Some US states have introduced measures to increase voter participation. I develop a formal model of elections to study how these measures affect political outcomes. I find that at high enough levels, measures to increase turnout lead to candidates converging at the median voter’s ideal point, as candidates switch from choosing policies that motivate their partisan base to competing over centri...

Moral foundations theory (MFT) posits that binding moral foundations (purity, authority, and ingroup loyalty) are rooted in the need for groups to promote order and cohesion, and that they therefore underlie political conservatism. We present evidence that binding foundations (and the related construct of disgust sensitivity) are associated with lower levels of ideological polarization on polit...

The agreement signed by the Irish and British governments and most of the political parties in Northern Ireland on 10th April 1998 (Good Friday) was a truly historic step. The agreement itself marks the most significant shift in party political positions since the partition of Ireland. This, coupled with the fact that the agreement is open-ended, and indeed under its provisions must develop bey...

Much of contemporary political debate in the United States focuses on the issue of polarization: specifically, its causal antecedents and its consequences for policymaking and political conflict. In this article, we argue that partisan preference polarization – conventionally defined as the difference in the favored policy positions of legislators from the two major parties – is not a sufficien...

This paper opens with a story of the mobility and varied temporalities of a particular landscape and uses this to reflect on a range of issues that revolve around the different kinds of ‘grounding’ that are appealed to in socio-cultural, political and academic life. It reflects upon the relations between human and natural sciences, the nature of appeals between them, and the important, but ofte...

This paper analyzes the economic foundations of a non-democratic political regime, where the ruling bureaucracy captures rents through collective control over state property and job assignment. The model developed here yields the equilibrium in the “political labor market,” where the ruling bureaucracy buys services and political support of activists recruited from the working population. The u...

In a recent editorial for this journal, Sergio Sismondo makes two claims. First, he states that STS bears no responsibility for the emergence of post-truth politics. Second, he claims that debates about the nature of expertise that take place within STS are irrelevant in this context. In contrast, we argue that, whether or not STS had a causal influence on the emergence of post-truth politics, ...

This paper focuses on the notion of ‘pockets of effectiveness’ in the light of the theorisation of regulated neopatrimonialism. The attention to pockets of effectiveness – understood as public organisations which deliver public goods and services relatively effectively in contexts of largely ineffective government – adds to the understanding of regulated neopatrimonialism by focusing on the con...

Article history: Received 7 August 2014 Received in revised form 20 June 2015 Accepted 29 June 2015 Available online 9 July 2015 This study investigates whether a firm with strong corporate governance (CG) requires political connections (PCs), that is, we examine whether CG and PC substitute for or complement each other. Using 71,069 individual bank loan contracts from Taiwan, we examine how lo...

the principal problem in studying farabi’s political philosophy is working out the dilemma of his thought, which has adopted three sources: greek political philosophy, iranshahri (persian polis) pre-islamic political thoughts, and islamic courses; who doesn’t accommodate properly in orientalist’s trinary category: greek political philosophy/ fighi shari’at-name/ iranian siasat-name. this articl...