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Research Spotlight
How Americans Enforce the Law
Diego Zambrano takes a deep dive into the American legal quirk of "private rights of action"―legal provisions that empower ordinary citizens and their lawyers to enforce the law through lawsuits— and how this system helps and hurts the pursuit of justice.
By using the tools of deliberative democracy, Alice Siu says everyday users, not just industry moguls, can and should contribute meaningfully to important decisions about technology governance.
What would a healthier system of political parties look like? Didi Kuo, Lee Drutman, and Mark Schmitt share key findings on how to rebuild talent pipelines, dismantle short-term incentives, strengthen democratic institutions, and reanimate state and local politics.
Chapter in "De Gruyter Handbook of Cities, Infrastructure and International Relations," edited by Michele Acuto, Simon Curtis, Ian Klaus, and Gaea Morales
A new report by Florence G'sell, visiting professor in the program on the Governance of Emerging Technologies, offers a nuanced analysis of blockchain technology's relationship with legal and regulatory frameworks.
A growing body of research on large language models (LLMs) has identified various biases, primarily in contexts where biases reflect societal patterns. This article focuses on a different source of bias in LLMs—government censorship. By comparing foundation models developed in China and those from outside China, we find substantially higher rates of refusal to respond, shorter responses, and inaccurate responses to a battery of 145 political questions in China-originating models. These disparities diminish for less-sensitive prompts, showing that technological and market differences cannot fully explain this divergence. While all models exhibit higher refusal to respond rates with Chinese-language prompts than English ones, language differences are less pronounced than disparities between China-originating and non-China-originating models. We caution that our study is observational and cross-sectional and does not establish a causal linkage between regulatory pressures and censorship behaviors of China-originating LLMs, but these results suggest that censorship through government regulation requiring companies to restrict political content may be an important factor contributing to political bias in LLMs.
