Designing Chatbots for Crises: A Case Study Contrasting Potential and Reality

Chatbots are becoming ubiquitous technologies, and their popularity and adoption are rapidly spreading. The potential of chatbots in engaging people with digital services is fully recognised. However, the reputation of this technology with regards to usefulness and real impact remains rather questionable. Studies that evaluate how people perceive and utilise chatbots are generally lacking. During the last Kenyan elections, we deployed a chatbot on Facebook Messenger to help people submit reports of violence and misconduct experienced in the polling stations. Even though the chatbot was visited by more than 3,000 times, there was a clear mismatch between the users’ perception of the technology and its design. In this paper, we analyse the user interactions and content generated through this application and discuss the challenges and directions for designing more effective chatbots

The European Union and party politics in Central Europe

It is only recently that political scientists have begun to focus on the influence of European Union involvement on national parties. Mair's study of the impact of Europe on the parties of Western Europe is now a standard point of reference, and relatively little divergence can be seen from his view that the direct impact of EU involvement has been strictly limited. An extensive research project on the Europeanization of national party organizations has recently been completed and it, too, seems to have found little evidence that European-level decision-making has greatly changed the balance of power within national political parties. In the past few years, publications on Central Europe developments have also begun to appear. Empirical studies of the Europeanization of CE parties have, however, been less common than work on EU effects in related fields. We conclude here that in CE party politics the logic of national competition has overridden other logics, including that of the EU. But integration has still shaped party systems in various ways. Parties converge, though with significant exceptions, towards the classic European ideological patterns and are rapidly integrating with the European party federations. Coalition alternatives and policy options have generally been constrained by the integration process, but it is not possible to state generally whether the EU has affected the stability of CE party systems. Integration may well have increased the distance between elites and citizens and depoliticized certain issues but, in contrast to claims made of WE, we cannot really speak of a 'hollowing out' of party competition. Some organizational changes can be identified. The EU has had an impact on the internal norms of some parties as far as gender quotas are considered. But party organization as a whole has not greatly changed, although MEPs have often been given representation in the party leadership. The pervasiveness of EU impacts is nevertheless highly differentiated and far from unambiguous, leaving considerable scope for continuing variation in post-accession party politics in Central Europe

European local authorities’ financial resilience in the face of austerity: a comparison across Austria, Italy and England

European local authorities have been particularly stricken by the current context of decline and cutback management, and represent an ideal place where to study how governments respond to shocks affecting their financial conditions and management. Along these lines, this paper adopt the perspective of financial resilience for looking at the current context of austerity, and related responses, by shedding new lights on the role of internal capacities and conditions in influencing such responses and, ultimately, performance. Through a multiple case study analysis based on 12 European local authorities in Austria, Italy and England, the paper identifies the main shocks perceived by local management, the related short-term and long-term responses, highlighting the dynamics of financial vulnerabilty, awareness, anticipatory capacity, flexibility and recovery ability (ie, financial resilience) in its interaction with the external context and shocks. From the analysis, four patterns of resilience emerge: pro-active resilience, adaptive resilience, passive/fatalist resilience, complacent resilience

Optimal Multiphase Investment Strategies for Influencing Opinions in a Social Network

We study the problem of optimally investing in nodes of a social network in a competitive setting, where two camps aim to maximize adoption of their opinions by the population. In particular, we consider the possibility of campaigning in multiple phases, where the final opinion of a node in a phase acts as its initial biased opinion for the following phase. Using an extension of the popular DeGroot-Friedkin model, we formulate the utility functions of the camps, and show that they involve what can be interpreted as multiphase Katz centrality. Focusing on two phases, we analytically derive Nash equilibrium investment strategies, and the extent of loss that a camp would incur if it acted myopically. Our simulation study affirms that nodes attributing higher weightage to initial biases necessitate higher investment in the first phase, so as to influence these biases for the terminal phase. We then study the setting in which a camp's influence on a node depends on its initial bias. For single camp, we present a polynomial time algorithm for determining an optimal way to split the budget between the two phases. For competing camps, we show the existence of Nash equilibria under reasonable assumptions, and that they can be computed in polynomial time

Defending Elections Against Malicious Spread of Misinformation

The integrity of democratic elections depends on voters' access to accurate information. However, modern media environments, which are dominated by social media, provide malicious actors with unprecedented ability to manipulate elections via misinformation, such as fake news. We study a zero-sum game between an attacker, who attempts to subvert an election by propagating a fake new story or other misinformation over a set of advertising channels, and a defender who attempts to limit the attacker's impact. Computing an equilibrium in this game is challenging as even the pure strategy sets of players are exponential. Nevertheless, we give provable polynomial-time approximation algorithms for computing the defender's minimax optimal strategy across a range of settings, encompassing different population structures as well as models of the information available to each player. Experimental results confirm that our algorithms provide near-optimal defender strategies and showcase variations in the difficulty of defending elections depending on the resources and knowledge available to the defender.Comment: Full version of paper accepted to AAAI 201

Varieties of System Transformations and Their Structural Background Based on the IPS Model

This study is the theoretical chapter of a planned book. This book, aims to contribute to the theoretical foundations of similarities and differences in the transformation of party-state systems. Analytical framework of system transformation is based on the extension of the Interactive Party State model (Csan di, 2006) where specifics of the structure and operation of party-state systems and structural background of their disparities were described and analyzed. Self-similarities and disparities of transformation and path-dependency of the variety of systemic outcomes are assigned to structural characteristics of power distribution of party-state systems interpreted as networks. The empirical part of the book uses the Chinese case to test this theory, measuring the dynamics of system transformation, the consequences of short- and long-term external adaptation pressures on the system transformation and long-term consequences of the short-term reactions to these pressures and their spatial disparities. This research was supported by the National Research Foundation in Hungary.system transformation, economic transformation political transformation, sequence of transformation, disparities of transformation, varieties of system outcomes, party-state network