The paper presents two studies on vagueness in political discourse. The first is a qualitative analysis of the commonsense definition of vagueness and related notions in political discourse. Participants were submitted two fragments of real political argumentations and a questionnaire asking to rate them as to vagueness, sincerity, persuasiveness and other criteria. They showed that two aspects...

According to attitudinal theorists, justices on the U. S. Supreme Court decide cases largely on political preferences that fall within one dimension of ideology. The focus of this study is to test whether a unidimensional ideological model explains the voting behavior of Canadian Supreme Court justices (1992-1997). The factor analysis results in three areas of law, two of which have never been ...

The flavor du jour in discussions of Islamic terrorism features a de-emphasis on the ideological component, drawing instead upon epidemiological and criminological concepts; approaching Mexican drug gangs and Islamic extremists as being more similar than they are different. This aids a network scrutiny and suggests buy-out rather than ideological deradicalization. Such new abandonments of the i...

Do legislators remain at one point on the ideological spectrum for their entire careers, or do they update their ideological positions in response to the demands of constituents? Although theories of the electoral connection predict that legislators should adapt to voter demands, most empirical studies instead show that they maintain consistent positions in the face of changing political condit...

In representative democracies, the development of party platforms depends on both ideological and electoral considerations. Decisions on party membership, on the other hand, are driven by the relative desirability of party platforms. This paper analyzes the dynamic interaction between party platforms and party membership. It shows how voter mobility, membership costs and the possibility of alie...

The efficacy of individual psychotherapy for acute schizophrenics has been the source of controversy for many decades. Discussion of the scientific issues, such as design, methodology, and assessment, has been clouded by strong ideological conflicts. The relative value of drugs and psychotherapy for schizophrenics has been the subject of tension and dispute between various psychiatric schools--...

We examine a legislative voting game where decisions are to be made over both ideological and distributive dimensions. In equilibrium legislators prefer to make proposals for the two dimensions together, despite having preferences that are separable over the two dimensions. The equilibria exhibit interaction between the ideological and distributive dimensions, and the set of legislators who app...

My paper is based on the idea that computer games as simulations can be seen as a new kind of aesthetical realism forming a certain perception of reality and thus certain ideological statements. These statements can be found in the structural shaping of the games, in other words the rules and gameplay of a game. The investigation thus concerns the framework that the rules and gameplay provide i...

With the proliferation of user-generated articles over the web, it becomes imperative to develop automated methods that are aware of the ideological-bias implicit in a document collection. While there exist methods that can classify the ideological bias of a given document, little has been done toward understanding the nature of this bias on a topical-level. In this paper we address the problem...

We present a model in which the media endorses the character of offi ce-seeking candidates as a means to promote its own ideological agenda. In equilibrium, political parties completely pander to the elite-controlled media under moderate ideological conflict between voters and the elite. Larger ideological conflict leads to stochastic polarization– parties either adopt the role of media darling...