Cognitive Polyphasia in a Global South Populist Democracy: Mapping Social Representations of Duterte\u27s Regime in the Philippines

Prevailing scholarship on populism focuses on explaining polarized patterns of support and opposition for populist regimes. This paper extends this conceptualization to account for the fragmented politics of Global South democracies. Invoking the concept of cognitive polyphasia, we map the Filipino public’s social representations of Duterte’s populist regime in the Philippines. Utilizing a mixed methods approach, we uncover a representational field organized by the two dimensions of political alignment (support vs. opposition) and political frame (individual vs. system). Diversely embedded in this polyphasic field, supporters of the regime may construct Duterte’s individual leadership in terms of paternalistic patriotism, or the broader government as a morally-bankrupt yet progressive technocracy. Opposition to the regime may frame the president as an oppressive tyrant, or his administration as a historical continuation of entrenched state violence. Our findings contribute to extant populism debates by describing unique representational processes of differentiation and annexation in unequal populist publics. We reflect on implications for democratic engagement in the Philippines and the broader Global South

Mapping State-Sponsored Information Operations with Multi-View Modularity Clustering

This paper presents a new computational framework for mapping state-sponsored information operations into distinct strategic units. Utilizing a novel method called multi-view modularity clustering (MVMC), we identify groups of accounts engaged in distinct narrative and network information maneuvers. We then present an analytical pipeline to holistically determine their coordinated and complementary roles within the broader digital campaign. Applying our proposed methodology to disclosed Chinese state-sponsored accounts on Twitter, we discover an overarching operation to protect and manage Chinese international reputation by attacking individual adversaries (Guo Wengui) and collective threats (Hong Kong protestors), while also projecting national strength during global crisis (the COVID-19 pandemic). Psycholinguistic tools quantify variation in narrative maneuvers employing hateful and negative language against critics in contrast to communitarian and positive language to bolster national solidarity. Network analytics further distinguish how groups of accounts used network maneuvers to act as balanced operators, organized masqueraders, and egalitarian echo-chambers. Collectively, this work breaks methodological ground on the interdisciplinary application of unsupervised and multi-view methods for characterizing not just digital campaigns in particular, but also coordinated activity more generally. Moreover, our findings contribute substantive empirical insights around how state-sponsored information operations combine narrative and network maneuvers to achieve interlocking strategic objectives. This bears both theoretical and policy implications for platform regulation and understanding the evolving geopolitical significance of cyberspace

The Language of Pandemic Leaderships: Mapping Political Rhetoric during the COVID-19 Outbreak

This paper maps political rhetoric by national leaders during the COVID-19 pandemic. We identify and characterize global variations in major rhetorical storylines invoked in publicly available speeches (N = 1201) across a sample of 26 countries. Employing a text analytics or corpus linguistics approach, we show that state heads rhetorically lead their nations by: enforcing systemic interventions, upholding global unity, encouraging communal cooperation, stoking national fervor, and assuring responsive governance. Principal component analysis further shows that country-level rhetoric is organized along emergent dimensions of cultural cognition: an agency-structure axis to define the loci of pandemic interventions, and a hierarchy-egalitarianism axis which distinguishes top-down enforcement from bottom-up calls for cooperation. Furthermore, we detect a striking contrast between countries featuring populist versus cosmopolitan rhetoric, which diverged in terms of their collective meaning-making around leading over versus leading with, as well as their experienced pandemic severity. We conclude with implications for understanding global pandemic leadership in an unequal world, and the contributions of mixed methods approaches to a generative political psychology in times of crisis

Impact of vaccine supplies and delays on optimal control of the COVID-19 pandemic: mapping interventions for the Philippines

