Committee-Based Profiles for Politician Finding

One step towards breaking down barriers between citizens and politicians is to help people identify those politicians who share their concerns. This paper is set in the field of expert finding and is based on the automatic construction of politicians’ profiles from their speeches on parliamentary committees. These committee-based profiles are treated as documents and are indexed by an information retrieval system. Given a query representing a citizen’s concern, a profile ranking is then obtained. In the final step, the different results for each candidate are combined in order to obtain the final politician ranking. We explore the use of classic combination strategies for this purpose and present a new approach that improves state-of-the-art performance and which is more stable under different conditions. We also introduce a two-stage model where the identification of a broader concept (such as the committee) is used to improve the final politician ranking.This work has been funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Economı́a y Competitividad under projects TIN2013-42741-P and TIN2016-77902-C3-2-P, and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF-FEDER)

Does Revolution Work? Evidence from Nepal’s People’s War

In 2015, after a decade-long conflict and nine years of negotiation, Nepal promulgated a constitution that replaced its 240-year-old monarchy by a federal republic. The subsequent 2017 local elections ushered more than 30,000 first-time politicians into office. Using a census of 3.68 million Nepalis (2.56 million of whom are of voting age) covering eleven districts, party nomination lists and party candidate selection committee surveys, electoral data and information on conflict incidence, we document that castes that were historically excluded from political representation achieved representation without a significant representation-ability trade-off: improved social representation among politicians is accompanied by positive selection on education and income. Triangulating across multiple data sources, we show that the entry of the revolutionary Maoist group as a post-conflict mainstream party played an important role. Finally, political representation of non-elite castes improved their policy inclusion as measured by individual access to earthquake reconstruction transfers. These gains, however, vary with the extent of social connections to the elected mayor and point to a continuing need to balance power by supporting institutions that provide all citizens political voice

Out of Sight, Out of Mind:The Value of Political Connections in Social Networks

This paper investigates the impact of social-network connections to politicians on firm value. We focus on the networks of university classmates and alumni among directors of U.S. public firms and congressmen. Using the Regression Discontinuity Design based on close elections from 2000 to 2008, we identify that a director’s connection to an elected congressman causes a Weighted Average Treatment Effect on Cumulative Abnormal Returns of -2.65% surrounding the election date. The effect is robust and consistent through various specifications, parametric and nonparametric, with different outcome measures and social network definitions, and across many subsamples. We find evidence to support the hypothesis that firms benefit more when connected politicians remain in state politics than when they move to federal office. Overall, our study identifies the value of political connections through social networks and uncovers its variation across different states and between state and federal political environments.Social network; political connection; close election; regression discontinuity design; firm value.

LDA-based Term Profiles for Expert Finding in a Political Setting

A common task in many political institutions (i.e. Parliament) is to find politicians who are experts in a particular field. In order to tackle this problem, the first step is to obtain politician profiles which include their interests, and these can be automatically learned from their speeches. As a politician may have various areas of expertise, one alternative is to use a set of subprofiles, each of which covers a different subject. In this study, we propose a novel approach for this task by using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to determine the main underlying topics of each political speech, and to distribute the related terms among the different topic-based subprofiles. With this objective, we propose the use of fifteen distance and similarity measures to automatically determine the optimal number of topics discussed in a document, and to demonstrate that every measure converges into five strategies: Euclidean, Dice, Sorensen, Cosine and Overlap. Our experimental results showed that the scores of the different accuracy metrics of the proposed strategies tended to be higher than those of the baselines for expert recommendation tasks, and that the use of an appropriate number of topics has proved relevant

Automatic Construction of Multi-faceted User Profiles using Text Clustering and its Application to Expert Recommendation and Filtering Problems

In the information age we are living in today, not only are we interested in accessing multimedia objects such as documents, videos, etc. but also in searching for professional experts, people or celebrities, possibly for professional needs or just for fun. Information access systems need to be able to extract and exploit various sources of information (usually in text format) about such individuals, and to represent them in a suitable way usually in the form of a profile. In this article, we tackle the problems of profile-based expert recommendation and document filtering from a machine learning perspective by clustering expert textual sources to build profiles and capture the different hidden topics in which the experts are interested. The experts will then be represented by means of multi-faceted profiles. Our experiments show that this is a valid technique to improve the performance of expert finding and document filtering

The Labor Market of Italian Politicians

Like voters (the represented), politicians (the representees) are the heart and soul of representative democracy. But isnt being a politician just like any other job? After we get past the rhetoric, is politics any different than other occupations? In the political sector, voters, parties and politicians represent the counterparts of consumers, firms and workers/managers in the market sector. In fact, the analogy is much deeper than it may appear at first sight. In the market sector, consumers determine to a large extent the success of a firm and ultimately the managements fate. However, managers are chosen by the firms, which typically have an objective that is different from those of consumers and managers. Likewise, while in all democratic systems the voters ultimately determine who is elected, it is typically the case that political parties nominate candidates for public office. Furthermore, the objectives of voters and parties with respect to the selection of candidates may differ, and are constrained by the career ambitions of individuals with political aspirations. But then, what really makes a career in the political sector different from a career in any other economic sector? There are at least three distinctive features that characterize the labor market in the political sector. First, politicians are typically under the spotlight, receiving the attention of the media and of a variety of citizens organizations. This makes politics a showcase, where politicians in office can display their political skills, while it might be more difficult for individuals working in the market sector to reveal their market ability. Second, inter-party competition for potential politicians is likely to be of secondary importance, as ideological preferences are more likely to attract individuals toward specific parties at the beginning of their political careers. Third, it is often the case that political parties take care of their losers by reserving partys positions to defeated incumbents. As a result, while individual careers within the political sector are inevitably linked to the opportunities available within parties, the extent to which individual endowments of political and market skills are correlated, or experience in the political (market) sector is also valuable in the market (political) sector, links the labor markets of the two sectors. This link affects the selection of politicians, the politicians careers, and the relationship between parties and voters.voters, parties, political sector

the Labor Market of Italian Politicians, Second Version

We analyze the career profiles of Italian legislators in the post-war period. Using a unique, newly collected dataset that contains detailed information on all the politicians who have been elected to the Italian Parliament between 1948 and 2008, we address a number of important issues that pertain to their career paths prior to election to Parliament, their parliamentary careers, and their post-Parliament employment. Our data span two institutional regimes: Italy’s First Republic (1948-1994) and the Second Republic (1994-present), characterized by different electoral rules and party structures. We first present a brief overview of the Italian political system. We then provide a comprehensive view of the career profiles of Italian legislators over the entire sample period, and highlight the major differences between the First and the Second Republic. We also compare the profiles of Italian legislators to those of the members of the United States Congress. We then use our data to address a number of questions that pertain to the selection of Italian politicians, their labor market, and their overall quality. We also draw some general conclusions that contribute to the debate about the relative efficacy and desirability of alternative policies regarding the selection and the compensation of elected representatives.politicians, parties, political careers

The Evolution of American Microtargeting: An Examination of Trends in Political Messaging

The usage of targeted messaging by political campaigns has seen a drastic evolution over the past half-century. Through advancement in campaign technology, and an increasingly large amount of personal information up for sale, campaigns have continually narrowed their scope from targeting large demographic groups to targeting each voter individually through a process called microtargeting. This presentation examines both the history of microtargeting in American politics, and the potential effects of its utilization