Much research has demonstrated that Democrats and Republicans use information about party affiliation to discriminate against one another. However, we know little how people gain the necessary other people’s partisanship engage in discriminatory behavior. We explore whether perceive when shown only images of faces, they then these perceptions partisa...

A US Republican Senator argued that the US must refuse to subsidize foreign family planning (FP) organizations that use their own funds for abortion-related activities because to support them would indirectly support abortion, since "money is fungible." The "Mexico City gag rule" advocated by Republicans would stop US-funded agencies from providing legal abortion or from engaging in a range of...

Justice and Development Party at the Helm: Resurgence of Islam or Restitution of Right of Center Predominant Party? by Ersin Kalaycıoğlu Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey Introduction General elections of July 22, 2007 witnessed a very rare occasion in Turkish politics. The Justice and Development Party (AKP), which had been in government since the November 3, 2002 elections managed to i...

In the current US Senate, the majority usually needs 60 votes to pass a bill, for institutional reasons. The Democrats basically had 60 senators starting the 111th Congress in 2009. The election of Scott Brown in February 2010 to fill the seat of late-Senator Ted Kennedy lowered this number to 59 members, and started a debate on whether Democrats would be able to pass their bills, in particular...

In this paper we investigate how to automatically determine if two document collections are written from different perspectives. By perspectives we mean a point of view, for example, from the perspective of Democrats or Republicans. We propose a test of different perspectives based on distribution divergence between the statistical models of two collections. Experimental results show that the t...

It is virtually a truism in American politics that a focus on some issue areas during election campaigns, like national security or traditional values, redounds to the benefit of Republicans, while emphasis on other areas, like education or social security, benefits Democrats. Political scientists refer to this phenomenon as “issue ownership” (Petrocik 1996, Ansolabehere and Iyengar 1994). To t...

In this paper we examine public attitudes on the role of religion in the American political process, as well as some public policy implications of those attitudes. Although the current American legal regime may lean toward strict separationism, the political system has seen renewed religious activism over the past three decades. Historically, religious involvement in American politics has been ...

Limbaugh said Fox’s spasms on camera were merely “an act”. As USA Today put it, “Limbaugh noted that Fox, a longtime advocate for research on embryonic stem cells, has said he sometimes does not take his medication in order to illustrate Parkinson’s severe physical effects. Uncontrolled shaking and stiffness are among the symptoms of the nerve disease.” The paper noted that stem cells are an is...