Political principals typically use low-cost ‘‘fire-alarm’’ signals transmitted by the media, interest groups, and disaffected constituents to monitor the activities of regulatory agencies. We argue that regulatory decision making is biased and inconsistent if the instruments of political oversight are simple and the information flows to the principal are coarse relative to the complexity of the...

............................................................................................................................ iii Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................... iv Introduction ........................................................................................................................1 Chapte...

Blogs are probably most associated with the high profile postings of a few highly popular bloggers who debate or comment on major news stories, but for each ‘A-lister’ there are numerous faceless bloggers who write about their own daily lives and/or interests. Hence it is interesting to investigate the extent to which an event with extensive media coverage, such as the London attacks, is reflec...

Transboundary regionalism can be defined as a spatially integrated form of political co-operation and problem-solving that transcends the limits of nationally-based administrative practice and attempts to create (or re-create, as the case might be) a sense of cohesiveness, interdependence and common interests across national boundaries. This summary discussion touches upon the phenomenon of Tra...

Political blogs are distinguished by their heightened interactivity, allowing users to participate directly in the political process. Does the interactivity afforded by political blogs really serve the public interest by contributing to deliberative democracy? A longitudinal between-subjects experiment was conducted during the week preceding an election to answer this question. Results suggest ...

Easton’s systems theory greatly contributed to the field of political science by providing a useful holistic framework, demonstrating how the political system functions, by meeting societal demands with policy outputs. Easton’s interest lay in the political system’s persistence, which in his model, merely required the existence of community. Communities, however, require state-provided security...

Introduction This progress report proceeds from a political ecology vantage point to explore the engagement by political ecologists with human health. Literature in political ecology, with an explicit interest in issues of health, remains a somewhat recent and narrow field of enquiry within the discipline. This paper explores this body of literature within its broader intellectual terrain along...

In this paper we present an approach to identify sets of patterns of behaviors which precede political events of interest (EoIs) such as the the onset of regime change, insurgency, ethnic violence, etc.. We define a pattern to be an identified set of values of sampled, quantized factor data which occurs before at least two instances of an EoI and only before the occurrences of EoIs. Not all EoI...