Can Social Media Predict Election Results? Evidence From New Zealand

The importance of social media for election campaigning has received a lot of attention recently. Using data from the 2011 New Zealand general election and the size of candidates’ social media networks on Facebook and Twitter, we investigate whether social media is associated with election votes and probability of election success. Overall, our results suggest that there is a statistically significant relationship between the size of online social networks and election voting and election results. However, the size of the effect is small and it appears that social media presence is therefore only predictive in closely contested elections.     

Individual neighborhood attachment and perceptions of neighborhood safety

Macrostructural research in the social disorganization tradition assumes neighborhood structure dictates individual behavior. The current research explores the opposite perspective to determine whether individual attachment to the neighborhood influences perceptions of neighborhood safety. Using the Chicago Metropolitan Area Survey, the results show that loners, persons wishing to move, and renters perceive their neighborhoods as being less safe than attached residents. Implications for future research are offered. Data for this study were made available by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research.     

Probity Auditing: Keeping the Bureaucrats Honest?

The use of probity audits has flourished in the public sector in recent years. This growth has been accompanied by the development of probity guidelines by a number of central agencies and infrastructure providers across Australia. However, these guidelines tend to focus on competitive procurement processes and ignore broader factors applying to other processes in which probity audits are also used. Further, as there are no professional standards governing a probity audit (unlike most other types of audit), it is important that agencies have a clear understanding of their benefits and limitations and of the skills and experience required of a probity auditor before they commission one.     

Semiotics of corruption: ideological complexes in Mexican politics

ABSTRACT

This article analyses a complex text and event to examine the role of ramifying contradictions in strategic social semiotics analysis. The focus was a paradoxical intervention into corruption by then-Mexican President Peña, who responded to an unprecedented wave of popular criticisms of corruption by simultaneously launching an Anticorruption System and apologizing for his own corruption. We asked: how did this contradiction work, in this conjuncture, with what effects, and how analyse them? We combined the concepts of the Ideological Complex and Wittgenstein’s “duck-rabbit” to explain unstable contradictions in a multiscalar, multimodal analysis of a diachronic corpus, to expose discursive strategies and identify points of vulnerability.