Social Choice Research Articles

Mood, Activity Participation, and Leisure Engagement Satisfaction (MAPLES): results from a randomised controlled pilot feasibility trial for low mood in acquired brain injury

BackgroundAcquired brain injury (ABI) is linked to increased depression risk. Existing therapies for depression in ABI (e.g., cognitive behavioural therapy) have mixed efficacy. Behavioural activation (BA), an intervention that encourages engaging in positively reinforcing activities, shows promise. The primary aims were to assess feasibility, acceptability, and potential efficacy of two 8-week BA groups.MethodsAdults (≥ 18 years) recruited from local ABI services, charities, and self-referral via social media were randomised to condition. The Activity Planning group (AP; “traditional” BA) trained participants to plan reinforcing activities over 8 weeks. The Activity Engagement group (AE; “experiential” BA) encouraged engagement in positive activities within session only. Both BA groups were compared to an 8-week Waitlist group (WL). The primary outcomes, feasibility and acceptability, were assessed via recruitment, retention, attendance, and qualitative feedback on groups. The secondary outcome, potential efficacy, was assessed via blinded assessments of self-reported activity levels, depression, and anxiety (at pre- and post-intervention and 1 month follow-up) and were compared across trial arms. Data were collected in-person and remotely due to COVID-19.ResultsN = 60 participants were randomised to AP (randomised n = 22; total n = 29), AE (randomised n = 22; total n = 28), or re-randomised following WL (total n = 16). Whether in-person or remote, AP and AE were rated as similarly enjoyable and helpful. In exploring efficacy, 58.33% of AP members had clinically meaningful activity level improvements, relative to 50% AE and 38.5% WL. Both AP and AE groups had depression reductions relative to WL, but only AP participants demonstrated anxiety reductions relative to AE and WL. AP participants noted benefits of learning strategies to increase activities and learning from other group members. AE participants valued social discussion and choice in selecting in-session activities.ConclusionsBoth in-person and remote group BA were feasible and acceptable in ABI. Though both traditional and experiential BA may be effective, these may have different mechanisms.Trial registrationClinicaltrials.gov, NCT03874650. Protocol version 2.3, May 26 2020.

SOCIAL CAPITAL, EDUCATION AND CHOICE JOB SEARCH METHODS IN SENEGAL

The objective of this paper is to analyze the microeconomic impact of education on well-being, as measured by social capital in terms of the different means used to search for a job in Senegal. The endogenous variable (social capital) is categorized into four sub-modalities represented as follows: « Personal relations », « Advertisements-firms » composed of advertisements/media/internet and applications to firms; « Agencies-State » composed of the civil service, the employment office, private placement agencies and competitions/tests; and « Other » composed of the search for partners, the search for financing or any other means. The exogenous characteristic variables are the different levels of education (primary, middle, secondary and higher), the gender, the age and the marital status of the individuals aged at least 15 years. The data come from the ANSD's (2020) Senegal Poverty Monitoring Survey database on a sample of 168,203 individuals. Using Stata, the results obtained through estimation by the multinomial logistic method (MLM) show that only higher education has a positive and significant impact on all the means used to look for a job in Senegal, but at different levels and probabilities. This article suggests a strong expansion of networks of acquaintances and mutual aid because the higher the individual's social capital, the more chance he has of interacting with others, broadening his contacts and improving his well-being. Combined with a higher level of education, it offers job-seekers more opportunities to succeed in their search.

On a class of strategy-proof social choice correspondences with single-peaked utility functions

We consider the problem of constructing strategy-proof rules that choose sets of alternatives based on the preferences of voters, modelled as Social Choice Correspondences (SCCs) in the literature. We focus on two domain restrictions inspired by Barberà et al. (2001) in the context of single-peaked utility functions. We find that for the narrower domain, the set of tops-only, unanimous, and strategy-proof SCCs coincides with the class of unions of two min–max rules (Moulin, 1980). For the broader domain, the set of SCCs coincides with the class of unions of two ‘adjacent’ min–max rules, meaning the corresponding parameters for the two rules must be either the same or consecutive alternatives.

