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This article explores the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in political campaigns, with a specific focus on the case of Imran Khan and the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party. The PTI utilized AI to create speeches and statements in Khan's voice, which generated positive attention and support for the party. However, the use of AI in politics raises concerns about the potential threat to democratic elections, as seen with the emergence of deepfakes during the 2020 US presidential election. The article emphasizes the importance of transparency and ethical use of AI in politics, while also discussing the risks of disinformation and the impact of AI on the information ecosystem. [Extracted from the article]

Over the past decade, political advertising via social media has grown rapidly, spurred by microtargeting, which looks to deliver specific messages to tightly defined audiences. Microtargeting strategies have been claimed to be effective, but questions remain around their cost, when looking to optimise impressions for a given budget. We analyse 11,837 ads aired on Snapchat over a two-year period leading up to the 2020 presidential election in the United States, which differ in the number of targeting criteria applied. We compare the number of impressions and the spend per ad placement (measured in CPM), whilst also considering the length of advertising schedule. We find that using fewer targeting criteria and longer schedules increases impressions with comparable or lower spend than microtargeting. These findings are in line with those from traditional broadcast media, such as TV, highlighting the relevance of existing media scheduling knowledge from traditional platforms for political advertising on newer, digital media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores why lawyers participate in attacks on the rule of law by examining the career trajectories of lawyers involved in the “Stop the Steal” campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 US presidential election. The article uses biographical information about “Trump lawyers” to identify distinctive paths into the campaign and to analyze how those paths were shaped by the interplay of individual motives, like money and power, and structural factors, like political context and practice site. Mapping the roles lawyers played in the 2020 election attack, the article proposes a typology of career trajectories into autocratic movements and considers what they teach about the influence of rising polarization and stratification on American lawyers' relationship to democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the challenges faced by misinformation researchers as they work to understand the complex ecosystem of misinformation and its impact. Topics include defining what constitutes misinformation, the politicization of the issue, and the difficulty in measuring the real-world harms of misinformation. Despite the growing body of research, the field still grapples with ambiguity in terms of how misinformation is identified and how it spreads across political divides.

"Wronged and Dangerous" by Karen Lee Ashcraft is a book that explores the intersections of gender, masculinity, and populism. Ashcraft argues that the global surge of populism is fueled by aggrieved masculinity, which she refers to as "viral masculinity." This connection between gender and populism poses a threat to public health, as seen during the COVID-19 pandemic. The book calls for a shift in perspective, focusing on how populism spreads rather than solely on its content, and emphasizes the need for empathy and understanding in addressing the issue. Ashcraft's framework adds valuable dimensions to the ongoing discourse on work and organizations, introducing concepts such as "lateral empathy," "aggrieved masculinity," and "viral masculinity" that contribute to a deeper understanding of contemporary organizations. [Extracted from the article]

Hindsight bias – also known as the knew-it-all-along effect – is a ubiquitous judgment error affecting decision makers. Hindsight bias has been shown to vary across age groups and as a function of contextual factors, such as the decision maker’s emotional state. Despite theoretical reasons why emotions might have a stronger impact on hindsight bias in older than in younger adults, age differences in hindsight bias for emotional events remain relatively underexplored. We examined emotion and hindsight bias in younger and older adults (N = 272) against the backdrop of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Participants predicted electoral college votes for the two presidential candidates before the election and were asked to remember their predictions approximately three weeks later, after the election results had been finalised. Republicans, for whom the electoral outcome was negatively tinged, exhibited greater hindsight bias for President Biden’s result compared with Democrats, for whom the electoral outcome was positive. The asymmetry in hindsight bias between Republicans and Democrats was similar for younger and older participants. This study suggests that negative emotions may exacerbate hindsight bias, and that adult age differences in hindsight bias observed in laboratory settings may not translate to real-world contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe the creation and verification of databases of all precinct boundaries used in the United States 2016, 2018, and 2020 November general elections, enhanced with election results for all partisan statewide offices. United States election officials report election results in the smallest geographic reporting known as the precinct. Scholars and practitioners find these election results valuable for numerous use cases. However, these data cannot be augmented with other geographically-bound data, such