Governments and legislatures in Europe have created or greatly strengthened independent regulatory agencies (IRAs). Yet they also retain many formal controls over those agencies. The article analyses whether elected politicians have used their powers to create IRAs in their own image and kept IRAs under tight control or whether they have allowed IRAs to become a distinct set of actors, and henc...

When voters fear that politicians may have a right-wing bias or that they may be in‡uenced or corrupted by the rich elite, signals of true left-wing conviction are valuable. As a consequence, even a moderate politician seeking reelection chooses ‘populist’policies— i.e., policies to the left of the median voter— as a way of signaling that he is not from the right. Truly right-wing politicians r...

The PoliticalMashup Ngramviewer is an application that allows a user to visualise the use of terms and phrases in the “Tweede Kamer” (the Dutch parliament). Inspired by the Google Books Ngramviewer, the PoliticalMashup Ngramviewer additionally allows for faceting on politicians and parties, providing a more detailed insight in the use of certain terms and phrases by politicians and parties with...

Members of the Turkish Parliament (MPs) earn a base salary. In addition, they earn a bonus, if they are retired from the labor force. A law enacted in January 2012 pegged this bonus to 18% of the salary of the President of Turkey. As a result, salaries of the retirement eligible MPs increased substantially. Using a data set of MPs who served in the Parliament between 2007 and 2015, and exploiti...

Physiological research suggests that social attitudes, such as political beliefs, may be partly hard-wired in the brain. Conservatives have heightened sensitivity for detecting emotional faces and use emotion more effectively when campaigning. As the left face displays emotion more prominently, we examined 1538 official photographs of conservative and liberal politicians from Australia, Canada,...

Negativity towards the institutions of formal politics is currently a concern across much of the democratic world. It is generally agreed that such negativity increased among British citizens during the second half of the twentieth century. In this paper, we analyse a novel dataset not previously used to study this topic: Mass Observation's General Election diaries. Since diarists wrote mostly ...

This paper analyzes whether the religious identity of political leaders in India influences policy-determined variation in health outcomes, both for citizens of their religious group and for the population as a whole. In order to analyze the causal effect of the religious identity of politicians, we take advantage of the fact that some Muslim politicians contested in close elections against non...

This paper presents resources and lexical strategies for persuasive natural language processing. After the introduction of a specifically tagged corpus of political speeches, some forms of affective language processing in persuasive communication and prospects for application scenarios are provided. In particular Valentino, a prototype for valence shifting of existing texts, is described.