Purpose – To contribute to the mapping of the social media discourse involving politicians and their followers during election campaigns, we examined Israeli politicians’ Aristotelian rhetoric on Facebook and its reception during the 2013 election campaign. D ow nl oa de d by U N IV E R SI T Y O F H A IF A A t 0 0: 49 3 0 M ar ch 2 01 5 (P T ) Design/methodology/approach – We examined the Arist...

Redistricting is among the least transparent processes in democratic governance. Often, politicians shape districts behind closed doors with little or no input from the public.1 The resulting lines embody the political goals of politicians and not the public interest, as much as the goals of the two groups do not overlap.2 Politicians use redistricting to realign their constituencies to further...

Periodic elections are the main instrument through which voters can hold politicians accountable. From this perspective term limits, which restrict voters’ ability to reward politicians with re-election, appear counterproductive. We show that despite the disciplining effect of elections, term limits can be ex ante welfare improving from the perspective of voters. By reducing the value of holdin...

We present a tool to generate real world political networks from user provided lists of politicians and news sites. Additional output includes visualizations, interactive tools and maps that allow a user to better understand the politicians and their surrounding environments as portrayed by the media. As a case study, we construct a comprehensive list of current Texas politicians, select news s...

A recent line of research in the field humor has proposed existence two morally based comic styles. One them, corrective (or satire), seeks to ridicule and mock establish justice. In contrast, benevolent attempts correct deviances using a friendly manner understanding human imperfections. Considering their focus on correcting what is perceived as wrong, this study we seek examine how these styl...

Periodic elections are the main instrument through which voters can hold politicians accountable. From this perspective term limits, which restrict voters’ ability to reward politicians with re-election, appear counterproductive. We show that despite the disciplining effect of elections, term limits can be ex ante welfare improving from the perspective of voters. By reducing the value of holdin...

This article provides a test of the secularization hypothesis, which argues that economic growth, industrialization, increased literacy and decreasing fertility depress religiosity. It focuses on the elections of the secular politicians who voted in favor of the separation between Church and State in the French Parliament in 1905. If the secularization hypothesis is correct, these secular polit...

We present an algorithm for automatically constructing a decompositional shape model from examples. Unlike current approaches to structural model acquisition, in which one-to-one correspondences among appearance-based features are used to construct an exemplar-based model, we search for many-tomany correspondences among qualitative shape features (multi-scale ridges and blobs) to construct a ge...

Imagine you are a climate scientist, and you get a call from a politician asking whether she should support a proposal to impose mandatory caps on carbon-dioxide emissions. Lucky you! Should you urge support of the proposal? Or should you restrict yourself to explaining recent developments in climate science? Should you offer to answer any specific questions the politician might have about clim...

I introduce a microfounded model of campaign finance with office-seeking politicians, a continuum of voters, and a large number of heterogeneous lobbies. Lobbies make contributions to politicians according to a common agency framework. Politicians use contributions to finance their electoral expenditures. Voters are not fooled by electoral expenditures: they are influenced in a way that is cons...