as U.S. Census data, without precinct boundaries. Here we describe the collection of precinct boundary data from state and local election officials, sometimes provided in GIS formats, images, text descriptions, and – in rare cases – verbally. We describe how we verify boundaries with other election data, such as geocoded voter registration files. Our open-source data has appeared in redistricting litigation argued before the United States Supreme Court; and has been used by state and local redistricting authorities, media organizations, advocacy groups, scholars, and a vibrant community of mapping enthusiasts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The special issue of the Journal of Political Marketing focuses on the 2022 United States congressional midterm elections, which defied expectations by resulting in Republicans winning control of the House by a narrow margin and losing a Senate seat. Factors such as former President Donald Trump's influence, the Dobbs v. Jackson decision on abortion policy, and economic conditions played significant roles in shaping the election outcomes. The issue includes articles by scholars exploring various aspects of the 2022 midterms, such as the impact of candidate experience, redistricting effects, and social media networks on voting behavior. [Extracted from the article]

Losing an election can be a huge blow. As a result, most elections are associated with a mixture of trepidation and optimism (outgroup vs. ingroup political party winning, respectively). However, we propose that levels of anxiety and future dread in the context of an election are enhanced when society is characterised by deep intergroup divisions and morally charged polarisation. Across two studies spanning two national elections (the 2020 U.S. presidential election and the 2021 Dutch general election; N = 1,079), we examined support for the prediction that projected moral polarisation in the aftermath of an election would be associated with enhanced perceived negative consequences of losing that election (i.e., an outgroup political party winning power). We consistently found that projected moral polarisation when anticipating an election loss predicted enhanced anxiety concerning the future state of society (collective angst), higher perceived likelihood of civil war, and a stronger perceived obligation to fight to overturn the results of the election. Moreover, this association was mediated by the perceived breakdown of leadership in society. The current findings have important implications for understanding the societal and political consequences of moral polarisation, including the potential for enhanced intergroup conflict and threats to democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigated COVID-19 Anxiety Scale (CAS) scores for participants from blue states, red states, and purple states across 276 days ranging from April 18, 2020 to January 23, 2021. The CAS scores increased with knowing and caring for an individual with COVID-19, following social distancing guidelines, hours talking and thinking about COVID-19, hypochondria, neuroticism, depression, anxiety, stress, negative PANAS, and time, whereas they decreased with positive PANAS. More importantly, the CAS scores were higher for participants from blue states than for participants from purple states, and the positive relation between CAS scores and time was only significant for participants from blue states. We connected media events that occurred concurrently for high CAS scores overall and for high CAS scores for participants from blue states. The spikes in CAS ratings occurred along with COVID-19 contagion, partisan reactions to protests for slain African Americans (e.g., George Floyd), and the 2020 presidential election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What explains politicians' involvement in foreign elections? Understanding this behavior is important not only because it has received little scholarly attention but also because it could undermine public faith in electoral integrity in target countries. In this study, I consider an electorally based explanation, which suggests that politicians' electoral incentives to appeal to expatriate voters in a foreign country can explain their rhetorical involvement in that country's elections. I test this argument in the context of the 2020 US presidential election, where more than 50 Colombian MPs extensively promoted or attacked Joe Biden and Donald Trump on social media. My analysis indicates that whether Colombian MPs competed for Colombian Americans' votes and their popularity in the US are the systematic correlates of how much they got involved in the 2020 US election. The findings highlight how diaspora enfranchisement is important to understand elite online communication that cuts across national borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2020 US election witnessed a surge of false claims on social media platforms asserting electoral fraud. Consequently, we ask the question, would greater online political engagement reduce perceived electoral integrity? We also explore whether the effects of online political participation on electoral integrity are contingent upon partisanship and news literacy. We use responses from a two-wave online panel survey conducted in the US before the November 2020 Presidential elections. Autoregressive regression models are employed to test the hypotheses. First, the findings suggest that those who engaged in greater online political engagement were more likely to doubt electoral integrity. Next, Republicans and those with lower levels of news literacy were also more skeptical of the electoral process. Further, moderation analyses suggest that the adverse effects of online political participation on perceived electoral integrity were more significant for Democrats and Independents than Republicans (perhaps because of ceiling effects). Finally, the