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...

Place-making – the set of social, political and material processes by which people iteratively create and recreate the experienced geographies in which they live – is an important but oft-neglected part of political theory. Place-making is an inherently networked process, constituted by the socio-spatial relationships that link individuals together through a common place-frame. While place-orie...

This study investigates whether microblogging messages on Twitter validly mirror the political landscape off-line and can be used to predict election results. In the context of the 2009 German federal election, we conducted a sentiment analysis of over 100,000 messages containing a reference to either a political party or a politician. Our results show that Twitter is used extensively for polit...

a bstr act Prominent positions in the contemporary theoretical field of the humanities tend to conceptualize late modern communities in general as aes­ thetic communities of taste. In regard to political communities, this means reducing the political to an implication of the aesthetic discourse. This article argues for addressing the aesthetic and the political as distinct discourses that are, ...

The rough and tumble of John Howard’s public school education left him with an electorally appealing ordinariness in a party renowned for a born to rule attitude. Howard was not brought up with the sense of noblesse oblige of an establishment figure such as Malcolm Fraser. His father owned a small petrol station and John Howard worked there on weekends while at school. Howard’s background may h...

This paper investigates convergence in left-right ideological positions in The Netherlands using cointegration techniques. Our sample consists of 765 weekly observations on those positions as well as on the corresponding political party preference. The time series data display nonstationary patterns in the sense that their means are not constant over time. Therefore, we rely on recently develop...