Fernando Mendez

Political polarization and popularity in online participatory media: an integrated approach

We present our approach to online popularity and its applications to political science, aiming at the creation of agent-based models that reproduce patterns of popularity in participatory media. We illustrate our approach analyzing a dataset from Youtube, composed of the view statistics and comments for the videos of the U.S. presidential campaigns of 2008 and 2012. Using sentiment analysis, we quantify the collective emotions expressed by the viewers, finding that democrat campaigns elicited more positive collective emotions than republican campaigns. Techniques from computational social science allow us to measure virality of the videos of each campaign, to find that democrat videos are shared faster but republican ones are remembered longer inside the community. Last we present our work in progress in voting advice applications, and our results analyzing the data from choose4greece.com. We show how we assess the policy differences between parties and their voters, and how voting advice applications can be extended to test our agent-based models.

The dimensionality of the Scottish political space Results from an experiment on the 2011 Holyrood elections

This article introduces Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) as a data-generating tool that can be used to measure the positions of party supporters in multidimensional policy space. It begins with an overview of the state of the art as regards methods for locating parties on a common policy space, in terms of how data are gathered and also in terms of how policy dimensions are identified and measured. We then use a dimension reduction technique to identify latent policy dimensions from a dataset obtained from a VAA carried out in Scotland in 2011. These dimensions are used to map the policy positions of supporters of five Scottish political parties. We argue that this tool allows more leverage on understanding the relative locations of parties ‘in the electorate’ in multidimensional policy space.

Fifteen years of internet voting in Switzerland [History, Governance and Use]

This paper reviews the piecemeal introduction of internet voting in a highly federalised political setting, Switzerland. We trace the processes leading to the implementation of internet voting and the network of actors involved in its governance. In the empirical analysis we report usage patterns and take stock of what we know about the individual and socio-demographic profiles of internet voters.

Clustering Online Poll Data: Towards a Voting Assistance System

Voting advice applications (VAA) are very recently developed in order to aid users in deciding what to vote in elections. Every user is presented with a set of important issues and she is asked to submit her opinion by selecting one of a predefined set of answers (e.g. agree/disagree). The VAA gathers the same information for all candidates that are about to compete in the elections. Hence, it can provide recommendation to users: the candidates that agree with the user on these selected issues. In this paper, we propose a collaborating filtering approach for providing such suggestions. Like-minded users are clustered together based on their profiles (views on the selected issues) and voting recommendation is provided to a user by the members of the nearest (to her profile) cluster. We observe that this method produces more effective recommendations by utilizing two different measures: accuracy and weighted mean rank. Furthermore, the proposed method provides with important insight and summarization information about the electorates opinion. This research is based on new data gathered by the voting advice application Choose4Greece which was widely used for the most recent elections in Greece.

Who are the Internet Voters

Assessing the influence that socio-economic characteristics have on the division between traditional voters and those who choose to vote via the internet is crucial to political debate as well as for the future development of democracies. Does the introduction of internet voting technology simply widen the divide between voters and non-voters, further isolating the part of the electorate already underrepresented in the political process? We address these issues by reviewing the current state of research in 22 empirical studies relating internet voting to socio-economic variables. The results are not homogeneous but suggest that although socio-economic factors do play an important role in explaining the choice of voting channel, they are strongly moderated by the general use of and trust in the internet.

Methodological Challenges in the Analysis of Voting Advice Application Generated Data

Voting advice applications (VAA) have become an increasingly popular feature of electoral campaigns. VAAs are online tools that use survey techniques to measure the degree to which the policy preferences of citizens match those of political parties or candidates. In some cases, such as The Netherlands, VAAs can attract millions of respondents providing an incredibly rich source of mass public opinion data. As a result political scientists have begun to exploit such datasets and this is fuelling a burgeoning literature on the topic. To date, however, there has been surprisingly little research on the cleaning techniques used to filter out the many rogues entries that are known to be present in VAA generated datasets. This paper presents the various methods used for cleaning VAA generated datasets that have been used for empirical research. Two main techniques are used based on item response timers and pattern recognition techniques. We show why cleaning matters and the problems that flow from not establishing rigorous cleaning techniques. The problem as such is not exclusive to VAA data but is common to all web based research involving self-administered surveys. To that end the techniques we present could be generalisable beyond the specific case of VAA-generated datasets.

EU Democracy and E-Democracy: Can the Two Be Reconciled?

For many observers neither EU-democracy nor e-democracy exist in any meaningful sense. With regard to the latter this is certainly the case, though this does not mean that we are not witnessing innovative experimentation with information and communication technologies (ICT) in the democratic realm. This chapter focuses on the prospects for e-democratic experimentation in the EU political setting. Drawing on normative democratic theory we look at four dimensions of e-democratic innovation: ICT techniques aimed at improving mechanisms of (1) representation, (2) participation and (3) deliberation and (4) opening new channels of contestation. The aim of the chapter is to survey some recent e-democratic innovations within the framework of these four broader normative visions and, in doing so, investigate the potential impact of ICT driven innovation on EU democratisation.

Direct Democracy in the European Union: How Comparative Federalism can Help us Understand the Interplay of Direct Democracy and European Integration

Durante las ultimas decadas ha habido un notable aumento en el uso de mecanismos de democracia directa como el referendum y la iniciativa popular en el espacio politico europeo. El objetivo de este articulo es analizar los referendums que estan directamente vinculados al proceso de integracion de la Union Europea (iJE), un tema que esta recibiendo mayor atencion de la academia. Se platean dos cuestiones interrelacionadas. En primer lugar, ?como se relacionan los mecanismos de democracia directa con las instituciones federales de la iJE ? Y, en segundo lugar, ?como afecta esto a la estabilidad institucional de la iJE? Para investigar este tema se realiza un estudio comparado de la democracia directa en la iJE que nos proporciona varios modelos institucionales y pone de manifiesto el papel que juegan las instituciones federales.

Contested Sovereignty: Mapping Referendums on Sovereignty over Time and Space

The recent proliferation of referendums on sovereignty matters has fuelled growing scholarly interest. However, comparative research is hindered by the weaknesses of current compilations, which tend to suffer from conceptual vagueness, varied coding decisions, incomplete coverage and ad hoc categorizations. Based on an improved conceptualization and theory-driven typology, this article presents a new dataset of 602 sovereignty referendums from 1776–2012, more than double the number in existing lists. In an exploratory analysis, it uncovers eight distinctive clusters of sovereignty referendums and identifies patterns of activity over time and space as well as outcomes produced.

Referendums on EU matters

This study was commissioned by the European Parliament’s Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs at the request of the Committee on Constitutional Affairs of the European Parliament. It analyses the political and legal dynamics behind referendums on EU-related matters. It argues that we have entered a period of increasing political uncertainty with regard to the European project and that this new political configuration will both affect and be affected by the politics of EU-related referendums. Such referendums have long been a risky endeavour and this has been accentuated in the wake of the Great Recession with its negative ramifications for public opinion in the European Union. It is clear that referendums on EU matters are here to stay and will continue to be central to the EU’s future as they are deployed to determine the number of Member States within the EU, its geographical reach, its constitutional evolution and adherence to EU policies. Only now they have become an even riskier endeavour.