relationship between online political participation and evaluations of electoral integrity is not contingent upon news literacy. Overall, the findings offer insight into how online political participation may erode electoral integrity for online users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent evidence suggests that cross-partisan conversation can reduce affective polarization. Yet, this evidence comes from experiments that dampen the contentious features of political environments like elections. We expected that cross-partisan conversation will be less effective at reducing affective polarization for partisans who experience partisan group threat from an election loss. We test our theory using a preregistered experiment in which Democrats and Republicans chatted via text online. Participants discussed the 2020 presidential election immediately following Biden's inauguration, a contentious context that we show differentially amplified feelings of group threat among Republicans. However, for both sides, cross-partisan conversations reduced out-party animosity for at least three days, reduced social polarization, but did not increase perceptions of election integrity. Our results suggest that cross-partisan conversation can effectively reduce affective polarization among both Republicans and Democrats even in contentious contexts that amplify group threat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research analyzes mass media coverage of The Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and Stop Enabling Online Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), two landmark 2018 bills that changed how sexual content is moderated by internet service providers in the United States. Using critical discourse analysis, I compare the framing of 101 news stories about FOSTA-SESTA published in mainstream U.S. newspapers, feminist media, and LGBTQ magazines over the course of 7 years. Findings describe coverage of online sex work, online child sexual exploitation, and free speech concerns that preceded and followed the landmark ruling from 2017 to 2023. I show FOSTA-SESTA's progression as a topic of discourse during the 2020 presidential election and compare differences between coverage in ideologically diverse U.S. media. While mainstream news originally supported FOSTA-SESTA's efforts to restrict the tech industry and prevent online child sexual exploitation, alternative media tended to present skeptical arguments that supported sex workers and other marginalized communities. Journalism industry interventions are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the challenging economic and political climate in the United States, particularly in relation to infrastructure and public works. It highlights the increasing national debt, the divisive nature of the presidential election, and the impact of government spending on infrastructure. The article also explores the potential shifts in infrastructure priorities and the integration of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, into government processes. It emphasizes the importance of considering values and democratic decision-making in the face of technological advancements. [Extracted from the article]

The article is a book review of "Telling Stories with Data: With Application in R" by Rohan Alexander. The book focuses on data science workflow and provides examples tailored for social science applications. It covers various aspects of data analysis, including data acquisition, preparation, modeling, and communication. The book emphasizes reproducibility, ethical issues, and the human element in data projects. While the examples are primarily focused on social science, the book offers comprehensive code recipes that can be adapted to different projects. It also highlights the importance of documentation, reproducibility, and responsible data practices. However, it does not extensively cover storytelling techniques or data communication for different formats and audiences. Overall, the book is a valuable resource for R users interested in social science applications. [Extracted from the article]

As misinformation has become a prominent topic in U.S. politics, Americans have become increasingly concerned about the problem that misinformation poses. Correspondingly, people have become weary of news media, with some actively avoiding news media and political information. While many situational and contextual factors contribute to news avoidance, this study considers how the feeling of being misinformed online might to contribute to related news attitudes and behaviors, like active news avoidance and news fatigue. Using panel data from a three-wave survey of U.S. adults collected during the 2020 U.S. presidential election, we find that feeling misinformed online is a widely felt phenomenon in the U.S. that is associated with increased active news avoidance and news fatigue overtime. We also find that strong partisans in the U.S. asymmetrically shift their news media use when they feel misinformed online; with strong Democrats relying more on non-partisan news media and strong Republicans using less news media overall, including less conservative news media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democracy in the United States is in decline. The current work examines to what degree U.S. Americans perceive this decline in the U.S., and how partisanship may shape those perceptions over time. Using cross-sectional archival data spanning three U.S. presidential administrations (Study 1), we find that perceived levels of democracy by U.S. Americans on both sides of the political spectrum were not attuned to objective democracy indices but instead followed a partisan gap where election winners perceived higher levels of democracy than election losers. Using a longitudinal quasi-experiment tracking the 2020 presidential election (Study 2), we find that the effect of