This paper addresses a relatively new text categorization problem: classifying a political blog as either ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’, based on its political leaning. Instead of simply using “Bag of Words” features (BoW) as in previous work, we have explored subjectivity manifested in blogs and used subjectivity information thus found to help build political leaning classifiers. Specifically, o...

Why do terrorists terrorize? In this paper, we advance an explanation for terrorist (and anti-terrorist) behavior in societies with deep cleavages that might promote terrorism—for example, in Northern Ireland, Israel, Sri Lanka, the Middle East, and the Balkans. In particular we develop a model of strategic interaction between groups in society as a way of examining the political conditions und...

This paper studies the effects of power-concentrating institutions on the quality of political selection, i.e., the voters’ capacity to identify and empower well-suited politicians. In our model, candidates are heterogeneous in two unobservable quality aspects: ability and public-spiritedness. As voters can only base their ballots on the candidates’ binding policy proposals, low-quality candida...

We investigate the effects of fiscal transparency and political polarization on the prevalence of electoral cycles in fiscal balance. While some recent political economy literature on electoral cycles identifies such cycles mainly in weak and recent democracies, in contrast we show, conditioning on a new index of institutional fiscal transparency, that electoral cycles in fiscal balance are a f...

In this paper, we discuss how machine learning could be used to produce a systematic and more objective political discourse analysis. Political footprints are vector space models (VSMs) applied to political discourse. Each of their vectors represents a word, and is produced by training the English lexicon on large text corpora. This paper presents a simple implementation of political footprints...

Recent studies have found that individuals tend to see themselves as more central in a network than they really are. This body of work has generally been done among small groups of <30 actors. Additionally, settings have usually been in a well-bounded social context focusing on friendship or work relations. Other related research has found links between activity and influence in a network and a...

Given inevitable constraints of the fiscal year framework for development planning, not to mention the day to day rush of project design and implementation, development policymakers and practitioners often simply lack the time to engage in longer term strategic planning. While there is usually a general sense of what they want to see happen 10 years down the line, there is still a need to think...

Only a professor of political science, indeed a specialist in theories of politics, would have the audacity to address a subject -state reform -on which he has intelligent opinions at most, and apply his views to state reform in a political system -Colombia -about which he appreciates only its broadest contours at best. Yet this is the task your National Planning Department has set for me, and ...