The reversal of populism. Assessing the explanatory power of the ideational approach in contemporary Argentina

In this study we conduct a least-likely case study in order to assess the analytical power of the ideational approach to populism. We do so by testing the direct and conditional effects of populist attitudes on vote choices in Argentina. We examine whether populist attitudes are associated with the Peronist vote, as more essentialist interpretations would lead us to expect, or, on the contrary, linked to vote for right parties, an expectation that is more consistent with thin-ideological approaches. Our data consists of an original online survey carried out in September 2020, a specific juncture at which the Peronist government had to deal with widespread popular discontent caused by intense economic crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings reveal that populist attitudes are positively associated with voting for right parties and that the effects of such attitudes are conditioned by ideological preferences. These results underscore the explanatory power of ideational approaches to the electoral activation of populist attitudes. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of International Political Science Review is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Critical Gloss to the Judgment of the Court of Appeal in Katowice of 22 June 2022, I ACa 669/21. Adoption of Written Resolutions by the General Assembly of a Housing Cooperative

The author believes that the provisions of Article 36 § 9-13 of the Co-operative Law concerning the possibility of ordering general assemblies to adopt resolutions in writing or using direct communication at a distance are also applicable to housing cooperatives, due to the wording of the provision of Article 1(7) of the Co-operative Law, according to which the provisions of the Co-operative Law are directly applicable to matters not regulated by the Act of Housing Cooperatives. Notwithstanding the above, the SA also seems to have completely ignored (iura novit curia) the wording of the uninterrupted provision of Article 15zzzr of the Act of 2 March 2020 on special solutions related to the prevention, prevention, and eradication of COVID-19, other infectious diseases, and crises caused by them, according to which a declaration of will of a member of a body of a legal person – and thus of the members of a housing cooperative who form a body such as the general assembly of the cooperative – other than the State Treasury or a local government unit, may be made in documentary form (and thus also in writing). Therefore, this provision should also be regar-ded as lex specialis to Article 83 of the Act on Housing Cooperatives. © 2023, Spoldzielczy Instytut Naukowy. All rights reserved.

A Brief Statistical and Geostatistical Survey of the Relationship between COVID-19 and By-Mail Balloting in the 2020 North Carolina General Election

Adding to the already polarizing 2020 general election was the COVID-19 pandemic. One way in which this pandemic greatly affected the election was through an increased participation in by-mail, or mail-in, ballots. The state of North Carolina experienced a 316 percent increase in by-mail votes between 2016 and 2020, when approximately 977,186 votes were cast by mail. It is no surprise that this increase was due to the COVID-19 pandemic;however, these by-mail voting patterns are spatial in nature and vary across the state. This research measures to what degree COVID-19 rates affected by-mail voting rates. Using geographic information systems data developed from robust tabular files provided by the North Carolina State Board of Elections, by-mail votes were calculated and mapped at ZIP code scale and compared to COVID-19 rates measured at different dates. By-mail rates taken from final absentee tallies for the highest and lowest COVID-19 ZIP codes saw no significant differences across multiple dates (30 September 2020 and 31 October 2020) when COVID-19 data were collected. COVID-19 hot spots (high COVID-19 rates surrounded by other high COVID-19 rates) were extracted using geostatistical techniques and compared to COVID-19 cold spots (low COVID-19 rates surrounded by other low COVID-19 rates). It was found the lowest by-mail rates actually occurred in these COVID-19 hot spots across both dates, as well a metric that expressed percentage change in COVID-19 rates in the month before the 2020 election.Alternate :COVID-19使得已经两极分化的2020年美国大选, 变得更加雪上加霜。COVID-19影响选举的一种方式是邮寄选票的增加。2016年至2020年, 北卡罗来纳州的邮寄选票增加了316%, 共约977,186张。毫无疑问, COVID-19导致了邮寄选票的增加。然而, 邮寄选票在本质上是空间性的, 并且在北卡罗来纳州的各个地方具有差异性。本研究计算了COVID-19发病率对邮寄选票比例的影响程度。利用北卡罗来纳州选举委员会提供的准确的表格文件, 本文制作了地理信息系统数据, 在邮政编码尺度上对邮寄选票进行计算和制图, 并将这些邮寄选票与不同时间的COVID-19发病率进行了比较。在拥有最高和最低COVID-19发病率的邮政编码和不同时间（2020年9月30日和2020年10月31日）, 从缺失人数统计中得到的邮寄选票比例没有显著差异。利用地学统计方法提取COVID-19热点（COVID-19高发病率在空间上被其它高发病率所包围）, 并与COVID-19冷点（COVID-19低发病率在空间上被其它低发病率所包围）进行比较。结果发现, 在这两个时间内, 最低邮寄选票比例出现在COVID-19热点地区。本文还制定了一个指标, 可以表示2020年大选前一个月的COVID-19发病率百分比的变化。

