Subnational variations in the quality of household survey data in sub-Saharan Africa

Nationally representative household surveys collect geocoded data that are vital to tackling health and other development challenges in sub-Saharan Africa. Scholars and practitioners generally assume uniform data quality but subnational variation of errors in household data has never been investigated at high spatial resolution. Here, we explore within-country variation in the quality of most recent household surveys for 35 African countries at 5 × 5 km resolution and district levels. Findings show a striking heterogeneity in the subnational distribution of sampling and measurement errors. Data quality degrades with greater distance from settlements, and missing data as well as imprecision of estimates add to quality problems that can result in vulnerable remote populations receiving less than optimal services and needed resources. Our easy-to-access geospatial estimates of survey data quality highlight the need to invest in better targeting of household surveys in remote areas

Central Asian Survey

Covert repression techniques, such as the use of digital technologies in surveillance, censorship and disinformation, have become a pervasive tool of autocracies worldwide. This research note discusses one of the possible explanatory factors fostering covert repression: autocratic linkages. Building on policy-learning, autocratic regional integration and linkages literature, this research note asks the following question: How can strong linkages with each other help autocracies achieve high levels of covert repression? By using Kazakhstan as a typical case of an informational autocracy, three possible causal channels through which autocratic linkages could impact covert repression are proposed: policy-learning, preferential trade in repression tech and preferential provision of expertise. In doing so, the note aims to encourage more comparative and process-tracing-based research on the role of autocratic linkages in authoritarian repression

how socioeconomic mixing affects language use

The socioeconomic background of people and how they use standard forms of language are not independent, as demonstrated in various sociolinguistic studies. However, the extent to which these correlations may be influenced by the mixing of people from different socioeconomic classes remains relatively unexplored from a quantitative perspective. In this work we leverage geotagged tweets and transferable computational methods to map deviations from standard English across eight UK metropolitan areas. We combine these data with high-resolution income maps to assign a proxy socioeconomic indicator to home-located users. Strikingly, we find a consistent pattern suggesting that the more different socioeconomic classes mix, the less interdependent the frequency of their departures from standard grammar and their income become. Further, we propose an agent-based model of linguistic variety adoption that sheds light on the mechanisms that produce the observations seen in the data

Policy Knowledge Production in De-democratizing Contexts

In an era of post-truth, the legitimacy of policy knowledge is questioned, especially in de-democratizing contexts where governments purposefully engage in post-truth politics to support their regimes. In such contexts, technocratic evidence-based policymaking is undermined, and the role played by policy advice changes. Recognizing the significance of political contextual factors that might differ across de-democratizing contexts, we analyzed how changes in policymaking and public administration in de-democratization contexts impact policy advice, focusing on think tanks in two de-democratizing countries of the European Union: Hungary and Poland. We identify four aspects of policymaking that are particularly consequential for the role of think tanks and the knowledge they produce in policymaking processes: questioning and politicizing expertise, centralizing policymaking, politicizing public administration, and dismantling accountability mechanisms. We argue that changes in policymaking along these four aspects are conducive to a controlled policy advice system, favoring short-term policy advice aligned with government ideology, while marginalizing and excluding the actors and knowledge that do not align. Our research, along with other literature on knowledge regimes in consolidated autocracies, suggests that control in these European Union–based contexts is not complete, and the think tank field continues to be characterized by diversity, particularly contestation and polarization between those who are aligned with the regime and those who oppose it. We substantiate our claims using an original interview dataset on think tanks in Hungary and Poland

PLOS Climate

Well-informed collective and individual action necessary to address climate change hinges on the public’s understanding of the relevant scientific findings. Social media has been a popular platform for the deliberation around climate change and the policies aimed at addressing it. Whether such deliberation is informed by scientific findings is an important step in gauging the public’s awareness of scientific resources and their latest findings. In this study, we examine the use of scientific sources in the course of 14 years of public deliberation around climate change on one of the largest social media platforms, Reddit. We find that only 4.0% of the links in the Reddit posts, and 6.5% in the comments, point to domains of scientific sources, although these rates have been increasing in the past decades. These links are dwarfed, however, by the citations of mass media, newspapers, and social media, the latter of which peaked especially during 2019–2020. Further, scientific sources are more likely to be posted by users who also post links to sources having central-left political leaning, and less so by those posting more polarized sources. Scientific sources are not often used in response to links to unreliable sources, instead, other such sources are likely to appear in their comments. This study provides the quantitative evidence of the dearth of scientific basis of the online public debate and puts it in the context of other, potentially unreliable, sources of information

Evidence from Russian and English native and non-native speakers

Grammatical aspect is a linguistic correlate of the temporal distribution of an event. However, aspect is not identical across languages. Crosslinguistic differences in mapping between aspect and basic temporal features such as event stage can reveal underlying language-specific criteria that guide event conceptualization. We investigated the relationship between grammatical aspect and event stage in conceptualizations of in-progress and completed events by native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers of aspectual languages Russian and English. In L1, event stage predicted aspect in Russian but not in English. In L2s, event stage did not predict aspect. We discuss these findings in terms of crosslinguistic differences in the relevance of event stage for conceptualization in L1 as well as the role of L1 transfer in L2 aspect use

Zeitschrift fur Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft

Historically, social movements and political parties had changing understandings of who contributes what to socio-political transitions. For the early workers’ movements, as well as the green ecological movements of the 1980s, it was clear that there had to be a steady strategic communication between parliamentary and extra-parliamentary organization to realize a better society. In contrast, contemporary mobilizations, such as Fridays for Future, make demands towards the parliamentary system but have declared to stay away from party politics. Drawing on a series of qualitative interviews with Fridays for Future activists and party functionaries in Germany and Austria, I compare how perceptions of the functioning of the party systems shape how movement activists and party functionaries form linkages: How do they understand the different roles of movements and parties? Which imaginations of democracy and logics of cooperation between institutions and extra-parliamentary mobilization do they maintain? Who is responsible for what? Results show differences that can be related to the varying openness of the party systems which facilitate or hinder party-movement-cooperations. Whereas German activists remain distant, but cooperate pragmatically with Green or leftist parties, Austrian activists are much more cautious and reject closer movement-party cooperations. By comparing the two party systems, I contribute to the better understanding of how party systems shape party-movement-cooperations and, more generally, how relationships between civil society, movements, and more traditional political channels such as political parties evolve

Philosophical Studies

There has been widespread opposition to so-called essentialism in contemporary social theory. At the same time, within contemporary analytic metaphysics, the notion of essence has been revived and put to work by neo-Aristotelians. The ‘new essentialism’ of the neo-Aristotelians opens the prospect for a new social essentialism—one that avoids the problematic commitments of the ‘old essentialism’ while also providing a helpful framework for social theorizing. In this paper, I develop a neo-Aristotelian brand of essentialism about social kinds and show how it avoids the legitimate worries of social theorists. I then argue that neo-Aristotelian social kind essentialism provides a helpful framework for a wide range of projects in social ontology and feminist metaphysics, including debunking projects, descriptive inquiries, and the project of achieving social change. I further argue that an essentialist framework is more useful than a grounding framework when it comes to certain legitimate theoretical and practical purposes in social theory