The crisis of the Eurozone has severely tested the political authority of the European Union (EU). Questions of normative legitimacy are raised by the crisis, both because the EU in general is a normative order and because the construction of economic and monetary union rested upon an explicit normative theory that stressed the importance of the depoliticisation of money. However, this theory n...

In this thesis, I outline the normative relevance of religious political parties as carriers of values in the context of contemporary political theory. The central argument of my thesis is that religious political parties are, in ideal terms, vital institutional tools for channelling religious claims into the public political realm of liberal democratic polities, in a way that favours democracy...

This paper estimates the political costs of increasing taxes and cutting expenditures for members of a legislature. It is found that both costs are individually significant, but that they are not significantly different. This coincides with the first order condition for maximization of the probability of reelection. Republican legislatures have a higher political cost for taxes, thus the party’...

This paper describes the application of statistical methods to political polling data in order to look for correlations and memory effects. We propose measures for quantifying the political memory using the correlation function and scaling analysis. These methods reveal time correlations and selfaffine scaling properties respectively, and they have been applied to polling data from Norway. Powe...

Out of the total population of Sri Lanka, the Muslim community constitutes about 8%, while the Buddhist majority makes up 69,1%. Still, the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress, a Muslim political party, has been a significant player in the Sri Lankan political arena since the early 1990s. This article explores how they managed to gain support as quickly as they did, from the early 1980s to the present, a...

Framing is a political strategy in which politicians carefully word their statements in order to control public perception of issues. Previous works exploring political framing typically analyze frame usage in longer texts, such as congressional speeches. We present a collection of weakly supervised models which harness collective classification to predict the frames used in political discourse...

in the 2nd half of the 6th century a.h., when the isma'ili caliphate in egypt was in the worst political situation, a series of political sunni figures managed to reach the important position of vizara some times. they, who were sympathetic towards the sunni caliphate of abbasids in baghdad and eventually made the fatimid caliphate to fall, during their vizara for fatimid dynasty, had to h...

Literature regarding the post-Soviet period has commented extensively on the difficulties of post-Soviet governments in extricating themselves from command economies and centralised polities and moving toward market economies and democratic government. For the most part, such writing has emphasised the economic variable. Essentially, the argument has concentrated on a consensus that the post-So...

In this paper we present a political economy approach in order to explain the degree of financial openness for an economy. In the model, entrepreneurs, who may have good or bad projects, vote for policies, which are proposed by selfish politicians. Two political frictions (ideological adherence and a supermajority requirement) impair political competition and lead to equilibria, where politicia...