partisanship on perceived levels of democracy kicked in right after the announcement of the election winner but was the strongest after the official inauguration. Moreover, Trump supporters showed heterogeneous responses to the Capitol attack, which highlights the possibility of bipartisan willingness to defend democracy after salient attacks on democratic principles. We discuss the implications of the effect of partisanship on perceptions of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Winning and losing voters tend to experience positive and negative emotions toward elections, respectively. The emotions of autobiographical event memories fade over time with unpleasant emotions fading faster than pleasant emotions; this phenomenon is referred to as the fading affect bias (FAB). Although the FAB differs across several event types (e.g., social media and nonsocial media), the FAB and its relations to political, healthy (e.g., grit), and unhealthy variables (e.g., depression) did not differ significantly across political and nonpolitical events in the context of the 2016 US presidential election. To further explore these relations across political and nonpolitical events, the current study used two online samples (college students and MTurk) in the 2020 US presidential election context. The FAB was expected and found to be robust, it was positively predicted by rehearsal ratings, and its relations to political variables were stronger for political events than nonpolitical events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: We examine how congressional candidates use social media such as Twitter (X) to promote a political brand and connect with voters during campaigns. Methods: Using a mixed‐method, interdisciplinary approach, we first conduct a brand analysis using 22 candidates from 11 open‐seat races in 2020. We develop and test several hypotheses using our races from 2020 and the subsequent contests in these districts in 2022, as well as the universe of tweets from all congressional candidates from the 2020 and 2022 general election campaigns (n = 789,411). Results: We find the three prominent themes present in our brand analysis—the adoption of gender roles, the mimicking of Trump, and expressions of populism—persist when we examine the Twitter posts from congressional candidates in 2020 and 2022. Male and female candidates behave differently on Twitter as do Republicans and Democrats. Most Republican candidates, regardless of gender, mimic the Trump brand rife with populist themes. Conclusion: We integrate research from political science and communication studies to gain a better understanding of how congressional candidates present their political brand to voters. We raise new questions scholars from the social sciences must consider while studying these phenomena in a fast‐evolving political and social media landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The personalization of politics and elite polarization have attracted considerable scholarly attention. We conducted an online experimental survey on policy proposals and voters' evaluations of candidates during the 2020 Taiwanese presidential election. We see an elite effect on voters' policy attitudes when controlling for party-related factors. The effect shows up as a negative cue but not as a positive cue. Moreover, the negative effect varies by candidate. These findings suggest that in policy attitude formation, opposition to a candidate has a stronger effect than liking a candidate. Overall, this study extends our understanding of the elite effect from the perspective of personalized politics with evidence from the Taiwanese electoral context. This information is critical not only for understanding the political consequences of polarization but also for understanding how it relates to opinion formation among citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades scholars and pundits alike have been interested in questions about divisive presidential primaries. However, most analyses examine how campaigns cause these effects after the field has been winnowed – the implicit assumption is that negativity via events and advertising is consequential. While campaigns are likely the proximate cause of divisive primary effects, we argue that the behaviors involved—allowing displeasure with one election outcome to affect behavior in a subsequent election—demands attention to individual dispositions. Thus, we take a step back to consider what we miss when we overlook what is happening at the time of the large field, shining a spotlight on the mindsets of primary voters at the start of the process. To do so, we identify individuals who possess what we call the "divisive primary mindset," which consists of two traits: (1) the degree to which they prefer one candidate over all others ("preference exclusivity"), and (2) the extent to which their affect for a candidate is indistinguishable from their assessment of that candidate's electability ("wish fulfillment"). Using an original, nation-wide panel following Democratic voters from the 2020 primaries through the general election, we find that individuals with both these traits were more likely to be late deciders in the general, less likely to participate in activities outside of voting, and more likely to defect from Biden. We test the robustness of these findings to candidate-centric explanations and discuss the importance of understanding campaign dynamics in an era of hyper-partisanship and nationalized politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Differences between urban, suburban, and rural voting outcomes in U.S. presidential elections is a common area of both academic research and news media analysis. Most scrutiny and mapping of the geography of the presidential vote is done at the county scale, with counties described as either urban, suburban, or rural. Small towns are often assumed to mirror surrounding