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The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of political relations on trade in strategic emerging industries (SEIs) in the Belt and Road initiative (BRI) associated countries. This investigation encompasses not only from the perspective of bilateral political relations but also the political intervention of third parties.

The study employs the temporal exponential random graphmodel to analyze the dynamic structure and influencing factor of SEIs trade network among 150 BRI-associated countries from 2015 to 2020.

The results indicate that the trade of SEIs in the BRI-associated countries exhibits a pattern of concentrated exporters and decentralized importers. Amicable bilateral political relations foster trade cooperations in SEIs, while political pressure from the United States has the opposite effect. Furthermore, compared with the influence of third parties, the BRI has created a more robust trade environment characterized by political mutual trust.

BRI-associated countries should strengthen their political communication, and endeavor to transform political consensus and shared vision into concrete collaborative projects, while mitigating geopolitical uncertainties through a sound risk evaluation system. Moreover, they should establish a more transparent and consistent consultation mechanism and leverage the BRI trade network to foster balanced and mutually beneficial partnerships that minimize rivalry and dependence on a single market.

This study goes beyond observed trade cost and incorporates the political factor into the determinants of the BRI trade, thereby expanding the theoretical boundaries of existing BRI research. Also, this study employs bilateral trade data to construct SEIs trade networks (SEITNs) along the BRI route. It provides a comprehensive understanding of the dynamic determinates of the SEITNs will provide valuable practical guidance for enhancing and expanding trade and cooperation among BRI-associated countries.

This study aims to investigate the drivers of political embeddedness and the possible outcome in terms of autonomy and subsidiary unique competences.

This study draws on resource dependence theory and applies structural equation modeling on a sample of 193 subsidiaries.

Political embeddedness is confirmed as a source of potential autonomy and the development of competences and is usually boosted by previous existing networks at the internal and external levels.

The authors investigate and discuss how multinational corporations can leverage political resources in host-country political arenas, extending their understanding of the interplay between political activities and market strategies.

This study examined how likeminded Facebook comments with incivility and without supporting evidence influence readers' evaluations of the commenter and online political participation intention. This study also investigated whether the indirect effect of exposure to uncivil comments and comments without evidence on online political participation through evaluations of the commenters is contingent on the strength of partisanship.

The study used a 2 (uncivil comments vs civil comments) × 2 (comments without supporting evidence vs comments with supporting evidence) factorial design with a scenario about reading similar viewpoints about the gun control issue in Facebook comments.

The results showed that compared to exposure to civil agreeing comments, exposure to uncivil likeminded comments resulted in higher levels of negative evaluations of the commenters, which in turn decreased willingness to participate in political activities online. Exposure to comments without evidence led to more negative evaluations of the commenters, but it did not significantly influence online political participation. In addition, the strength of partisanship did not significantly moderate the indirect effect of exposure to uncivil comments and comments without evidence on online political participation through evaluations of the commenters.

Although previous studies have demonstrated the significant effects of incivility and reasoned argument, little is known about whether and how people evaluate ingroup members' comments that are uncivil and lacking reasoned arguments. Most of these studies have examined incivility in political contexts, but few have extended the context to the effect of likeminded comments, especially when the comments are uncivil and lack supporting evidence. The current study aims to fill this gap in the literature.

The performance of financial markets is significantly influenced by the political environment during general elections. This study investigates the effect of general elections on stock market performance in selected African markets.

Prior studies have been inconsistent in determining whether electioneering events negatively or positively influence stock market performance. The study utilized panel data set with annual observations from 1990 to 2020. The generalized method of moments (GMM) is employed to investigate the effect of electioneering and change in government on key stock market performance indicators, including stock market capitalization, stock market turnover ratio and the value of stock traded.

The study finds that electioneering activities generally have a positive impact on the performance of the stock market, whereas a change in government has a negative impact. As a result, the study recommends that stakeholders of the stock market remain vigilant and actively monitor electioneering events to devise and implement effective policies aimed at mitigating political risks during general elections. By adopting these measures, investor confidence can be significantly enhanced, fostering a more robust and secure investment environment.

The study investigates a neglected section of the literature by highlighting not only the effect of elections on stock market indicators but also possible change in government during elections.

Trade credit is an important business-to-business marketing tool for building firms’ competitive advantage. Many studies explore the determinants of trade credits from a trust-based view, but the role of political connections is largely overlooked, despite their potential influence in assessing firms’ trustworthiness in the context of emerging economies. This study aims to fill this gap by examining how political connections affect the capacity of emerging economy firms (EEFs) to grant and receive trade credit.

This study tests a conceptual model using secondary data collected from 1,149 Chinese privately owned listed manufacturing firms between 2008 and 2016.

