Objective. We investigate the ideological orientations of U.S. statehouse journalists, asking whether reporters hold similar political ideologies to their audiences, and under what conditions reporter ideology diverges from audience ideology. Methods. We use an original survey of statehouse journalists, and employ both traditional OLS regressions and a heteroskedastic regression. Results. We fi...

The Besley-Coate model of representative democracy has the problem of multiple equilibria (Besley-Coate, 1997). We show that requiring the Besley-Coate political equilibria to be iteratively undominated at the voting stage re nes the set of (pure strategy) political equilibrium outcomes only for those cases where at least four candidates stand for election. This note complements the results of ...

The stability and functioning of any kind of political regime—including democratic or representative ones—relies on the combination of the capacity of rulers and government officials to use coercion and the development of political legitimacy. Political legitimacy can be described as people's recognition and acceptance of the validity of the rules of their entire political system and the decisi...

This paper explores the features of political economy in the dynamics of representative politics in India. Politics is seen as enhancing economic benefits through acquiring and maintenance of power in the realm of democratic set up. The system of representation is riddled with competitive populism. Emerging leaders and parties are forced to accommodate their ideologies in coping with competitiv...

We compare six definitions of the concept of “representative user,” including interpretations based in statistics, grounded theory, political theory and design practice. This participatory poster invites conference participants to contribute their own interpretations.

This paper surveys political science literature in search of a proper conceptualization of political representation. The first section of the paper reviews most influential normative and theoretical understandings of political representation. The section concludes with a summary of general attributes of the concept of representation which ought to be taken into consideration in each study on re...

The role that emotions play in shaping mass political behavior is increasingly well researched. This study refocuses the debate to explore the effect that the emotions expressed by candidates (target affect) through new media have on participation, rather than the effect of emotions felt by voters (observer affect). A unique experiment embedded in a nationally representative online survey demon...

This article addresses questions regarding the origins of individual variations in political trust. Using 2 prospective longitudinal studies, we examine the associations between family background, general cognitive ability (g) and school motivation at early age, educational and occupational attainment in adulthood, and political trust measured in early and mid-adulthood in 2 large representativ...

Though political theorists have emphasized the importance of political discussion in non-political spaces, past study of online political discussion has focused on primarily political websites. Using a random sample from Blogger.com, we find that 25% of all political posts are from blogs that post about politics less than 20% of the time, because the vast majority of blogs post about politics s...

In the time since the rise of the Internet, it has often been claimed that it has the potential to contribute to the quality of democracy by fostering citizens’ involvement in politics. So far, empirical evidence regarding this purported effect has been mixed, and many questions about the consequences of specific forms of political Internet use (PIU) have remained unanswered. This study expands...