This article examines whether the American cultural phenomena of the practice of Buddhism or the Buddhism-derived technique of mindfulness are likely to be helpful to the political left. It summarizes the central teachings of the ancient Buddhist texts, with particular focus on the issues of mindfulness and politics. It also reviews the political history of Buddhist countries. The author argues...

This paper presents classification results for the analysis of sentiment in political news articles. The domain of political news is particularly challenging, as journalists are presumably objective, whilst at the same time opinions can be subtly expressed. To deal with this challenge, in this work we conduct a two-step classification model, distinguishing first subjective and second positive a...

Studying the personalities of political leaders requires methods of measuring personality at a distance. One such method is content analysis of speeches, interviews, and other texts. This article reviews the author's research on achievement, affiliation, and power motives of U.S. presidents and other leaders and draws the following conclusions: (1) motivation and personality can be objectively ...

With the emergence of smarthphones and social networks, a very large proportion of communication takes place on short texts. This type of communication, often anonymous, has allowed a new public participation in political issues. In particular, electoral phenomena all over the world have been greatly influenced by these networks. In the recent elections in Mexico, Twitter became a virtual place...

Political viewpoints identification (PVI) is a task in Natural Language Processing that takes political texts and recognizes the writer’s opinions towards matter. PVI reduces ambiguity by identifying underlying meaning clarifying bias margin along spectrum (bias leaning). Thus, even non-experts can better understand texts. For instance, they identify misinformation, bias, hidden agendas. In thi...

THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK is to examine the concept of freedom in five key canonical figures: Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Mill. The importance of the concept of freedom is, I assume, self-evident to readers of this book: it is clearly a, if not the, key concept of the modern canon. Defining “the canon” of modern political theory in terms of these five figures, rather than Hume, Hegel, Mar...

How do law and politics intertwine in Supreme Court adjudication? Traditionally, in law schools and political science departments, scholars refused to mix law and politics. Law professors insisted that legal texts and doctrines controlled Supreme Court decision making, while political scientists maintained that political ideologies dictated the justices'votes. In the late twentieth century, som...