Related papers: Epistemic orientation in parliamentary discourse i…

Pursuit of honest and truthful decision-making is crucial for governance and accountability in democracies. However, people sometimes take different perspectives of what it means to be honest and how to pursue truthfulness. Here we explore…

Theories of democratic stability, populism, and party-system crisis often point to a form of polarization that comparative research rarely measures directly: hostile relations among political elites. Existing comparative measures capture…

The The use of Large language models (LLMs) to summarise parliamentary proceedings presents a promising means of increasing the accessibility of democratic participation. However, as these systems increasingly mediate access to political…

The political biases of Large Language Models (LLMs) are usually assessed by simulating their answers to English surveys. In this work, we propose an alternative framing of political biases, relying on principles of fairness in multilingual…

We develop and apply epistemic tests to various decentralized governance methods as well as to study the impact of participation. These tests probe the ability to reach a correct outcome when there is one. We find that partial abstention is…

Understanding how policy is debated and justified in parliament is a fundamental aspect of the democratic process. However, the volume and complexity of such debates mean that outside audiences struggle to engage. Meanwhile, Large Language…

In an era of increasing societal fragmentation, political polarization, and erosion of public trust in institutions, representative deliberative assemblies are emerging as a promising democratic forum for developing effective policy…

As large language models (LLMs) become deeply embedded in digital platforms and decision-making systems, concerns about their political biases have grown. While substantial work has examined social biases such as gender and race, systematic…

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly embedded in civic, educational, and political information environments, concerns about their potential political bias have grown. Prior research often evaluates such bias through simulated…

In dialogical argumentation it is often assumed that the involved parties always correctly identify the intended statements posited by each other, realize all of the associated relations, conform to the three acceptability states (accepted,…

We present a large-scale computational analysis of migration-related discourse in UK parliamentary debates spanning over 75 years and compare it with US congressional discourse. Using open-weight LLMs, we annotate each statement with…

Entropy-based confidence signals are increasingly leveraged to improve reasoning in large language models (LLMs), yet existing approaches treat confidence as a static quantity -- typically aggregated over tokens. We show that the…

This study analyzes political interactions in the European Parliament (EP) by considering how the political agenda of the plenary sessions has evolved over time and the manner in which Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have reacted…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in evaluative processes, from information filtering to assessing and addressing knowledge gaps through explanation and credibility judgments. This raises the need to examine how such…

Search engines (SEs) and large language models (LLMs) are central to political information access, yet their algorithmic decisions and potential underlying biases remain underexplored. We developed a standardized, privacy-preserving,…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly pervasive, finding applications across many industries and disciplines. Ensuring the trustworthiness of LLM outputs is paramount, where Uncertainty Estimation (UE) plays a key role. In…

This paper introduces an LLM-driven framework designed to accurately scale the political issue stances of parliamentary representatives. By leveraging advanced natural language processing techniques and large language models, the proposed…

The simplified hypothesis that an election is polarized as an explanation of recent electoral outcomes worldwide is centered on perceptions of voting patterns rather than ideological data from the electorate. While the literature focuses on…

Real-world knowledge representation often requires capturing subjective, continuous attributes -- such as political positions -- that conflict with pairwise validation, the widely accepted gold standard for human evaluation. We address this…

Current political developments worldwide illustrate that research on democratic backsliding is as important as ever. A recent exchange in Political Science & Politics (2/2024) has highlighted again a fundamental challenge in this…