Suchergebnisse

Portrayals of history are never complete, and each description inherently exhibits a specific view-
point and emphasis. In this work, we automatically identified such differences by computing time-
lines and detecting temporal focal points of written history across languages on Wikipedia. In
particular, we studied articles related to the history of all UN member states and compared them in
30 language editions. We developed a computational approach that allows to identify focal points
quantitatively, and found that Wikipedia narratives about national histories (i) are skewed towards
more recent events (recency bias) and (ii) are distributed unevenly across the continents with sig-
nificant focus on the history of European countries (Eurocentric bias). Thus, our work explored
how colonial ties shape popular historiography on Wikipedia. We also established that national
historical timelines vary across language editions, although average interlingual consensus is rather
high. We hope that this work provides a starting point for a broader computational analysis of
written history on Wikipedia and elsewhere.

This data collection project is a joint effort by the three institutions named above. Focal points in the different organisations were Eduardo Nguenha (ANAMM), Armin von Schiller (DIE) and Salvador Forquilha (IESE). The idea to collect this data was orginally conceived within the project «Determinantes sociopolíticos e administrativos da tributação local em Moçambique.». This project was implemented within the context of the 52nd Postgraduate Training Programme of the Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik/ German Development Institute (DIE) funded by the al Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). Partners of this broader project included the DIE, the Instituto de Estudos Sociais e Económicos (IESE), the Associação Nacional dos Municípios de Moçambique (ANAMM) and Programa de Boa Governação Financeira (Cooperação Alemãpara o desenvolvimento em Mozambique). This broader project was also able to financially support the implementation of this data collection effort. However, this project would not have been possible without the support of various persons involved at several step of the process: Bernardino António, Saida Bunk, Dominique Klawonn, Jonathan Krull, Julia Leininger, Abel Manhique, Onofre Muianga, Alina Sennewald, Conrad Steinhilber and Juliane von Boeselager. We also acknowledge the great support by the student assistant Ricardo Lengler, Madeleine Mockenhaupt and Franziska Schwingeler. Last but certainly not least, we want to express our gratitude to the municipalities and their officials who took the time to share their information with us. We sincerely hope that creating this database and following up on it will offer a solid basis to discuss the situation of municipalities and avenues to improve their administrative capacities.

This dataset consists of three types of 'short-text' content:



1. social media posts (tweets)

2. psychological survey items, and

3. synthetic adversarial modifications of the former two categories.



The tweet data can be further divided into 3 separate datasets based on their source:



1.1 the hostile sexism dataset,

1.2 the benevolent sexism dataset, and

1.3 the callme sexism dataset.



1.1 and 1.2 are pre-existing datasets obtained from Waseem, Z., & Hovy, D. (2016) and Jha, A., & Mamidi, R. (2017) that we re-annotated (see our paper and data statement for further information). The rationale for including these dataset specifically is that they feature a variety of sexist expressions in real conversational (social media) settings. In particular, they feature expressions that range from overtly antagonizing the minority gender through negative stereotypes (1.1) to leveraging positive stereotypes to subtly dismiss it as less-capable and fragile (1.2).



The callme sexism dataset (1.3) was collected by us based on the presence of the phrase 'call me sexist but' in tweets. The rationale behind this choice of query was that several Twitter users opine potentially sexist comments and signal so using the presence of this phrase, which arguably serves as a disclaimer for sexist opinions.



The survey items (2) pertain to attitudinal surveys that are designed to measure sexist attitudes and gender bias in participants. We provide a detailed account of our selection procedure in our paper.



Finally, the adversarial examples are generated by crowdworkers from Amazon Mechanical Turk by making minimal changes to tweets and scale items, in order to change sexist examples to non-sexist ones. We hope that these examples will help us control for typical confounds in non-sexist data (e.g., topic, civility) and lead to datasets with fewer biases, and consequently allow us to train more robust machine learning models. We only asked to turn sexist examples into non-sexist ones, and not vice versa, for ethical reasons.



The dataset is annotated to capture cases where text is sexist because of its content (what the speaker believes) or its phrasing (the speaker's choice of words). We explain the rationale for this codebook in our paper cited below.

