Political Analysis Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

In a relatively short period of time, Romanian political science has made considerable progress, moving from virtual obscurity to unchallenged local prominence. This article examines the efforts to date to institutionalize political... more

In a relatively short period of time, Romanian political science has made considerable progress, moving from virtual obscurity to unchallenged local prominence. This article examines the efforts to date to institutionalize political science as a separate teaching and research discipline by presenting recently established political science university-level programs, the major groups of authors carrying out research on political phenomena and the recurrent themes emerging from relevant literature. Though the present article is concerned mainly with current developments, occasional references to the political science's position during the communist period are also made.

"Practitioners and academics are today convinced that ‘thinking politically’ is important to successful development interventions. Since the early 2000s, attempts to mainstream political thinking in most donor agencies have used a... more

"Practitioners and academics are today convinced that ‘thinking politically’ is important to successful development
interventions. Since the early 2000s, attempts to mainstream political thinking in most donor agencies have used a political
economy analysis (PEA) approach, and yet this has been largely ineffective. This paper attempts to explain this failure
through re-focusing current debate on PEA.
The paper argues that the process of PEA is not fundamentally flawed and indeed agrees, as PEA advocates have consistently
argued throughout the 2000s, that success in future development programmes requires a wholesale re-thinking of the
relationship between politics and international development.
However, we argue that PEA has today become a tool or product ‘sold’ to donors and ‘done’ externally, and it is no longer
fit for purpose. We critique this type of ‘PEA™’,1
tracing its evolution from a transformative approach to policy-making
to a discrete instrument that is applied to specific ‘problems’, usually by external consultants. We draw attention to the
consistently faulty and introspective methodology that has informed the undertaking and application of PEA™.
Our analysis leads us to suggest that throwing away this model and doing something completely different is the only way
donors can hope to move forward with the ‘thinking politically’ agenda."

Цель. Представить основные принципы подготовки прикладного аналитического текста. Тема обладает исключительной прикладной значимостью с точки зрения аналитического обеспечения управленческой деятельности и принятия политических решений.... more

Цель. Представить основные принципы подготовки прикладного аналитического текста. Тема обладает исключительной прикладной значимостью с точки зрения аналитического обеспечения управленческой деятельности и принятия политических решений. Статья адресована как студентам, начинающим заниматься прикладным политическим анализом, так и профессиональным аналитикам, работающим в научно-образовательной среде, исследовательских фондах и государственном управлении. Методы. На основании существующих методических разработок в рамках теоретических дисциплин и собственного практического опыта автор систематизирует информацию и формализует ключевые положения, необходимые для формирования навыков и умений подготовки прикладной политической аналитики Результаты. В статье показаны особенность аналитического стиля, его отличия от научного и публицистического текста. Введено и проанализировано понятие «формата» аналитического исследования. Показаны различия в подготовке открытой и закрытой аналитики. Показана роль заказчика аналитической работы. Показаны различия анализа информационного поля и реальных политических процессов. Особое внимание уделяется структурным особенностям и внутренней архитектонике аналитического текста, общей логике построения прикладного анализа в удобном для заказчика (лица, принимающего решения) виде. Акцентировано значение управленческих рекомендаций как главного итога аналитической работы. Научная новизна. Статья обладает практической и дидактической значимостью и направлена на формирование у читателей умений и навыков подготовки прикладного аналитического текста. Систематизирована (по сути, введена в научный оборот) проблематика подготовки аналитических текстов, обеспечивающих принятие и сопровождение политических и управленческих решений. Предложены конкретные инструменты прикладного политического анализа, значимые для управленческой практики.
Ключевые слова: аналитический текст, методология аналитической работы, политический анализ, прикладной анализ.

This article examines the development of methods of political analysis concerned with ideas, beliefs and meanings and argues that these need to be supplemented by an approach attuned to the specific nature of political action. It argues... more

This article examines the development of methods of political analysis concerned with ideas, beliefs and meanings and argues that these need to be supplemented by an approach attuned to the specific nature of political action. It argues that since politics involves the contest of ideas, beliefs and meanings, analysis should focus on arguments. Considering methods for the study of political arguments the article argues for a re-examination of the rhetorical tradition and the development of a Rhetorical Political Analysis (RPA). It then outlines the sorts of things this would examine, the questions it would ask and the ways in which it might go about answering them.

