We examined whether participants' political beliefs significantly predicted likelihood of forwarding political videos and the characteristics of the targets of these forwards. Participants viewed one of four political advertisements that varied in terms of the candidate's political party (Democrat or Republican) and the emotion that the advertisement evoked (Positive or Negative). Democrats wer...

Over the past decades, we see a trend that social scientists adopt the experiment approach to study our social and political world. Particularly, agent-based modelling (ABM) is employed as a tool for “thought experiment” because theorists usually (1) fall short of empirical data to contrast with experiment results and (2) are more interested in solving theoretical puzzles than empirical puzzles...

BACKGROUND The development of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing methods has dramatically increased the potential for the extraction of previously unrecoverable natural gas. Nonetheless, the potential risks and hazards associated with such technologies are not without controversy and are compounded by frequently changing information and an uncertain landscape of international politics...

Since its foundation, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has promoted gender equality, at least at the level of official rhetoric. Despite some progress in their social and economic lives, women have not been able to make headway in Chinese politics. Many scholars have studied this topic, but due to the CCP’s political sensitivity, systematic data are not available. Drawing on a unique data set ...

It is believed that economic integration, in terms of increasing flows of trade and foreign direct investment, contributes to lower the level of corruption in host countries because integration increases market competition and efficiency, reduces rents, and promotes the diffusion of good governance. However, such kind of argument ignores the interactions between economic integration and local p...

Authoritarianism has resurfaced as a research topic in political psychology, as it appears relevant to explain current political trends. Authoritarian attitudes have been consistently linked to feelings of disgust, an emotion that is thought to have evolved to protect the organism from contamination. We hypothesized that body odour disgust sensitivity (BODS) might be associated with authoritari...

The estimation of causal effects has a revered place in all fields of empirical political science, but a large volume of methodological and applied work ignores a fundamental fact: most people are skeptical of estimated causal effects. In particular, researchers are often worried about the assumption of no omitted variables or no unmeasured confounders. This paper combines two approaches to sen...

In this paper we compare the performance of standard nearest-neighbor propensity score matching with that of an analogous Bayesian propensity score matching procedure. We show that the Bayesian approach has several advantages, including that it makes better use of available information, since it makes less arbitrary decisions about which observations to drop and which ones to keep in the matche...