Leisure and social occupational choice within nursing home facilities in Ireland: Residents perspectives

Background National standards for nursing homes in Ireland require that residents are offered a choice of recreational and stimulating activities to meet their needs and preferences. Aims/Objectives To investigate residents’ perceptions of leisure and social occupational choice in nursing homes in Ireland to determine if occupational choice is facilitated. Materials and method Qualitative-descriptive design – nursing home residents completed two semi-structured interviews that explored their experiences of leisure and social occupational engagement. Results Two overarching themes with six associated sub-themes emerged. From residents’ perspectives, social and leisure occupational choice was dependent on: Environmental factors (nursing homes’ Cultural, Social, Physical, and Temporal Environments) and Personal factors (residents’ Health Status and Personal Attitudes). Conclusion The cultural environment had the most significant influence on residents’ leisure and social occupational choice, highlighting the importance of person-centred care within nursing homes, to promote occupational choice. Resident’s health status was also identified as a contributing factor. Significance Occupational therapists could play a critical role in supporting the leisure and social occupational choices of nursing home residents by developing residents’ skills, educating staff and adapting tasks and the environment to limit/reduce occupational deprivation.

Clashes and agreements between regulatory agencies and courts: The influence on regulatory governance

Literature on the operation of regulatory agencies and their interactions with the executive branch of government is well established. Much less attention has been devoted to the relationship between these agencies and the courts, especially in case of judicial review of regulators’ decisions. This paper examines how judicial review of regulatory decisions produces clashes and agreements between regulatory agencies and the courts, and the influence of these relationships on regulatory governance. The research was conducted in Brazil with 21 interviews, consisting of eight officials of six federal regulatory agencies, seven attorneys from five agencies, and six federal judges. Regulatory governance, institutional theory, and regulatory overlap were the main analytical frameworks for this research. Data was subjected to content analysis. The findings showed that judicial review plays an important role in the overlapping scopes between courts and regulatory agencies. The institutional details of regulatory governance are crucial for the regulatory bodies to function. Despite the conflicts, judges seek more coordination with regulators, because of a greater awareness of the specifics of regulatory policies. Attorneys of regulatory bodies perform a key role in the dialogue between regulators and courts, especially by bridging the gap between technical and legal protocols. Regulatory litigation provides powerful economic agents with the opportunity to obtain a successful remittance of fines, thereby diluting the regulators’ ability to enforce regulation. Points for practitioners Judicial review is the only coordinating mechanism between regulatory agencies and the courts and plays a crucial role in defining regulatory policies and in controlling administrative behavior. In the process of judicial review, regulatory bodies confront the uncertainties that mark the blurred boundaries between the roles performed by state actors and authorities in dealing with regulation. By examining the Brazilian case, the research sheds light on regulatory governance and deals with the balance of power between the judiciary and formally independent regulatory bodies. The findings indicate the value of closer dialogue between regulators and courts in a context where regulatory agencies are increasingly called upon to make important technical and social choices on highly sensitive public issues.

A Study on the Popularity of MBTI in Social Media Platform Brings Self-labeling and Group Stereotype to College Students

With the development of the Internet, MBTI personality test has rapidly entered the field of view of college students with its accessible and entertaining characteristics. For college students who are in a period of life choice and confusion, the relatively scientific MBTI personality test has become an important rely on their self-cognition and group sociability. In order to explore the negative impact of MBTI personality test on college students, quantitative statistics were carried out through questionnaires and PLS-SEM to analyze its impact on college students self-cognition and social choice. From the results, there are negative effects on college students such as self-labeling and group stereotype, which is not conducive to the formation of correct self-cognition. In addition, through the analysis of the results, it is found that the Internet and the intervention of intelligent algorithms have played a non-negligible intermediary role. Therefore, at the level of solutions, it is suggested that students improve their own literacy and emphasize the role of the Internet as a correct guide to improve the existing problems.

