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A growing body of research has examined the uptake of social media by politicians, the formation of communication ties in online political networks, and the interplay between social media and political polarization. However, few studies have analyzed how social media are affecting communication in parliamentary networks. This is especially relevant in highly fragmented political systems in which collaboration between political parties is crucial to win support in parliament. Does MPs’ use of social media foster communications among parliamentarians who think differently, or does it result in like-minded clusters polarized along party lines, confining MPs to those who think alike? This study analyzes the formation of communication ties and the degree of homophily in the Dutch MPs’ @mention Twitter network. We employed exponential random graph models on a 1-year sample of all tweets in which Dutch MPs mentioned each other ( N = 7,356) to discover the network parameters (reciprocity, popularity, and brokerage) and individual attributes (seniority, participation in the parliamentary commissions, age, gender, and geographical area) that facilitate communication ties among parliamentarians. Also, we measured party polarization by calculating the external–internal index of the mentions. Dutch MPs’ communication ties arise from network dynamics (reciprocity, brokerage, and popularity) and from MPs’ participation in the parliamentary commissions, age, gender, and geographical area. Furthermore, there is a high degree of cross-party interactions in the Dutch MPs’ mentions Twitter network. Our results refute the existence of “echo chambers” in the Dutch MPs’ mentions Twitter network and support the hypothesis that social media can open up spaces for discussion among political parties. This is particularly important in fragmented consensus democracies where negotiation and coordination between parties to form coalitions is key.

A causa de la situació climàtica i mediambiental actual cal cercar metodologies de generació d’energia sense impacte negatiu al nostre entorn. Una alternativa que no genera cap emissió de CO2 ni residu perjudicial sens dubte és la solar fotovoltaica. Aquest fet sumat a les constants pujades de preu del mercat elèctric converteix les instal·lacions fotovoltaiques d’autoconsum en un imperatiu dels nous temps que venen. L'idea principal del projecte es realitzar un estudi de viabilitat legal, tècnica i econòmica d'una instal·lació fotovoltaica de producció d'energia elèctrica, ubicada al institut públic Baix Penedès. Consisteix en el conjunt de metodologies i càlculs que cal emprar per part d’un enginyer elèctric per a la modelació i dimensionament una instal·lació de baixa tensió sobre coberta connectada a xarxa per autoconsum. El present projecte tècnic defineix l'obra i instal·lació a realitzar de manera que un tècnic competent pugui dirigir els treballs especificats, seguint els apartats que en ell es desenvolupen, i que permetran lliurar l'hort solar al promotor a total satisfacció.

It has been widely recognized that platforms utilize their editorial capacity to transform the industries they intermediate. In this paper, we examine the intermediary role of the leading audio streaming platform – Spotify – on the recorded music industry. Spotify is often called the ‘new radio’ for the influence it has on breaking songs and artists, and for the role it plays in music discovery and consumption. Our purpose is to determine whether Spotify is leveling the playing field or entrenching hierarchies between major labels and independent labels. We attempt to answer this question through a longitudinal analysis of content owners (major labels or ‘indies’) and formats (albums, tracks, or playlists) promoted by Spotify through its global Twitter account: @Spotify. As a carefully curated venue for corporate speech @Spotify provides a window into continuities and changes in Spotify’s corporate strategy. By using @Spotify as a proxy through which to track patterns of promotion between the years 2012 and 2018, this paper offers a novel empirical examination of how Spotify is shaping the consumption of music, and in turn the structure of the recording industry. In doing so, we provide evidence for speculating about the future of the recorded music industry in a platform era.