Deutsch:



Auf die inkludierende Wirkung (neuer) Partizipationsformen, wie beispielsweise direktdemokratische Verfahren, wurden zeitweise große Hoffnungen gesetzt. Diese Hoffnungen haben sich jedoch als wenig realistisch erwiesen. Direktdemokratische Verfahren werden, hierzulande spätestens seit dem Hamburger Schulentscheid, häufig als Ungleichheit fördernd bewertet - Direktdemokratie würde Gleichheit eher verhindern und Ungleichheiten verschärfen. Doch tragen direktdemokratische Verfahren tatsächlich zur Stabilisierung oder sogar zu einer Vertiefung von Ungleichheiten bei? Das Projekt untersucht basierend auf partizipations-, ungleichheits- und institutionentheoretischen Zugängen quantitativ-vergleichend die Effekte unterschiedlicher direktdemokratischer Verfahrenstypen auf sozio-ökonomische, rechtliche und politische Ungleichheiten.



Wir gehen davon aus, dass sich direkte Demokratie auf alle Ungleichheitsdimensionen auswirkt. Zudem vermuten wir unterschiedliche Wirkungen unterschiedlicher direktdemokratischer Verfahren sowohl auf Ungleichheit als auch auf die Konfiguration des politischen Felds. Widersprüchliche Ergebnisse der bisherigen Forschung, die sich hauptsächlich auf die Schweiz und die USA beziehen, hoffen wir durch eine breitere Datenbasis aufklären zu können. Zur Analyse dieser Zusammenhänge untersuchen wir konkrete Policy-Entscheidungen in einer Vielzahl an (Glied-)Staaten quantitativ-statistisch und vergleichend. Dabei konzentrieren wir uns auf die Zeitspanne 1990-2015, da in vielen Staaten direktdemokratische Verfahren im Laufe der 1990er Jahre eingeführt wurden. Bei der Datenerhebung werden alle direktdemokratischen Verfahren in Demokratien auf nationaler Ebene berücksichtigt.



Das Projekt verfolgt in erster Linie eine wissenschaftliche Zielsetzung. Allerdings verspricht es auch Antworten auf eine Reihe aktueller, gesellschaftspolitischer Fragen. Denn derzeit werden die Chancen und Risiken direktdemokratischer Verfahren weltweit intensiv diskutiert. Umso wichtiger ist es, keine voreiligen Schlüsse aus einzelnen Verfahren oder aus Forschungen zu einzelnen Ländern zu ziehen, sondern die Ergebnisse umfassender Datensätze – auch jenseits der Schweiz und den USA – abzuwarten. Mit unserem Projekt leisten wir daher einen zentralen Beitrag für die gesellschaftspolitische Diskussion.





English:



(New) modes of participation, such as direct democratic votes, for a long time have been presented as a "cure" for rising inequalities in western societies. In practice these aspirations have proven themselves to be rather unrealistic. At least since the "Hamburger Schulentscheid" direct democratic votes have often been estimated to rather increase inequality. It is presumed that direct democracy hinders equality and exacerbates inequality. But do direct democratic votes really reinforce inequalities? This question is addressed not only within the public discourse but also in political science. While some authors proclaim the positive effect of referenda, others point to the dangers of direct democracy such as the possible discrimination of minorities. The current state of the art displays three research gaps that have not yet been addressed: first, the majority of academic work is limited to the comparative analysis on the subnational level (mostly Switzerland and the US). Second, predominantly one dimension of inequality, namely socio-economic inequality, is regarded. The other dimensions (political and legal) are mostly excluded from analysis. Third, often only the existence of direct democratic options has been inspected. What is missing is an in-depth review and analysis of the actual outputs of referenda. The project aims at closing these research gaps by drawing on datasets of national referenda in democracies worldwide from 1990-2015.



Based on theories of participation, inequality and institutions, the research project quantitative-comparatively examines the outputs of different direct democratic votes on socio-economic, legal, and political inequalities. We assume that direct democracy has an impact on all of these dimensions of inequality. Additionally, we expect different effects of different direct democratic instruments. We hope to add to the somewhat contradictory results of previous research, primarily based on Switzerland and the US, by deploying a more extensive database. Thereby this project contributes to a discourse in society. We focus on the timespan between 1990 and 2015, because in many states direct democratic options were introduced during the nineties.



First and foremost this project pursues an academic benefit. Additionally, it presents itself to be a promissory source for answers to current, socio-political issues. Currently opportunities and risks of direct democratic options are part of a worldwide discussion. Here, it is crucial not to jump to quick conclusions, but to make statements based on more extensive databases like those set up in our project.

