The idea that political institutions can be deliberately shaped or “engineered” in order to achieve desired political outcomes is hardly new-the authors of the Constitution of the United States, for example, vigorously debated various configurations of rules, constraints, and incentives that might simultaneously disperse political power over a wide range of actors, while at the same time provid...

The Blogosphere has more influence on both the general public’s opinions and mainstream media nowadays. As vast political blogs representing grassroots voices go online, it is both interesting and useful to find them and determine their political leanings as either liberal or conservative. In this paper, we address both problems by using front pages of blogs in a corpus we built to create two c...

As I use the term here, the central component of political liberalism holds that political institutions are not to be guided by substantive principles of the good about which reasonable people may disagree. If a particular policy or institutional action is a requirement of justice, this cannot be because this policy or action promotes human welfare, well-being, or flourishing. Morality, on the ...

The papers in this special iSSU. e of Studies in Political Economy are, with one exception, drawn from presentations made at the SPE annual conference in February 2002. The conference objective was to provide a forum for public and scholarly engagement with the questions of political ecology and political economy.The papers provided a number of critical perspectives on the themes of sustainable...

This conceptual paper focuses on political marketing „strategies‟ in the context of major British political parties. There is consideration of the underlying drivers that are encouraging the adoption of the political marketing approach. It is debated whether political parties actually have political marketing „strategies‟. The difference between political marketing and political campaign strate...

Legitimacy is always considered an important concept among basic topics of political science; since it has been already posed as the prerequisite of acceptability for exercising of power in the societies through history. Accordingly, all of the political philosophies made efforts to establish an intellectual apparatus that enforces the fundamentals of governance, dealt to some extent with the i...

Much of what we recognize as political is a function of choice. Political phenomena such as elections, wars, legislation, and protests occur because people choose to take particular actions at particular times. For scholars, the concept of choice is important because it primes us to consider not just the existence of an action, but also the volition that produced it. Such priming of volition is...

This paper explores the institutional factors behind the crisis of capital accumulation in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. Because of its focus on institutional stability, the paper contributes to the literature on the existence of an apartheid social structure of accumulation in which economic and political institutions are important determinants of investment. Investment function estimat...