Background Around the world, controlling the COVID-19 pandemic requires national coordination of multiple intervention strategies. As vaccinations are globally introduced into the repertoire of available interventions, it is important to consider how changes in the local supply of vaccines, including delays in administration, may be addressed through existing policy levers. This study aims to identify the optimal level of interventions for COVID-19 from 2021 to 2022 in the Philippines, which as a developing country is particularly vulnerable to shifting assumptions around vaccine availability. Furthermore, we explore optimal strategies in scenarios featuring delays in vaccine administration, expansions of vaccine supply, and limited combinations of interventions. Methods Embedding our work within the local policy landscape, we apply optimal control theory to the compartmental model of COVID-19 used by the Philippine government’s pandemic surveillance platform and introduce four controls: (a) precautionary measures like community quarantines, (b) detection of asymptomatic cases, (c) detection of symptomatic cases, and (d) vaccinations. The model is fitted to local data using an L-BFGS minimization procedure. Optimality conditions are identified using Pontryagin’s minimum principle and numerically solved using the forward–backward sweep method. Results Simulation results indicate that early and effective implementation of both precautionary measures and symptomatic case detection is vital for averting the most infections at an efficient cost, resulting in \u3e99% role= presentation style= box-sizing: inherit; display: inline; line-height: normal; word-spacing: normal; overflow-wrap: normal; white-space: nowrap; float: none; direction: ltr; max-width: none; max-height: none; min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; border: 0px; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; position: relative; \u3e\u3e99%\u3e99% reduction of infections compared to the no-control scenario. Expanding vaccine administration capacity to 440,000 full immunizations daily will reduce the overall cost of optimal strategy by 25% role= presentation style= box-sizing: inherit; display: inline; line-height: normal; word-spacing: normal; overflow-wrap: normal; white-space: nowrap; float: none; direction: ltr; max-width: none; max-height: none; min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; border: 0px; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; position: relative; \u3e25%25%, while allowing for a faster relaxation of more resource-intensive interventions. Furthermore, delays in vaccine administration require compensatory increases in the remaining policy levers to maintain a minimal number of infections. For example, delaying the vaccines by 180 days (6 months) will result in an 18% role= presentation style= box-sizing: inherit; display: inline; line-height: normal; word-spacing: normal; overflow-wrap: normal; white-space: nowrap; float: none; direction: ltr; max-width: none; max-height: none; min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; border: 0px; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; position: relative; \u3e18%18% increase in the cost of the optimal strategy. Conclusion We conclude with practical insights regarding policy priorities particularly attuned to the Philippine context, but also applicable more broadly in similar resource-constrained settings. We emphasize three key takeaways of (a) sustaining efficient case detection, isolation, and treatment strategies; (b) expanding not only vaccine supply but also the capacity to administer them, and; (c) timeliness and consistency in adopting policy measures

Mathematical Analysis of a COVID-19 Compartmental Model with Interventions

Mathematical models of the COVID-19 pandemic have been utilized in a variety of settings as a core component of national public health responses. Often based on systems of ordinary differential equations; compartmental models are commonly used to understand and forecast outbreak trajectories. In view of the primarily applied nature of COVID-19 models; theoretical analysis can provide a global and long-term perspective of key model properties; and relevant insights about the infection dynamics they represent. This work formulates and undertakes such an investigation for a compartmental model of COVID-19; which includes the effect of interventions. More specifically; this paper analyzes the characteristics of the solutions of a compartmental model by establishing the existence and stability of the equilibrium points based on the value of the basic reproductive number R0. Our results provide insights on the possible policies that can be implemented to address the health crisis

Power-differentiated Emotions of Populist Support: Regional Anger and Classed Fear in Duterte’s Philippines

Extensive studies link anger; fear; and support for populist leaders; but prevailing approaches largely assume an individual model of emotion. In this exploratory short report; we invoke a structurally sensitive social psychological account of the group-based and power-laden dynamics of populist emotion. Analyzing a stratified sample of Philippine respondents; we investigate how anger and fear interact with memberships in low- and high-power classed and regional groups in predicting support for populist President Rodrigo Duterte and various policies of his regime. Lower levels of regional and classed power intensified the association between emotions and populist support. Power-laden complications were also detected on the policy level. We discuss the implications of this work in terms of contextualizing political emotions within local configurations of unequal intergroup relations

