The outcome of the French presidential election, in which the Republican Francois Fillon, Front National’s Marine Le Pen, and the Socialist Party will be vying for position in April 2017, could have wide reaching implications for public health in Europe. Concerns over living standards in France will influence the vote— could income inequality and poor health also influence voting, as it seems t...

Prior research offers a mixed view of the value of expert surveys for long-term election forecasts. On the positive side, experts have more information about the candidates and issues than voters do. On the negative side, experts all have access to the same information. Based on prior literature and on our experiences with the 2004 presidential election and the 2008 campaign so far, we have rea...

This article describes a US political corpus comprising 245 speeches given by senators John McCain and Barack Obama during the years 2007–2008. We present the main characteristics of this collection and compare the common English words most frequently used by these political leaders with ordinary usage (Brown corpus). We then discuss and compare certain metrics capable of extracting terms best ...

By examining disaggregate state-level data, we address two weaknesses of prior estimates of economic voting models in U.S. Presidential elections. First, our disaggregate approach substantially improves statistical power, thus reducing the danger of “overfitting.” Second, our analysis demonstrates systematic differences in voting behavior across states, which have been ignored: voters in higher...

Exposure and adoption of opinions in social networks are important questions in education, business, and government. We describe a novel application of ubiquitous computing based on using mobile phone sensors to measure and model the face-to-face interactions and subsequent opinion changes of undergraduates during the US presidential election campaign. We find that self-reported political discu...

Following the Democratic primaries, the build-up to the US presidential election has begun and there is a growing call for changes to the science agenda.

The technology behind RSS feeds offers great possibilities to retrieve more news items than ever. In contrast to these technical developments, human capabilities to read all these news items have not increased likewise. To bridge this gap, this paper presents a visual analytics tool for conducting semi-automatic sentiment analysis of large news feeds. While the tool automatically retrieves and ...

The 2016 presidential election season and subsequent political events have had physical and emotional impacts on youth. We collected qualitative insights from 14 to 24 year olds across the US related to these events over time. Open-ended probes were sent via text message at three time points before and after the 2016 presidential election. The majority of youth reported emotional stress during ...

The visibility of network-based technologies in the 2008 U.S. presidential election is indicative of their importance as tools to inform and motivate a populace. By explaining what factors impact usage behaviors with respect to these technologies, their use can be better encouraged. In this paper, the authors examine the constructs influencing usage behaviors for political technologies using th...