Inequalities persist when it comes to the attention, resource allocation and political prioritization, and provision of appropriate, adequate, and timely health interventions to populations in need. Set against a complex socio-political backdrop, the pressure on public health science is significant: institutions and scientists are accountable for helping to find the origins of disease, and to p...

We conducted a field experiment to measure the effect of exposure to newspapers on political behavior and opinion. Before the 2005 Virginia gubernatorial election, we randomly assigned individuals to a Washington Post free subscription treatment, a Washington Times free subscription treatment, or control. We find no effect of either paper on political knowledge, stated opinions or turnout in po...

This study presents evidence for the mediation effect of political knowledge through political self-efficacy (i.e. internal political efficacy) in the prediction of political participation. It employs an action theoretic approach-by and large grounded on the Theory of Planned Behaviour-and uses data from the German Longitudinal Election Study to examine whether political knowledge has distinct ...

The Thai coup of 19 September 2006 derived ideological legitimacy from the view that the Thaksin government’s electoral mandate was illegitimate because it had been ‘‘bought’’ from an unsophisticated and easily manipulated electorate. There is nothing new about this argument, nor its use in justifying military interference. Political commentators have asserted regularly that the Thai populace l...

Opinion mining, which aims the automatic processing of subjective information, has become a key field. In the political context, the awareness of people’s sentiment towards their representatives, public organizations, political parties or politicians, can support political decisions, campaign moves, government policies, marketing strategies, etc. This paper describes a case study over opinions ...

For nearly 150 years, environmental concerns have been part of the U.S. political agenda. As early as 1864, the U.S. Congress debated the proper use of national lands, and, motivated by press accounts of the logging of Giant Sequoia trees, decided to protect Yosemite Valley for aesthetic reasons (Brulle 2000). Since then, as industrialization and environmental impacts have risen in tandem, envi...

Concern that donations to political campaigns secure preferential treatment from policy makers has long occupied judges, scholars, and the public. However, the effects of contributions on policy makers’ behavior are notoriously difficult to assess. We present the first randomized field experiment on the topic. The experiment focuses on whether contributions facilitate access to influential poli...