The role of "genes" on political preferences has gained wide attention across disciplines. However, the role of person-specific experiences has yet to be incorporated into models which explore the interconnected roles of genes and environment on political attitudes. Here, relying on a large sample of related individuals, this study empirically address geneenvironment interplay through explicati...

Does contentious collective action matter? Whereas most social movement literature has addressed this question in the US context for policy change outcomes, this paper takes a different approach by bringing the question to a global context and examines democratization as a structural outcome. Accordingly, we test several hypotheses about the ephemeral, positive, and negative influences of conte...

BACKGROUND Radicalisation is proposed to explain why some individuals begin to support and take part in violent extremism. However, there is little empirical population research to inform prevention, and insufficient attention to the role of psychiatric vulnerabilities. AIMS To test the impact of depressive symptoms, adverse life events and political engagement on sympathies for violent prote...

We introduce spatial patterns of Tweets visualization (SPoTvis), a web-based geovisual analytics tool for exploring messages on Twitter (or “tweets”) collected about political discourse, and illustrate the potential of the approach with a case study focused on a set of linked political events in the United States. In October 2013, the U.S. Congressional debate over the allocation of funds to th...

We present an approach using conditional random fields (CRFs) for extracting and coding political events from newswire stories. Coding an event from a news story requires the extraction of the actor and target, the event itself, and the date of occurrence. Actors and targets are political entities. Events are classified into 22 discrete categories in the popular WEIS scheme (Tomlinson 1993). Le...