Argumentation theory is an interdisciplinary field studying how conclusions can be reached through logical reasoning. The notion of argument is completely general, including for example legal arguments, scientific arguments, and political arguments. Computational argumentation theory is studied in the context of artificial intelligence, and a number of computational argumentation frameworks hav...

This paper examines how and when newspapers, environmental nongovernmental organizations, businesses, and the government converge on environmental events. Using data on the 2010 BP Oil Spill from newspaper articles in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, press releases by Greenpeace and Sierra Club, press releases by BP, Halliburton, Transocean, ExxonMobil, and Shell, and press st...

The collapse of the traditional social ties, the advance of the mass media and the advent of political marketing have altered the structure and the direction of electoral campaigns. Present-day media-mediated electoral campaigns are hotly debated. On one side are those who claim that campaigns simplify political reality, manipulate voters, encourage voting apathy and in the long run contribute ...

This article discusses, from an historical-neo-institutionalist and relational-strategic perspective, the postmodern thesis of the end of the state due to the increasing processes of world globalization. The main hypothesis is that the arguments which predict the structural crisis or the disappearance of the State in the age of neo-liberal globalization have their roots in a theoretically and h...

This article provides two arguments for using caution when interpreting the results of a Global Change Game simulation indicating that people high in right-wing authoritarianism are particularly likely to bring the world to ruin. First, we review research that demonstrates that extremists on both the political left and right share characteristics likely to be associated with poor performance in...

Political intervention into markets can take a nearly endless number of forms. During the latter part of the twentieth century, there was a widely shared sense that governments should decrease their role in the economy. Still, there were important variations in this trend. In response to onerous banking crises, countries chose policies that varied dramatically between rescuing insolvent banks (...

I examine the effect of political turnover on government expenditure policy in Indian state legislatures during 1980-2000. Much similar to arguments for term limits, greater turnover of elected may weaken their hold on the office, and hence, forces them to be more competent. However, a counter-argument is that greater turnover shortens an elected official’s expected stay in the office, which gi...

Formal political institutions have been assigned two roles in democratization theorizing: as contingent effects of strategic interaction and as predictable bases for democratic consolidation. These roles might be reconciled if we assume that institutions become persistent once in place. But patterns of behavior surrounding these institutions do not appear to conform to the expectations of path ...

This paper argues that political-economic trends referred to under the single heading of globalisation have distinct causes and manifestations in different countries. Institutional variables chosen by governments and their constituents play a dominant role in determining the character of those manifestations, few of which are inevitable. The political Left and Right often base their arguments o...

People often discount evidence that contradicts their firmly held beliefs. However, little is known about the neural mechanisms that govern this behavior. We used neuroimaging to investigate the neural systems involved in maintaining belief in the face of counterevidence, presenting 40 liberals with arguments that contradicted their strongly held political and non-political views. Challenges to...