Political Science Commons^™

Extracting Policy Positions From Political Texts Using Words As Data, Michael Laver, Kenneth Benoit, John Garry

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

We present a new way of extracting policy positions from political texts that treats texts not as discourses to be understood and interpreted but rather, as data in the form of words. We compare this approach to previous methods of text analysis and use it to replicate published estimates of the policy positions of political parties in Britain and Ireland, on both economic and social policy dimensions. We “export” the method to a non-English-language environment, analyzing the policy positions of German parties, including the PDS as it entered the former West German party system. Finally, we extend its application beyond …

The Evolution Of Party Systems Between Elections, Michael Laver, Kenneth Benoit

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Most existing theoretical work on party competition pays little attention to the evolution of party systems between elections as a result of defections between parties. In this article, we treat individual legislators as utility-maximizing agents tempted to defect to other parties if this would increase their expected payoffs. We model the evolution of party systems between elections in these terms and discuss this analytically, exploring unanswered questions using computational methods. Under office-seeking motivational assumptions, our results strikingly highlight the role of the largest party, especially when it is “dominant” in the technical sense, as a pole of attraction in interelectoral …

Business And Global Governance: The Growing Role Of Corporate Codes Of Conduct, Ann Florini

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

These are, in many ways, halcyon days for global business. In a vast ideological shift in the late 20th century, markets rather than governments came to be seen as the road to prosperity. Governments that once nationalized foreign firms now seek out the investment, technology, and managerial expertise such companies can bring. The halls of the United Nations used to ring with calls for international regulation of those dreaded evil-doers, the multinational corporations. Now the UN instead implores business to join with it in a voluntary Global Compact to ensure respect for internationally agreed environmental, labor, and human rights standards.

The Lion And The Lamb: Demythologizing Franklin Roosevelt's Fireside Chats, Elvin T. Lim

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

We are accustomed to a characterization of Franklin Roosevelt’s legendary Fireside Chats as intimate exchanges between the president and the people. This essay argues that the Fireside Chats were a harsher, more castigatory rhetorical genre than such a characterization would allow. A content analysis of the 27 Fireside Chats recorded in FDR’s Public Papers suggests that the Fireside Chats were, on a number of indices, far less intimate than have traditionally been supposed, and in fact among the more vitriolic and declamatory utterances of the 32nd president. The essay proceeds with a discussion of how this illusion of intimacy was …

The Role Of The Eu In The Non-Proliferation Of Nuclear Weapons: The Way To Thessaloniki And Beyond, Clara Portela

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Over the past few years the EU has begun taking some steps against the spread of nuclear weapons within its Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). At the Thessaloniki Summit June 2003, the European Council adopted its first draft Strategy against the proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). In order to assess the significance of the Strategy, this paper will first present and evaluate the Union’s record in the field, then review the newly released Strategy, and finally make suggestions as to how it can be improved.

The EU is not an unitary actor in the nuclear non-proliferation domain, …

The Concept Of A Middle Power In International Relations: Distinguishing Between Emerging And Traditional Middle Powers, Eduard Jordaan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This article seeks to develop a distinction between emerging and traditional middle powers as a means to giving the concept of a middle power greater analytical clarity. All middle powers display foreign policy behaviour that stabilises and legitimises the global order, typically through multilateral and cooperative initiatives. However, emerging and traditional middle powers can be distinguished in terms of their mutually-influencing constitutive and behavioural differences. Constitutively, traditional middle powers are wealthy, stable, egalitarian, social democratic and not regionally influential. Behaviourally, they exhibit a weak and ambivalent regional orientation, constructing identities distinct from powerful states in their regions and offer appeasing …

Estimating Irish Party Policy Positions Using Computer Wordscoring: The 2002 Election: A Research Note, Kenneth Benoit, Michael Laver

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Developments in the computerised analysis of political texts now make itmuch easier than before to investigate large volumes of political text inorder to estimate the policy positions of the authors. Previous contentanalyses of party manifestos, for example, have relied on the hand codingof texts (Budge et al., 1987; Laver and Budge, 1992; Klingeman et al.,1994; Budge et al., 2001), or on dictionary-based computer codingtechniques (Laver and Garry, 2000; Kleinnijenhuis and Pennings, 2001;Garry, 2001; de Vries et al., 2001; Bara, 2001). Such analyses, even thosebased on computer coding dictionaries, require heavy human involvement or intervention, creating both a huge resource cost …

