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AbstractDo politicians carry on their interpersonal relations online? We examine how online political support compares to offline support. We overlay two data sets on political support among members of the Swiss National Council to estimate the explanatory power of online endorsements on offline cosponsorship signatures among members, using a gHypEG network regression model. Whereas offline support behavior is driven by a broad range of factors, such as network and homophily effects, endorsement is less diverse. Our findings show that online endorsement is predominantly driven by partisanship and does not mirror the richness found in offline support behavior.

I create a simple formal model of support for term limits which predicts that respondents in districts represented by the other party should more strongly favor term limits. An additional layer of theory predicts that weak Democrats and strong Republicans should be most responsive to the incentives illustrated in the formal model. Using the 1992, 1994, and 1998 National Election Studies, I find support for both of these hypotheses.

This study investigates how antidiscrimination policy and related policy knowledge influence citizens' support for the democratic system and its institutions. The article argues that antidiscrimination measures and knowledge about rights to equal treatment foster perceptions of government responsiveness, which increase political support among target groups and citizens who advocate egalitarianism. Utilizing a longitudinal design and more valid measures to resolve causality issues, the results of the empirical models show that increases in policy knowledge over time systematically predict higher political support, especially among individuals who hold egalitarian values. Individuals who are discriminated against express particularly high political support in contexts where antidiscrimination laws are expanded. Overall, the results amplify the role of policy knowledge as a key factor in studying policy feedback effects.

Compared with the traditional public-finance approach of a monolithic fully informed planner, earmarking of taxation is less likely to be optimal if a principal-agent setting is considered, where taxing and spending are performed by two separate agents which are monitored by the parliament. We assume that the parliament either maximizes welfare or expected votes. Vote maximizers are more inclined to choose earmarking, but at the price of inefficiently high costs.