Technology Firms Shape Political Communication: The Work of Microsoft,Facebook, Twitter,and Google With Campaigns During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Cycle

This article offers the first analysis of the role that technology companies, specifically Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Google, play in shaping the political communication of electoral campaigns in the United States. We offer an empirical analysis of the work technology firms do around electoral politics through interviews with staffers at these firms and digital and social media directors of 2016 U.S. presidential primary and general election campaigns, in addition to field observations at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. We find that technology firms are motivated to work in the political space for marketing, advertising revenue, and relationship-building in the service of lobbying efforts. To facilitate this, these firms have developed organizational structures and staffing patterns that accord with the partisan nature of American politics. Furthermore, Facebook, Twitter, and Google go beyond promoting their services and facilitating digital advertising buys, actively shaping campaign communication through their close collaboration with political staffers. We show how representatives at these firms serve as quasi-digital consultants to campaigns, shaping digital strategy, content, and execution. Given this, we argue that political communication scholars need to consider social media firms as more active agents in political processes than previously appreciated in the literature.     

The Four Predicaments of American Liberalism: Challenges and Opportunities in a Presidential Election Year

The presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have indicated an apparent resurgence in American liberalism. More significantly, they have underlined both the highly problematic nature of the liberal legacy within the Democratic Party and the difficulties of mobilising liberal themes in the battle of ideas that characterises the conduct of politics in the United States. The article examines the difficulty of the issue by reference to four predicaments that persistently condition the status and deployment of liberal themes. In analysing the problems of strategy, historical narrative, political positioning and ideational engagement, the study analyses the negative connotations of contemporary liberalism, the multiple limitations of liberal reform, and liberalism's deficiencies in the politics of America's core ideas. A revived liberal prospectus will depend upon the ingenuity of liberal forces in challenging the conservative ascendancy in ideational competition, and in renegotiating a public settlement of their own with the central strands of political legitimacy.     

超市自动存包服务法律性质探析

超市自动存包服务的法律性质应当视顾客的行为具体分析:当顾客进入超市消费成为消费者时,自动存包服务是商家的附属服务,消费者寄存物丢失毁损的,消费者可以依照《消费者权益保护法》获得赔偿;当顾客进入超市尚未消费而未成为消费者时,超市自动存包柜服务是商家的先契约义务,其利用超市自动存包柜寄存的物品发生丢失毁损的,顾客可以依据《合同法》,诉之法院获得赔偿。     

Elections and the Development of Civil War: An Empirical Study of Sri Lanka

Present empirical research on the connection between elections and civil war often treats causality as a one-way effect because it focuses exclusively on either the onset or the consequence of civil war. What is omitted in the literature is the endogenous nature of the election–conflict nexus throughout a civil war. This article dedicates itself to filling that gap. Treating administrative units in conflict as part of a rebellion network, we apply a stochastic actor-oriented model (SAOM) to the case of Sri Lanka. We find that, on the one hand, rebellion is less likely to occur in Tamil regions if national winners in presidential elections enjoy high local approval ratings (selection effect). On the other hand, regions involved in the rebellion network converge in terms of their local support for the national winner of the presidency (influence effect). Overall, our model-based simulation analysis shows that the influence effect has a larger impact on the endogenous relationship than the selection effect.     

Keeping the left at bay: Delegate selection system choice in US Democratic presidential nominations

In the modern era of US presidential nominations, every election cycle we witness around 20% change in delegate selection system types. This variance remains unexplained and for the most part unexplored. At the same time, prior formal and empirical models offer contradicting expectations of party leader behavior in their choice of system. This paper looks to bridge this divide. We argue state party leaders use delegate selection systems to select candidates favorable to their own ideological position. When the median partisan is ideologically left relative to the position of state Democratic leaders, the leaders of the Party will open up the delegate selection system to dilute the voices furthest on the left. We employ maximum likelihood estimation as a method to show that left positioning of citizens relative to state Democratic leaders increases the likelihood the state Democratic Party will use a primary system as opposed to a caucus.     