Campaign Spending In The Local Government Elections Of 1999, Kenneth Benoit, Michael Marsh

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

For the first time in Irish electoral history, the 1999 local elections required candidates to publicly declare their campaign expenditures. Drawing on these data, we explore patterns in campaign spending and assess their impact, both on candidate success and on turnout. First, examining the elections contested by 1,838 candidates from 180 local constituencies and 34 councils, we identify both partisan and geographic spending patterns, and examine how well these can be explained as a function of political and demographic variables. Second, we model and estimate the effects of expenditure on individual electoral outcomes. The findings clearly indicate that even at …

Islam, Democracy And Civil Society, Chandran Kukathas

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

What is the relationship between Islam, democracy, and civil society? This is thequestion which supplies the topic of this essay, Its purpose, more particularly, is to explore theplace of Islam in the modern world-a world which contemporary writers increasingly try tounderstand by invoking the notions of democracy and civil society. But the occasion for thisexploitation has a more precise origin still. The issue of the place of Islam in the modernworld is raised, more often than not, by writers and commentators for whom Islam is, aboveall, a danger, in geo-political terms, it is a danger to the West; in world-historical …

The Cultural Contradictions Of Socialism, Chandran Kukathas

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

While no one has yet announced the death of capitalism, reports of its imminent demise have been as numerous as they have been exaggerated. Such reports have usually been bolstered by thoughtful analyses of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, which was expected to come sliding—if not crashing—down under the weight of its own inconsistencies. Leaving aside Karl Marx's own predictions, twentieth-century analysts as diverse as Joseph Schumpeter, Daniel Bell, and Jurgen Habermas have asserted that the contradictions of capitalism could only mean that its days were numbered. Alas, all that has been established by these analyses is that predictive failure …

Survey Article: Multiculturalism As Fairness: Will Kymlicka's Multicultural Citizenship, Chandran Kukathas

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

According to Will Kymlicka's book Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights, `the liberal ideal is a society of free and equalindividuals'.1 But what, he goes on to ask, is the relevant `society'? The answer he says most people would give is `their nation'. `The sort of freedom and equality they most value, and can make use of is freedom and equality within their own societal culture'. Indeed, most people `are willing to forgo a wider freedom and equality to ensure the continued existence of their nation' (93). Thus few favour open borders which allow people freely to settle, …

Like Deja Vu All Over Again: The Hungarian Parliamentary Elections Of 2002, Kenneth Benoit

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

On 7 and 21 April 2002, Hungary went to the polls to vote in its fourth competitive election since the transition to a multi-party system in 1989. Voting took place in two rounds, first on 7 April in 176 single-member districts and 20 proportional list districts, and then on 21 April in a run-off in the 131 single-member districts that had not yielded a majority candidate in the first round. The result was a surprise to nearly everyone. First, surpassing all expectations, turnout exceeded 70 per cent of the registered electorate, higher than in any previous election in Hungary. Second, …

Increasing Transparency In Government, Ann Florini

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The article focuses on the transparency in the government and investigates how transparency is related directly to achieving and maintaining international peace, by transforming the security relationship between countries. It also examines transparency's indirect role in contributing to legitimate and effective governance and explores the trends in transparency in national politics, international organizations, and environmental management. Information is the lifeblood of both democracies and markets. Without information, citizens have no basis upon which to evaluate their representatives or voice their opinions, and both elections and the very process of representation become a meaningless sham. Without information, the financial markets upon …

Equality And Diversity, Chandran Kukathas

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The foundations of human inequality lie in the fact of human diversity, or in the human tendency to differentiate from some while associating with others to form groups. The diversity which results from association and differentiation makes equality unattainable. Diversity and equality are incompatible, and attempts to promote one can only be made at the expense of the other. In these circumstances, we should abandon the ideal of equality as incapable of offering us an adequate understanding of the nature of the good society.

