An official website of the United States government
Key aspects of international policy, such as those pertaining to migration and trade, manifest in the physical world at international political borders; for this reason, borders are of interest to political science studying the impacts and implications of these policies. While some prior efforts have worked to characterize features of borders us- ing trained human coders and crowdsourcing, these are limited in scale by the need for manual annotations. In this paper, we present a new task, dataset, and baseline approaches for estimating the legibility of international political borders automatically and on a global scale. Our contributions are to (1) define the border legibility estimation task; (2) collect a dataset of overhead (aerial) imagery for the entire world’s international borders, (3) propose several classical and deep-learning-based approaches to establish a baseline for the task, and (4) evaluate our algorithms against a validation dataset of crowdsourced legibility com- parisons. Our results on this challenging task confirm that while low-level features can often explain border legibility, mid- and high-level features are also important. Finally, we show preliminary results of a global analysis of legibility, confirming some of the political and geographic influences of legibility.
more »
« less
Estimating the legibility of international borders
Researchers in the social sciences are interested in the consequences of institutions, increasingly on a global scale. Institutions that may be negotiated between states can have consequences at a microlevel, as local populations adjust their expectations and ultimately even their behavior to take institutional rules into account. However, large-scale fine-grained analyses that test for the complex evidence of such institutions locally are rare. This article focuses on a key institution: International borders. Using computer vision techniques, we show that it is possible to produce a geographically specific, validated, and replicable way to characterizeborder legibility, by which we mean the ability to visually detect the presence of an international border in physical space. We develop and compare computer vision techniques to automatically estimate legibility scores for 627,656 imagery tiles from virtually every border in the world. We evaluate statistical and data-driven computer vision methods, finding that fine-tuning pretrained visual recognition models on a small set of human judgments allows us to produce local legibility scores globally that align well with human notions of legibility. Finally, we interpret these scores as useful approximations of states’ border orientations, a concept that prior literature has used to capture the visible investments states make in border areas to maintain jurisdictional authority territorially. We validate our measurement strategy using both human judgments and five nomological validation indicators.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1917573
- PAR ID:
- 10570016
- Publisher / Repository:
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Volume:
- 122
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 0027-8424
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Exploring Human and Language Model Alignment in Perceived Design Similarity Using Ordinal EmbeddingsAbstract In recent years, large language models (LLMs) and vision language models (VLMs) have excelled at tasks requiring human-like reasoning, inspiring researchers in engineering design to use language models (LMs) as surrogate evaluators of design concepts. But do these models actually evaluate designs like humans? While recent work has shown that LM evaluations sometimes fall within human variance on Likert-scale grading tasks, those tasks often obscure the reasoning and biases behind the scores. To address this limitation, we compare LM word embeddings (trained to capture semantic similarity) with human-rated similarity embeddings derived from triplet comparisons (“is A closer to B than C?”) on a dataset of design sketches and descriptions. We assess alignment via local tripletwise similarity and embedding distances, allowing for deeper insights than raw Likert-scale scores provide. We also explore whether describing the designs to LMs through text or images improves alignment with human judgments. Our findings suggest that text alone may not fully capture the nuances humans key into, yet text-based embeddings outperform their multimodal counterparts on satisfying local triplets. On the basis of these insights, we offer recommendations for effectively integrating LMs into design evaluation tasks.more » « less
-
Prior research reports mixed results regarding the economic impacts of crime. This study employs data from all regions of Mexico, including border regions in both the north and the south, to examine the effects of homicides on retail activity across Mexico during a period of escalating violence. The results indicate that one additional homicide within a municipality eliminates one retail establishment and one paid job in the retail sector. Furthermore, the negative consequences of violent crime for retailers are augmented by proximity to an international border. This is consistent with previous research findings that cross-border shopping is a key feature of commerce along the international boundaries of Mexico. It suggests that crime waves may disproportionately impact border city retail activity by partially diverting customer traffic to stores located in neighboring countries. This result is also consistent with the finding of recent research that violent conflict in northern Mexico resulted in increased retail activity in some United States border cities.more » « less
-
With the proliferation of the international human rights regime, states confront a dense set of institutional commitments. Our knowledge of the influence of these commitments is limited for two reasons. First, scholars largely focus on the effect of treaty ratification on states’ human rights behavior, but states engage with these institutions after ratification via regional human rights court rulings and UN recommendations. Second, scholars often examine these institutions in isolation. The institutions do not operate in isolation, however, nor do states necessarily consider the requests they receive from these institutions independently. In this article, we introduce the Women’s Rights Recommendations Digital Database (WR2D2), which maps the various recommendations international women’s rights institutions make on European states. We begin by discussing the importance of recommendations from international institutions and their relationship with commitment and compliance. We then describe the data collection effort, including two dimensions on which recommendations made to European states vary – precision and action. Next, we report descriptive statistics from the dataset, including regional and temporal trends. We conclude with a discussion of the multifaceted research agenda that this new dataset can facilitate.more » « less
-
Abstract When do host governments protect migrants and expand their rights? On 8 February 2021, Colombian President Iván Duque announced a 10-year temporary protected status for over 1.7 million Venezuelan migrants, a policy shift contrasting with more restrictive global migration responses. We offer three motivations for Colombia’s liberalization of migration policy: the pragmatic response to challenges in border control, the economic and legibility benefits of migrant regularization, and the pursuit of international reputation gains. Drawing on interviews with thirty Colombian policymakers, politicians, diplomats, bureaucrats, and NGO leaders, this study offers insights into the drivers of inclusive migration policies in the Global South.more » « less
