Chun Chou
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📄 【預刊】（38卷3期）做個「稱職的第三者」：性／別、道德與婚家體制的親密協商

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