The Westminster model is recognized the world over as delivering strong, stable one-party government with hung parliaments an anomaly. The recent UK general election has proved the exception to the rule, with 2010 providing the first hung parliament since 1974. Unlike the 1974 minority administration, 2010 saw the formation of a coalition government for the first time in over 70 years. Bringing...

A distributive politics model establishes that the presence of exogenously enforceable spending limits reduces spending and that the effect of executive veto authority is contingent on whether spending is capped and whether the chief executive is a liberal or conservative. Surprisingly, when spending limits are in place, governments with conservative executives spend more than those with more l...

Gordon Tullock’s The Politics of Bureaucracy must be considered one of the most important works on bureaucracy ever written. In addition to discussing Tullock’s contribution to our understanding of bureaucracy, I contend that his insights on the topic remain relevant today. To support this claim, I focus on U.S.-led reconstruction efforts which attempt to export liberal democracy via military o...

The issue of the „Ground Zero Mosque‟ has been one of the most controversial political issues in US politics in the last several years. Using two different statistical text-analysis techniques, we analyze conservative and liberal blog posts, related to the construction of this Muslim community center and the debates surrounding the issue. In the first experiment, we use a machine learning techn...

Estonia is the only country in the world where all voters can vote online in national elections. In the 2015 election, 31% of voters did so. This paper discusses the sociology and politics of online voting in Estonia. I first show that online voting is a partisan project. Liberal, conservative, and social democratic parties support online voting as a way of modernizing the electoral system, whi...

carl schmitt (1985-1888), is one of the most controversial legal and political thinkers and one of the leading theorists of the twentieth century. schmitt’s views can be criticized from some aspects: ignoring friends and enemies, reducing human and dominance of an individualistic perspective, de-politicization and de-humanization (loss of identity of the subject due to political suspension, eme...

One of the most striking features of the anglophone literature on NGOs is the diversity of NGO sectors and their contributions to civil society and democracy; yet, exploration of this complexity is often eschewed in favour of a normative approach in which the apparently mutually enhancing relationship between NGOs, civil society and the state is underpinned by liberal democratic assumption rath...

Violence is an ever present and very visible feature of our political landscape. And war—its strategy, its preparation, and its conduct—remains a central preoccupation of political elites and of political scientists. In his new book Winning the War on War, Joshua S. Goldstein sifts the statistical and historiographical evidence to tell a story of how we seem to be winning the long-term fight ag...

Each month, many women experience an ovulatory cycle that regulates fertility. Although research has found that this cycle influences women's mating preferences, we proposed that it might also change women's political and religious views. Building on theory suggesting that political and religious orientation are linked to reproductive goals, we tested how fertility influenced women's politics, ...

Each month many women experience an ovulatory cycle that regulates fertility. Whereas research finds that this cycle influences women’s mating preferences, we propose that it might also change women’s political and religious views. Building on theory suggesting that political and religious orientation are linked to reproductive goals, we tested how fertility influenced women’s politics, religio...