During political campaigns, candidates often change their positions on controversial issues. Does changing positions create confusion and impair memory for a politician's current position? In 3 experiments, two political candidates held positions on controversial issues in two debates. Across the debates, their positions were repeated, changed, or held only in the second debate (control). Relat...

We present ongoing doctoral work on automatically understanding the positions of politicians with respect to those of the party they belong to. To this end, we use textual data, namely transcriptions of political speeches from meetings of the German Bundestag, and party manifestos, in order to automatically acquire the positions of political actors and parties, respectively. We discuss a variet...

Women politicalparticipation in Nigeria is an issue of concern to many because of the continuing record of women's underrepresentation in both elective and appointive positions. Although, several effortshave been made by both government and non-governmental organizations to increase the level of women's participation in politics through affirmative action. This paper examined these efforts and ...

This paper proposes a model of two-party representative democracy on a singledimensional political space, in which voters choose their parties in order to influence the parties’ choices of representative. After two candidates are selected as the median of each party’s support group, Nature determines the candidates’ competence levels. Based on the candidates’ political positions and competence ...

Is political radicalization a product of increased issue position polarization, by which left and right-wing attitudes become ever more extreme? We argue that this is not the best explanation. Indeed, radical right supporters are so much “left” or “right” in terms their ideological attitudes. Instead, we cynicism relevant attitude, with radicals being characterized distinctly high levels, makin...

The policy positions parties choose are central to both attracting voters and forming coalition governments. How then should parties choose positions to best represent voters? Laver and Sergenti show that in an agent-based model with boundedly rational actors a decision rule (Aggregator) that takes the mean policy position of its supporters is the best rule to achieve high congruence between vo...