Theories of parties and lawmaking typically require measures of legislators' preferences for empirical analysis. However, existing methods for generating estimates of these preferences presume that legislators care only about their own policy preferences and not about their constituency or party...

Using Eurovision Song Contest data from the years 1957 to 2009, we analyze voting biases of the participating countries in an attempt to answer the question: “Is it about music or politics?” More specifically with this study we show that determine states’ affinity toward one another and...

Predicting social outcomes on the basis of numerous individual-level interactions is an exhaustive task that only a computer can complete. Even a computer takes exponentially longer to compute all the interactions as the number of actors increases. In addition, the measurement of relevant...

In the U.S. the belief in the ability of the self-reliant individual to become materially wealthy is the foundation of the American Dream and pervades American political thought from Jefferson to today. Although significant to some of the successes of the country, this belief has also been used...

Following the 2006 post-electoral crisis, important changes were made to the Constitution and several secondary laws in Mexico. Unfortunately, this new legislation has at least three drawbacks: (1) a weakening of electoral institutions, (2) a reduction in freedom of speech and access to the...

The Canadian general election of 2008 was not as much a victory for the governing party as it was a defeat for the opposition leader. The Conservative minority government of Stephen Harper elected January 23, 2006 was remarkably resilient; it was the longest uninterrupted minority government in...

We propose a mechanism explaining how elections may legitimize autocratic government even if they are undeniably not free and not fair. We advocate the concept of elections as a mechanism to manipulate public beliefs about the true popularity of an autocratic government. Instead of being...

One of the premises of democratization is that political parties are able to contest in elections. As local governments are able to control a large amount of resources, the results of local elections can be crucial to a party's prospects in national elections. In Taiwan, local elections used to...

This paper affords an opportunity to study the early adoption and dissemination of emerging technology tools in campaigns by analyzing which candidates were the most likely to use Facebook in the 2006 and 2008 congressional elections, and how. The research hypotheses draw from the diffusion of...

There is increasing recognition of the importance of party leaders in British elections. The internationalization of domestic politics, growth of the state, erosion of the traditional cleavage of class, and changes in media coverage of elections, have all contributed to the presidentialization...