We present a thorough characterization of what we believe to be the first significant analysis of the behavior of groups in WhatsApp in the scientific literature. Our characterization of over 270,000 messages and about 7,000 users spanning a 28-day period is done at three different layers. The message layer focuses on individual messages, each of which is the result of specific posts performed ...

We examine the incentives of an interest group to provide verifiable policy-relevant information to a political decision-maker and to exert political pressure on her. We show that both lobbying instruments are interdependent. In our view information provision is a risky attempt to affect the politician’s beliefs about the desirability of the lobby’s objective. The constraints governing informat...

Political scientists often find themselves tracking amendments to political texts. As different actors weigh in, texts change as they are drafted and redrafted, reflecting political preferences and power. This study provides a novel solution to the problem of detecting amendments to political text based upon minimum edit distances. We demonstrate the usefulness of two language-insensitive, tran...

Purpose To offer greater insight in the role of blogs in the creation of a more transparent news media system and a more democratic political reality. Design/methodology/approach Framing theory is employed as a conceptual tool to re-interpret existing evidence of the performance of news blogs during situations of political conflict and war. A theoretical analysis is developed setting out the pr...

The interpretability of Machiavelli’s political thought relates, in the most part, to the concept of virtue and its dimensions. In Western thought, this concept has had continuity and has reached the Renaissance and Machiavelli’s times. In the Roman and Medieval tradition, philosophical, verbal, religious and even literary and historical approaches were dominant in the clarification and explana...

Political units often spatially depend in their political choices on other units. This is no less so in dyadic settings where, as in much of international relations research, the focus of the analysis is the pair or dyad of two political units. Yet, with few exceptions social scientists have analyzed contagion only in monadic datasets, consisting of individual political units. This article expl...

Conventional wisdom holds that democracy endures in rich countries but is unstable in poor ones. Building on Ansell and Samuels (2014), we suggest that the sources of democratic stability lie not just with a country’s aggregate level of wealth, but also with its distribution. However, we conceive of inequality and its political impact differently from previous work, which has focused on the med...

As online consumer reviews have tremendously gained in importance for consumer decision-making and firm strategies, scholars have greatly advanced our understanding of the effect of various review characteristics on review helpfulness and product sales. However, the question of what actually causes variations in these review characteristics remains largely unexplored. This study addresses this ...

We propose an automated and unsupervised methodology for a novel summarization of group behavior based on content preference. We show that graph theoretical community evolution (based on similarity of user preference for content) is effective in indexing these dynamics. Combined with text analysis that targets automatically-identified representative content for each community, our method produc...