This study examines the role of women political bloggers and how they use their blogs for purposes related to politics, public policy, and current events. Based on a combined purposive-snowball sample, in-depth interviews were conducted with 20 women political bloggers in October 2006. Findings show respondents blog about a range of topics, not necessarily unique to women. Generally, women use ...

Scholars and commentators have debated whether lower-threshold forms of political engagement on social media should be treated as being conducive to higher-threshold modes of political participation or a diversion from them. Drawing on an original survey of a representative sample of Italians who discussed the 2013 election on Twitter, we demonstrate that the more respondents acquire political ...

Daily, several news agencies publish thousands of articles concerning many events of all types (political, economic, cultural, etc.). The decision-makers find themselves in front of a great number of events, a few of which concern them. The automatic treatment of such events becomes increasingly necessary. Thus, we propose a machine learning-based approach that allows annotating news articles t...

Due to the legacy of apartheid segregation South Africa remains a divided society where most voters live in politically homogenous social environments. This paper argues that political discussion within one’s social context plays a primary role in shaping political attitudes and vote choice. Using data from the Comparative National Elections Project 2004 and 2009 South African post-election sur...

I conducted case studies on the level of political priority given to maternal mortality reduction in 5 countries: Guatemala, Honduras, India, Indonesia, and Nigeria. Among the factors that shaped political priority were international agency efforts to establish a global norm about the unacceptability of maternal death; those agencies' provision of financial and technical resources; the degree o...

Political scientists frequently lament the media’s neglect of our research. Although reporters should have a basic understanding of the field, it is not reasonable to expect them to restate the conclusions of academic research on a daily basis. Moreover, it is not always clear how research findings apply within the conventions of political journalism, which is context-specific and episodic in n...

Fear is a pervasive aspect of political life and is often explored as a transient emotional state manipulated by events or exploited by elites for political purposes. The psychological and psychiatric literatures, however, have also established fear as a genetically informed trait, and people differ in their underlying fear dispositions. Here we propose these differences hold important implicat...

What is the political legacy of violent conflict? I present evidence for a link from past violence to increased political engagement among excombatants. The evidence comes from northern Uganda, where rebel recruitment generated quasiexperimental variation in who was conscripted by abduction. Survey data suggest that abduction leads to substantial increases in voting and community leadership, la...

Almost all democratic societies evolved socially and politically out of authoritarian and nondemocratic regimes, often as a result of revolutionary changes, illustrating the possibility of successful social evolution following major political changes. These changes not only altered the allocation of economic resources in society but also the structure of political power. Key actors demanding an...

Twitter offers tremendous opportunities for people to engage with real-world events (e.g., political election) through information sharing and communicating about these events. However, little is understood about the factors that affect people’s Twitter engagement (e.g., posting) in such real-world events. This paper examines multiple predictive factors associated with four different perspectiv...