This paper explores why two countries with similar electoral, partisan and presidential institutions, have produced significantly different policy outcomes in Latin America. Brazil and Ecuador are conventionally known as having highly fragmented party systems, where legislators have great incentives to cultivate a personal vote. Presidents are perceived to be strong and to make large use of gov...

Usenet is a decentralized discussion community predating blogs by decades. Just as there are a wide range of political blogs, many Usenet sub-communities focus on politics. However, we find these two communities are very different in terms of source content. In this work we compare linking patterns of the political Usenet with a well-known political blog and news aggregator, Memeorandum, with r...

Usenet is a decentralized discussion community predating blogs by decades. Just as there are a wide range of political blogs, many Usenet sub-communities focus on politics. However, we find these two communities are very different in terms of source content. In this work we compare linking patterns of the political Usenet with a well-known political blog and news aggregator, Memeorandum, with r...

The political districting problem has been studied since the 60’s and many different models and techniques have been proposed with the aim of preventing districts’ manipulation which may favor some specific political party (gerrymandering). A variety of political districting models and procedures was provided in the Operations Research literature, based on singleor multiple-objective optimizati...

Many studies have revealed that conventional forms of political participation, especially among young people, women, minorities and migrants, are currently in decline (e.g., Blais & Dobrzynska, 1998; Franklin, 2002; International IDEA, 2004; Putnam, 2000). However, two different explanations have been put forward to explain this phenomenon: some authors argue that political apathy and alienatio...

For IS academics to provide political consulting and to offer expertise in political decision making would seem to open enormous opportunities for 'doing good' and for reinforcing the relevance of the IS field. However, the contributions of IS academics to political decision making are minor compared to our colleagues in other fields. This panel will offer the personal views of panel members on...

Political text scaling aims to linearly order parties and politicians across political dimensions (e.g., left-to-right ideology) based on textual content (e.g., politician speeches or party manifestos). Existing models scale texts based on relative word usage and cannot be used for cross-lingual analyses. Additionally, there is little quantitative evidence that the output of these models correl...

This paper presents a political economy model of public standards in an open economy model. We use the model to derive the political optimum and to analyze different factors that have an influence on this political equilibrium. The paper discusses how the level of development influences the political equilibrium. We also analyze the relation between trade and the political equilibrium and compa...

A political literary discourse is important at this moment, given the political upheavals that have engulfed African countries. The writer is often seen as an emancipator of the masses therefore, the imaginative writer can, through his work, offer critical appraisal of existing political situations in order to mould and redirect the actions of society, its belief and values. Literature can ther...

This article examines the effects of migration experience on political attitudes in Central and Eastern European countries. The rationale for this quest is the hypothesis that contact with democratic contexts translates into democratic political attitudes, for which evidence is so far inconclusive. In this article, we are interested to see whether migrants returning from Western countries displ...