This study finds that political connections reduce EEFs’ accounts receivable and payable; their philanthropic activities alleviate this negative effect for accounts payable, while patent applications reduce it for accounts receivable. These findings suggest the effect of political connections can spillover to EEFs’ relationship with their up- and down-stream partners.

This study has implications EEF managers, particularly in pointing to the detrimental effect of political connections on relationships with buyers and suppliers, and highlights the need to adopt suitable approaches to offset this effect.

This study sheds new light on the negative effect of political connections on EEFs’ capacity to grant and receive trade credit in their exchanges with up-stream and down-stream partners. It enriches the trust-based view of trade credit by revealing the significant influence of EEFs’ political connections, while also advancing a contingency view by testing the moderating role of corporate philanthropic activities and patent applications.

This study aims to examine the relationship between political regimes and e-government performance, with a focus on governments’ perspectives of e-government. First, the authors use United Nations (UN) E-government Development Index (EGDI) to establish the current patterns of e-government performance across different regime types, and then develop their own typology of the various perspectives of different political regime types to e-government adopted in the literature. The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between e-government performance and regime types.

This study adopts a mixed-method research approach that involves quantitative (statistical databases) as well as qualitative (interviews) methods to go beyond the statistics and obtain interpretations of explored patterns of e-government performance and regime types. The research instruments for this study include the Jupyter open-source software used for drawing the relevant correlations, and validating the results using expert interviews.

The results of the analysis support the research hypothesis that democracies have better e-government implementation than autocracies. The findings suggest that the type of a political regime has an influence on the conceptualization of e-government, the implementation of its practices and subsequently the assessment of its performance.

This study relies on the UN EGDI and data from previous literature. the UN Index only measures the supply side of government outputs without taking into consideration their impact on citizens, which does not provide a holistic view of the whole picture. Therefore, the UN EGDI rankings do not necessarily imply citizen satisfaction or improved e-government.

From a practice point of view, this study gives information to government leaders as well as technical experts on how the political regime influences the government’s performance in e-government. In fact, this paper bridges the gap between theory and practice by calling policymakers to take different regime worldviews and motivations into consideration before setting e-government strategies or even assessing e-government performance. Considering the current global digital transformation, it should be ensured that practitioners take these regime specifications into consideration. In the long term, the results of this research will prove that setting up e-government or e-participation platforms is not enough as technology alone is not enough to strengthen democracy or let alone stimulate citizen engagement. When dealing with e-government initiatives, the focus should be broadened beyond the technological aspect and take the social and political motivations of governments into consideration.

From a theoretical standpoint, this study calls for a more holistic e-government performance indicator that could take the regime perspectives into consideration and integrate them into its evaluation process. An indicator that can accommodate the different objectives pursued by different regime types. This could also be achieved by setting two indicators with each one matching the perspective of the specific regime type, which takes us to Ashby’s “Law of Requisite Variety” (1991). The Law of Requisite Variety states that “the system must possess as much regulatory variety as can be expected from the environment” (Ashby, 1956). This law has some implications for this study. It implies that the regime worldview influences the requisite variety depending on the political context where e-government is being implemented. Because we have two regime worldviews, we need to have at least two responses (in this case indicators) that consider the variety of political contexts. Therefore, through appreciating the differences between these two worldviews, this study recommends using the Law of Requisite Variety to investigate the influence of political regimes on e-government. In the same way, in our repertoire of responses, we should not assume that one discipline has the answer but have a variety of cross-disciplinary responses.

The contribution of this study lies in going beyond the statistical analyses of the UN EGDI to come up with possible interpretations of the reasons why political regimes differ in their e-government performance and what could be the reasons behind such variations. Based on analyzing correlations between e-participation performance and regime types, and interviews with experts, two different e-government perspectives could be identified: one for democracies and one for autocracies. Through identifying the relationship between these perspectives and the e-government performance of each regime type, this study provides governments and policy makers with new evidence that different regime types have different motivations for developing their e-government performance. Hence, e-government policies and strategies ought to match particular political contexts.

Charitable giving in China has moved from being subjected to government attention and public skepticism to receiving government encouragement and public support. The role played by political connections in philanthropy is indisputable, although very few studies have explored their association from the perspective of the country’s first Charity Law of 2016. This study aims to contribute to the ongoing debate about the 2016 Charity Law and offers an understanding of the future trends in corporate charitable giving.

Using empirical analysis of data collected from listed companies in China, this study analyzes the impact of political connections on corporate charitable giving before and after the 2016 Charity Law. The study adopts three leading theories from previous research into corporate charitable giving and political connections: corporate social responsibility, resource dependence theory and stakeholder theory. A conceptual framework is outlined, and hypotheses are formulated accordingly.

