This study investigates the effect of participative political institutions (PPIs) that emerged in many central European cities from the late 13th century. The empirical analysis of the paper is based on newly compiled long-run data for the existence of different types of PPIs in 104 cities in the Holy Roman Empire. The effect of both an overall index of participativeness of political institutio...

The role of blogs and bloggers in the political process has received a great deal of attention in recent years; perhaps especially so in the context of the rise and fall of the first mainstream blogger-candidate for U.S. President, Howard Dean, and the subsequent scramble of other political players in the United States to establish blogs of their (or more frequently, their staffers’) own. U.S.-...

From 1992 to 1995 the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina experienced a war of genocidal proportions between the Bosnian Serbs, the Bosnian Croats, and the Bosnian Muslims. The international Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has indicted Dr. Radovan Karadzic--former President of the Bosnian Serb Republic, psychiatrist, and poet--as a suspected war criminal for his role in war crimes, crime...

Despite the rapid growth of blogging in China, little is known about the communicative processes of blogs and their implications for China. This current study aims to bridge that gap by specifically looking at the political blogs posted on the NetEase, one of the largest portal websites in China, regarding the dismissal of Shanghai leader Chen Liangyu. Results from a content analysis indicate t...

While ther is no evidence that Freud ever had in analysis a leading political figure, he did analyze the sister of one, and made her the basis of an important case study. Dora's brother, Otto Bauer, was an influential Marxist theoretician and leader of the Austrian Socialist Party from 1918 to 1934. Freud's Dora case illuminates the psychodynamics of Otto Bauer's life and career, and a re-exami...

The work investigates the influence of leader's strategy on opinion formation in artificial networked societies. The strength of the social influence is assumed to be dictated by distance from one agent to another, as well as individual strengths of the agents. The leader is assumed to have much greater resources, which allows him to tune the way he influences the other agents. We study various...

On June 13, 2016, the Pimpriraja Primary Health Center in Aurangabad district, Maharashtra State, in western India reported learning of approximately 90 persons with red eyes and blurred vision. One day earlier, the patients had attended a gathering in Zalta village to acknowledge the contributions of a local political leader. An investigation by the Field Epidemiology Training Program (FETP) a...

This paper investigates whether improvements in women’s political representation are associated with higher child survival, and whether any improvements are greater for girls. It also differentiates the caste of both the child and the political leader. We use within-district variation in electoral outcomes for 286 districts across 31 years and within-mother variation in survival outcomes for 0....

The themewe explore in this paper is that uncontrolled growth and resulting environmental damage can be considered as an Environmental March of Folly. A folly has been defined as the pursuit of policies that are contrary to the pursuers own long-term interests. For an event or series of events to be considered a folly, three criteria must bemet. The policy must be perceived as counter-productiv...