Deutsch:



Auf die inkludierende Wirkung (neuer) Partizipationsformen, wie beispielsweise direktdemokratische Verfahren, wurden zeitweise große Hoffnungen gesetzt. Diese Hoffnungen haben sich jedoch als wenig realistisch erwiesen. Direktdemokratische Verfahren werden, hierzulande spätestens seit dem Hamburger Schulentscheid, häufig als Ungleichheit fördernd bewertet - Direktdemokratie würde Gleichheit eher verhindern und Ungleichheiten verschärfen. Doch tragen direktdemokratische Verfahren tatsächlich zur Stabilisierung oder sogar zu einer Vertiefung von Ungleichheiten bei? Das Projekt untersucht basierend auf partizipations-, ungleichheits- und institutionentheoretischen Zugängen quantitativ-vergleichend die Effekte unterschiedlicher direktdemokratischer Verfahrenstypen auf sozio-ökonomische, rechtliche und politische Ungleichheiten.



Wir gehen davon aus, dass sich direkte Demokratie auf alle Ungleichheitsdimensionen auswirkt. Zudem vermuten wir unterschiedliche Wirkungen unterschiedlicher direktdemokratischer Verfahren sowohl auf Ungleichheit als auch auf die Konfiguration des politischen Felds. Widersprüchliche Ergebnisse der bisherigen Forschung, die sich hauptsächlich auf die Schweiz und die USA beziehen, hoffen wir durch eine breitere Datenbasis aufklären zu können. Zur Analyse dieser Zusammenhänge untersuchen wir konkrete Policy-Entscheidungen in einer Vielzahl an (Glied-)Staaten quantitativ-statistisch und vergleichend. Dabei konzentrieren wir uns auf die Zeitspanne 1990-2015, da in vielen Staaten direktdemokratische Verfahren im Laufe der 1990er Jahre eingeführt wurden. Bei der Datenerhebung werden alle direktdemokratischen Verfahren in Demokratien auf nationaler Ebene berücksichtigt.



Das Projekt verfolgt in erster Linie eine wissenschaftliche Zielsetzung. Allerdings verspricht es auch Antworten auf eine Reihe aktueller, gesellschaftspolitischer Fragen. Denn derzeit werden die Chancen und Risiken direktdemokratischer Verfahren weltweit intensiv diskutiert. Umso wichtiger ist es, keine voreiligen Schlüsse aus einzelnen Verfahren oder aus Forschungen zu einzelnen Ländern zu ziehen, sondern die Ergebnisse umfassender Datensätze – auch jenseits der Schweiz und den USA – abzuwarten. Mit unserem Projekt leisten wir daher einen zentralen Beitrag für die gesellschaftspolitische Diskussion.





English:



(New) modes of participation, such as direct democratic votes, for a long time have been presented as a "cure" for rising inequalities in western societies. In practice these aspirations have proven themselves to be rather unrealistic. At least since the "Hamburger Schulentscheid" direct democratic votes have often been estimated to rather increase inequality. It is presumed that direct democracy hinders equality and exacerbates inequality. But do direct democratic votes really reinforce inequalities? This question is addressed not only within the public discourse but also in political science. While some authors proclaim the positive effect of referenda, others point to the dangers of direct democracy such as the possible discrimination of minorities. The current state of the art displays three research gaps that have not yet been addressed: first, the majority of academic work is limited to the comparative analysis on the subnational level (mostly Switzerland and the US). Second, predominantly one dimension of inequality, namely socio-economic inequality, is regarded. The other dimensions (political and legal) are mostly excluded from analysis. Third, often only the existence of direct democratic options has been inspected. What is missing is an in-depth review and analysis of the actual outputs of referenda. The project aims at closing these research gaps by drawing on datasets of national referenda in democracies worldwide from 1990-2015.



Based on theories of participation, inequality and institutions, the research project quantitative-comparatively examines the outputs of different direct democratic votes on socio-economic, legal, and political inequalities. We assume that direct democracy has an impact on all of these dimensions of inequality. Additionally, we expect different effects of different direct democratic instruments. We hope to add to the somewhat contradictory results of previous research, primarily based on Switzerland and the US, by deploying a more extensive database. Thereby this project contributes to a discourse in society. We focus on the timespan between 1990 and 2015, because in many states direct democratic options were introduced during the nineties.



First and foremost this project pursues an academic benefit. Additionally, it presents itself to be a promissory source for answers to current, socio-political issues. Currently opportunities and risks of direct democratic options are part of a worldwide discussion. Here, it is crucial not to jump to quick conclusions, but to make statements based on more extensive databases like those set up in our project.