How do politicians respond to opinion polls? An experiment with Swedish politicians

How open government data facilitates profiling politicians

A system is proposed and implemented that creates a language model for each member of the Dutch parliament, based on the official transcripts of the meetings of the Dutch Parliament. Using expert finding techniques, the system allows users to retrieve a ranked list of politicians, based on queries like news messages. The high quality of the system is due to extensive data cleaning and transform...

Overprotected Politicians

This paper argues that politicians are overprotected. The costs of political assassination differ systematically depending on whether a private or a public point of view is taken. A politician attributes a very high (if not infinite) cost to his or her survival. The social cost of political assassination is much smaller as politicians are replaceable. Conversely, the private cost of the securit...

Bad Politicians

We present a simple theory of the quality (competence and honesty) of elected officials. Our theory offers three main insights. Low-quality citizens have a ‘comparative advantage’ in pursuing elective office, because their market wages are lower than those of high-quality citizens (competence), and/or because they reap higher returns from holding office (honesty). Hence, voters may find themsel...

How, Why and with Whom Do Local Politicians Engage on Facebook?

This article focuses on how, why and with whom local politicians engage on Facebook. Based on a literature review of the public sphere, eParticipation and research related to social media, we propose a theoretical framework that identifies thematic areas integral to understanding the nature of political participation. The explanatory potential of our ‘ENGAGE’ model (Exchange, Narcissist, Gather...

When Topologists Are Politicians...