rural areas, with little research examining election results and historic patterns in these places. This is understandable: Accurate spatial data at a fine scale for national elections is difficult and, in some states, impossible, to obtain. Research presented here (in states where precinct‐level data is readily available) indicates that while most small towns indeed voted Republican in the 2020 U.S. election, a closer inspection indicates that they are more Democratic‐leaning than surrounding rural areas. This research indicates the value of studying these fine‐scale data as well as the challenges faced in acquiring these data and resulting lack of research and visualization of these differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary campaigns, six women, the most in history, announced their candidacy for the presidency. Using computational topic modeling and network analysis of 84,000 newspaper articles (2.2 million paragraphs), we analyze how gender and electability was discussed during the Primaries. Results reveal that male candidates, and especially Joe Biden, were frequently compared with the incumbent, Donald Trump, while coverage of female candidates focused directly on social policy. Trump's attack on Biden during the impeachment process produced a lasting effect by promoting discourse topics traditionally dominated by men. This crowded out the topics emphasized by women, such as health care and education. Women candidates' press coverage was also more reactionary than men's. Although explicit reference to gender as a discourse topic has decreased, which suggests growing gender parity within the political process, gendered policy salience emerges transitively in comparison with the incumbent. Transitive policy salience emerges as a key explanatory variable that articulates the indirect path media coverage can lead to the marginalization of women candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines "process" discourse and the politics of reassurance across the prototypically American media domains of reality TV and cable news. Using The Bachelorette 's 2020 season and CNN's concurrent coverage of 2020s famously disputed presidential election as case studies, it argues that both broadcasts' copious references to the soundness of the "processes" they purport to depict both naturalize and stabilize the tenuous notions of heterosexuality and democracy on which they rest. The two programs' exemplary televisual "process" discourse reassures even cynical viewers that, though much of the pleasure US audience-members take in their broadcasts derives from the spectacle (or threat) of dysfunctionality, we can ultimately rely on the functionality of the systems that govern our lives. Not least, it courts the perception that television is the true arbiter of "the process," and thus that TV itself deserves Americans' trust—a vitally important impression to maintain during a global pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay serves as the introduction to TVNM 's special issue on "Pandemic TV," an analysis of the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic affected principally anglophone television and television-watching in 2020 to 2021 (including television's response to corresponding events such as the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings and the fall 2020 U.S. presidential election). The introduction situates various periodizations of the pandemic, framing the dissonant temporalities of the pandemic against television's traditional approaches to informing, representing, and containing ongoing crises. The essay also introduces the ten articles contained within the special issue, which covers representations of the pandemic, the logics of television present within the videoconferencing applications that came to define communication during the pandemic, and the changing labor of television studies scholars and teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional leaders can influence electoral outcomes. We designed an experiment to investigate why public endorsements by chiefs affect voters—and which types of voters they influence. Chiefs have incentives to prefer politicians who will promote local development, and can use endorsements to sway elections accordingly. We argue that voters often interpret chiefs' endorsements as a signal of candidate quality. To assess this argument, we exposed voters to real endorsements made by chiefs during Ghana's 2020 presidential election. We show that endorsements impact the vote choice of undecided voters. Consistent with a signaling mechanism, respondents exposed to chiefs' rationale for endorsing a candidate were no more likely to vote for the endorsed candidate than those who only heard chiefs' approval of a candidate. Further, treated respondents hold higher evaluations of the endorsed candidate on multiple dimensions of candidate quality. Our results suggest that chiefs influence voters through a non-coercive mechanism, which has positive implications for accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between the late 1960s and the early twenty-first century, the process by which astronomers identified gravitational lenses went from a time-consuming spectroscopic experiment to a two-second glance at a telescope image. This article analyzes discoveries of gravitational lenses over this period to explore the questions: How did astronomers learn to see new objects in the sky, and how did they train their eyes to effortlessly recognize these patterns in nature? Rather than separating procedural and intuitive approaches, I argue that the mathematical modeling and the spectroscopic identifications of the sixties and seventies were necessary scaffolding for the development of expert intuition in the eighties. By developing an intuition for what a lens looked like, astronomers increasingly relied on their own expert judgment rather than