There were once again high expectations that a major global health event - the Ebola virus outbreak of 2014-2015 - would trigger meaningfully World Health Organization (WHO) reform and strengthen global health governance (GHG). Rather than a "turning point," however, the global community has gone back to business as usual. This has occurred against a backdrop of worldwide political turmoil, cha...

We study astroturf political campaigns on microblogging platforms: politically-motivated individuals and organizations that use multiple centrally-controlled accounts to create the appearance of widespread support for a candidate or opinion. We describe a machine learning framework that combines topological, content-based and crowdsourced features of information diffusion networks on Twitter to...

2 Informed citizenship is taken as fundamental to democratic governance. Deliberation, political participation and holding elected officials accountable for their actions presuppose an electorate capable of expressing informed opinions. In modern democracies, the institution entrusted with delivering relatively costless access to public affairs information is the news media. In recent years, ho...

Generally speaking, the effects of international political party assistance are viewed negatively, or at least controversially. This study attributes some of the shortcomings of political party aid to the poor relationship between assistance providers and political science party research. They simply operate in different worlds. Party assistance lacks clear-cut concepts and strategies in practi...

Accounting practices differ across geographic and political boundaries, across sectors of the economy within these boundaries, and across types of organizations. Globalization exerts a homogenizing force across the political and jurisdictional boundaries with mixed consequences. The development of markets for various factors of production exerts a similar integrative force across sectors of the...

Stochastic Opponent Modeling Agents (SOMA) have been proposed as a paradigm for reasoning about cultural groups, terror groups, and other socio-economic-political-military organizations worldwide. In this paper, we describe a case study that shows how SOMA was used to model the behavior of the terrorist organization, Hamas. Our team, consisting of a mix of computer scientists, policy experts, a...

As institutions are created to engage citizens and civil society organizations more directly, who participates, and what effect does participation have? This article explores two of Peru’s participatory institutions, the Regional Coordination Councils and the participatory budgets, created in 2002. Specifically it asks, once these institutions are set up, do organizations participate in them? a...

The crime-terror nexus includes two independent, but related, components. First, it incorporates the straightforward involvement in criminal activities by terrorists as a source of funding, and second, it refers to the linkages between organized criminal organizations and terrorist groups. Indeed, the criminal and political organizations appear to be learning from each other, adopting each othe...