Political surveys have indicated a relationship between a sense of Scottish identity and voting decisions in the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum. Identity is often reflected in language use, suggesting the intuitive hypothesis that individuals who support Scottish independence are more likely to use distinctively Scottish words than those who oppose it. In the first large-scale study of s...

Political surveys have indicated a relationship between a sense of Scottish identity and voting decisions in the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum. Identity is often reflected in language use, suggesting the intuitive hypothesis that individuals who support Scottish independence are more likely to use distinctively Scottish words than those who oppose it. In the first large-scale study of s...

Drawing on new data that combine recorded votes from the Swiss National Assembly with canton-level referendum results on identical legislative proposals, Portmann et al. (Public Choice 151:585–610, 2012) develop an innovative strategy to identify the effect of district magnitude on the relationship between representatives and their constituents. We replicate PSE’s central result and also estima...

Dichotomous choice (referendum) contingent valuation questions have gained popularity over the last several years due to their purported advantages for avoiding many of the biases known to be inherent in other value elicitation formats. However, this type of valuation question is inefficient in that a much larger number of observations is required to identify the distribution of values with any...

Pre-electoral surveys typically attempt, and sometimes fail, to predict voting behavior on the basis of explicit measures of agreement or disagreement with a candidate or political position. Here, we assessed whether a specific brain signature of disagreement with one's social values, the event-related potential component N400, could be predictive of voting behavior. We examined this possibilit...

The analysis of a corpus of micro-blogs on the topic of the 2011 UK referendum about the Alternative Vote has been undertaken as a joint activity by text miners and social scientists. To facilitate the collaboration, the corpus and its analysis is managed in a Web-accessible framework that allows users to upload their own textual data for analysis and to manage their own text annotation resourc...

We analyze single binary-choice voting rules and identify the presence of the No-Show paradox in this simple setting, as a consequence of specific turnout or quorum conditions that are included in actual rules. Since these conditions are meant to ensure a representative outcome, we formalize this concern and reach our main result: no voting rule can ensure representation if abstention is possib...

Bots are social media accounts that automate interaction with other users, and they are active on the StrongerInBrexit conversation happening over Twitter. These automated scripts generate content through these platforms and then interact with people. Political bots are automated accounts that are particularly active on public policy issues, elections, and political crises. In this preliminary ...

A statistical problem that arises in several fields is that of estimating the features of an unknown distribution, which may be conditioned on covariates, using a sample of binomial observations on whether draws from this distribution exceed threshold levels set by experimental design. Applications include bioassay and destructive duration analysis. The empirical application we consider is refe...

The American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law (AAPL) has been formally debating taking an official position on the death penalty since at least 1998. It is clear that there are divergent views on the appropriateness of capital punishment, the involvement of psychiatrists in various stages of death penalty proceedings, the propriety of AAPL’s taking a stand on this (or any) sociopolitical issue...