One of the main aims of representative governance surrounds the ability of citizens to hold their elected leaders accountable for their actions. In principle, this is only possible when voters know and comprehend the policy positions of their elected leaders, which of course requires political parties and politicians to be transparent and consistent in staking out issue positions. One particula...

Scholars wanting to estimate substantive quantities of interest, for example policy positions, from political texts typically apply a coding scheme to discrete text units such as words or sentences. Scales of policy positions, for example a left-right scale of economic policy, are typically built from the relative frequencies of text units coded into different categories. In this paper we reexa...

Given the current economic and political crisis in Europe, many argue that the 2014 EP elections shifted the electoral competition from national politics to a debate about the extent and scope of the EU level of governance. We contribute to this discussion by analyzing the European ideological space at the time of the elections. We build upon existing scaling techniques applied to social media ...

Using social dominance theory and structural balance theory to analyze the political and psychological perspectives of subordinated peoples, we argue that struggles between dominant and subordinated polities are embedded in layered power structures. In such contexts, it is important to examine publics’ political desires and interests in relation to their political elites’ positions or choices o...

Some argue that there is an organic connection between being religious and being politically conservative. We evaluate an alternative thesis that the relation between religiosity and political conservatism largely results from engagement with political discourse that indicates that these characteristics go together. In a combined sample of national survey respondents from 1996 to 2008, religios...

Organisational structures, institutional practices, societal assumptions and subscribed concepts impact significantly on individuals’ career aspirations and progression. Progression to educational leadership positions is no exception. In fact it emerges as a highly complex process with sensitive political underpinnings in the emerging multiply diverse societies. Research confirms the effect of ...

There are two contradictory answers to the question in the title. The first is the good growth hypothesis: economic growth generates higher incomes, which should make people approve of the government. Hence growth generates stability. The second is the destabilizing growth hypothesis: growth generates complex changes in society, and therefore instability. A part of the instability will be polit...