The Endogeneity Problem In Electoral Studies: A Critical Re-Examination Of Duverger's Mechanical Effect, Kenneth Benoit

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Studies of electoral law consequences typically treat electoral laws as exogenous factors affecting political party systems, even while acknowledging that political parties often tailor electoral institutions to suit their own distributional needs. This study represents a departure from that approach, directly examining one aspect of the endogeneity of electoral systems: the endogeneity of Duverger's ‘mechanical’ effect. Theory clearly posits that the Duvergerian ‘psychological’ effect of electoral rules occurs in anticipation of their reductive mechanical effect, yet in empirical models this endogenous character is typically ignored. In this paper I formalize the two types of Duvergerian effects of electoral laws in …

The American People In Crisis: A Content Analysis, Roderick P. Hart, Sharon E. Jarvis, Elvin T. Lim

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This study examines how images of the American electorate were deployed after the11 September 2001 terrorism incident and during the Clinton impeachment. Transcripts of congressional proceedings, news coverage, and presidential campaign addresses were analyzed to determine how the phrase the American people was used during these two crises and in unrelated presidential campaign speeches. The analysis considered the roles, actions, qualities, and circumstances ascribed to the people, as well as the time orientation and the forces aligned against the people. The results show that (1) relative to presidential campaign rhetoric, both crises resulted in greater concentration on the electorate; (2) …

Five Trends In Presidential Rhetoric: An Analysis Of Rhetoric From George Washington To Bill Clinton, Elvin T. Lim

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Several political scientists have argued that the presidential recourse to public rhetoric as a mode of political influence in the twentieth century represents a significant departure from a pre-twentieth-century institutional norm where “going public” was both rare and frowned upon. This article looks specifically at the changes in the substance of rhetoric that have accompanied this alleged institutional transformation. Applying computer-assisted content analysis to all the inaugural addresses and annual messages delivered between 1789 and 2000, the author identifies and explores five significant changes in twentieth-century presidential rhetoric that would qualifiedly support the thesis of institutional transformation in its rhetorical …

Reshaping World Politics: Ngos, The Internet, And Global Civil Society, Ann Florini

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This largely descriptive book sets out three questions of interest to international relations scholars and policy-makers: What is global civil society? What are its origins? And what are the roles of individuals in creating and maintaining it? After a brief literature review, the book provides a definition: global civil society is 'a socially constructed and transnationally defined network of relationships that provides ideologically variable channels of opportunity for political involvement' (p. 19). This definition reflects the book's grounding in 'people-centered' International Relations theory, drawing on the English school of Wight and Bull and paralleling the American constructivist paradigm to focus …

Locating Tds In Policy Spaces: The Computational Text Analysis Of Dáil Speeches, Michael Laver, Kenneth Benoit

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This article adapts a new technique for the computerised analysis of political texts, previously used to analyse party manifestos, to the analysis of speeches made in a legislature. The benefits of computerised text analysis come from the ability to analyse, for the first time, complex and daunting electronic sources of text, such as the parliamentary record. This allows the systematic estimation of the policy positions of individual political actors, with huge benefits both for theory development and empirical analysis. In this article, the technique is used to analyse all 58 English language speeches made in the October 1991 confidence debate …

Overhauling The Wto: Opportunity At Doha And Beyond, John Audley, Ann Florini

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The world's trade ministers, who will meet at a WTOministerial in November 2001 in Doha, Qatar, are wrong to think that only a newround of negotiations will save the much-maligned international trade system.Carnegie senior associates John Audley and Ann M. Florini argue that theyshould, instead, simultaneously tackle internal and external reform of the WTOto make it a truly equitable institution. Internally, industrial countries muststart treating developing countries as equal partners in making the rules thatgovern global trade, and where necessary provide technical assistance to makethat equality possible. Externally, to satisfy legitimate public demands,members should improve the transparency of WTO proceedings …

Intelligent Island Discourse: Singapore’S Discursive Negotiation With Technology, Alwyn Lim

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The small nation-state of Singapore has increasingly been referred to in the popular media as the Intelligent Island of the future. With significant state investment in the promotion and dissemination of information-communications technology and attendant social ramifications, this has become an area that can no longer be ignored or taken for granted. This article intends to map the conditions of possibility on which Singapore can be conceived of as an Intelligent Island, in situating the role of information technology and Intelligent Island discourse within the discourses of postcoloniality, technocapitalism, late modernity, and globalization. In particular, this article attempts to show …

