Social networks have been resorted to as effective platforms for social mobility in many parts of the world. This mobility occurs when social media users exploit their interpersonal relationships, especially their ‘weak ties’ (Granovetter, 1973). Social networks enable their users to be producers of information, rather than mere consumers, and to be socially and politically well-informed. They ...

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Does campaign duration affect election outcomes? To date, this question has largely evaded political scientists, but it is reasonable to expect systematic links between campaign length and candidate performance in elections. We hypothesize that longer campaigns would help challengers' electoral fortunes, thereby curbing incumbency advantage and potentially boosting competitiveness in elections....

We study astroturf political campaigns on microblogging platforms: politically-motivated individuals and organizations that use multiple centrally-controlled accounts to create the appearance of widespread support for a candidate or opinion. We describe a machine learning framework that combines topological, content-based and crowdsourced features of information diffusion networks on Twitter to...

Awareness and AIDS: A Political Economy Perspective* Across African countries, prevention policies are unrelated to the prevalence of HIV/AIDS and, even in countries in which they were successful, these policies are often unstable or reversed. To explain these two puzzles, we propose a simple political economy model that examines how prevention policies and the epidemic dynamics are jointly det...

In the last years, the blogosphere has become a vital part of the web, covering a variety of different points of view and opinions on political and event-related topics such as immigration, election campaigns, or economic developments. Tracking the public opinion is usually done by conducting surveys resulting in significant costs both for interviewers and persons consulted. In this paper, we p...

■ Abstract This review concerns political preferences—what they are and where they come from. We begin by documenting the close relationship between processes of preference formation and change. Rather than suddenly appearing, most preferences emerge from interactions between individuals and their environment. This aspect of preference formation poses a concrete challenge: to uncover the mechan...

This paper argues that academic approaches to environmental policy that equate political pluralism with the representation of plural environmental rationalities are overoptimistic and avoid the complex ways in which risk is constructed. The paper discusses two cases of industrial poisoning in Thailand to illustrate how alliances between factory workers and middle class activists strengthened po...

We argue that citizens distinguish the tone of a campaign from the quality of information that it provides and that evaluations on each dimension respond differently to positive and negative political advertising. We test these claims using survey and advertising data from the 2000 presidential campaign and two 1998 gubernatorial races. In each race, citizens separate judgments about the tone o...