Social media and political communication in the 2014 elections to the European Parliament

Social media play an increasingly important part in the communication strategies of political campaigns by reflecting information about the policy preferences and opinions of political actors and their public followers. In addition, the content of the messages provides rich information about the political issues and the framing of those issues during elections, such as whether contested issues concern Europe or rather extend pre-existing national debates. In this study, we survey the European landscape of social media using tweets originating from and referring to political actors during the 2014 European Parliament election campaign. We describe the language and national distribution of the messages, the relative volume of different types of communications, and the factors that determine the adoption and use of social media by the candidates. We also analyze the dynamics of the volume and content of the communications over the duration of the campaign with reference to both the EU integration dimension of the debate and the prominence of the most visible list-leading candidates. Our findings indicate that the lead candidates and their televised debate had a prominent influence on the volume and content of communications, and that the content and emotional tone of communications more reflects preferences along the EU dimension of political contestation rather than classic national issues relating to left-right differences.     

ISO Standards Addressing Issues of Bias and Impartiality in Forensic Work

The ISO/IEC 17020 and 17025 standards both include requirements for impartiality and the freedom from bias. Meeting these requirements for implicit cognitive bias is not a simple matter. In this article, we address these international standards, specifically focusing on evaluating and mitigating the risk to impartiality, and quality assurance checks, so as to meet accreditation program requirements. We cover their meaning to management as well as to practitioners, addressing how these issues of impartiality and bias relate to forensic work, and how one can effectively evaluate and mitigate those risks. We then elaborate on specific quality assurance policies and checks and identify when corrective action may be appropriate. These measures will not only serve to meet ISO/IEC 17020 and 17025 requirements, but also enhance forensic work and decision-making.     

Do female legislators benefit from incumbency advantage? Incumbent renomination in a flexible-list PR system

This study investigates whether female legislators, just like their male colleagues, also benefit from incumbency advantage in the form of privileged access to candidate selection. This is done by examining whether female and male MPs receive the same reward for equivalent political performance when renomination decisions are made by political parties. Political performance is conceptualised in terms of incumbents’ popularity among voters, readiness to vote along the party line and legislative activity. An original dataset comprising 1032 observations on Czech legislators elected between 1996 and 2017 is used in the analysis. The results suggests that well-performing female MPs are just as likely as their male colleagues to secure a favourable renomination outcome. This result should not, however, be interpreted as evidence of gender-neutral access to re-election and political seniority as past research clearly indicates that female MPs need to work harder than men to produce the same political output.     

Voter reaction to legislator dissent across political systems

Research shows that legislators who dissent from the political line of their party are rewarded among constituents. This raises concerns about future party cohesiveness and, in turn, parties’ ability to govern and voters' ability to hold parties accountable. However, nearly all studies are conducted in single-member district systems, such as the United States and United Kingdom, which are generally considered most-likely settings for observing such effects. In this note, we conduct a country comparative study of voter reaction to legislator dissent across single-member and multi-member district systems (US, UK and Denmark). Building off existing theories, we argue that voters in multi-member districts also reward legislator dissent but that the reward is significantly weaker. We support this argument with observational and experimental data. Our results suggest that concerns regarding party governance and accountability associated with legislator party dissent extend to—but are less pertinent in—the more widespread multi-member district systems.     

Testing Zaller’s Reception and Acceptance Model in an Intense Election Campaign

The paper provides a test of Zaller’s reception and acceptance model. The theory describes conditions under which a political message is received, and, if received, accepted or rejected. The study deals with the 1988 Canadian election that was fiercely fought over one central issue, the Free Trade Accord with the United States. We use the 1988 Canadian Election Study campaign rolling cross-section survey, and we test Zaller’s propositions about who is most likely to receive and then accept party messages. Our findings provide little support for the model. We suggest that when an issue is hotly debated in an election campaign voters who receive party messages are able to connect these messages to their values and predispositions whatever their level of political awareness.