DEMOCRACY AMID CRISES: Polarization, Pandemic, Protests, and Persuasion

Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had been stolen from Donald Trump. Democracy amid Crises explains how these forces and the media messaging through which they were filtered shaped the election and post-election dialogue, as well as voter perceptions of both, with worrisome potential consequences for democracy. The book spotlights not one but several electorates, each embedded in a distinctive informational environment. The four crises affected these electorates differently, partly because the unique constellations of media in which they were advertently and inadvertently enmeshed contained dissimilar messages from the campaigns and other sources of influence. Awash in distinctive message streams, the various electorates adopted divergent perspectives on the crises, candidates, and state of the country. As a result, understanding voting behavior and attitudes about the events that followed requires an analysis of both the distinctive electorates and the informational environments that enveloped them. Importantly, our findings raise fundamental questions about the nation's future, occasioned by the contest over whether the 2020 presidential election was fairly and freely decided and by worrisome responses to the reality that the country's citizenry is becoming more multiracial, multiethnic, and, on matters religious, agnostic. © Oxford University Press 2023.

Combating the infodemic: COVID-19 induced fake news recognition in social media networks.

COVID-19 has caused havoc globally due to its transmission pace among the inhabitants and prolific rise in the number of people contracting the disease worldwide. As a result, the number of people seeking information about the epidemic via Internet media has increased. The impact of the hysteria that has prevailed makes people believe and share everything related to illness without questioning its truthfulness. As a result, it has amplified the misinformation spread on social media networks about the disease. Today, there is an immediate need to restrict disseminating false news, even more than ever before. This paper presents an early fusion-based method for combining key features extracted from context-based embeddings such as BERT, XLNet, and ELMo to enhance context and semantic information collection from social media posts and achieve higher accuracy for false news identification. From the observation, we found that the proposed early fusion-based method outperforms models that work on single embeddings. We also conducted detailed studies using several machine learning and deep learning models to classify misinformation on social media platforms relevant to COVID-19. To facilitate our work, we have utilized the dataset of "CONSTRAINT shared task 2021". Our research has shown that language and ensemble models are well adapted to this role, with a 97% accuracy.

Electoral Democracy and Working-Age Mortality.

Policy Points The erosion of electoral democracy in the United States in recent decades may have contributed to the high and rising working-age mortality rates, which predate the COVID-19 pandemic. Eroding electoral democracy in a US state was associated with higher working-age mortality from homicide, suicide, and especially from drug poisoning and infectious disease. State and federal efforts to strengthen electoral democracy, such as banning partisan gerrymandering, improving voter enfranchisement, and reforming campaign finance laws, could potentially avert thousands of deaths each year among working-age adults. CONTEXT: Working-age mortality rates are high and rising in the United States, an alarming fact that predates the COVID-19 pandemic. Although several reasons for the high and rising rates have been hypothesized, the potential role of democratic erosion has been overlooked. This study examined the association between electoral democracy and working-age mortality and assessed how economic, behavioral, and social factors may have contributed to it. METHODS: We used the State Democracy Index (SDI), an annual summary of each state's electoral democracy from 2000 to 2018. We merged the SDI with annual age-adjusted mortality rates for adults 25-64 years in each state. Models estimated the association between the SDI and working-age mortality (from all causes and six specific causes) within states, adjusting for political party control, safety net generosity, union coverage, immigrant population, and stable characteristics of states. We assessed whether economic (income, unemployment), behavioral (alcohol consumption, sleep), and social (marriage, violent crime, incarceration) factors accounted for the association. FINDINGS: Increasing electoral democracy in a state from a moderate level (defined as the third quintile of the SDI distribution) to a high level (defined as the fifth quintile) was associated with an estimated 3.2% and 2.7% lower mortality rate among working-age men and women, respectively, over the next year. Increasing electoral democracy in all states from the third to the fifth quintile of the SDI distribution may have resulted in 20,408 fewer working-age deaths in 2019. The democracy-mortality association mainly reflected social factors and, to a lesser extent, health behaviors. Increasing electoral democracy in a state was mostly strongly associated with lower mortality from drug poisoning and infectious diseases, followed by reductions in homicide and suicide. CONCLUSIONS: Erosion of electoral democracy is a threat to population health. This study adds to growing evidence that electoral democracy and population health are inextricably linked.

