political participation of citizens is an important political issue which affects the process of political development in each society. in the age of information revolution, information and communication technologies are penetrating all levels of societies and have catalyzed the process of development in every country and encourage many scholars to study how these technologies affect the social...

It is a piece of idle senthentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, or prevailing against the dungeon and the stake. Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a sufficient application oflegal or even of social penalties will generally succeed in stopping the propagation of either. The real advantage which truth has, consists in th...

This paper develops a theory of the interaction between appropriative conflict and economic growth. Appropriative conflict, as measured by the diversion of resources, is viewed as the cost of securing effective property rights. We identify conditions under which conflict rises or falls as the rate of economic growth improves. The main implication of the analysis is that if the quality of proper...

the study considers mass media communication as intertwined with social norms, as assumed by the perspective of social representations. it explores the italian press communication by focusing on three pairs of men and women politicians with different political orientations and all serving as presidents of the houses of parliament in three legislatures. the article concentrates on five newspaper...

Recent communication research concerning participatory politics has found that the effects of media, especially campaign ads, conventional news, and online political resources, are largely mediated through interpersonal discussion about politics. This article extends this line of theorizing about the role of political conversation in citizen competence by testing an O-S-R-O-R model of campaign ...

Work in political communication has discussed the ongoing predominance of negative news, but has offered few convincing accounts for this focus. A growing body of literature shows that humans regularly pay more attention to negative information than to positive information, however. This article argues that we should view the nature of news content in part as a consequence of this asymmetry bia...

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...

This paper discusses the application of the resource mobilization theory (RMT) to clarify the activities of certain key socio-political groups and movements in Egypt up till 2011. It contends that the political movements in the country have utilized information and communication technologies (ICTs) and social networks sites (SNSs) as a tool for mobilizing people and coordinating anti-regime act...