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pt. 1. Political communication : empowering or disempowering? -- pt. 2. Political participation in mediated spaces : merely 'soft' empowerment? -- pt. 3. Citizen (public) mediated acts of empowerment : challenging the status quo? -- pt. 4. Conclusion.

This article investigates how players of digital games apply their own play with the intent to transmit political messages to other players. Acts of activism are collected from a sample of commercial multiplayer online games; three taxonomies are proposed of which one is used to present the findings, and popular patterns or structures of activism are identified. It is found that in-game activism often takes its cue from activism in everyday life, but that some original topics emerge, for example, the ownership of virtual worlds and practices of in-game political activism such as novel forms of rallies. Current political activism often appears to utilize generic and widely-shared game mechanics, rather than mechanics specific to individual games or genres. Games are therefore selected for their topics, availability, and costs, and popularity with the target audience.

This paper shows that political attitudes are linked to cooperative behavior in an incentivized experiment with a large sample randomly drawn from the Danish population. However, this relationship depends on the way the experiment is framed. In the standard game in which subjects give to a public good, contributions are the same regardless of political attitudes. In an economically equivalent version, in which subjects take from a public good, left-wingers cooperate significantly more than subjects in the middle or to the right of the political spectrum. Through simulation techniques we find that this difference in the framing effect across political point of views is to some extent explained by differences in beliefs and basic cooperation preferences.

Using employment data for Portuguese municipalities, we find strong evidence of political business cycles. Employment increases shortly before elections mainly in municipalities where the mayor's party has a majority of deputies in the municipal assembly and where she is running for reelection. ; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia - ...

Socio-political instability is considered as an obstacle for economic and social development of countries. Therefore, Political violence as a feature of socio-political instability is a significant development constraint that generates economic problems, limits public and private investments, and damages the country's infrastructure. This paper offers an explanation for political violence and economic development through an empirical analysis of Colombian departments that includes factors such as social conditions and narcotrafficking. We use multiple datasets to measure political violence and economic development, and we employ panel fixed-effects Driscoll and Kraay regressions and Generalized Method of Moments Estimation (GMM) for a sample of Colombian departments over the period 2000-2014. In the political violence model, we find that the aggregate-level production per capita, education, arrests and health coverage have a negative effect on political violence, whereas GINI, unemployment rate, illegal drugs and displaced population have a positive effect on violence. In the economic development model, political violence, armed actions and corruption have a negative effect on economic development, whereas population, saving, employment, political participation, manufacturing and production have a positive effect on economic development. The findings demonstrate the importance of implementing social policies and strategies against political violence to increase economic growth and development, productivity, political participation and security for the population across Colombia's departments. ; peer-reviewed

The main intention of this paper is to reconstruct the conceptual and historical‎ genesis of the idea and value of political peace from the point of view of ‎political philosophy at the intersection between late scholasticism and early modernity. The paper consists of three related parts. The first part highlights‎ methodological and contextual reasons why the idea of political peace has ‎been overshadowed throughout history by dominant discourses on war. The ‎second part deals with conceptual clarifications. The nature of war is distinguished ‎from other types of conflict and three interpretative approaches to‎ war are analyzed: political realism, fundamentalist-moralistic view of the holy‎ war, and the many theories of natural law that give rise to conceptions of just‎ war, but also the first abolitionist perspective or idea of ending all wars. Early‎ theoretical articulations of the notion of peace indicated modern-day emancipation‎ of politics from the tutelage of metaphysics and classical ethics, thus‎ separating the value of political peace from its original oneness with cosmic ‎and psychological peace. The third part of the paper highlights key moments ‎in the historical genesis of the value of political peace in the works of Aurelius ‎Augustine, Marsilius of Padua, and William of Ockham.‎