In order to understand the relevance of class politics and the changing composition of our politicians, we must first understand how the public derive their views of social class and, importantly, that of their elected representatives. If the social class of representatives is to matter, the public must be able to at least partly accurately infer the social class of representatives. This article addresses that question through a large conjoint experiment conducted in Britain (N = 4157). In addition to a wide range of social class cues, participants were randomly exposed to distinct information conditions where statements about the hypothetical profiles under consideration were of individuals with political experience or not. The findings reveal meaningful differences in how social class markers are perceived between Members of Parliament (MPs) and the general public. Notably, MPs are consistently viewed as less working class, even when they possess identical working-class attributes to an average member of the public. These results have implications for understanding how people derive the social class of others, especially elected representatives. The latter is important: the perceptual gap underscores a fundamental dilemma for the promotion of working-class representation in politics as working-class MPs are likely to struggle to be recognised as authentic representatives of the class groups they descriptively represent.

Political science is a field rich in multimodal information sources, from televised debates to parliamentary briefings. This paper bridges a gap between computer and political science in multimodal data analysis using audio. The adoption of multimodal analyses in political science (e.g., video/audio with text-as-data approaches) has been relatively slow due to unequal distribution of computational power and skills needed. We provide solutions to challenges encountered when analyzing audio, advancing the potential for multimodal data analysis in political science. Using a dataset of all televised U.S. presidential debates from 1960 to 2020, we focus on three features encountered when analyzing audio data: low-level descriptors (LLDs), such as pitch or energy; Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs); and audio embeddings/encodings, like Wav2Vec. We showcase four applications: (a) forced alignment of audio text using MFCCs, time-stamping transcripts, and speaker information; (b) speech characterization using LLDs; (c) custom-made classification models with audio embeddings and MFCCs; and (d) emotional recognition models using Wav2Vec for classification of discrete emotions and their valence-arousal dominance. We provide explanations to help understand how these features can be applied for different political research questions and advice on vigilance to naive interpretation, for both experienced researchers and those who want to start working with audio.

Computer scientists have developed argument mining and mapping tools to identify, classify, and interpret argument structures. These tools help scale up citizen deliberation, improve the quality of argumentation, and harvest deliberative outcomes more effectively. However, little is known about how they affect individuals with different personalities or social backgrounds. We investigate whether a novel facilitated form of argument mapping—“argument mapping facilitation”—can improve equality and reduce dominance in synchronous online deliberation. We study an online dialogue on sentencing policy, where participants were randomly assigned to either standard facilitation or enhanced visual facilitation using an argument mapping tool. Based on video observations, surveys, and interviews, we find that argument mapping facilitation improves internal equality by highlighting arguments from minority and less active individuals. It also externalises ownership of arguments, which may make dominant participants less attached to their initial views and more open to reflection. At the same time, the structured and depersonalised nature of mapping risks diminishing the salience of personal narratives and experiential forms of reasoning, suggesting that careful design is needed to ensure these contributions are not displaced. By situating these findings within debates on deliberative and representative democracy, the paper clarifies what is at stake when digital tools mediate the deliberative forums that increasingly inform representative institutions.

Hybrid role-playing games are increasingly used to support democratic learning, yet there is limited empirical evidence on how such hybrid designs function across contexts. This study analyses the pedagogical and deliberative effects of Empaville, a hybrid role-playing game designed to simulate a green participatory budgeting process by embedding deliberation, competition, and voting within a fictional urban setting. We analyse six implementations conducted between 2023 and 2025 in the United Kingdom and Morocco (N = 118), combining participant observation with post-game survey data. The analysis examines role activation, phase-level enjoyment, and participants’ reported learning and deliberative experiences, using descriptive statistics, non-parametric tests, effect size measures, and qualitative thematic analysis. Across contexts, participants report that the game supports perspective-taking, intellectual humility, and constructive engagement with disagreement, while perceived learning and participation intensity vary more substantially across individuals and sessions. Cross-national comparisons reveal some statistically detectable differences in how specific phases are experienced, particularly voting, but effect sizes are generally small or trivial, indicating limited substantive divergence overall. These findings suggest that hybrid role-playing games can foster deliberative learning outcomes in short educational interventions, while highlighting the importance of distinguishing between enjoyment, engagement, and perceived pedagogical value. The study contributes an exploratory but systematic mixed-methods evaluation suitable for small-N pedagogical interventions without causal claims.

The working class are poorly represented in democratic institutions across the world, despite substantial evidence that the public do not discriminate against working-class candidates and view them more positively across numerous character traits. We propose a novel explanation: a pragmatism bias where working-class individuals are perceived as less likely to achieve political success. We provide experimental evidence that this bias may operate at multiple stages of the political process. We go beyond existing work by using a multidimensional operationalization of class to show that contemporary class has the largest effects on perceived chances of political success. Finally, we show that this cannot be remedied by social mobility, and high-income individuals are more likely to display this belief.