Ordinariness in Disaster: Rereading Brion’s “Story” During the Covid-19 Pandemic

In contexts of broad structural strain, humanistic psychology points to the deeply embodied, relational, and spatiotemporal nature of literary encounters by agents in history. Through heuristic inquiry, this essay examines thematic transformations of Rofel G. Brion’s Story (1997), an autobiographical collection of poetry, when reread during the COVID-19 pandemic. I reflect on selected poems to reconsider and reclaim themes of intimacy amid solitude through narrative affection, home in exile through connections of care, and possibilities for living in ordinary time

Contentious Practices of Postfeminist Audiencing: Online Discourse About Cinematic Feminisms in Birds of Prey

In this paper, we examine online audience discourse surrounding the superhero film Birds of Prey, a new addition to the wave of female-centric films within the genre. Numerous studies have focused on the gendered industry politics surrounding the production of such films, as well as their representations of women and women’s narratives. This study turns to the film’s audience on Twitter, understanding their negotiation of cinematic feminisms through the conceptual lens of postfeminism. Through a mixed methods analysis of public tweets, we unpack how the film facilitates contentious practices of postfeminist audiencing. We argue that audience discussions surrounding the film are organized around overlapping frames of feminist affirmation and cinematic politicisation. These dual discursive processes of postfeminist media consumption comprise audience constructions of Birds of Prey’s feminism as raging, calibrated, overbearing, or immaterial. Taken together, these constructions of cinematic feminism depart from dichotomous views of postfeminist advances in media representation encountering misogynistic backlash. Instead, we observe a multipolar discursive landscape in which audiences may perform diverse forms of postfeminist and anti-feminist solidarity and conflict. However, we also underscore that these diverse appraisals remain circumscribed within overarching neoliberal logics which tie commercial value to collective performances of gendered subjectivities

Computational Analysis of Bot Activity in the Asia-Pacific: A Comparative Study of Four National Elections

Bot-driven electoral disinformation represents a major threat to democracies worldwide. Extant scholarship, however, tends to concentrate around Western contexts. This paper undertakes a comparative computational analysis of bot activity during four recent elections in the Asia-Pacific. Through a systematic, multi-level comparison of bot activity, we contribute novel insights about shared and distinct computational features of the disinformation landscapes within a significant yet understudied geopolitical region. Across case studies in Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Taiwan, we find non-negligible levels of bot activity: bots engage in higher levels of tweet production; interact with humans especially through mentions; tend to occupy denser and more isolated communities; use simpler and abusive language; and share partisan, irrelevant, or conspiratorial content. We conclude with implications for deepening and utilizing the analysis presented here as well as future directions for further cross-national work

Foundations for a decolonial big data psychology

The accelerated datafication of social life has led to increased interest in advancing the use of big data in psychology. However, prevailing methodological preoccupations in big data psychology elide foundational issues which amplify the problems of modernity/coloniality, including the suppression of marginalized psychologies and the widened gap between researchers and their subjects. We propose decolonial foundations for utilizing big data in psychological scholarship. We move beyond prevailing technical concerns with data processing, to engage situated practices of knowledge production. The ontological object of computing shifts from a universal psychology of numerous individuals, to a localized psychology of collectives. Epistemological priorities shift from context-free definition and control, to prioritizing temporal responsiveness and linguistic fidelity to emergent psychological phenomena. Ethical guidelines extend beyond issues of personal privacy, and address sociopolitical concerns in fragile democracies. Finally, reflexivities from the margins account for unequal systems that situate psychologists, big data, and the phenomena they study within the plurality of Global Souths. Two Philippine case studies operationalize these principles through localized data collection practices, participatory algorithmic design, interrogation of bias, and wrestling with state encroachments. We conclude with decolonial directions for advancing equitable practices of knowledge production within the computational and psychological sciences