This article argues that by providing virtually unlimited sources of political information, the new media environment undermines the idea that there are discrete gates through which political information passes: If there are no gates, there can be no gatekeepers. The difficulty of elites (political and media both) and academics in understanding the Lewinsky scandal stems from their failure to r...

Recent studies of American politics evidence that political polarization of both the electorate and the political elite have moved “almost in tandem for the past half century” (McCarty et al., 2003, p.2), and that party polarization has steadily increased since the 1970s. However, existing theoretical models of political competition are not manifestly compatible with these observations. This pa...

The property rights ideally suited for farming differed from those that were well adapted to mobile hunting and gathering, raising the question: How did this new institution emerge in the places where farming was first practiced? I survey the current archaeological evidence on the political, social, and economic institutions of the first populations that adopted farming in southwest Asia. While...

Old elites can block changes, but not all do. Why is it that stronger elites may allow more changes than weaker elites? Why do economies with larger stocks of natural resources not grow faster than economies poorer in natural resources? We argue that old elites hold some power to extract rents from the economy. Whereas old sectors (i.e. agriculture or extraction of natural resources) are not af...

This article presents a systematic content analysis of three religious-conservative and two pro-secular newspapers in 1996–2004 in Turkey, and discusses some findings and their implications regarding elite values and democratization: considerable internal pluralism within both religious-conservative and pro-secular elites; general consensus on democracy but not on democratic norms’ application ...

Humans are a coalitional, parochial species. Yet, extreme actions of solidarity are sometimes taken for distant or unrelated groups. What motivates people to become solidary with groups to which they do not belong originally? Here, we demonstrate that such distant solidarity can occur when the perceived treatment of an out-group clashes with one's political beliefs (e.g., for Leftists, oppressi...

We study incumbency advantage and the electoral returns to pork and patronage over ten legislative periods from 1948 to 1992 for two political parties — the Christian Democrats (DC) and the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) — in Italy's lower house of representatives, the Chamber of Deputies. Adapting a regression discontinuity design to Italy's open-list system of proportional representation, we s...

Although the role of IT is salient in sporting mega-events (e.g. instant replay, goal-line technology), IS research has not yet paid any attention to the processes by which technologies are selected for and implemented at these mega-events, the strategies used by actors, nor the consequences of such implementations on actors in related sectors and industries. To tackle this underdeveloped resea...

Using discourse analysis as its methodology, this article demonstrates how the Turkish political elite sought to play a ‘Western nation role’ towards Afghanistan in order appeal indirectly US elite. In that sense, underlines how, under coalition (1999–2002) and Justice Development Party (2002–) rule, governments used security humanitarian narratives underscore Turkey’s contributions Western aft...