The results show that political connections have a substantial positive impact on corporate charitable giving, both before and after the implementation of the 2016 Charity Law, which has significantly promoted and increased the amount and proportion of charitable giving. Although the 2016 Charity Law attempted to weaken the political connections of enterprises, the influence of political connections on corporate charitable giving has proved difficult to diminish or eliminate, as charity is dominated by the state.

This study explores the association between political connections and corporate charitable giving from the perspective of China’s Charity Law of 2016.

In the face of increasing political polarization worldwide, this study explores whether people create biased perceptions of political knowledge and how this affects their selection and evaluation of political content on YouTube.

For this study, an online experiment was conducted with 441 panels of South Korean respondents. In the first phase, participants answered 10 questions designed to capture their level of objective political knowledge, and for each question, they indicated whether they had responded to that question correctly as a means of measuring their subjective political knowledge. In the second phase, two types of YouTube thumbnails were presented to represent progressive and conservative claims on two controversial political issues, and participants rated and selected the content they would like to see.

Participants with low political knowledge perceived their knowledge as more than it really was. In contrast, participants with high political knowledge perceived their political knowledge as less than it really was. This biased perception of political knowledge influences respondents' choice and evaluation of political YouTube channel videos.

At a time when political polarization is increasing around the world, this study sought to explore how perceptions of political knowledge differ from actual political knowledge by applying the Dunning-Kruger effect. The authors also used political YouTube channels, whose role in forming public opinion and political influence is rapidly growing, to study the behavior and attitudes of a group of Korean respondents in the media according to their actual and perceived level of political literacy.

This study aims to examine the role of hope and hate in political leaders’ messages in influencing liberals versus conservatives’ social-distancing behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the increasing political partisanship across the world today, using the appropriate message framing has important implications for social and public policy.

The authors use two Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods – a pretrained package (HateSonar) and a classifier built to implement our supervised neural network-based model architecture using RoBERTa – to analyze 61,466 tweets by each US state’s governor and two senators with the goal of examining the association between message factors invoking hate and hope and increased or decreased social distancing from March to May 2020. The authors examine individuals’ social-distancing behaviors (the amount of nonessential driving undertaken) using data from 3,047 US counties between March 13 and May 31, 2020, as reported by Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports and the New York Times repository of COVID-19 data.

The results show that for conservative state leaders, the use of hate increases nonessential driving of state residents. However, when these leaders use hope in their speech, nonessential driving of state residents decreases. For liberal state leaders, the use of hate displays a directionally different result as compared to their conservative counterparts.

Amid the emergence of new analytic techniques and novel data sources, the findings demonstrate that the use of global positioning systems data and social media analysis can provide valuable and precise insights into individual behavior. They also contribute to the literature on political ideology and emotion by demonstrating the use of specific emotion appeals in targeting specific consumer segments based on their political ideology.

The findings have significant implications for policymakers and public health officials regarding the importance of considering partisanship when developing and implementing public health policies. As partisanship continues to increase, applying the appropriate emotion appeal in messages will become increasingly crucial. The findings can help marketers and policymakers develop more effective social marketing campaigns by tailoring specific appeals given the political identity of the consumer.

Using Neural NLP methods, this study identifies the specific factors linking social media messaging from political leaders and increased compliance with health directives in a partisan population.

There are many factors that determine consumers’ satisfaction. Specifically, the current study examines how political-economic views affect the perception of public services. This study also aims to extend the relationship between public service satisfaction and political-economic opinion from an empirical perspective.

The analysis process is carried out with the Microdataset of the Life Satisfaction Survey. Independent sample t-test which compares individual public service satisfaction ratings and ordinal probit regression models assesses the impacts of political-economic attitude on public service satisfaction.

According to the findings, household size and gender impact public service satisfaction. Again, service satisfaction diminishes as the education level rises. Moreover, a person’s political-economic view affects their public service satisfaction. The study has the potential to literature in terms of determining society’s political-economic view on public services with these empirical results.

The study’s use of the state as a point of reference and quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the service exchange between the citizen and the state is a significant difference in the literature. Also, unlike the other studies, this one used microdata to test the relationship between the political-economic type and the level of satisfaction with public services at different levels. It is thought that future studies on the determinants of public service satisfaction, to be carried out in different country samples, will contribute to the field.

This study has implications on whether the perception of public service varies according to partisanship status.

This study has implications on whether the perception of public service varies according to partisanship status.

This study determines the interaction between the political-economic typology derived from microdata and the satisfaction level variables related to public services offered at different levels. It also evaluates how public service satisfaction differs regarding personality traits and political-economic attitudes.