The Impact of COVID-19, Election Policies, and Partisanship on Voter Participation in the 2020 U.S. Election

The COVID-19 pandemic had the potential to wreak havoc on elections. Democracies initiated varied policies to minimize health risks to voters and election workers. This study assesses the impact of voting policies, personal exposure to COVID, and partisanship on voter behavior in the 2020 U.S. general election. Using a comparative state-politics approach and new data, we demonstrate that exposure to COVID substantially influenced voter turnout, and election policies had a major effect on whether a voter cast a ballot by mail, early in-person, or in-person on Election Day. Unique circumstances, including the emergence of voting policies as a polarizing issue, also spawned a new partisan voting gap that is especially prominent among heavy news consumers. Compared to 2018, many more Democrats than Republicans abandoned Election Day voting in favor of mail voting.

Healthy citizens, healthy democracies? A review of the literature

A growing literature over the past 10 years on health and political behavior has established health status as an important source of political inequality. Poor health reduces psychological engagement with politics and discourages political activity. This lowers incentives for governments to respond to the needs of those experiencing ill health and thereby perpetuates health disparities. In this review article, we provide a critical synthesis of the state of knowledge on the links between different aspects of health and political behavior. We also discuss the challenges confronting this research agenda, particularly with respect to measurement, theory, and establishing causality, along with suggestions for advancing the field. With the COVID-19 pandemic casting health disparities into sharp focus, understanding the sources of health biases in the political process, as well as their implications, is an important task that can bring us closer to the ideals of inclusive democracy.

Race, poverty and unemployment as quantitative predictors of voter turnout in St. Louis amidst COVID-19 and a racial justice movement

PurposeThe 2020 election season brought with it a global public health pandemic and a reenergized racial justice movement. Given the social context of the intertwined pandemics of COVID-19 and racialized violence, do the traditional predictors of voter turnout – race, poverty rates and unemployment rates – remain significant?Design/methodology/approachUsing county-level, publicly available data from twelve Midwest states with similar demographic and cultural characteristics, voter turnout in St. Louis City and St. Louis County were predicted using race, poverty rates and unemployment rates.FindingsFindings demonstrate that despite high concentration of poverty rates and above average percentages of Black residents, voter turnout was significantly higher than predicted. Additionally, findings contradict previous studies that found higher unemployment rates resulted in higher voter participation rates.Originality/valueThis study suggests that the threat of COVID-19 and fear of an increase in police violence may have introduced physical risk as a new theoretical component to rational choice theory for the general election in 2020.

Deep learning and Gaussian Mixture Modelling clustering mix. A new approach for fetal morphology view plane differentiation.

The last three years have been a game changer in the way medicine is practiced. The COVID-19 pandemic changed the obstetrics and gynecology scenery. Pregnancy complications, and even death, are preventable due to maternal-fetal monitoring. A fast and accurate diagnosis can be established by a doctor + Artificial Intelligence combo. The aim of this paper is to propose a framework designed as a merger between Deep learning algorithms and Gaussian Mixture Modelling clustering applied in differentiating between the view planes of a second trimester fetal morphology scan. The deep learning methods chosen for this approach were ResNet50, DenseNet121, InceptionV3, EfficientNetV2S, MobileNetV3Large, and Xception. The framework establishes a hierarchy of the component networks using a statistical fitness function and the Gaussian Mixture Modelling clustering method, followed by a synergetic weighted vote of the algorithms that gives the final decision. We have tested the framework on two second trimester morphology scan datasets. A thorough statistical benchmarking process has been provided to validate our results. The experimental results showed that the synergetic vote of the framework outperforms the vote of each stand-alone deep learning network, hard voting, soft voting, and bagging strategy.