The Electoral Success of Beauties and Beasts

Les prises de positions, les programmes politiques ou encore les résultats précédents des candidats et des partis n'expliquent que partiellement leur succès électoral. D'autres mécanismes, plus simples, jouent aussi un rôle. Dans cet article, nous explorons l'influence de l'attractivité physique sur le nombre de votes de préférence reçus par 744 candidats à l’élection au Conseil national en Suisse en 2007. Le système électoral suisse de scrutin proportionnel avec liste ouverte offre une excellente opportunité d’étudier de tels effets, car les électeurs ne choisissent pas simplement entre partis ou entre candidats, mais également entre candidats au sein du même parti. Nous démontrons un effet robuste de l'attractivité physique sur le nombre de votes de préférence reçus par un candidat. L'effet est aussi important pour les femmes que pour les hommes. Cette influence de l'attractivité est essentiellement liée au fait que les candidats attractifs ont une plus grande probabilité d’être remarqués.     

Information,perceptions, and electoral behaviour of young voters: A randomised controlled experiment

The way people absorb and process politically relevant information is central to their subsequent political behaviour (in terms of turnout and vote choice). Nonetheless, little is known about how young voters – who might be more impressionable than more experienced voters – respond to the provision of such information. In this article, we design a between-subject randomised controlled trial that exposes a sample of university students to positive, neutral or negative information about central government performance before the 2017 Portuguese local elections. We find that young voters update their perceptions more when exposed to negative news. This negativity bias is stronger for first-time voters. We also find that negative information significantly affects turnout of initially undecided young voters. Our results imply that sensitivity to information is heterogeneous and that some young voters may be prone to manipulation through the provision of negative news.     

Economic shocks and democratic consolidation: Historical evidence from party-level electoral volatility in France

The emergence of a stable party system is a central aspect of democratic consolidation. Building a novel historical dataset, we analyze how economic growth affected the party-level electoral volatility during the consolidation of the French democracy over the Third Republic (1870-1940). We document an asymmetric effect in that positive economic shocks produced electoral stability, while negative shocks had not the expected destabilizing effect. Moreover, a positive shock had a disproportionally stabilizing effect during economic prosperity, four times stronger than during an average economic conjuncture. As France experienced strong positive shocks over this period, our results imply that the party system consolidation may have been driven by a few exceptionally high growth episodes. We also find evidence suggesting that positive shocks developed voters’ support for institutionally stable parties.     

Publication bias as a threat to the validity of meta-analytic results

This paper reviews the evidence in support of the contention that publication bias is a potential threat to the validity of meta-analytic results in criminology and similar fields. It then provides a critique of the traditional file drawer or failsafe N method for examining publication bias, and an overview of four newer methods that can be used to detect publication bias. These include two (trim and fill and cumulative meta-analysis) that enable the researcher to estimate the magnitude of the influence of publication bias on the overall mean effect size. Advantages and limitations of both traditional and newer methods are examined. The methods reviewed are illustrated through their application to a meta-analysis of the effects of drug courts on recidivism by Wilson et al. (Journal of Experimental Criminology, 2, 459–487, 2006).

Estimation of arrest careers using hierarchical stochastic models

This paper introduces a general procedure using hierarchical stochastic models for characterizing criminal careers within a population of heterogeneous offenders. Individuals engage in criminal careers which are treated as stochastic processes governed by fixed parameters (e.g., a rate parameter), and these parameters come from specified distributions. The parameters of these distributions at the upper level of the hierarchy must then be specified. The models are estimated using data on all persons arrested at least once in the six-county Detroit Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area during the 4 years 1974–1977 for a criterion offense (an index crime other than larceny) and arrested at least once for robbery through April 1979. The collected data set is not a random sample of all such offenders in the population. There is a bias toward selecting those with a higher arrest frequency. In order to make more general inferences, statistical adjustment was needed to overcome the arrest-frequency sampling bias. We construct a series of models for the arrest career and fit the models with the data set of arrests. After correcting biases in the data, we estimate the model parameters using empirical Bayes methods and then examine the resulting models.