In Russian political reality, public experts and the media often refer to various «ratings». In conditions of low confidence in the election institution (according to the Levada Center and VCIOM), various kinds of «ranking tables» serve... more

In Russian political reality, public experts and the media often refer to various «ratings». In conditions of low confidence in the election institution (according to the Levada Center and VCIOM), various kinds of «ranking tables» serve as a kind of substitute for electoral ratings. In part, the abundance of ratings of political elites (governors, deputies, ministers), based not on opinion polls, but on expert assessments and data analysis, is an indirect evidence of a decrease in the role of public opinion in influencing political processes. The ratings make up for the lack of information about political processes, as well as help implement the imitation or, as it is commonly called in a number of Russian media, «hybrid» model of democracy. The article analyzes the role of political ratings at present. The author comes to the conclusion that the ratings are currently not a reliable source of information, but rather a PR tool.

Semester Two, 2013 curriculum for a subject taught and co-ordinated at the University of Melbourne. The loose idea was to explore the experience of neoliberalism via readings from different disciplines, including sociology,... more

Semester Two, 2013 curriculum for a subject taught and co-ordinated at the University of Melbourne. The loose idea was to explore the experience of neoliberalism via readings from different disciplines, including sociology, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School and cultural studies.

If an experimental treatment is experienced by both treated and control group units, tests of hypotheses about causal effects may be difficult to conceptualize, let alone execute. In this article, we show how counterfactual causal models... more

If an experimental treatment is experienced by both treated and control group units, tests of hypotheses about causal effects may be difficult to conceptualize, let alone execute. In this article, we show how counterfactual causal models may be written and tested when theories suggest spillover or other network-based interference among experimental units. We show that the ���no interference��� assumption need not constrain scholars who have interesting questions about interference. We offer researchers the ability to model theories ...

This article presents a conceptual clarification of asymmetric hypotheses and a discussion of methodologies available to test them. Despite the existence of a litany of theories that posit asymmetric hypotheses, most empirical studies... more

This article presents a conceptual clarification of asymmetric hypotheses and a discussion of methodologies available to test them. Despite the existence of a litany of theories that posit asymmetric hypotheses, most empirical studies fail to capture their core insight: boundaries separating zones of data from areas that lack data are substantively interesting. We discuss existing set-theoretic and large-N approaches to the study of asymmetric hypotheses, introduce new ones from the literatures on stochastic frontier and data envelopment analysis, evaluate their relative merits, and give three examples of how asymmetric hypotheses can be studied with this suite of tools.

... Although originally conceived to explicate the psychological roots of prejudice and intolerance (eg ... at the outset of the study, consisted of a “mortality salience” manipulation used in ... In addition, we assessed... more

... Although originally conceived to explicate the psychological roots of prejudice and intolerance (eg ... at the outset of the study, consisted of a “mortality salience” manipulation used in ... In addition, we assessed respondents' ambivalence toward the policy by separately assessing the ...

DW-NOMINATE scores for the U.S. Congress are widely used measures of…

Researchers who generate data often optimize efficiency and robustness by choosing stratified over simple random sampling designs. Yet, all theories of inference proposed to justify matching methods are based on simple random sampling.... more

Researchers who generate data often optimize efficiency and robustness by choosing stratified over simple random sampling designs. Yet, all theories of inference proposed to justify matching methods are based on simple random sampling. This is all the more troubling because, although these theories require exact matching, most matching applications resort to some form of ex post stratification (on a propensity score, distance metric, or the covariates) to find approximate matches, thus nullifying the statistical properties these theories are designed to ensure. Fortunately, the type of sampling used in a theory of inference is an axiom, rather than an assumption vulnerable to being proven wrong, and so we can replace simple with stratified sampling, so long as we can show, as we do here, that the implications of the theory are coherent and remain true. Properties of estimators based on this theory are much easier to understand and can be satisfied without the unattractive properties...

Automated text analysis methods have made possible the classification of large corpora of text by measures such as topic and tone. Here, we provide a guide to help researchers navigate the consequential decisions they need to make before... more

Automated text analysis methods have made possible the classification of large corpora of text by measures such as topic and tone. Here, we provide a guide to help researchers navigate the consequential decisions they need to make before any measure can be produced from the text. We consider, both theoretically and empirically, the effects of such choices using as a running example efforts to measure the tone of New York Times coverage of the economy. We show that two reasonable approaches to corpus selection yield radically different corpora and we advocate for the use of keyword searches rather than predefined subject categories provided by news archives. We demonstrate the benefits of coding using article segments instead of sentences as units of analysis. We show that, given a fixed number of codings, it is better to increase the number of unique documents coded rather than the number of coders for each document. Finally, we find that supervised machine learning algorithms outpe...

