46,391 research outputs found
Data Innovation for International Development: An overview of natural language processing for qualitative data analysis
Availability, collection and access to quantitative data, as well as its
limitations, often make qualitative data the resource upon which development
programs heavily rely. Both traditional interview data and social media
analysis can provide rich contextual information and are essential for
research, appraisal, monitoring and evaluation. These data may be difficult to
process and analyze both systematically and at scale. This, in turn, limits the
ability of timely data driven decision-making which is essential in fast
evolving complex social systems. In this paper, we discuss the potential of
using natural language processing to systematize analysis of qualitative data,
and to inform quick decision-making in the development context. We illustrate
this with interview data generated in a format of micro-narratives for the UNDP
Fragments of Impact project
Outside income and moral hazard : the elusive quest for good politicians
In most modern democracies elected officials can work in the private sector while appointed in
parliament. We show that when the political and market sectors are not mutually exclusive, a
trade-off arises between the quality of elected officials and the effort they exert in political life.
If high-ability citizens can keep earning money outside of parliament, they will be more likely
to run for election; for the same reason, they will also be more likely to shirk once elected.
These predictions are confronted with a unique dataset about members of the Italian Parliament
from 1996 to 2006. The empirical evidence shows that bad but dedicated politicians come along
with good but not fully committed politicians. There is in fact a non-negligible fraction of
citizens with remarkably high pre-election income who are appointed in parliament. These
citizens are those who gain relatively more from being elected in terms of outside income.
Conversely, they are less committed to the parliamentary activity in many respects, like voting
attendance and bills sponsorship
Party Formation and Coalitional Bargaining in a Model of Proportional Representation
We study a game theoretic model of a parliamentary democracy under proportional representation where `citizen candidates' form parties, voting occurs and governments are formed. We study the coalition governments that emerge as functions of the parties' seat shares, the size of the rents from holding office and their ideologies. We show that governments may be minimal winning, minority or surplus. Moreover, coalitions may be `disconnected'. We then look at how the coalition formation game affects the incentives for party formation. Our model explains the diverse electoral outcomes seen under proportional representation and integrates models of political entry with models of coalitional bargaining.Proportional representation, Party formation, Coalitions
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