4,924 research outputs found
Twitter-based analysis of the dynamics of collective attention to political parties
Large-scale data from social media have a significant potential to describe
complex phenomena in real world and to anticipate collective behaviors such as
information spreading and social trends. One specific case of study is
represented by the collective attention to the action of political parties. Not
surprisingly, researchers and stakeholders tried to correlate parties' presence
on social media with their performances in elections. Despite the many efforts,
results are still inconclusive since this kind of data is often very noisy and
significant signals could be covered by (largely unknown) statistical
fluctuations. In this paper we consider the number of tweets (tweet volume) of
a party as a proxy of collective attention to the party, identify the dynamics
of the volume, and show that this quantity has some information on the
elections outcome. We find that the distribution of the tweet volume for each
party follows a log-normal distribution with a positive autocorrelation of the
volume over short terms, which indicates the volume has large fluctuations of
the log-normal distribution yet with a short-term tendency. Furthermore, by
measuring the ratio of two consecutive daily tweet volumes, we find that the
evolution of the daily volume of a party can be described by means of a
geometric Brownian motion (i.e., the logarithm of the volume moves randomly
with a trend). Finally, we determine the optimal period of averaging tweet
volume for reducing fluctuations and extracting short-term tendencies. We
conclude that the tweet volume is a good indicator of parties' success in the
elections when considered over an optimal time window. Our study identifies the
statistical nature of collective attention to political issues and sheds light
on how to model the dynamics of collective attention in social media.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables. Published in PLoS ON
Political Motive and Bail: The Effect of Prosecutorial Strategies on Pretrial Decisions in Federal Terrorism Trials
The purpose of this study is to understand how prosecutorial strategies affect pretrial decisions in U.S. terrorism trials and how pretrial decisions in turn affect the disposition of those trials. This research builds off of the work of Smith and Damphousse (1996) which compared terrorism indictees to traditional federal offenders. They found that the use of explicit politicality as a prosecution strategy was a significant predictor of both disposition and the sentence length in terrorism trials. This study focuses on the question of whether the use of an explicitly political prosecution strategy impacts pretrial decisions in terrorism cases and whether the pretrial decisions impact the guilty plea rates in those cases.
This study addresses this issue through a structural-contextual theoretical framework by looking at the prosecutorial strategy of explicit politicality. The reason for this research is to see whether defendants in more heavily politicized cases are less likely to receive pretrial release and if the pretrial detention of the defendants affects the disposition of the trial. Using available data from the American Terrorism Study database, this study looks at data collected for 480 individuals indicted from the years 1980-2006 to investigate whether the prosecutorial strategy used had an effect on pretrial detention decisions. Rather than comparing terrorism indictees with traditional criminals, this study looks at indictees who have been indicted in federal terrorism trials, but were either prosecuted as traditional offenders or had their cases politicized by the prosecution. The study uses bivariate and multivariate analyses to measure the strength of the relationships between prosecution strategy, pretrial decisions, and trial disposition for both traditional and politicized terrorism trials.
