The roll calls of the Italian Parliament in the XVI legislature are studied by employing multidimensional scaling, hierarchical clustering, and network analysis. In order to detect changes in voting behavior, the roll calls have been divided in seven periods of six months each. All the methods employed pointed out an increasing fragmentation of the political parties endorsing the previous gover...

The vast majority of scholarship on foreign aid looks at either the effectiveness of foreign aid or why particular countries receive aid from particular donors. This paper takes a different approach: what are the domestic sources of support for foreign aid? Specifically, how does the donor’s domestic political and economic environment influence ‘aid effort’? This paper uses a time-series cross-...

This article develops a basic tool for stylistic metaphor analysis to assess the role of creative metaphors in a corpus of political speeches. Starting with a general discussion of creativity in political discourse it provides a definition and six basic strategies of creative metaphor uses. This definition and the strategies allow the identification of creative and conventional metaphors in spe...

  This is undoubtedly recognized that economic performance for each country over time is related to a great extent to its political, institutional and legal environment. In fact, these institutions and policies are that determine the governance quality.   In a panel data study, we applied newly developed indices to examine the effects of good governance on FDI for fifteen middle-income countri...

Political redistricting, a well-known problem in political science and geographic information science, can be formulated as a combinatorial optimization problem, with objectives and constraints defined to meet legal requirements. The formulated optimization problem is NP-hard. We develop a scalable evolutionary computational approach utilizing massively parallel high performance computing for p...

In this paper we build a model to examine inequality of process and inequality of outcomes in interest group politics. The model has the following features: (i) interest groups which compete for rents in a noncooperative game, (ii) a self-interested rent-setting political decision maker (iii) democratic or popular pressure as a check on the self-interest of the political decision maker. We allo...

• Factors that impact the level of effectiveness of focused-deterrence strategies and selective interdiction include the political context, the level of pre-existing intelligence and enforcement capacity of the government, the government’s capacity to concentrate resources, the size and scale of criminality, the complexity of and power distribution in the criminal market, and the structure of c...

This paper explores methods for increasing performance of CRF models, with a particular concern for transfer learning. We consider in particular the transfer case from political news to hard-to-tag business news, and show the effectiveness of several methods, including a novel semi-supervised approach.

Abstract Political machines use state resources to win elections in many developing democracies and electoral autocracies. Recent research has noted that the coordination of machine politics can be much more complex problem-prone than previously thought. Yet, role subnational political context plays solving these problems largely been neglected comparative literature. This article seeks fill th...