Institutional Incentives for Strategic Voting:

Looking more closely at the way people form expectations about the possible outcome of the election in their electoral district I will provide evidence for the first time that strategic voting can be observed and predicted even in PR systems with large districts magnitudes, such as in Portugal. Employing district-level data from 1975-2002 I estimate that a party, who is expected to win no seat, will be strategically deserted on average by about 3 per cent of the voters. This number does systematically vary with the district magnitude of each district and is largest (> 4 per cent) in Portugal�s smallest electoral districts (e.g., Beja and Ãvora). Nevertheless even in Portugal�s largest electoral district, Lisbon, strategic voting can be observed to have a systematic impact on parties vote shares.

Social capital and deceased organ donation

This chapter examines the link between deceased organ donation and social capital from a theoretical standpoint.In this chapter, the theoretical links between deceased organ donation and social capital theory are examined and evaluated

Courts and Executives

William Howard Taft was both our twenty-seventh president and the tenth Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court -- the only person to have ever held both high positions in our country. He once famously commented that presidents may come and go, but the Supreme Court goes on forever (Pringle 1998). His remark reminds us that presidents serve only four-year terms (and are now limited to two of them), but justices of the Supreme court are appointed for life and leave a legacy of precedent-setting cases after departing the High Court. Of course, presidents also leave a legacy of important decisions, not the least of which being their appointment of federal judges. [excerpt

Responsible corporate governance in Europe

The latest European Union’s (EU) guiding policies are encouraging big businesses and state-owned organisations to provide a fair and truthful view of their respective entities’ environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance. At present, European member states are transposing directive 2014/95/EU on non-financial reporting. The EU’s “comply or explain” approach has presented a significant step forward toward the corporations’ active engagement on corporate governance disclosure and transparency. Hence, this chapter makes specific reference to some of the corporations’ best practices as it identifies areas for improvement in corporate governance issues. It explains how three major European banks have reviewed the roles and responsibilities of corporate boards and management. In many cases, they have anticipated any regulatory, legal, contractual, social and market-driven obligations as they helped stakeholders to exercise their rights. This contribution contends that there are significant implications for financial services corporations who intend following the right path toward responsible corporate governance and ethical behaviours.peer-reviewe

The effects of social media on political party perception and voting behavior

This study sought to determine to what extent social media influences political party perception (PPP) and political voting behavior. Based on literature a conceptual model was developed which measures political interest, political trust, religion and the use of social media and their effects on PPP and voting behavior. Using an online questionnaire the conceptual model was tested towards and during the Dutch national elections of 2010. Although data analysis indicates several significant effects on PPP, voting behavior is solely determined by political interest. Certain effects of social media seem evident, though further research is necessary in funding and legitimizing its future role in political marketing

The Effect of Biased Communications On Both Trusting and Suspicious Voters

In recent studies of political decision-making, apparently anomalous behavior has been observed on the part of voters, in which negative information about a candidate strengthens, rather than weakens, a prior positive opinion about the candidate. This behavior appears to run counter to rational models of decision making, and it is sometimes interpreted as evidence of non-rational "motivated reasoning". We consider scenarios in which this effect arises in a model of rational decision making which includes the possibility of deceptive information. In particular, we will consider a model in which there are two classes of voters, which we will call trusting voters and suspicious voters, and two types of information sources, which we will call unbiased sources and biased sources. In our model, new data about a candidate can be efficiently incorporated by a trusting voter, and anomalous updates are impossible; however, anomalous updates can be made by suspicious voters, if the information source mistakenly plans for an audience of trusting voters, and if the partisan goals of the information source are known by the suspicious voter to be "opposite" to his own. Our model is based on a formalism introduced by the artificial intelligence community called "multi-agent influence diagrams", which generalize Bayesian networks to settings involving multiple agents with distinct goals

"Beasts in human form": How dangerous speech harms

Recent years have seen an upsurge of inflammatory speech around the world. Understanding the mechanisms that correlate speech with violence is a necessary step to explore the most effective forms of counterspeech. This paper starts with a review of the features of dangerous speech and ideology, as formulated by Jonathan Maynard and Susan Benesch. It then offers a conceptual framework to analyze some of the underlying linguistic mechanisms at play: derogatory language, code words, figleaves, and meaning perversions. It gives a hypothesis for assessing the moral responsibility of interlocutors in dangerous speech situations. The last section applies this framework to a case of demagogic discourse. The framework offered explains how public discourse has harmed social relations and institutions, and is an obstacle to rational resolutions to the political situation

The law of corporate groups in Portugal

After the pioneering German “Aktiengesetz” of 1965 and the Brazilian “Lei das Sociedades Anónimas” of 1976, Portugal has become the third country in the world to enact a specific regulation on groups of companies. The Code of Commercial Companies (“Código das Sociedades Comerciais”, abbreviately hereinafter CSC), enacted in 1986, contains a unitary set of rules regulating the relationships between companies, in general, and the groups of companies, in particular (arts. 481° to 508°-E CSC). With this set of rules, the Portuguese legislator has dealt with one of the major topics of modern Company Law. While this branch of law is traditionally conceived as the law of the individual company, modern economic reality is characterized by the massive emergence of large-scale enterprise networks, where parts of a whole business are allocated and insulated in several legally independent companies submitted to an unified economic direction. As Tom HADDEN put it: “Company lawyers still write and talk as if the single independent company, with its shareholders, directors and employees, was the norm. In reality, the individual company ceased to be the most significant form of organization in the 1920s and 1930s. The commercial world is now dominated both nationally and internationally by complex groups of companies”. This trend, which is now observable in any of the largest economies in the world, holds also true for small markets such as Portugal. Although Portuguese economy is still dominated by small and medium-sized enterprises, the organizational structure of the group has always been extremely common. During the 70s, it was estimated that the seven largest groups of companies owned about 50% of the equity capital of all domestic enterprises and were alone responsible for 3/4 of the internal national product. Such a trend has continued and even highlighted in the next decades, surviving to different political and economic scenarios: during the 80s, due to the process of state nationalization of these groups, an enormous public group with more than one thousand controlled companies has been created (“IPE - Instituto de Participações do Estado”); and during the 90s until today, thanks to the reprivatisation movement and the opening of our national market, we assisted to the re-emergence of some large private groups, composed of several hundred subsidiaries each, some of which are listed in foreign stock exchange markets (e.g., in the banking sector, “BCP – Banco Comercial Português”, in the industrial area, “SONAE”, and in the media and communication area, “Portugal-Telecom”)