Sentiment analysis of public sensitivity to COVID-19 vaccines on Twitter by majority voting classifier-based machine learning

With the rise of social media platforms, which have billions of users around the World, the dissemination of information has become easier than ever. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the use of social media to discuss many topics, including vaccines. The aim of this study is to analyze public sentiment with Machine Learning of vaccine-related tweets obtained on Twitter in order to better understand the attitudes and concerns of social media users, especially regarding COVID-19 vaccines in Turkey. For this purpose, the majority voting method, which is an ensemble learning method, was developed by comparing the machine learning algorithm used in six different classification tasks and then via Support Vector Machine, XGBoost and Random Forest having the highest accuracy, in the study. Soft Voting method, which is one of the majority voting methods, has reached a success rate of 90.5%, with a higher success rate than both the Hard Voting approach and the other six individual machine learning approaches. With the Soft Voting method, which has the highest accuracy rate, 412,588 daily tweets from 153 days obtained from Twitter were analyzed and the results were reported. The findings of the study are very striking and differ from studies on other countries. As far as we know, this study is the first in Turkey to perform sentiment analysis on COVID-19 vaccines. In addition, the findings of the study show that the proposed method is a valuable and easily applied tool to monitor the sensitivity of COVID-19 vaccines with a sentiment analysis approach via social media. © 2023 Gazi Universitesi Muhendislik-Mimarlik. All rights reserved.

Economic and Pandemic Performance Voting in the 2021 Czech National Election*

The literature on how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected vote choice provides evidence of both `rally-'round-the-flag' effects and the influence of perceived government pandemic performance. However, this evidence concerns short-term effects. Much less is known about how COVID-19-related economic changes and government measures in response to the pandemic have affected vote choice over a longer period. Using a post-election survey from the Czech Republic fielded in October 2021, we examine the effect of pandemic-related issues on support for governing parties in an election one and a half years after the pandemic started, focusing on a general evaluation of the economy and of government pandemic performance and on individual economic and health-related experiences of COVID-19. First, a negative health-related experience of COVID-19 did not affect vote choice. Second, only business loss negatively affected governmental support;job loss had no effect. Third, retrospective evaluations of the national economy and government pandemic performance affected vote choice, while retrospective evaluation of one's personal economic situation did not. Fourth, the majority of the above-mentioned effects drove support for the dominant governing party (ANO) and only in a limited way support for the junior cabinet partner (CSSD).

Contagious Elections: The Influence of COVID-19 on Comfort in Voting in Canadian Provincial Elections

Did the COVID-19 pandemic impact citizens' comfort voting in-person? Did it influence their decision to vote, and if so, which method they used to cast their ballot? This article presents public opinion data from the first five Canadian provinces to hold elections during the COVID-19 pandemic: New Brunswick, Saskatchewan, British Columbia, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Nova Scotia. We find that comfort voting in person can be predicted by a person's assessment of their own and their families' COVID risk, as well as their interest in, and the importance that they place on, the act of voting. Those with higher risk, and the psychological engagement with politics that likely led to great awareness of some of the risks the pandemic posed to society, were less comfortable with in person voting. Additionally, we find that those uncomfortable voting in person were more likely to not vote at all, or when they did vote, to use the mail-in voting option. Although advance in-person voting was recommended to avoid election day crowds, comfort voting in-person could not predict in-person advance voting when compared to election day voting.

Voting technology, democracy, and propaganda: Ontological considerations for the 2020 presidential election

The 2020 United States Presidential election was considered one of the most tumultuous political contests in the 21st century. During an international pandemic, travel restrictions and social distancing requirements created uncertainty about whether to vote in person or via absentee-mail-in ballot. The present study sought to investigate how voters experience different technologies in the 2020 United States Presidential election. Selected concepts in media ecology supplemented Fox and Alldred's (2013) framework for new materialist inquiry to explore the technical material characteristics of voting technology and the discursive elements of voter fraud propaganda. By tracing the history of voting technologies and voter fraud propaganda, the analysis argued that the vast array of technologies and experiences of voting in the 2020 election rendered the idea of an archetypal or monolithic voting method insufficient. Therefore, the present study suggests an ontological revision for the ways we conceptualize the relationship between voters, voting technologies, and democracy writ large. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Enhancing Marathi Handwritten Character Recognition Using Ensemble Learning

In the current era, the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) model plays a vital role in converting images of handwritten characters or words into text editable script. During the COVID-19 pandemic, students' performance is assessed based on multiple-choice questions and handwritten answers so, in this situation, the need for handwritten recognition has become acute. Handwritten answers in any regional language need the OCR model to transform the readable machine-encoded text for automatic assessment which will reduce the burden of manual assessment. The single Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) algorithm recognizes the handwritten characters but its accuracy is suppressed when dataset volume is increased. In proposed work stacking and soft voting ensemble mechanisms that address multiple CNN models to recognize the handwritten characters. The performance of the ensemble mechanism is significantly better than the single CNN model. This proposed work ensemble VGG16, Alexnet and LeNet-5 as base classifiers using stacking and soft voting ensemble approaches. The overall accuracy of the proposed work is 98.66% when the soft voting ensemble has three CNN classifiers. © 2023 Lavoisier. All rights reserved.

