During the 2016 United States presidential election, politicians have increasingly used Twitter to express their beliefs, stances on current political issues, and reactions concerning national and international events. Given the limited length of tweets and the scrutiny politicians face for what they choose or neglect to say, they must craft and time their tweets carefully. The content and deli...

Reputational Concerns in Political Agency Models Andrew Yuichi Lemon 2005 Citizens in democracies can be thought of as hiring politicians to run the government. In this sense, elections are contracts. The citizens are the principals and retain politicians as agents who are responsible for making policy decisions. Provided politicians value holding office in the future, elections generate incent...

This article focuses on how, why and with whom local politicians engage on Facebook. Based on a literature review of the public sphere, eParticipation and research related to social media, we propose a theoretical framework that identifies thematic areas integral to understanding the nature of political participation. The explanatory potential of our ‘ENGAGE’ model (Exchange, Narcissist, Gather...

Much literature on political behavior treats politicians as motivated by reelection, choosing actions to signal their types to voters. We identify two novel implications of models in which signalling incentives are important. First, because incumbents only care about clearing a reelection hurdle, signals will tend to cluster just above the threshold needed for reelection. This generates a skew ...

In this paper we provide a political game where agents decide whether to become legislators or politicians. Legislators determine the political institutions constraining politicians’ behavior and politicians compete for gaining the power to make decisions about the level of the public good. We derive the following results: i) Political competition is a necessary but not a sufficient condition f...

The scope of the public sector (i.e. what activities are undertaken by public rather than private entities) is a decision made by politicians. While there are economic costs and benefits to privatization, there is also a political benefit to incumbents: By privatizing today, politicians transfer future revenues (when they might not be in office) to the present. This political benefit leads to o...

I analyze equilibria in an infinite-horizon model of elections with a twoperiod term limit in the presence of adverse selection and moral hazard. The focus is on responsiveness of policy choices of first-term politicians. In equilibrium, office holders’ policy choices are ordered by type; politicians exert positive effort in the first term of office; and as politicians become highly office moti...

Politicians often use Twitter to express their beliefs, stances on current political issues, and reactions concerning national and international events. Since politicians are scrutinized for what they choose or neglect to say, they craft their statements carefully. Thus despite the limited length of tweets, their content is highly indicative of a politician’s stances. We present a weakly superv...

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...