This paper shows how syntactic information can be used to automatically extract clauses from text, consisting of a subject, predicate, and optional source. Since the output of this analysis can be seen as an enriched token list or bag of... more

This paper shows how syntactic information can be used to automatically extract clauses from text, consisting of a subject, predicate, and optional source. Since the output of this analysis can be seen as an enriched token list or bag of words, normal frequency based or corpus linguistic analyses can be used on this output. Taking the 2008–2009 Gaza war as an example, we show how corpus comparison, topic modelling, and semantic network analysis can be used to explore the differences between US and Chinese coverage of this war.

Studies on national identity differentiate between nationalistic attitudes and constructive patriotism (CP) as two more specific expressions of national identity and as theoretically two distinct concepts. After a brief discussion of the... more

Studies on national identity differentiate between nationalistic attitudes and constructive patriotism (CP) as two more specific expressions of national identity and as theoretically two distinct concepts. After a brief discussion of the theoretical literature, the following questions are examined: (1) Can nationalism and CP be empirically identified as two distinct concepts?; (2) Is their meaning fully or partially invariant across countries?; and (3) Is it possible to compare their means across countries? Data from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) 2003 National Identity Module are utilized to answer these questions in a sample of 34 countries. Items to measure nationalism and CP are chosen based on the literature, and a series of confirmatory factor analyses to test for configural, measurement (metric), and scalar invariance are performed. Full or partial metric invariance is a necessary condition for equivalence of meaning across cultures and for a meaningful compar...

The Internet offers a number of advantages as a survey mode: low marginal cost per completed response, capabilities for providing respondents with large quantities of information, speed, and elimination of interviewer bias. Those seeking... more

The Internet offers a number of advantages as a survey mode: low marginal cost per completed response, capabilities for providing respondents with large quantities of information, speed, and elimination of interviewer bias. Those seeking these advantages confront the problem of representativeness both in terms of coverage of the population and capabilities for drawing random samples. Two major strategies have been pursued commercially to develop the Internet as a survey mode. One strategy, used by Harris ...

The concept of electoral competition is relevant to a variety of research agendas in political science, yet the question of how to measure electoral competition has received little direct attention. We revisit the distinction proposed by... more

The concept of electoral competition is relevant to a variety of research agendas in political science, yet the question of how to measure electoral competition has received little direct attention. We revisit the distinction proposed by Giovanni Sartori between competition as a structure or rule of the game and competitiveness as an outcome of that game and argue that to understand which elections can be lost (and therefore when parties and leaders are potentially threatened by electoral accountability), scholars may be better off considering the full range of elections where competition is allowed. We provide a data set of all national elections between 1945 and 2006 and a measure of whether each election event is structured such that the competition is possible. We outline the pitfalls of other measures used by scholars to define the potential for electoral competition and show that such methods can lead to biased or incomplete findings. The new global data on elections and the m...

The directional and proximity models offer dramatically different theories for how voters make decisions and fundamentally divergent views of the supposed microfoundations on which vast bodies of literature in theoretical rational choice... more

The directional and proximity models offer dramatically different theories for how voters make decisions and fundamentally divergent views of the supposed microfoundations on which vast bodies of literature in theoretical rational choice and empirical political behavior have been built. We demonstrate here that the empirical tests in the large and growing body of literature on this subject amount to theoretical debates about which statistical assumption is right. The key statistical assumptions have not been empirically ...

Words matter in politics. The rhetoric that political elites employ structures civic discourse. The emergence of social media platforms as a medium of politics has enabled ordinary citizens to express their ideological inclinations by... more

Words matter in politics. The rhetoric that political elites employ structures civic discourse. The emergence of social media platforms as a medium of politics has enabled ordinary citizens to express their ideological inclinations by adopting the lexicon of political elites. This avails to researchers a rich new source of data in the study of political ideology. However, existing ideological text-scaling methods fail to produce meaningful inferences when applied to the short, informal style of textual content that is characteristic of social media platforms such as Twitter. This paper introduces the first viable approach to the estimation of individual-level ideological positions derived from social media content. This method allows us to position social media users—be they political elites, parties, or citizens—along a shared ideological dimension. We validate the proposed method by demonstrating correlation with existing measures of ideology across various political contexts and ...