Politicians Using History

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...

When Topologists Are Politicians...

Poking Lawyers and Politicians

A report on the 5th Internet, Law and Politics conference hosted by the UOC in July 2009. The author, who attended the conference as rapporteur and wrote a ‘live blog’ during the two-day event, reviews some of the contributions, reflects on the theme of social networking sites (‘pro or con?’) and explores the different approaches of the disciplines of law and of political science, suggesting th...

Using Textual Transcripts of Parliamentary Interventions for Profiling Portuguese Politicians

This paper presents an experimental study on the subject of profiling political actors through textual transcriptions of their parliamentary interventions. Supervised learning techniques were used to learn models, which attempt to classify Portuguese politicians according to their gender, their age group, or their political affiliation and orientation. Experiments were made using different type...