Gender Reconstruction in Visual Form of Teaching Material

Background: 
 Gender has become a crucial area of research due to the unpleasant experience of gender disparity in the workplace, home, and other settings, including education, health, and civic engagement. The ideal way to promote gender equality early on is to guarantee everyone access to a high-quality education. The learning process is greatly aided by textbooks. Through language, visuals, stories, and illustrations, gender content is developed and represented in books. Given that the textbook serves as the primary means of instruction, it is crucial to examine how gender is constructed in Kontakte Deutsch 1, the widely used textbook in Indonesia.
 Methodology: 
 A descriptive qualitative methodology was used in this study's Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach. The research data source was from illustrations, words, and stories in the textbook Kontakte Deutsch 1.
 Findings: 
 The results showed that male and female figures appeared visually at the same frequency. In categories like social roles, passions, and professional choices, gender equality was noted and portrayed. Inequalities such as stereotyping, gender subordination, and marginalization of gender were still present in a tiny proportion of phrases and narratives.
 Conclusion: 
 This study demonstrated how the authors of Kontakte Deutsch 1 made an effort to advance gender equality principles through linked topics. Gender discrimination only appeared in a minor portion of the story. 
 Originality: 
 There have been no studies on gender reconstruction in Kontakte Deutsch 1, commonly used in Indonesian high schools. This thorough investigation deepens our understanding of how gender is portrayed in instructional materials and emphasizes the significance of treating all genders equally and respectfully.

Everyday sense making and the discursive delineation of social policy space in Zambia

AbstractThis article connects the notions of policy space and social contract in order to understand the importance of everyday discourse for the perceived legitimacy of social policy choices and emerging responsibilities in Zambia. Based on a Grounded Theory analysis of interview and document material, the article reconstructs common sense ideas about the limited resources of the state, from which modalities in the Social Cash Transfer programme, especially the requirements for targeting and graduation, are derived. It moreover explores how from these limited means also follows the sharing of responsibilities between the state and the recipients themselves, giving way to a self‐responsibility discourse. Thereby, the attempt by implementing officers and the wider community to rationalise distributional choices in light of wide‐spread poverty, shape the social contract between the state and citizens in Zambia and ultimately also delineate the space of what becomes possible to imagine within social policy. The article concludes with an argument for broadening social policy visions away from the individual level towards tackling the underlying structural causes of poverty by connecting social with economic interventions.

Multidimension: a dimensionality extension of simple games

In voting theory and social choice theory, decision systems can be represented as simple games, i.e., cooperative games defined through their players or voters and their set of winning coalitions. The weighted voting games form a well-known strict subclass of simple games, where each player has a voting weight so that a coalition wins if the sum of weights of their members exceeds a given quota. Since the number of winning coalitions can be exponential in the number of players, simple games can be represented much more compactly as intersections or unions of weighted voting games. A simple game’s dimension (codimension) is the minimum number of weighted voting games such that their intersection (union) is the given game. It is known there are voting systems with a high (co)dimension. This work introduces the multidimension as the minimum size of an expression with intersections and unions on weighted voting games necessary to obtain the considered simple game. We generalize this notion to subclasses of weighted voting games and analyze the generative properties of these subclasses. We also characterize the simple games with finite generalized multidimension over the set of weighted voting games without dummy players. We provide a comprehensive classification for simple games up to a certain number of players. These results complement similar classification results for generalized (co)dimensions. Our results show how generalized multidimension allows representing more simple games and more compactly, even for a small number of players and for subclasses.

Symmetric mechanism design: Comment

In an earlier paper published in this journal, Azrieli and Jain (2018) claim that a social choice function (SCF) is symmetrically implementable in a dominant strategy equilibrium only if the SCF is symmetric. This result crucially relies on their notion of dominant strategy, which is used in the game theory literature and is stronger than the one traditionally used in the mechanism design literature. We discuss the limitation of using their notion in mechanism design and provide a set of characterizations of symmetric mechanism design using the (weaker) standard notion that differ from their findings.

Impacts of unconditional cash transfers on health care utilisation in informal sector households in Togo.

