What determines political candidates’ election prospects? We match roll call votes of candidates for the majority elected upper house of parliament who were previously in the lower house with revealed preferences of their constituency. Thereby, we obtain a direct measure of past congruence. Politicians have a significantly and quantitatively important higher probability of election when they mo...

The successful leader must first make the commitment to practice evidence-based leadership by examining best practices and modeling her/his leadership practice after these models. We know from a plethora of evidence that the relationship-based leader who is also grounded in good operational abilities and can paint the picture of a compelling future is much more effective than the leader who is ...

In the course of history, a large number of politicians have been assassinated. To investigate this phenomenon, rational choice hypotheses are developed and tested using a large data set covering close to 100 countries over a period of 20 years. Several strategies, in addition to security measures, are shown to significantly reduce the probability of politicians being attacked or killed: extend...

In a closed-list proportional-representation system, where votes are cast for a given political party, not for any particular candidate, the seat distribution in the parliament is highly sensitive to small changes in the vote distribution among political parties. This creates randomness in who gets elected as a Member of the Parliament (MP). Using a detailed data set of the MPs in Turkish Parli...

Because of the complex aetiology of modern obesity patterns, isolated therapeutic or public health measures will not solve the obesity problem. Consumers must be made aware of the ways in which the food industry influences their food purchases. Government needs to prioritise health ahead of industrial productivity and increased consumption. An obesity intervention wish list is presented as a su...

The psychosocial effects of terrorist threat and close protection have never been studied systematically in political leaders. We conducted a study among 12 Dutch politicians and their partners who were living under terrorist threat and close protection in the aftermath of two political murders. Interviews revealed that their coping with the situation varied and consisted of emotion-focused, de...

Social-categorical knowledge is partially grounded in proprioception. In Study 1, participants describing "hard" and "soft" politicians, and "hard" and "soft" scientists used different "hard" and "soft" traits for the two groups, suggesting that the meaning of these traits is context specific. Studies 2 to 4 showed that both meanings were supported by hard and soft proprioception. Consistent wi...

ed the relative merits of sexuality education that promotes abstinence as the only acceptable form of behavior outside of marriage and more comprehensive approaches that discuss contraception as well. The results of several new studies show that these debates may have had a considerable impact on what is being taught in the classroom; moreover, they strongly indicate that politicians—in their d...