Web sites of Slovenian political parties do not fully exploit the Internet’s potential for interactive and deliberative communication on political issues with citizens, because they favour a competitive-elitist perception of democracy. As result, political party’s web sites are mainly used for political mobilization, agitation in persuasion. Supporting this model of democracy via web pages enab...

DEMANDS FOR POLITICAL ORTHODOXY seem to appear, at least in the twentieth century, in thirty-year cycles. Thus, in the 1930s, we witnessed the rise of Hitlerism and Stalinism, both of which were aimed as much on purging their respective parties of differences as providing the “masses” with ideological guidance. In the 1960s, politics shifted its ground from parties to movements, and hence the d...

The three million-strong Jewish community constituted almost ten per cent of the population of the Polish state that emerged from the Great War in 1918. In the turbulent years of Poland’s reformation many of them suffered from anti-Semitic excesses and a number of pogroms. However, the threat of violence and an electoral system biased in favour of big parties proved insufficient in uniting the ...

Electoral systems are uniquely distributive political institutions that shape political outcomes, yet are themselves endogenously shaped outcomes of political choices. In Poland, party system development has involved not only parties adapting to electoral institutions in each election, but also parties modifying these institutions prior to every election. We model electoral system change as dri...

Assessing political conversations in social media requires a deeper understanding of the underlying practices and styles that drive these conversations. In this paper, we present a computational approach for assessing online conversational practices of political parties. Following a deductive approach, we devise a number of quantitative measures from a discussion of theoretical constructs in so...

Poland’s economic and political transition, one of the most successful transitions, has depended very heavily on the job creation in new firms to replace the jobs lost in the formerly state-owned enterprises. This uses evidence from both survey and aggregate data to analyze four Polish elections during the transition. These analyses indicate that these de novo firms, the individuals they employ...

Recent surveys have shown that an increasing portion of the US public believes the two major US parties inadequately represent the US public opinion, and think additional parties are needed [1]. However, there are high barriers for third parties in political elections. In this paper, we aim to address two questions: “How well do the two major US parties represent the public’s ideology?” and “Do...