Do “niche” parties—such as Communist, Green, and extreme nationalist parties—adjust their policies in response to shifts in public opinion? Would such policy responsiveness enhance these parties’ electoral support? We report the results of statistical analyses of the relationship between parties’ policy positions, voters’ policy preferences, and election outcomes in eight Western European democ...

Do legislators remain at one point on the ideological spectrum for their entire careers, or do they update their ideological positions in response to the demands of constituents? Although theories of the electoral connection predict that legislators should adapt to voter demands, most empirical studies instead show that they maintain consistent positions in the face of changing political condit...

This R (R Development Core Team, 2011) package contains software designed to recover latent dimensions (i.e. a basic space) from a numeric matrix of data. The initial development was conducted by Poole (1998), who wrote the Fortran executable that was previously used by social scientists to analyze survey data in publications such as Saiegh (2009) and Abrajano and Poole (2011). The principal pu...

INTRODUCTION The study focuses on the programmatic bases of Slovenian political parties since independence. It presents an analysis of party programs and their preferences regarding doctors and other health workers, as well as the contents most commonly related to them. At the same time, the study also highlights the intensity of the presence of doctors on the policy agenda through time. METH...

This study investigates the effect of participative political institutions (PPIs) that emerged in many central European cities from the late 13th century. The empirical analysis of the paper is based on newly compiled long-run data for the existence of different types of PPIs in 104 cities in the Holy Roman Empire. The effect of both an overall index of participativeness of political institutio...

The present study was undertaken to examine the positions of Spanish health professionals on a variety of bioethical issues and to determine the relationships between these positions and the professionals’ religious beliefs and political views. The study sample consisted of 50 individuals randomly selected from a database of Spanish health professionals who had received solid training in bioeth...

coin and coining as civilization indices have undergone many changes and development. it has been argued that the economic and political positions of states have always affected not only the physical shapes of a coin but its economic values within the current trade systems. to understand the changes were seen in the coining during the different time periods several political social, economic, c...

This article presents an electoral model where activist groups contribute resources to their favored parties. These resources are then used by the party candidates to enhance the electoral perception of their quality or valence. We construct an empirical model of the United States presidential election of 2008 and employ the electoral perception of the character traits of the two candidates. We...

is paper uses a formal electoral model as the basis for discussion of various political episodes in British and US history and to evaluate the logic of Madison’s argument about the republican scheme of government. is leads to the inference that political choice involves electoral judgment as well as preference. e stochastic electoral model is extended to incorporate the basis of judgment, namel...

This paper uses an unusual administrative dataset covering the universe of French hospitals to consider hospital employment: this is consistently higher in public hospitals than in not-for-profit (NFP) or private hospitals, even controlling for a number of measures of hospital output. NFP hospitals serve as a benchmark, being very similar to public hospitals, but without political influence on ...