Vasiliki Triga

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.

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.

Parties and Change in the Post-Bailout Cyprus: The May 2016 Parliamentary Elections

Abstract The parliamentary elections of 2016, the first following Cyprus’ exit from the bailout programme, took place in a context of indifference on the part of the citizens. Characterised by a decline in bipartisanship, a rise in abstention and a more fragmented party system, the elections paved the way for the historical entry into parliament of the far right party, ELAM. This article sets these outcomes against the broader backdrop of the Great Recession while also paying attention to the reinvigoration of the cultural dimension of political conflict, with potentially significant constraints for future negotiations on the Cyprus problem.

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.

Constitution-making, constitutional conventions and conflict resolution: lesson drawing for Cyprus

theorization in favour of pragmatism. The constitutional bargain struck in 1848 that gave birth to the modern Swiss Confederation offers another Jon Elster, ‘Arguing and bargaining in two constituent assemblies’, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, 2, 1999, p. 345. Alfred Kölz, Le origini della costituzione svizzera, Armando Dado Editore, Locarno, 1999. Constitution-making, constitutional conventions and conflict resolution 369

Post-crisis Political Normalisation? The 2018 Presidential Elections in the Republic of Cyprus

ABSTRACT This article takes stock of the most recent presidential election in the Republic of Cyprus and connects it to broader currents in post-crisis European political settings. Although the elections took place against a backdrop of improving economic prospects, the crisis has left its political mark in a number of areas we identify that include a growing political fragmentation, the rise of the far right and increased voter abstention. The empirical analysis focuses on the media campaign and draws on a topic-modelling approach to identify and contrast emphasis given to policy issues over the two electoral rounds. The policy themes identified clustered around two dominant dimensions of political conflict: the Cyprus conflict and the economy.

Representations of the Economic Crisis and Austerity Politics

In the period between the 2009 and 2014 elections to the European Parliament, the international economic recession and related global debt crisis impacted seriously in several European Union (EU) member states. The rights and wrongs of debt fuelled growth and bank bailouts packages shaped political discourse not just in member states seeking sovereign external support but also placed great strain on the European project and raised real questions about the very future of the eurozone. The discussion draws on the content analysis data set generated from the assessment of posters and videos in the 2014 European Parliament election. The subsample in this chapter – focused on countries which experienced significant economic decline due to the post-2008 crisis – includes 321 items – 188 posters and 133 videos – which enables significant comparisons of trends and differences in six member states (Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Cyprus, Italy and Malta). Moving beyond this core group of countries, in the final section of the chapter we examine how themes such as ‘austerity’ were also evident in other member states and discuss how the economic backdrop to 2014 elections was evident in posters and broadcast spots produced by parties and candidates across the EU. It is possible to conclude that the ideological issues and national themes that played in the past an important role (Reif and Schmitt 1980) have been replaced by economic issues. The conomy and the crisis have become the new battlegrounds among parties, even bypassing the traditional distinction between right and left. The 2014 European Parliament campaign allows us to talk of the existence of a European anti-European campaign, which may well be a feature of EU politics beyond the economic crisis itself.

Comparing Online and Offline Modes of Survey Administration: VAA Versus Traditional Survey Administration

This paper addresses the issue of potential bias in VAA generated data. Specifically, we report the findings from a study whereby a VAA questionnaire was administered through two different modes. One group consisted of participants who filled an online version of the VAA while the other consisted of participants elicited through a traditional survey. We find that there is differential respondent behaviour among the two groups suggesting that VAA-generated data is not fully comparable to traditional survey data - though this does not mean VAA data is better or worse but rather that both modes of administration are subject to different forms of methodological bias.

e-Strategy and Legislatures: A Longitudinal Analysis of Southern Europe’s Parliaments

Parliaments are the cornerstone of representative democracy and one of the most significant loci of democratic politics. A growing number of studies have focused on the effects of ICTs on parliamentary function, but there is still a lack of systematic empirical research which measures change overtime. This chapter attempts to fill this gap by studying the extent and nature of change in ICT use by the parliaments of Southern Europe, focusing on whether parliaments have moved significantly forward toward opening up their digital gates to concerned citizens. To this end, comparative website analysis is deployed to track the use of ICTs by the legislatures in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Spain, Portugal, as well as the legislature of the European Union, at three different time instances, namely 2004, 2011, and 2013. Change is measured using the ‘E-Legislature Index’ and its four dimensions: Information provision, Bilateral interactivity, Multilateral interactivity, and User-friendliness. The study’s findings show that ICT use by parliaments is characterized by volatility and discontinuity rather than continuous linear growth. Furthermore, the analysis reveals that e-government and e-governance follow different trajectories: whereas ‘Information Provision’ follows a steady but expected progress and ‘Bilateral Interactivity’ shows an upward but unsteady trend, ‘Multilateral Interactivity’ fluctuates between stagnation and retrogression, pointing to a tendency of the parliaments to avoid taking greater risk of opening up their practices to citizens. In light of these findings, ICT use by parliaments is evaluated from the perspective of ICT strategic planning, providing suggestions for future research in the field.