Models of voter choice frequently assume voters behave as independent actors who make decisions in a social vacuum. Recent work has demonstrated that social connections play a formative role in the decision to turnout to vote, to take expressive political action, and in the formation of political identity. Yet, no work has examined how social connections influence voters’ choices in an election...

In recent years we have witnessed political parties adopting social media as part of their election campaign strategy to encourage citizen participation and involvement. The purpose of this paper is to investigate what Facebook as a social media platform is perceived to afford political parties in their campaign strategy and how these intentions are reflected in the actual actions during the ca...

The body of content available on Twitter undoubtedly contains a diverse range of political insight and commentary. But, to what extent is this representative of an electorate? Can we model political sentiment effectively enough to capture the voting intentions of a nation during an election capaign? We use the recent Irish General Election as a case study for investigating the potential to mode...

The result of a referendum delivers a signi…cant amount of information about social preferences to each composite member of the society. This paper argues that, beyond this obvious fact, the choice of an authority not to o¤er a referendum, although permitted to do so, may enhance the information individuals posses about social preferences as well. The addition of a referendum option in the rule...

based on a meta-theoretical analysis of voting, the present paper is an attempt to present a theoretical model encompassing all the possible aspects of voting in an election action system, proposing four sub-systems of voting as follows: economic voting, political voting, cultural voting and moral voting. having distinguished among these sub-systems, the writer describes the constitutive elemen...

This study investigates whether microblogging messages on Twitter validly mirror the political landscape off-line and can be used to predict election results. In the context of the 2009 German federal election, we conducted a sentiment analysis of over 100,000 messages containing a reference to either a political party or a politician. Our results show that Twitter is used extensively for polit...

This paper presents a model of political competition, where voter decisions are affected by their ideological adherence to political parties. We derive a number of interesting results: First, we show that an equilibrium exists even though voting is fully deterministic. Second, although politicians, because of deterministic voting, can win an election with certainty by making concessions to vote...

The role of the media in the creation of distrust is much debated in political communication. Will negative news, for example, relentless attacks on political authorities, result in political cynicism or in a stimulation effect? By and large the media may stimulate political participation,but it is less clear when negative news will nullify this effect. Negative news may not only have short-ter...

political participation is an important factor for political survival of the society and government. this concept is a symbol showing people’s presence at actions of government, and it is a substantial index for people’s satisfaction in democratic countries. election can be the most important symbol of political participation. this is why people’s presence in election is carefully investigated ...

We provide a welfare analysis of early elections in a dynamic model of political competition with endogenous political blockades. Blockades arise if a party wins an election due to the support of voters with extreme policy preferences. We show that flexible election timing has the advantage that political blockades are overcome and political decisions are taken more frequently, but also the dis...