Institutional Choice In New Democracies: Bargaining Over Hungary's 1989 Electoral Law, Kenneth Benoit, John W. Schiemann

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Institutions shape political outcomes, yet institutions themselves are endogenously shaped outcomes of political choices. Such choices are especially significant during transitions to democracy, when initial institutional designs fundamentally structure the path of democratic development. Most theories of institutional emergence, however, focus on stable contexts rather than on the conditions of acute uncertainty identified in the standard transitions literature. Our article attempts to bridge the two subfields by outlining and applying a model of institutional choice as the outcome of a struggle between fledgling opposition parties and the authoritarian regime wherein each side struggles to gain the greatest distributive payoff. We …

Is Feminism Bad For Multiculturalism?, Chandran Kukathas

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Multiculturalism and feminism are in tension to the extent that multiculturalism is a doctrine that condones the tolera- tion of cultural communities which might not respect or value women's concerns or interests. This has led some feminist think- ers, notably Susan Okin, to ask whether multiculturalism is bad for women. This paper agrees with Okin that there is a tension between feminism and multiculturalism - some of her critics to the contrary notwithstanding - but argues that multiculturalism should take preceden

District Magnitude, Electoral Formula, And The Number Of Parties, Kenneth Benoit

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Duverger's propositions concerning the psychologicaland mechanical consequences of electoral rules have previously beenexamined mainly through the lens of district magnitude,comparing the properties of single-member district pluralityelections with those of multimember proportional representationelections. The empirical consequences of multi-member plurality(MMP) rules, on the other hand, have received scant attention.Theory suggests that the effect of district magnitude on the numberand concentration of parties will differ with regard to whether theallocation rules are plurality-based or proportional. I test thistheory by drawing on a uniquely large-sample dataset where districtmagnitude and electoral formula vary but the basic universe ofpolitical parties is held constant, applying regression analysis …

Doing Research In Political Science: An Introduction To Comparative Methods And Statistics, By Paul Pennings, Hans Keman And Jan Kleinnijenhuis., Kenneth Benoit

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

No abstract provided.

China And The Globalization Of Ir Theory: Discussion Of 'Building International Relations Theory With Chinese Characteristics', William A. Callahan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This essay examines current developments in International Relations theory in China. First it comments on Song Xinning's essay, agreeing that IR theory in China is limited by ideology, the dominance of policy-oriented research, and the state. But rather than seeing culture ('IR theory with Chinese characteristics') as a problem that can be solved by a more scientific approach to IR theory, the essay argues that the scientism of realism and IPE has similar problems. Thus the essay switches from the universals of science to the contingency of interpretation to understand global politics, drawing on recent books which combine IPE with …

International Studies In The 21st Century: Civilization, Ethics And Transnational Relations, William A. Callahan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

No abstract provided.

Evaluating Hungary's Mixed-Member Electoral System, Kenneth Benoit

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The electoral system adopted by Hungary in 1989 represents a monument to the potential for institutional design through bargaining to produce complex yet stable institutions. The key compromise reached during this bargaining process was the decision to use a mixed-member system, electing a roughly even number of representatives from both majoritarian single-seat districts (SSDs) and from multi-seat, list proportional representation (PR) districts. This decision established Eastern Europe's first mixed-member electoral system, a format that was to become common in post-communist electoral systems. In its ten-year existence, Hungary's mixed-member system has operated in three elections and seen three different governments come …

International Studies In The 21st Century: Civilization, Ethics And Transnational Relations, William A. Callahan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Since the end of the Cold War, the world has been reorganizing itself, moving away from the global issues to other forms of international politics. There has been a shift in the study of world politics as well. Some have tried to refashion Realism to again concentrate on nation-states in perpetual conflict.

Simulation Methodologies For Political Scientists, Kenneth Benoit

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In this brief article I identify and characterize the variety of simulation methodologies relevant to political science research. Having identified them, I then recount a light-hearted tale of one successful application of a computer simulation to a real world problem of enormous significance. Extending the discussion to other examples, I discuss some of the main issues and benefits in simulation models for political science. Finally, I identify some software tools and additional resources for those who would like to learn more about using simulation methods for their own work.