Economics, COVID, Election Forecasting: Did Trump Escape Blame?

Given Trump's provocative personal profile, coupled with boasts of his political prowess, one might expect that the electorate would not allocate praise or blame at the ballot box in the usual reward and punishment way. They might blame him more than other candidates or, indeed, they might blame him less. Utilizing election forecasting as a benchmark, in particular the structural model of political economy, we assess whether voters blamed him less for his faltering performance with respect to leading policy issues, particularly the economy and COVID-19. Our findings suggest that, contrary to claims from supporters, voters punished him at least as much as they punished past presidents, when confronted with similar issue contexts. The Trump image of a leader with superior powers has the character of fiction, rather than fact. © The Author(s) 2023.

‘Your luck is our luck': Covid-19, the radical right and low polarisation in the 2022 Portuguese elections

In the 2022 Portuguese legislative elections, held nearly two years after the pandemic hit the country, the incumbent Socialists improved their position, being now able to govern with an absolute majority, while populist radical right Chega experienced considerable growth. Was the pandemic a relevant factor for vote choice in these elections? The main goal of this article is to shed light on this matter. In addition to portraying this election's background and results, we describe the degree of COVID-19-related polarisation in Portugal, analyse the salience of the pandemic in the campaign and measure the relative impact of pandemic-related perceptions vs other variables on voting behaviour. Our findings reveal that, although there was little politicisation of the pandemic and the incumbent enjoyed high levels of support among both political elites and public opinion, Chega, which was less involved in rallying around the flag, arguably sent signals that made COVID-19-related assessments relevant in terms of voting behaviour. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Brothers or Fools

Justin A. Joyce introduces the eighth volume of James Baldwin Review with a discussion of the US Supreme Court, the misdirected uproar over Critical Race Theory, a survey of canonical dystopian novels, and the symbolism of masking during COVID-19.

Conducting a secret ballot elections for virtual meetings.

Communication plays a crucial role in business, education, and generally in everyday people's interactions. Face-to-face communication has been banned by the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions and had to be replaced with its electronic remote form. Popular digital applications allowed us to switch to online life quite easily. That conversion wasn't problematic for most (especially young) people. Working online and meeting people virtually became a standard, and people have mostly adapted to the new reality. Moving conventional communication to the Internet wasn't much challenging, because it was only a matter of existing ICT solutions popularization. They have already existed and were functional, but haven't been used much often. COVID-19 pandemic changed it permanently because there was no other way as rapid adoption to this unusual situation. Although most of the actions could have been realized online, some were more problematic to conduct electronically. One of them was secret balloting for virtual meetings. As open voting was not much complicated to arrange using remote communication, conduction the secret type of elections was not so obvious. In open voting electors' data can be revealed and the results may be easily verified when it's finished. Secret voting demands to remain voters' data and their choices confidential. That leads to the question of how to verify the users' identity and voting rights and keep them anonymous at the same time? This paper provides an overview of a person's remote identification and verification methods, also explores the possibilities of using them for secret voting authentication. Results show that conducting a secret ballot with remote voter authentication is possible. The method was widely described and also applied in a authors' digital system. A fully functional ICT solution has been tested in real elections across several organizations in Poland, in which present authorities were elected electronically during the COVID-19 lockdown period.

Legislative Behaviour of MPs in the Czech Republic in Times of Covid-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic has affected almost every aspect of our lives. While millions of people fought with the disease, economies, societies and institutions faced side-effects of government measures resisting the spread of the virus. This article describes the effects of the pandemic on the legislative behaviour of MPs in one of the worst-hit countries in the world, the Czech Republic. The results show that the number of bill proposals and roll calls substantially increased during the pandemic compared to pre-pandemic times. Since the start of the outbreak, a third of roll calls and a half of bill proposals concerned the pandemic. Nonetheless, the outbreak did not substantially affect the voting unity of parliamentary party groups nor the opposition became more supportive of the cabinet. Still, while the liberal Pirates became more cooperative during the pandemic than the pre-pandemic period, the rightist antisystem party Freedom and Direct Democracy receded from the rest of the parties on the pandemic issues. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Parliamentary Affairs is the property of Oxford University Press / USA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)