This article introduces the multifaceted roles of intermediaries in policy and governance processes. Intermediaries are organizations and actors that bridge the gap between the public and private sectors. They help resolve conflicting interests, transfer knowledge across different sectors and organizational levels, and facilitate policy coordination and collaboration in complex institutional environments. While certain types of intermediaries have long been recognized as important actors in policy systems, their functions and conceptualization remain inadequately understood. We argue that intermediaries fulfill distinctly different functions depending on their position within various stages of the policy process and the specific governance contexts in which they operate. These functional variations significantly influence policy outputs and outcomes, and governance effectiveness, yet current scholarship lacks sufficient empirical depth to fully conceptualize these differences. To address this gap and facilitate improved theoretical understanding of intermediary functions across diverse policy stages and governance settings, we need to substantially expand our empirical knowledge base. This special issue contributes to this objective by presenting comprehensive case studies and comparative analyses that illuminate the complex, context-dependent nature of intermediary roles, thereby laying crucial groundwork for future conceptual development in this emerging field. Drawing on eight original case studies, it shows how intermediaries act as translators, negotiators, and strategic actors across varied institutional landscapes. Together, the contributions illuminate the relational, contested, and performative dimensions of intermediary work, challenging technocratic accounts, and offering a powerful lens for understanding contemporary governance.

Finance is among the most influential activities in our economies and societies. Financialisation – the embeddedness of finance into our social, economic, and political life – is progressing. Large parts of finance are being determined and performed on the global level. We point out the ‘public good’ qualities of global financial governance. Stability is the prominent example. We briefly describe the global financial architecture and show that contrary to its importance, current global financial governance is fragmented in several aspects. For example, no central global financial institution exists to set and enforce formal global rules on finance. Therefore, we argue that better regulatory governance at the national, regional, and global level is of great importance, not only because it can bring more stability but also because it can bring more sustainable growth and a fairer, more equal world, while also improving the life chances of millions who live in poverty.

How is a factual claim made credible? We propose the novel task of Epistemic Appeal Identification, which identifies whether and how factual statements have been anchored by external sources or evidence. To advance research on this task, we present FactAppeal, a manually annotated dataset of 3,226 English-language news sentences. Unlike prior resources that focus solely on claim detection and verification, FactAppeal identifies the nuanced epistemic structures and evidentiary basis underlying these claims and used to support them. FactAppeal contains span-level annotations which identify factual statements and mentions of sources on which they rely. Moreover, the annotations include fine-grained characteristics of factual appeals such as the type of source (e.g. Active Participant, Witness, Expert, Direct Evidence), whether it is mentioned by name, mentions of the source's role and epistemic credentials, attribution to the source via direct or indirect quotation, and other features. We model the task with a range of encoder models and generative decoder models in the 2B-9B parameter range. Our best performing model, based on Gemma 2 9B, achieves a macro-F1 score of 0.73.

While media bias is widely studied, the epistemic strategies behind factual reporting remain computationally underexplored. This paper analyzes these strategies through a large-scale comparison of CNN and Fox News. To isolate reporting style from topic selection, we employ an article matching strategy to compare reports on the same events and apply the FactAppeal framework to a corpus of over 470K articles covering two highly politicized periods: the COVID-19 pandemic and the Israel-Hamas war. We find that CNN's reporting contains more factual statements and is more likely to ground them in external sources. The outlets also exhibit sharply divergent sourcing patterns: CNN builds credibility by citing Experts} and Expert Documents, constructing an appeal to formal authority, whereas Fox News favors News Reports and direct quotations. This work quantifies how partisan outlets use systematically different epistemic strategies to construct reality, adding a new dimension to the study of media bias.

This essay explores the distinctive role of political scientists in defending democracy during democratic crises, emphasizing their professional responsibility to safeguard democratic institutions. Drawing upon the engagement of Israeli political scientists in widespread protests against democratic backsliding, beginning in January 2023, it proposes a model of scholarly activism that integrates collective initiatives with coordinated individual efforts. Through the voluntary forum "Political Scientists for Israeli Democracy," Israeli scholars contributed expert analysis and strategic guidance, shaping public discourse and civic mobilization. The Israeli experience underscores the benefits of organized activism, while addressing related challenges of academic neutrality, sustainability, institutional support, and scholarly engagement as knowledge brokers.