We set out a case for practice theory as a way to better understand and advance commoning, responding to calls for more communologies, that is, methodologies for the commons. Within the framing offered by practice theory, we argue for two potentially complementary ways of knowing: comparison and interpretation. These approaches and combinations of them are under-used in the field but are growing as additional ways of knowing that could inform both theory-building and practice. The aim is to add to the knowledge base for commons movements, as part of the mycelium for the commonsverse. Such a claim is not just a methodological or epistemological argument, but an argument about how to advance the commoning movement by rethinking how we try to understand and study it. Particularly, we focus on trying to bridge the gap between the utopian aspirations of commons movements and the realities of making such changes to existing ways of organising social, political and economic life. Worked examples by the authors are offered to illustrate the value of comparison and interpretation. One is from a ’comparative configurational analysis’ of participatory budgeting, suggesting that some of the widely argued combinations of success factors for those initiatives are not borne out by the evidence. A second worked example showcases an innovative ‘autoactionography’ method, which helps to reveal the lived experiences of developing new practices of commoning, and how commoners in one place are creating strategies towards an ontological shift against dominant modes of social organisation. It concludes with a call for methodologies that foreground an understanding of the world as a recursive process of dynamic interplays between material resources, various forms of human agency and know-how, and ascribed meanings and aspirations.

The industrial revolution of the 19th century marked the onset of an era of machines and robots that transformed societies. Since the beginning of the 21st century, a new generation of robots envisions similar societal transformation. These robots are biohybrid: part living and part engineered. They may self-assemble and emerge from complex interactions between living cells. While this new era of living robots presents unprecedented opportunities for positive societal impact, it also poses a host of ethical challenges. A systematic, nuanced examination of these ethical issues is of paramount importance to guide the evolution of this nascent field. Multidisciplinary fields face the challenge that inertia around collective action to address ethical boundaries may result in unexpected consequences for researchers and societies alike. In this Perspective, we i) clarify the ethical challenges associated with biohybrid robotics, ii) discuss the need for and elements of a potential governance framework tailored to this technology; and iii) propose tangible steps toward ethical compliance and policy formation in the field of biohybrid robotics.

Serious Games (SGs) can create a platform for democratic participation by allowing players to make decisions in scenarios that simulate real-world systems. Yet, little is known about what players get from such games and how learning takes place, particularly from a collective and structural point of view. This paper summarises and interprets the findings of 4 playtesting sessions of Empaville, a hybrid (digital and physical) Participatory Budgeting (PB) Role-Playing Game (RPG) in which players need to play a character, propose projects for a fictional city and vote for them. By utilising the Activity Theory Model of Serious Games (ATMSG) as a method of analysis, we identified that the core PB collaborative actions were empathy, ideation and decision-making, but these depended on each of the player's knowledge. We also identified that operationalising actions removes the learning opportunity (e.g., voting) and that sharing physical props was more engaging than sharing digital photos. World-building collaborative mechanisms that emerged were rooted in the structure of the city and access to services (via a shared map), social class and persuasion, and the players' knowledge of the real-world mechanisms. To conclude, we extend the ATMSG by proposing an analysis of collaboration and cooperation aspects in an SG as opportunities for learning by co-creating worlds.

Dataset and codes for the Multimodal USElecDeb60To16 dataset, released in the paper "Augmenting pre-trained language models with audio feature embedding for argumentation mining in political debates", published at the Findings of the 17th conference on European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) in 2023. This is the version that contains the audio features and the artificial voices. If you want a (lighter) version without those large files, check out the first release v.1.0.0 with DOI 10.5281/zenodo.7628465.

The integration of multimodality in natural language processing (NLP) tasks seeks to exploit the complementary information contained in two or more modalities, such as text, audio and video. This paper investigates the integration of often under-researched audio features with text, using the task of argumentation mining (AM) as a case study. We take a previously reported dataset and present an audio-enhanced version (the Multimodal USElecDeb60To16 dataset). We report the performance of two text models based on BERT and GloVe embeddings, one audio model (based on CNN and Bi-LSTM) and multimodal combinations, on a dataset of 28,850 utterances. The results show that multimodal models do not outperform text-based models when using the full dataset. However, we show that audio features add value in fully supervised scenarios with limited data. We find that when data is scarce (e.g. with 10% of the original dataset) multimodal models yield improved performance, whereas text models based on BERT considerably decrease performance. Finally, we conduct a study with artificially generated voices and an ablation study to investigate the importance of different audio features in the audio models.

