This article examines the use of the Internet by a range of political actors in the 2004 European Parliament election in Britain—candidates, citizens, parties, government, pressure groups, and the media. Specifically, it surveys the structure of online political communications and the amount and nature of electoral information and engagement opportunities available to citizens in the framework ...

There is ample evidence for a “democracy premium”. Laws that have been implemented via election lead to a more cooperative behavior compared to a top-down approach. This has been observed using field data and laboratory experiments. We present evidence from Chinese students and workers who participated in public goods experiments and a value survey. We find a premium for top-down rule implement...

Questão Pública was a Voting Advice Application website set up for the 2010 Senate elections in Brazil. Promoted by a consortium of Brazilian and international NGOs as well as universities, Questão Pública was not only a research but also a political initiative. The consortium understood Questão Pública as a complementary tool to reinforce transparency and accountability during an election camp...

Institutions shape political outcomes, yet institutions themselves are endogenously shaped outcomes of political choices. Electoral systems are a unique class of distributive institutions that fundamentally shape political competition and political outcomes in democratic polities. Our paper examines the origins and subsequent changes to the Polish electoral system from the semi-free election in...

We consider an election that is solely concerned with redistribution of income. It is well known that when voters are selfish, there is no political equilibrium. We consider the case where voters are modestly altruistic. We demonstrate that modest altruism results in a unique political equilibrium. We also provide an explanation for why voters are much more altruistic than individuals acting al...

1. Introduction: This study examines the correlation between the Southern Vowel Shift in the Middle Tennessee area and different social characteristics, such as education level, age, and political views. To this end, field recordings were conducted, and the results were analyzed in terms of age, gender, occupation, education, political views, and other factors. The hypothesis is that people who...

Inclement weather on election day is widely seen to benefit certain political parties at the expense of others. Empirical evidence for this weather-vote share hypothesis is sparse however. We examine the effects of rainfall and temperature on share of the votes of eight political parties that participated in 13 national parliament elections, held in the Netherlands from 1971 to 2010. This paper...

We study the recruitment of individuals in the political sector. We propose an equilibrium model of political recruitment by two political parties competing in an election. We show that political parties may deliberately choose to recruit only mediocre politicians, in spite of the fact that they could select better individuals. Furthermore, we show that this phenomenon is more likely to occur i...

We use a lifecycle model in which individuals differ by age and by wage in order to analyze a pairwise majority voting process on the legal retirement age. We consider two different retirement regimes. In the first one the retirees do not return to the labor market, regardless the new retirement age. In the second one, they have to return if this ∗Corresponding author. Juan Antonio Lacomba, Dep...