Most Togolese population earns their income from informal sector, and they are very often exposed to health outcomes. Cash transfers impact healthcare utilization by improving household's social capital, socio-economic status, lifestyle choice, and physical health. The aim of this paper was to analyse the impact of unconditional cash transfers on health care utilisation in informal sector households. We used the propensity-score method to compare health care utilisation by households that received cash transfers from nonbeneficiary households and simulated a potential confounder to assess the robustness of the impacts of the estimated treatment (i.e., cash transfer). Data were obtained from a national survey that covered 1405 households. The results show that women benefited the most from cash transfers (73.1%). Our estimates indicate that health care utilisation increased by 28.3% among workers in the informal sectors who benefited from unconditional cash transfers compared to nonbeneficiaries. The greatest impact was found on agriculture households with an increase by 31.3% in the health care utilisation. In general, cash transfer beneficiaries are more likely to use public health centres; there was an increase in public health facility attendance of 21.3%. Cash transfers are a valuable social protection instrument that improve health care utilisation of populations in the informal sector. Policymakers could use cash transfer as the infusion of income and/or assets that may impact health outcomes. Cash transfers are an opportunity to alleviate barriers of access to health care by older people. Future research must examine impact of cash transfer on health of vulnerable groups such as older people, children, and people with disabilities.

Theoretical approach to the concept of sociometry and its benefits for the social sciences

Sociometry allows researchers to quantify social relationships' preferences, choices, and rejections, facilitating an in-depth understanding of social structure and group cohesion. The study aimed to analyze the relevance and applicability of sociometrics for social research. A qualitative literature review research was conducted using a rigorous process of selecting documents in the Scopus database. This article comprehensively reviews sociometrics, a methodological and theoretical tool developed to measure interpersonal relationships and dynamics within groups and communities. The benefits of applying sociometric analysis in various fields, such as social psychology, education, social work, and community organization, were discussed. In addition, methodological and ethical challenges inherent in using sociometrics are addressed, and future directions for research are suggested. Sociometry has important relevance as a powerful tool for analyzing social networks, improving group dynamics, and designing more inclusive and functional environments.

Fun with Frustration? TikTok Influencers’ Emotional Expression Predicts User Engagement with COVID-19 Vaccination Messages

ABSTRACT This study examined what kinds of TikTok video and message features are associated with user engagement in the context of COVID-19 vaccination. Content analysis was applied to study a sample of 223 COVID-19 vaccination-related videos from creators with at least 10,000 followers. The content analysis involved coding themes, video formats, the valence of attitude toward vaccination, and emotional expressions from the influencers. A majority of videos showcased personal vaccination experiences, followed by fictitious dramas and instructional information. More fictitious dramas expressed unclear attitudes, neither explicitly supporting nor opposing the COVID-19 vaccine, compared to personal vaccination stories and instructional videos. Some imaginative and dramatic scenes, such as zombie transformation or dramatic spasms after taking the vaccines, were widely imitated across influencers, perhaps humorously, and raised concerns about diminishing positive images of vaccine uptake. Videos with simultaneous expression of humor and frustration significantly predicted engagement when the video content opposed or was uncertain about taking the vaccine, implying the effectiveness of mixed emotional attributes within a message. This study provides insight into how social context and message choices by creators interact to influence audience engagement.

Applied Democracy in Light of the Five “Iso”s of Democracy

Athenian democracy, with its five criteria, expresses an understanding and internalization of its components and thus becomes virtue. Modern democracies should strive to maintain a long process based on education for substantive democracy, and those that only emphasize the formal aspect, express a partial application of democracy. In such a situation, damage to democracy occurs. We argue that democracy can be treated as a collection of practices in the polity area by analyzing the politics and strategies of defending democracy as well as human rights. To do so, it is suggested here to integrate the tools of social choice theory with a unique institutionalist perspective that looks at both formal and informal factors. This notion creates the need to develop effective strategies for defending democracy and human rights.

How hard is safe bribery?

Bribery in an election is one of the well-studied control problems in computational social choice. In this paper, we propose and study the safe bribery problem. Here the goal of the briber is to ask the bribed voters to vote in such a way that the briber never prefers the original winner (of the unbribed election) more than the new winner, even if the bribed voters do not fully follow the briber's advice. Indeed, in many applications of bribery, campaigning for example, the briber often has limited control on whether the bribed voters eventually follow her recommendation and thus it is conceivable that the bribed voters can either partially or fully ignore the briber's recommendation. We provide a comprehensive complexity theoretic landscape of the safe bribery problem for many common voting rules in this paper.