In regards to pretrial release, this analysis has shown that defendants with less than high school education are less likely to receive pretrial release and that crime severity and community ties have significant roles in pretrial bail decisions. Surprisingly, race was also significant with white defendants being less likely to be released on bail. However, failure to secure pretrial release was not found to have any significant relationship with case dispositions
The Transition. Convergence and discrepancy in the international and national press coverage of Spain’s major postwar international news export
The role of the national and foreign press in the news coverage of the Spanish transition to democracy (1975-1978) has been a constant reference in the historical study of the period of political change after the end of the Francoist dictatorship. In this article we present the general results of three research projects concerning the role of the foreign press, of the Spanish daily press and the magazine marketin which we can observe both convergence and discrepance in the news narrative, editorial behaviour and political standpoints. The greater independence and informative freedom of the foreign press contrasts with the proximity of the Spanish press to both King and government with the exception of the critical support to reform expressed in both the new political magazines and newspapers during the first few months of the process of political change.El papel de la prensa nacional y extranjera en la cobertura informativa de la Transición española a la democracia (1975-1978) ha sido una referencia constante en la historiografía del período de cambio político en España tras el final de la dictadura de Franco, así como en la cultura periodística. En este artículo presentamos los resultados generales de tres proyectos de investigación sobre el papel de la prensa extranjera, de la prensa diaria española y de la prensa no diaria enlos que se pueden comprobar convergencias y discrepancias en el relato informativo, las valoraciones editoriales y los posicionamientos políticos. La mayor independencia y libertad informativa de la prensa extranjera contrasta con la proximidad de la prensa española al rey y al gobierno, con la excepción del apoyo crítico a la reforma de las nuevas revistas políticas y los diarios surgidos en los primeros meses del proceso de cambio político
Analyses of Methods for Prediction of Elections Using Software Systems
The primary objective of this research study is to review and analyze the published literature regarding the possibilities of forecasting and predicting the result of elections using software systems. The factors motivating research institutions and individuals to consider research impact on prediction of elections are manifold. Understanding the impact of different software tools, algorithms and social networking software applications on prediction of elections is a vital, and often overlooked, element of forecasting the election results. The literature review was conducted to examine methods and current software applications and practices as well as projects on election predictions. The review focused in particular on social media applications and different methods on accessing the opinion of the potential voters. The review draws on an international literature, although it is limited to English language publications. The findings identify the different methods used, the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches and the methods that are used currently and that have shown most effective results and recommendations are provided
Discourse Strategies in Chief Olusegun Obasanjo’s Letter to President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan
The paper sets out to investigate the discourse strategies deployed by former President Olusegun Obasanjo in his open letter to President Jonathan on December 12, 2013 which was published in most of the nation’s major newspapers. The work adopts M.A.K Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar as its theoretical framework because of the great importance which the model attaches to meanings and functions of a linguistic expression in relation to its context of usage. The researchers, through content and qualitative analysis, identify the discourse strategies used by the encoder of the speech to have the desired maximum effects on the decoders, especially President Goodluck Jonathan. Our findings reveal that President Obasanjo makes use of six discourse strategies in the letter for achieving some aims. The discourse strategies are: references to national interest; using the vocative “Mr President”; mentioning and portraying God in different perspectives; making direct appeals to the president; making references to late Gen. Sanni Abacha and copious repetitions of Nigeria and Nigerians in the text
Quantifying echo chamber effects in information spreading over political communication networks
Echo chambers in online social networks, in which users prefer to interact
only with ideologically-aligned peers, are believed to facilitate
misinformation spreading and contribute to radicalize political discourse. In
this paper, we gauge the effects of echo chambers in information spreading
phenomena over political communication networks. Mining 12 million Twitter
messages, we reconstruct a network in which users interchange opinions related
to the impeachment of the former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. We define
a continuous {political position} parameter, independent of the network's
structure, that allows to quantify the presence of echo chambers in the
strongly connected component of the network, reflected in two well-separated
communities of similar sizes with opposite views of the impeachment process. By
means of simple spreading models, we show that the capability of users in
propagating the content they produce, measured by the associated spreadability,
strongly depends on their attitude. Users expressing pro-impeachment sentiments
are capable to transmit information, on average, to a larger audience than
users expressing anti-impeachment sentiments. Furthermore, the users'
spreadability is correlated to the diversity, in terms of political position,
of the audience reached. Our method can be exploited to identify the presence
of echo chambers and their effects across different contexts and shed light
upon the mechanisms allowing to break echo chambers.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures. Supplementary Information available as ancillary
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Predator State: Corruption in a Council-Manager System–The Case of Bell, California
This article seeks to explain recent patterns of corruption in the City of Bell, California. After reviewing the literature on municipal corruption, Progressive reform, and political participation in immigrant communities, the article examines the Bell case study. It argues that the council-manager form of government contributes to civic disengagement in California’s high-immigration cities. Insulated from civic accountability, Bell became effectively a ‘predator state’ as local officials exploited governmental power and resources for personal gain. Implications for political reform and local state- building in high immigration cities are discussed
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