This research was motivated by an interest in understanding how social media are applied in teaching in higher education. Data were collected using an online questionnaire, completed by 333 instructors in higher education, that asked about general social media use and specific use in teaching. Education and learning theories suggest three potential reasons for instructors to use social media in their teaching: (1) exposing students to practices, (2) extending the range of the learning environment, and (3) promoting learning through social interaction and collaboration. Answers to open-ended questions about how social media were used in teaching, and results of a factor analysis of coded results, revealed six distinct factors that align with these reasons for use: (1) facilitating student engagement, (2) instructor’s organization for teaching, (3) engagement with outside resources, (4) enhancing student attention to content, (5) building communities of practice, and (6) resource discovery. These factors accord with a Uses and Gratifications perspective that depicts adopters as active media users choosing and shaping media use to meet their own needs. Results provide a more comprehensive picture of social media use than found in previous work, encompassing not only the array of media used but also the range of purposes associated with use of social media in contemporary teaching initiatives. Keywords: Adoption of technology, educational technology, higher education, instructor experiences, social media, teaching, Uses and Gratifications

Learning on and through social media is becoming a cornerstone of lifelong learning, creating places not only for accessing information, but also for finding other self-motivated learners. Such is the case for Reddit, the online news sharing site that is also a forum for asking and answering questions. We studied learning practices found in ‘Ask’ subreddits AskScience, Ask_Politics, AskAcademia, and AskHistorians to develop a coding schema for informal learning. This paper describes the process of evaluating and defining a workable coding schema, one that started with attention to learning processes associated with discourse, exploratory talk, and conversational dialogue, and ended with including norms and practices on Reddit and the support of communities of inquiry. Our ‘learning in the wild’ coding schema contributes a content analysis schema for learning through social media, and an understanding of how knowledge, ideas, and resources are shared in open, online learning forums. Keywords: informal learning, social media, coding, content analysis, Reddit

Instant messaging (IM) platforms are believed to foster intimate and controlled conversations within small groups and hence provide safe social settings for political conversations, and yet we know little about how political talk emerges from the everyday social interactions in these environments. To fill the gap, this study examines how sociability within small, private WhatsApp groups shapes the extent and forms of political talk among young adults. Relying on in-depth interviews conducted in the Netherlands, we find that young people perceive politics as personal, offensive, divisive, and depressing, hence unsafe for WhatsApp groups where they find comfort in communicating care and phatic exchanges. Nonetheless, rules, relationship qualities, and strategies enacted in these groups allow some political talk to become temporarily possible. However, they perceive that what makes political talk safer also makes it unproductive. Our findings thus contribute to a finer-grained understanding of political talk in the closed digital spaces.

The aim of this article is to determine whether there is opportunistic behavior in local government decisions related to contracting out, public-private partnership (PPP) and/or public externalizat...

This article investigates the memory work concerning Michael Jackson on Reddit. By means of their posts, comments, and replies, people contributing to this site – Redditors – enter into a process we call mnemonic stabilization. This is a collaborative process in which networked individuals share their memories about, in this case, Michael Jackson. We argue that this process resembles Jackson’s dance technique called moonwalking: Redditors seem to go back in time, but they continually alter how Jackson is remembered and forgotten, depending on the (personal) context of the present and an imagined future. These theoretical observations are assessed empirically by a content analysis of comments and replies ( N = 917) posted on the subreddit /r/MichaelJackson between June 25, 2009, and December 31, 2018. This revealed that most posts with a mnemonic dimension focus on personal memories of Michael Jackson’s music, performances, and (perceived) positive characteristics, rather than on how he should be remembered. These findings can be partially explained by Reddit’s socio-technical infrastructure.

Public corporations have been constantly in the spotlight, with some commentators arguing that they can help governments provide better public services, and others insisting that their governance is simply too complex. Despite this ongoing debate, few studies have researched public-corporation performance. The present study offers empirical evidence of the effects of various forms of corporatisation on public-service costs. In particular, it examines public-service costs incurred under four different forms of governance: public agencies, public corporations, mixed public corporations with minority public ownership, and mixed public corporations with majority public ownership. The analysis considers eight types of public services in 874 Spanish municipalities between 2014 and 2017. The empirical results show that services provided by public corporations are no less costly than those provided by public agencies. In fact, the services offered by mixed corporations with government majorities tend to cost more than those provided by public agencies.

