Political discourse in the United States is getting increasingly polarized. This polarization frequently causes different communities to react very differently to the same news events. Political blogs as a form of social media provide an unique insight into this phenomenon. We present a multi-target, semisupervised latent variable model, MCR-LDA to model this process by analyzing political blog...

Political Islam, the book under review, contains eight sections; the first being introductory, the rest all with four articles each, under different themes, and captioned; Modern Understandings and Explanations of Islamism (section two), Political Islam, the State and Political Power (section three), Political Islam and Democracy (section four), Islamic Movements in Multicultural Settings (sect...

Article history: Received 15 April 2011 Received in revised form 13 October 2011 Accepted 22 November 2011 Available online xxxx The social sciences have traditionally assumed that education is amajor determinant of citizens' political orientations and behavior. Several studies have also shown that intelligence has an impact. According to a theory that conceptualizes intelligence as a burgher (...

Conventional models of ‘transitions to democracy’ are incomplete and insufficient for the analysis of the regime changes in Russia and other post-Soviet societies, which go beyond the usual textbook cases. This article reconsiders conceptual frameworks for the analysis of democracy and democratization in the light of the experience of postSoviet political developments. The distinction between t...

Using data from a national survey we conducted in 2009 of about 1,500 lawyers and non-lawyers working in China’s legal system, we measure the political values of Chinese lawyers, compare them to various reference populations, and identify some of their sources. We find that, on the whole, Chinese lawyers are strongly inclined toward political reform, attach far greater importance to political r...

This paper develops the empirical and theoretical case that differences in economic institutions are the fundamental cause of differences in economic development. We first document the empirical importance of institutions by focusing on two "quasi-natural experiments" in history, the division of Korea into two parts with very different economic institutions and the colonization of much of the w...