Abstract This chapter explains how Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) can be used to compare different instances of deliberation. QCA is a method for establishing the configurations of conditions that are necessary or sufficient for an outcome. QCA uses learning from the mathematics of set theory to map and analyse the constellations of attributes of cases of a social phenomenon like democratic deliberation. In deliberative democracy research, QCA is useful for comparing a number of cases and understanding the conditions for good and bad deliberation. The chapter provides a guide to the approach and outlines the assumptions that distinguish QCA from other methods. It provides a quick stepwise guide to undertaking QCA. The chapter presents examples of how QCA has been used to understand when and how different designs of deliberative forums affect policymaking in Brazil, and how analysis of necessary conditions can better specify the contexts in which participatory budgets allow citizens to control decisions in participatory forums. Those findings give scholars and practitioners a greater confidence and justification for designing and implementing deliberative projects in diverse contexts.

Regional responses to international threats and opportunities have become prevalent. Yet significant lacunae persist in our recognition of some impacts of regional policies. Where measuring impact of regional policy does exist, this tends to focus on economic impact, heavily influenced by the EU model, or focuses on impacts that we have come to expect from national level policymaking. In this paper we show that important effects of regional policymaking in South American regionalism are being overlooked. Specifically, we argue that failure to recognize the creation of normative frameworks, dynamics of regional diplomacy, and social policy outcomes from regional policymaking has negatively affected the credibility of regional organizations. Lack of understanding of the impact of regional policy risks trivializing progress in regional policy and, critically, affects the legitimacy and credibility of regional governance. We make this case by focusing on regional health and migration policies in South America.

This chapter summarises the contributions of the book and develops future agendas for research on participatory budgeting and comparative methods in the field. It provides sober but positive advice for advocates of participation in politics based on the evidence and learning of a worldwide comparison of participatory budgeting.

We can learn much from independently explaining the absence of citizen control. Where programmes have failed to empower there are at least two sufficient explanations. One is the absence of participatory leadership alone, which resonates with the idea that participatory leadership is a necessary condition for success. The other is the combined absence of bureaucratic support, autonomous civil society, and financial freedoms. Designers/adopters of participatory programmes are reminded that the otherwise beneficial features of political leadership can be immaterial where civil society and organisational staff participation is desultory, and funds are lacking. A key remaining puzzle is what distinguishes citizen control from its absence in cases where participatory leadership is present. The answers to this question remain inconclusive. Future research may need to investigate more closely whether the presence of some conditions are beneficial in the early stages of development of a PB but less so later and vice versa.

We advance theorizing on the governance of the commons through a configurative comparative analysis (CCA) of community control in the housing commons. We focus our analysis on community land trusts (CLTs), which are increasingly recognised as a potential governance mechanism for collective access to housing provision for low-income communities. Through systematic comparative analysis of CLTs in the US and UK, we extend the existing evidence base and develop a conceptual typology of community control in the housing commons. The typology suggests that whilst some social purposes for CLTs may align with notions of the commons – enrichment of community politics, conservation of community life, or creation of participatory governance – other CLTs focus on housing provision as a means of making a broader contribution to the social economy, or as an asset-lock to enable wider provision for affordable housing. By understanding this differentiation, we challenge the assumption that design principles or governance mechanisms are sufficient for or inherently offer a singly clear route to community control, and recognise that community control is achieved through different pathways informed by the multiple configurations of dynamics between different aspects of governance, as usefully illuminated by CCA. Our approach demonstrates the value to scholarship and activism on the commons of systematic comparative analysis in order to interrogate the expansion of the commons not only in practice but in spirit.

This chapter presents the analysis of necessary conditions and shows that strong claims about finding necessary conditions in PB research have been premature. Nevertheless, there is strong evidence that political leaders’ commitment to participation is almost always necessary for successes. The chapter discusses alternative calibrations of previous research and offers an assessment of Brian Wampler’s work on Brazilian PB using QCA, before offering an assessment of 30 cases worldwide.

When and how do ordinary citizens gain substantial control over important collective decisions affecting their lives? This book provides new answers to that question by systematically accumulating evidence in novel ways. This comparative review of participatory budgeting reveals the factors behind its success and failures in achieving democratic engagement. The book describes the application of Qualitative Comparative Analysis to systematically accumulate evidence of citizens gain control over important collective decisions in Participatory Budgeting. Analysis shows that popular claims that there are several single necessary conditions for citizens to gain such control over collective decisions have been imprudent. Nevertheless, a political leadership committed to participation is almost always required for sustained citizen control of political decisions over the longer term. There is evidence that these good outcomes only occur where those willing leaders can rely on strong support and competence from administrative staff, or alternatively where participatory leaders have strong fiscal independence. Perhaps controversially, the evidence for the importance of civil society conditions, which have played a strong role in theories of successful citizen participation, is mixed. The relevance afforded civil society in explanation depends on the level of uncertainty that researchers are willing to accept in their theories and reveals issues of conceptualisation of civil society roles in participatory programmes. Where politicians and bureaucratic staff are committed to supporting programmes, mobilised civil society organisations may serve to overcome fiscal constraints. Comparing global examples of both positive change and notable failure, it provides persuasive evidence and guidance for future public involvement in policymaking.