Despite the current popularity of artificial intelligence (AI) and a steady increase in publications over time, few studies have investigated AI in public contexts. As a result, assumptions about the drivers, challenges, and impacts of AI in government are far from conclusive. By using a case study that involves a large research university in England and two different county councils in a multiyear collaborative project around AI, we study the challenges that interorganizational collaborations face in adopting AI tools and implementing organizational routines to address them. Our findings reveal the most important challenges facing such collaborations: a resistance to sharing data due to privacy and security concerns, insufficient understanding of the required and available data, a lack of alignment between project interests and expectations around data sharing, and a lack of engagement across organizational hierarchy. Organizational routines capable of overcoming such challenges include working on-site, presenting the benefits of data sharing, reframing problems, designating joint appointments and boundary spanners, and connecting participants in the collaboration at all levels around project design and purpose.

There is a scarcity of empirical evidence surrounding the challenges and approaches to artificial intelligence deployment. Using data analytics, our study moves from speculation to gathering evidence. Our findings show that most challenges arise during implementation and relate to skills, culture, and resistance to share information driven by data challenges.

One of the main governance decisions that policymakers need to make is whether to implement public services via centralized or decentralized forms. As Costa et al. discuss in their article, when public services are implemented via competing systems, service providers contend to provide good services with the ultimate objective of gaining market quota. This is known as managed competition (MC), as the authorities will have to manage the panoply of public and private organizations offering the service. The alternative is to manage the service more centrally, in what it is identified as vertical integration. As the authors describe, several governments around the globe have abandoned their vertical integrated models in favour of decentralized models. This is the case, as the authors recall, for most health services in Europe. While there is an emerging body of evidence suggesting that decentralized MC outperforms vertically integrated models both in terms of efficiency and in terms of service quality, little is known on how these systems react under different circumstances. This means, for example, how these systems can cope with a sudden increase in their service demands.

To what extent are elements of rational-critical debate present in Twitter political networks? And to what extent are the discursive practices in these networks constitutive of a public sphere online? This research presents the different phases of a coding manual we developed to assess deliberation in Twitter political networks. To exemplify the use and value of the coding manual, we manually annotated communications (N = 3657) in the Dutch MPs' mentions Twitter network. Our results show clear signs of positive empathy and cross-ideological interactions in the MPs' communications, yet they also point to low levels of internal justification, reflexivity and critique. Therefore, although communications in the Dutch MPs' mentions Twitter network exhibit important components of rational-critical debate, they cannot be considered full-fledged deliberative.

La democracia se basa en la capacidad de los individuos para generar libremente sus opiniones. Para hacerlo, necesitan tener acceso a una pluralidad de fuentes y contenidos veraces de información, y este acceso depende, en gran medida, de las características de sus entornos mediáticos. Uno de los principales problemas de la sociedad actual es el elevado volumen de desinformación que circula a través de las redes sociales. Este trabajo se centra en la desinformación parlamentaria. Observa si y cómo los parlamentarios contribuyen a generar desorden informativo en el espacio público digital. Mediante un análisis exploratorio del contenido de 2.307 mensajes publicados en Twitter por portavoces parlamentarios y representantes de la lista principal de cada grupo en el Congreso de los Diputados en España, se estudian las retóricas de desinformación. Los resultados permiten concluir que, si bien el volumen de mensajes de desinformación es relativamente bajo (14% de los tweets), tanto las temáticas (COVID-19, violencia de género, migrantes o colectivo LGTBI), como el tono y las líneas discursivas de los tweets conforman pautas que contribuyen al desorden informativo, generando desconfianza en las instituciones y entre los propios representantes parlamentarios. El estudio ahonda en el conocimiento de la desinformación generada por las élites políticas, sujetos clave en la gestación de narrativas polarizadoras, Democracy is based on individuals’ ability to give their opinions freely. To do this, they must have access to a multitude of reliable information sources, and this greatly depends on the characteristics of their media environments. Today, one of the main issues individuals face is the significant amount of disinformation circulating through social networks. This study focuses on parliamentary disinformation. It examines how parliamentarians contribute to generating information disorder in the digital public space. Through an exploratory content analysis − a descriptive content analysis of 2,307 messages posted on Twitter accounts of parliamentary spokespeople and representatives of the main list of each political party in the Spanish Lower House of Parliament − we explore disinformation rhetoric. The results allow us to conclude that, while the volume of messages shared by parliamentarians on issues susceptible to disinformation is relatively low (14% of tweets), both the themes of the tweets (COVID-19, sex-based violence, migrants or LGBTI), as well as their tone and argumentative and discursive lines, contribute to generating distrust through institutional criticism or their peers. The study deepens current knowledge of the disinformation generated by political elites, key agents of the construction of polarising narratives