The British Election Study 2015 general election constituency forecast

This paper develops a votes-to-seats nowcast model using individual level data from the British Election Study Internet panel to model the flow of the vote between 2010 and 2015. Transition matrices for each constituency are calculated using multinomial models of flows between 2010 origins and 2015 destinations. Respondents are reweighted to the polling average for England, Scotland and Wales and are further reweighted using predicted turnout to downweight respondents who are less likely to vote. The forecast performed poorly in 2015 because of polling errors and because the “Ashcroft” constituency vote intention question overestimated the Liberal Democrat incumbency effect. Without these errors, the forecast would have come much closer to the result but would still have underestimated the Conservatives' seats.     

Assessing the ‘Gold Standard’ of party policy placements: Is computerized replication possible?

The Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) offers data on party policy positions based on a coding scheme of 56 categories. To what extent can we replicate the CMP coding results by using computerized topical coding of digitalised manifestos? Both human and computer coding have a number of strengths and weaknesses so that the combination of strengths could help to arrive at both valid and reliable party policy placements, in particular the measurement of policy movements over time. More than 1500 digitalised party manifestos in 20 democracies in the period 1960–2009 are re-coded with a computerized CMP-compatible coding scheme in order to assess the differences with human coding using exactly the same issue categories and the same left–right scale.The analysis shows that it is possible to use computer coding in order to locate the potential weakness of the human coding and the other way around. It also illustrates that the validity and reliability of policy placements is a function of the conceptualisation and operationalisation of issues, of the size of documents and of scale construction. Computerized cross-validation of the CMP-coding results offers a new and powerful tool to assess its reliability.     

Short-term factors versus long-term values: Explaining the 2009 election results

This paper examines the way three types of factors influence eastern and western German voters in order to assess the similarities and differences in electoral behavior across the former East-West divide. First, to what extend does the performance of parties and the regime influence party support in the East and the West? Second, how do candidate perceptions affect party support? Third, to what degree do ideological values influence vote choice? The results suggest that even 20 years after unification, voters in the East and the West still follow a partially different logic. While candidate evaluations broadly influence party support similarly, negative performance assessments lead west German voters to support the opposition, whereas eastern Germans tend to either “exit” the electoral arena or support the Linke party. Moreover, ideological values have no affect on party choice in the West, whereas they strongly influence the choice of Die Linke in the East. Theoretically, the results reflect the different East-West experiences, illustrating that voters in newer democracies may base their party choice on a different rationale than voters in more mature democracies.     

Looking to the future: Prospective economic voting in 2008 Presidential Elections

Despite the economic turmoil of the time, a typical study of vote choice in the 2008 US Presidential Election would (falsely) find little evidence that voters’ opinions about the future state of the economy affected their vote choice. We argue that this misleading conclusion results from serious measurement error in the standard prospective economic evaluations survey question. Relying instead on a revised question, included for the first time in the 2008 American National Election Study, we find that most respondents condition their prospective economic evaluations on potential election outcomes, and that these evaluations are an important determinant of vote choice. A replication in a very different political context – the 2008 Ghanaian election – yields similar results.     

Forecasting proportional representation elections from non-representative expectation surveys

This study tests non-representative expectation surveys as a method for forecasting elections. For dichotomous forecasts of the 2013 German election (e.g., who will be chancellor, which parties will enter parliament), two non-representative citizen samples performed equally well than a benchmark group of experts. For vote-share forecasts, the sample of more knowledgeable and interested citizens performed similar to experts and quantitative models, and outperformed the less informed citizens. Furthermore, both citizen samples outperformed prediction markets but provided less accurate forecasts than representative polls. The results suggest that non-representative surveys can provide a useful low-cost forecasting method, in particular for small-scale elections, where it may not be feasible or cost-effective to use established methods such as representative polls or prediction markets.