The concept of delegation offers scholars of federalism a novel analytical framework for examining previously overlooked aspects of fiscal centralization. Adopting a bottom-up approach, we develop a taxonomy of delegation types to assess the dynamic evolution and feedback effects of key milestones of fiscal centralization in Argentina, a developing federation with institutionally strong provinces that have increasingly surrendered revenue authority. We conceptualize fiscal centralization as a cyclical economic adjustment, wherein provinces delegated tax and borrowing powers following major economic disruptions – specifically, the Great Depression and Argentina’s sovereign debt default. In contrast, during periods of economic growth that promised increased subnational fiscal revenues, provinces further relinquished tax authority as a procyclical correction. Overall, this analysis demonstrates how categorizing delegation into distinct types can enrich the literature on the distribution of fiscal power – a central dimension of subnational self-rule in federal systems.

Political language is deeply intertwined with social identities. While social identities are often shaped by specific cultural contexts and expressed through particular uses of language, existing datasets for group and identity detection are predominantly English-centric, single-label and focus on coarse identity categories. We introduce HebID, the first multilabel Hebrew corpus for social identity detection: 5,536 sentences from Israeli politicians' Facebook posts (Dec 2018-Apr 2021), manually annotated for twelve nuanced social identities (e.g. Rightist, Ultra-Orthodox, Socially-oriented) grounded by survey data. We benchmark multilabel and single-label encoders alongside 2B-9B-parameter generative LLMs, finding that Hebrew-tuned LLMs provide the best results (macro-$F_1$ = 0.74). We apply our classifier to politicians' Facebook posts and parliamentary speeches, evaluating differences in popularity, temporal trends, clustering patterns, and gender-related variations in identity expression. We utilize identity choices from a national public survey, enabling a comparison between identities portrayed in elite discourse and the public's identity priorities. HebID provides a comprehensive foundation for studying social identities in Hebrew and can serve as a model for similar research in other non-English political contexts.

Why do some subnational governments consent to the centralization of fiscal authority? This article’s explanatory framework is built on the cases of Argentina and Australia. It adopts an inverse perspective to explain why subnational entities in these two cases assented to revenue centralization during moments of sudden economic change. In the case of Argentina, subnational abdication of revenue powers has unexpectedly resulted in a more predictable and formalized fiscal co-responsibility. By contrast, in Australia, the abdication of borrowing powers and the permanent loss of income tax revenue following a temporary delegation have unexpectedly caused a large vertical fiscal accountability gap.

We introduce a novel multi-labeled scheme for joint annotation of hate and counter-hate speech in social media conversations, categorizing hate and counter-hate messages into thematic and rhetorical dimensions. The thematic categories outline different discursive aspects of each type of speech, while the rhetorical dimension captures how hate and counter messages are communicated, drawing on Aristotle's Logos, Ethos and Pathos. We annotate a sample of 92 conversations, consisting of 720 tweets, and conduct statistical analyses, incorporating public metrics, to explore patterns of interaction between the thematic and rhetorical dimensions within and between hate and counter-hate speech. Our findings provide insights into the spread of hate messages on social media, the strategies used to counter them, and their potential impact on online behavior.

Can major cities accommodate the growing political polarization surrounding immigration? Attitudes of city residents toward immigrants vary widely, influenced by factors like urban diversity, labor market dynamics, and cultural identity. While some embrace immigrants as enriching urban life, others view them as threats to culture and economic stability. Using data from three original surveys from Berlin, Barcelona, and Paris (N = 1500), we explore how engagement in urban politics shapes these attitudes, considering national and non-national identities. Results indicate a correlation between political engagement and positive attitudes toward immigrants but also reveal how it can reinforce existing identity-based biases, potentially polarizing urban politics. Our comparative analysis highlights city-specific variations, with Berlin showing favorable attitudes alongside stronger polarization than Paris and Barcelona. These differences possibly stem from urban conditions, such as diversity, capital city status, and pro-immigrant policies. These findings highlight the central role of cities in shaping immigration politics—both as spaces that foster inclusive, a-national affiliations and as battlegrounds where national identity-driven polarization can intensify. In the conclusion, we discuss the implications of these findings for local governments, particularly how cities can respond to the growing political divides.