In this paper we investigate the determinants of local governments’ technical efficiency in road maintenance for a panel of German counties using a broad variety of estimation approaches. More specifically, we calculate efficiency indices using non-parametric (DEA) and parametric (stochastic frontier analysis) reference technologies, and examine how these efficiency indices can be explained by ...

The Blogosphere has more influence on both the general public’s opinions and mainstream media nowadays. As vast political blogs representing grassroots voices go online, it is both interesting and useful to find them and determine their political leanings as either liberal or conservative. In this paper, we address both problems by using front pages of blogs in a corpus we built to create two c...

the organization of the petroleum exporting countries (opec) has a key role in making universal political and economic decisions regarding petroleum. therefore, it seems highly important to assess the opec member’s degree of concentration and its monopoly.  this research, aims to assess and classify the concentration of petroleum export in the opec countries during the 1997-2011 period by the h...

In this paper, we identify a mechanism through which media concentration reduces political polarization and media competition (via media specialization) increases polarization. This mechanism may help explain the patterns of US Congressional polarization. In an effort to avoid offending potential customers, a concentrated media avoids making clear-cut endorsements and, as a result, provides lit...

As I use the term here, the central component of political liberalism holds that political institutions are not to be guided by substantive principles of the good about which reasonable people may disagree. If a particular policy or institutional action is a requirement of justice, this cannot be because this policy or action promotes human welfare, well-being, or flourishing. Morality, on the ...

The papers in this special iSSU. e of Studies in Political Economy are, with one exception, drawn from presentations made at the SPE annual conference in February 2002. The conference objective was to provide a forum for public and scholarly engagement with the questions of political ecology and political economy.The papers provided a number of critical perspectives on the themes of sustainable...

This conceptual paper focuses on political marketing „strategies‟ in the context of major British political parties. There is consideration of the underlying drivers that are encouraging the adoption of the political marketing approach. It is debated whether political parties actually have political marketing „strategies‟. The difference between political marketing and political campaign strate...

Legitimacy is always considered an important concept among basic topics of political science; since it has been already posed as the prerequisite of acceptability for exercising of power in the societies through history. Accordingly, all of the political philosophies made efforts to establish an intellectual apparatus that enforces the fundamentals of governance, dealt to some extent with the i...