Suchergebnisse

Even though voters can have complex preferences over multiple candidates or parties, all extant electoral systems provide political representation based solely or primarily on voters' first preferences. I present a new concept of proportional representation that takes account of voters' preferences over the full list of alternatives—fully proportional representation (FPR)—and schemes for its implementation. I outline a "pure" FPR scheme, but because this scheme would have several undesirable features when used by real voters, I also discuss modifications that account for these difficulties. Although there are a variety of interpretations of the role played by voting in democracy, several can be shown to suggest FPR as a normative ideal. Fully proportional representation provides us with new ways to conceptualize existing electoral systems, a new standard against which alternative systems can be evaluated, and several feasible alternatives for approximating this new ideal.

Although we often plead with our colleagues and students to be more "systematic," we may not always be clear about what we mean. In biology, systematics is the "scientific study of the kinds and diversity of organisms and of any and all relationships among them" (Simpson 1961), the most important aspect of which is taxonomy, "the theory and practice of classifying organisms into groups on the basis of their relationships" (Mayr 1969). In political science, our organisms are political institutions. This article is a call for research in political systematics with suggestions for how the taxonomy of electoral systems might be developed.Institutional taxonomy can play many roles in comparative politics. It can provide an appreciation of the existing and theoretical diversity of political institutions, provide the information necessary to construct a theory of institutional development, systematize the variables that affect and constrain political interactions, and provide the starting point for informed discussions of institutional reform. Current attempts to develop large standardized data sets in comparative politics (Rosenstone 1994), for instance, require institutional taxonomy if the effort is to be effective. Of course, this discussion would be moot if institutional taxonomy were already well established (with or without the term).

Text is arguably the most pervasive—and certainly the most persistent—artifact of political behavior. Extensive collections of texts with clearly recognizable political—as distinct from religious—content go back as far as 2500 BCE in the case of Mesopotamia and 1300 BCE for China, and 2400-year-old political discussions dating back to the likes of Plato, Aristotle, and Thucydides are common fare even in the introductory study of political thought. Political tracts were among the earliest productions following the introduction of low-cost printing in Europe—fueling more than a few revolutions and social upheavals—and continuous printed records of legislative debates, such as the British parliament's Hansard and precursors tracing to 1802, cover centuries of political discussion.

AbstractSentiment analysis techniques have a long history in natural language processing and have become a standard tool in the analysis of political texts, promising a conceptually straightforward automated method of extracting meaning from textual data by scoring documents on a scale from positive to negative. However, while these kinds of sentiment scores can capture the overall tone of a document, the underlying concept of interest for political analysis is often actually the document's stance with respect to a given target—how positively or negatively it frames a specific idea, individual, or group—as this reflects the author's underlying political attitudes. In this paper, we question the validity of approximating author stance through sentiment scoring in the analysis of political texts, and advocate for greater attention to be paid to the conceptual distinction between a document's sentiment and its stance. Using examples from open-ended survey responses and from political discussions on social media, we demonstrate that in many political text analysis applications, sentiment and stance do not necessarily align, and therefore sentiment analysis methods fail to reliably capture ground-truth document stance, amplifying noise in the data and leading to faulty conclusions.

Electoral systems scholarship has frequently focused on the role of district magnitude -- the number of seats awarded per district -- in shaping party systems. The basic insight is that an increase in district magnitude will tend to increase the number of parties & party system fragmentation. District magnitude varies in many electoral systems, but cross-national research summarizes this distribution with a single number. We argue here that magnitude variation itself has important partisan political consequences, which we refer to collectively as the "variance effect." The variance effect creates disadvantages for urban political interests relative to rural interests; making it more difficult for urban & other correlated interests to convert support into parliamentary representation & to obtain unfragmented parliamentary representation. We demonstrate, with analyses of 24 elections in 16 countries, that the variance effect operates as theoretically predicted & is surprisingly important. 7 Tables, 2 Figures, 33 References. Adapted from the source document.