Abstract
Political beliefs vary significantly across different countries, reflecting distinct historical, cultural, and institutional contexts. These ideologies, ranging from liberal democracies to rigid autocracies, influence human societies, as well as the digital systems that are constructed within those societies. The advent of generative artificial intelligence, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), introduces new agents in the political space-agents trained on massive corpora that replicate and proliferate socio-political assumptions. This paper analyses whether LLMs display propensities consistent with democratic or autocratic world-views. We validate this insight through experimental tests in which we experiment with the leading LLMs developed across disparate political contexts, using several existing psychometric and political orientation measures. The analysis is based on both numerical scoring and qualitative analysis of the models' responses. Findings indicate high model-to-model variability and a strong association with the political culture of the country in which the model was developed. These findings highlight the need for more detailed examination of the socio-political dimensions embedded within AI systems.

Abstract
The choice of protest tactics in a social movement has often been analyzed based on the demands, participants, and internal characteristics of the movement. However, recent evidence highlights the context or setting in which the demonstration takes place as another key element in the process; Using structural equation modeling, studies have shown a link between high perceptions of injustice in the treatment received by authorities and a greater acceptance of non-normative and/or violent methods of protest. In line with this approach, this article aims to examine the extent to which another form of authority legitimacy -- such as political trust -- affects the overall justification for the use of violence by both protesters and the police. Using longitudinal data from Chile (2016 -- 2019), which captures the collective protests of the ``Social Outbreak'', three analytical approaches -- fixed effects, cross-lagged, and multilevel models -- demonstrate that declining political trust not only weakened public acceptance of police violence but also increased tolerance toward protesters' use of violent tactics. This relationship adds a new dimension to the analysis of violent protests, suggesting that low political trust in many modern states may be a contributing factor to the increasing radicalization of demonstrations in recent years.

Abstract
Understanding the collective social behavior of software developers is crucial to model and predict the long-term dynamics and sustainability of Open Source Software (OSS) communities. To this end, we analyze temporal activity patterns of developers, revealing an inherently ``bursty'' nature of commit contributions. To investigate the social mechanisms behind this phenomenon, we adopt a network-based modelling framework that captures developer interactions through co-editing networks. Our framework models social interactions, where a developer editing the code of other developers triggers accelerated activity among collaborators. Using a large data set on 50 major OSS communities, we further develop a method that identifies activity cascades, i.e. the propagation of developer activity in the underlying co-editing network. Our results suggest that activity cascades are a statistically significant phenomenon in more than half of the studied projects. We further show that our insights can be used to develop a simple yet practical churn prediction method that forecasts which developers are likely to leave a project. Our work sheds light on the emergent collective social dynamics in OSS communities and highlights the importance of activity cascades to understand developer churn and retention in collaborative software projects.

Abstract
Detecting media bias is crucial, specifically in the South Asian region. Despite this, annotated datasets and computational studies for Bangla political bias research remain scarce. Crucially because, political stance detection in Bangla news requires understanding of linguistic cues, cultural context, subtle biases, rhetorical strategies, code-switching, implicit sentiment, and socio-political background. To address this, we introduce the first benchmark dataset of 200 politically significant and highly debated Bangla news articles, labeled for government-leaning, government-critique, and neutral stances, alongside diagnostic analyses for evaluating large language models (LLMs). Our comprehensive evaluation of 28 proprietary and open-source LLMs shows strong performance in detecting government-critique content (F1 up to 0.83) but substantial difficulty with neutral articles (F1 as low as 0.00). Models also tend to over-predict government-leaning stances, often misinterpreting ambiguous narratives. This dataset and its associated diagnostics provide a foundation for advancing stance detection in Bangla media research and offer insights for improving LLM performance in low-resource languages.

Abstract
We model bipartisan elections where voters are exposed to two forces: local homophilic interactions and external influence from two political campaigns. The model is mathematically equivalent to the random field Ising model with a bimodal field. When both parties exceed a critical campaign spending, the system undergoes a phase transition to a highly polarized state where homophilic influence becomes negligible, and election outcomes mirror the proportion of voters aligned with each campaign, independent of total spending. The model predicts a hysteresis region, where the election results are not determined by campaign spending but by incumbency. Calibrating the model with historical data from US House elections between 1980 and 2020, we find the critical campaign spending to be $\sim 1.8$ million USD. Campaigns exceeding critical expenditures increased in 2018 and 2020, suggesting a boost in political polarization.

Abstract
We examine formal games that we call "capital games" in which player payoffs are known, but their payoffs are not guaranteed to be von Neumann-Morgenstern utilities. In capital games, the dynamics of player payoffs determine their utility functions. Different players can have different payoff dynamics. We make no assumptions about where these dynamics come from, but implicitly assume that they come from the players' actions and interactions over time. We define an equilibrium concept called "growth equilibrium" and show a correspondence between the growth equilibria of capital games and the Nash equilibria of standard games.

Abstract
Artificial intelligence is set to revolutionize social and political life in unpredictable ways, raising questions about the principles that ought to guide its development and regulation. By examining digital advertising and social media algorithms, this article highlights how artificial intelligence already poses a significant threat to the republican conception of liberty -- or freedom from unaccountable power -- and thereby highlights the necessity of protecting republican liberty when integrating artificial intelligence into society. At an individual level, these algorithms can subconsciously influence behavior and thought, and those subject to this influence have limited power over the algorithms they engage. At the political level, these algorithms give technology company executives and other foreign parties the power to influence domestic political processes, such as elections; the multinational nature of algorithm-based platforms and the speed with which technology companies innovate make incumbent state institutions ineffective at holding these actors accountable. At both levels, artificial intelligence has thus created a new form of unfreedom: digital domination. By drawing on the works of Quentin Skinner, Philip Pettit, and other republican theorists, this article asserts that individuals must have mechanisms to hold algorithms (and those who develop them) accountable in order to be truly free.

Abstract
"Theory figures" are a staple of theoretical visualization research. Common shapes such as Cartesian planes and flowcharts can be used not only to explain conceptual contributions, but to think through and refine the contribution itself. Yet, theory figures tend to be limited to a set of standard shapes, limiting the creative and expressive potential of visualization theory. In this work, we explore how the shapes used in theory figures afford different understandings and explanations of their underlying phenomena. We speculate on the value of visualizing theories using more expressive configurations, such as icebergs, horseshoes, M\"obius strips, and BLT sandwiches. By reflecting on figure-making's generative role in the practice of theorizing, we conclude that theory is, in fact, shapes.