Rights Systems and Aggregation Functions on Property Spaces

The notion of decisive coalitions of voters with different grades of decisiveness is a part of the mathematical framework for many models in social choice theory. More generally, we study aggregation problems in which a subgroup of decision makers have the right to determine the properties of the aggregate. Then, we introduce property spaces and rights to properties and characterize aggregation operators that are consistent with rights to properties. Moreover, we define congruences in property spaces, and we propose a generalization of the Sugeno integral in our framework.

Stated preference methods and STI policy studies: a foreground approach

Abstract This discussion article explores the ontological and epistemic basis for analysing social preferences in the broader interdisciplinary field of Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI) policy studies and its evaluation using stated preference (SP) methods. STI policy studies base their approximations of policy problems on a revealed preference (RP) approach, which analyses economic agents' actual market behaviours based on standardized data sources. SP methods arose as an alternative to address the analysis of public goods for which the market fails to assign prices efficiently and can only be evaluated in hypothetical or contingent situations. In an analytical context of complexity defined by grand societal challenges related to the provision of public goods to be addressed by STI transformative policies, analysing social preferences by SP methods could support a more robust and holistic approach to STI policy analysis and its evaluation, improving the policy-making process and promoting more informed policy mixes and evaluation policy mixes. A kind of Kantian categorical imperative favouring SP methods is discussed based on the new STI policy research agenda on transformative change and supported by axiology around social choice, welfare, and a more participative STI policy governance.

The emergence of social choice at the Cowles Commission, 1948–1952: Arrow’s Social Choice and Individual Values in context

Kenneth Arrow’s Social Choice and Individual Values (Cowles Monograph No. 12, 1951), a work that established the field of social choice and set the limits for what public economic theory could hope to achieve, was formulated at the Cowles Commission at the University of Chicago from 1947 to 1949 (and during the summer of 1948 at the RAND Corporation) in a context in which concern with using economic theory to guide the economy was intense. During the period just before he shared in developing the Arrow-Debreu-McKenzie proof of existence of general equilibrium, Arrow moved through a series of papers to prove the non-existence of a social welfare function. The context of Arrow’s non-existence proof for aggregation of individual preferences into social welfare function and to Arrow’s shift from trying to prove a possibility theorem for social welfare to proving an impossibility theorem has been confused by a reprinted and influential reminiscence in which Arrow mis-remembered when he had spent a summer at RAND and when he had presented his impossibility theorem to the Econometric Society.

Computations of volumes in five candidates elections

We describe several analytical (i.e., precise) results obtained in five candidates social choice elections under the assumption of the Impartial Anonymous Culture. These include the Condorcet and Borda paradoxes, as well as the Condorcet efficiency of plurality, negative plurality and Borda voting, including their runoff versions. The computations are done by Normaliz. It finds precise probabilities as volumes of polytopes in dimension 119, using its recent implementation of the Lawrence algorithm.

Capitalismo de plataforma e tipologia constitucional das plataformas digitais: entre mercados, praças públicas, anfiteatros e estradas

This text deals with a proposed classification of digital platforms, based on a constitutional typology and represented by the archetypes of the “Market”, the “Public Square”, the “Amphitheatre” and the “Roads”. The article begins by analyzing the heuristics for understanding the digital age (speed, complexity, ambivalence, and uncertainty). In sequence, the industrial and communication revolutions are covered, until the advent of the digital age. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that technological progress is not a simple deterministic march but is also subject to political and social choices. It continues with the exposition of the evolution of the concept of platform, its main characteristics (network effects, non-neutrality of prices, scalability at “almost zero” marginal cost, intensive use of data and algorithms, and tendency to concentration in quasi-natural monopolies). Moreover, the current concept of the multilateral digital platform is presented, as well as its main functions (coordination, governance, and dispute resolution). The article ends with an analysis of the main classifications already presented for digital platforms, as well as proposing the outline of a new classification, based on the aforementioned constitutional typology.