Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the rhetoric and reality of the impact of political blogs in the specific context of American politics, where online, mainstream media and academic accounts suggest blogs have had significant impacts on political communication. Design/Methodology/Approach: This paper examines three high profile events in which blogging has been implicated as part...

Undecided voters represent a major challenge to political pollsters. Recently, political psychologists have proposed the use of implicit association tests (IAT) to measure implicit attitudes toward political parties and candidates and predict voting behavior of undecided voters. A number of studies have shown that both implicit and explicit (i.e., self-reported) attitudes contribute to the pred...

This study examines how political knowledge has shaped the effects of two values—egalitarianism and traditional morality—on American public opinion about gay rights and whether media framing accounts for the role that knowledge has played. An analysis of mass media coverage during the peak years of the debate over gay rights (1990–97) showed that the implications of moral traditionalism were vi...

I use the example of the 2000 US Presidential election to show that political controversies with technical underpinnings are not resolved by technical means. Then, drawing from examples such as climate change, genetically modified foods, and nuclear waste disposal, I explore the idea that scientific inquiry is inherently and unavoidably subject to becoming politicized in environmental controver...

We study the Shapley value in weighted voting games. The Shapley value has been used as an index for measuring the power of individual agents in decision-making bodies and political organizations, where decisions are made by a majority vote process. We characterize the impact of changing the quota (i.e., the minimum number of seats in the parliament that are required to form a coalition) on the...

What political institutions improve property rights? Building on the work of North and Weingast, this article argues that institutional checks on policymaking discretion (“veto players”) improve the property rights of investors regarding the value of the domestic currency. Veto players constrain the ability of policy makers to opportunistically pursue policy that may lead to a depreciated domes...

We study the Shapley value in weighted voting games. The Shapley value has been used as an index for measuring the power of individual agents in decision-making bodies and political organizations, where decisions are made by a majority vote process. We characterize the impact of changing the quota (i.e., the minimum number of seats in the parliament that are required to form a coalition) on the...

This study considers the implications of corporate political activity and political risk on asset pricing. It is found that firms which operate an affiliated political action committee (PAC) outperform firms that do not. Among firms that operate a PAC, we find that those that spend relatively less on politics outperform those that spend more and that political risk is successfully hedged by fir...

Political correctness (PC) norms are highly controversial and have been subject to political and philosophical debate for decades. Yet, surprisingly little empirical research has been conducted to understand if they have any impact at all and, in particular, if and how they affect the perception of and interaction between social groups. In this chapter, we will argue that PC language has tangib...