spectroscopy or calculations to initially identify lensing candidates. Through this history, I highlight intuition as a skill and explore the methods by which scientists train and retrain their intuition over the course of a career. The gamut of gravitational lens discoveries reveals that scientists used models to not only describe the world as it is but also to teach themselves what it could look like. To retrain their intuition and to learn how to see gravitational lenses, astronomers learned to see their models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, an independent Belarus came into being, with a large Polish diaspora within its borders. Initially, the country embarked on a path of democratic and market reforms, and cooperation with Poland seemed promising. In 1994, Alexander Lukashenko won the presidential election. From that point on, a shift toward an authoritarian political system and a reversal of market reforms began. Poland and Belarus began to diverge in terms of their chosen political and economic systems and strategic foreign partners. It became increasingly difficult for Warsaw to "get along" with Minsk. The Polish diaspora became somewhat hostage to the international situation and the Belarusian dictator. This article presents the basic problems faced by the Polish diaspora in Belarus under Lukashenko's rule in terms of preserving its national identity, culture, and language, and it establishes prospects for further developments. We analyze current (independent and official) news, official Belarusian statistics, estimates from independent experts, and relevant literature (primarily Polish and Belarusian). We present the genesis of the Polish diaspora and attempt to determine its current size. We discuss the Poles' changing situation under Lukashenko's rule, his personal attitude toward the Polish minority, and the role of the Polish diaspora in the regime's propaganda. We devote significant space to the issue of freedom of education in the Polish language as, in our opinion, one of the most important conditions for preserving national identity. We reference recent events triggered by the wave of mass public protests that followed the 2020 presidential election, which involved an escalation of the Lukashenko regime's actions against the Polish diaspora. We hypothesize that the conditions for the functioning of the Polish diaspora are currently the worst since the establishment of the Belarusian state, and the continued persistence of such a situation seriously threatens the linguistic and cultural distinctiveness of Poles in Belarus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States over the past 40 years national issues and allegiances have increasingly displaced state and local concerns and identities in shaping the preferences of voters and the internal processes of political parties. This study finds that such nationalization has also manifested itself in health-related behaviour, specifically in the takeup of Covid-19 vaccines. Despite the heterogeneities of US states, counties, and towns, the share of the vote that Trump received in the 2020 US presidential election is found at each level to be a strong and robust predictor of a lower June 2022 Covid-19 vaccination initiation rate, even after adjusting for sociodemographic composition, spatial effects, and diverse provisioning- and takeup-related factors. At each of the three subnational levels, the Trump 2020 vote share was also correlated more closely than the Trump 2016 vote share or the Romney 2012 vote share with the June 2022 Covid-19 vaccination initiation rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Law-abiding firms often attempt to conceal their corporate political activity (CPA), yet the concealment of CPA has not been matched by our understanding of the phenomenon. We develop a theoretical framework consisting of three components to analyze firms' CPA concealment strategies. First, we provide a detailed conceptual background on CPA concealment, including what CPA concealment is and how it can occur. Second, we develop an in-depth analysis of the key benefits and costs of concealing CPA for firms. Finally, we integrate this analysis with positive political theory to place our firm-level calculus in the context of policymaking by identifying the public policymakers whom firms are most likely to influence via CPA concealment. Based on this framework, we generate additional empirically testable propositions on how CPA concealment changes with factors at the country, institution, issue, and firm levels. This study is the first to generate systematic theory on firms' CPA concealment strategies. Moreover, this research context highlights the particular importance of theory for investigating consequential phenomena that yield scarce data; it is theory which guides data discovery ex ante, helps assess bias ex post, and uncovers key insights that empirical analysis alone cannot generate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the evolution of legal professionals and the implications of their changing work and practices on society. It introduces a conceptual framework that explores professional trajectories and professional spaces, and how these interact with various contexts. The text discusses the impact of new regulations, economic changes, and technological advancements on the legal profession. It also examines the influence of political movements and societal polarization on the legal profession. The special issue includes papers that focus on various empirical cases, such as the use of artificial intelligence in legal work, the professional trajectories of women in the legal labor market, and the career paths of lawyers involved in autocratic movements. The given document is a list of references and sources related to the legal profession and its relationship with technology, globalization, and societal changes. [Extracted from the article]