Aunque el discurso sobre competencia digital no es nuevo, la investigación sobre el concepto y su medición siguen siendo una temática de actualidad. En esta línea el presente artículo evalúa la competencia digital de 168 estudiantes de primer curso de educación (Educación Infantil, Educación Primaria, Doble Titulación, Educación Social y Pedagogía) de la Facultad de Educación y Pedagogía de la Universitat Rovira i Virgili mediante el cuestionario de autopercepción INCOTIC durante el curso académico 2017-2018. Los resultados muestran que estos estudiantes disponen de fácil acceso a la tecnología, pero no hacen mucho uso de esta. Contrariamente a lo que se puede esperar, aunque hacen poco uso de esta se muestran muy predispuestos para la integración de la tecnología en sus procesos de trabajo. Finalmente, en referencia a su nivel de competencia digital se puede considerar que estos tienen una autopercepción alta, especialmente de esas habilidades relacionadas con la comunicación y los elementos multimedia que son las que más utilizan en su vida diaria. Los resultados obtenidos con el proceso son útiles para mejorar la formación de estos estudiantes de grado y poder reformular en caso de ser necesario los planes de estudio. Although the discourse on digital competence is not new, research on the concept and its measurement remain a current issue. According to that idea, this article evaluates the digital competence of 168 firstyear students in the Bachelor of Education programme (Preschool Education, Primary Education, double Bachelor's Degree in Preschool and Primary Education, Social Education and Pedagogy) in the Faculty of Education and Pedagogy at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili by means of the use of INCOTIC (a self-perception questionnaire) during the academic year 2017-2018. The results show that these students can easily access technology but do not make much use of it. However, although they make limited use of technology, they are very predisposed to integrate it in their work. Finally, in reference to their digital competence level, they have a high self-perception, especially in those skills related to communication and multimedia elements, which are the ones that they most commonly use in their everyday life. The results obtained with the research could be useful to improve the ICT training of these students and the abovementioned Bachelors’ study plans.

The question of whether private organizations can outperform public ones in public service delivery has been a major topic of interest over the last few decades. However, the empirical evidence does not systematically support the hypothesis of lower costs and higher efficiency when private organizations deliver public services. To better understand the cost and efficiency differences between public and private organizations, we have conducted a meta-regression analysis of econometric studies relating to hospital ownership and performance. We have analyzed 61 estimates extracted from health studies, using public versus private hospital costs and efficiency as an independent variable. Our analysis shows a genuine true effect in favor of public sector hospitals. Although we found evidence that the public sector may provide public health services more cheaply than the private sector, the latter achieves better productive efficiency. We discuss how this divergence in results is affected by factors such as country, year, the use of panel data in a study, the extent to which performance is measured by examining financial costs, and the inclusion of not-for-profit hospitals.

This article examines the interaction of organisational and technological changes adopted by parties to respond to members’ demands for more participation. We develop a term, platform politics, and create a framework for identifying how parties use platforms to open or close intra-party decision-making. The framework is then applied to two institutionalised parties (PSOE and PD) and to two movement-based parties (Podemos and M5S) of the changing party systems of Spain and Italy. We conclude that the tensions between existing organisational structures and the use of internet-based platforms create a series of unintended consequences for parties, which result in potentially disruptive outcomes.