Capacity, incentives, and mandate responsiveness

The absence of significant agenda-setting effects of party platforms in the UK, as found in all other countries, seems counterintuitive: the comparative literature would predict the greatest impact in majoritarian systems, while counter-majoritarian institutions are meant to dilute governing parties’ policymaking powers. Comparing different political and institutional configurations in each country over time, we can confirm such a moderating impact of counter-majoritarian institutions and coalition constraints. We then show that party incentives may help to disentangle the British paradox. High incentives in electoral periods are associated with strong programme-to-policy linkages, in particular in the UK. We conclude that majoritarian systems provide governing parties with extended institutional powers to implement their mandate, although this may limit their incentives: opposition parties have less opportunity to pressurize them and scrutinize any drift away from mandate priorities. Consensual systems limit governing parties’ institutional power, but the ‘tunnel’ of attention may generate strong incentives to stick to campaign priorities.

Cross-Domain Topic Classification for Political Texts

We introduce and assess the use of supervised learning in cross-domain topic classification. In this approach, an algorithm learns to classify topics in a labeled source corpus and then extrapolates topics in an unlabeled target corpus from another domain. The ability to use existing training data makes this method significantly more efficient than within-domain supervised learning. It also has three advantages over unsupervised topic models: the method can be more specifically targeted to a research question and the resulting topics are easier to validate and interpret. We demonstrate the method using the case of labeled party platforms (source corpus) and unlabeled parliamentary speeches (target corpus). In addition to the standard within-domain error metrics, we further validate the cross-domain performance by labeling a subset of target-corpus documents. We find that the classifier accurately assigns topics in the parliamentary speeches, although accuracy varies substantially by topic. We also propose tools diagnosing cross-domain classification. To illustrate the usefulness of the method, we present two case studies on how electoral rules and the gender of parliamentarians influence the choice of speech topics.

From Government Funding to Crowdfunding: Identifying Approaches and Models for Universities

Malaysian public universities are bracing for funding cuts and moving towards autonomous status causing them to be more innovative in generating income. Crowdfunding has been part of the solutions. Unfortunately, the emerging of university crowdfunding platforms in Malaysia is relatively slow as compared to the universities in the U.K. and U.S. This study aims to explore approaches and crowdfunding models used by the universities. This study highlights different approaches used by the universities in incorporating crowdfunding into their funding strategies, which can be differentiated into two main groups, namely setting up a university-operated crowdfunding platform and using existing third-party platforms. The investigation on the Skolafund crowdfunding shows that it could be an example of which the crowdfunding model fits Malaysian universities. The findings in this paper can help the universities to ease the burden due to the budget cut impact by utilising crowdfunding.

The Politicization of Immigration and Integration at the Subnational Level: Electoral Campaigns in Ontario and Quebec

Open political debate on immigration and integration policies (IIP) among Canadian political parties has been relatively limited. As Canada's immigration and integration systems become more decentralized, what about political debates about IIP in Canadian provinces? This article examines how IIP evolved across time by focusing on political parties’ claims, frames and pledges in party platforms and newspapers, using the cases of Ontario and Quebec. In Ontario, IIP were primarily framed as an economic and social resource. However, following the event of 9/11, new frames began to be introduced, contributing to a heightened salience and polarization. In contrast to Quebec, however, this politicization was not sustained. In Quebec, IIP were only marginally a matter of debate until the mid-2000s. This changed following the Hérouxville event, as these topics became salient, and dominant frames of immigration as economic and social resources were challenged by those of immigration as economic and cultural threats.

The Winning Party Platform: Voter Perceptions of Party Positions and Voting in Urban Africa

Previous literature suggests that some African parties employ non-valence positional issues in their party platforms and that this practice is more prevalent in some countries than in others; however, no quantitative research has analysed the electoral effects of non-valenced campaigns. How do African voters perceive parties’ policy positions? Who uses party platforms to choose candidates? Using data from an original survey experiment conducted in Nairobi, we examine voter perceptions of party platforms and their behaviour in the 2017 Kenyan presidential elections. We find that the opposition party’s clearer messaging helps average voters recognise and characterise the party, compared to the incumbent’s moderate policy stance. Moreover, while both parties’ policy positions positively affect voting, non-partisan voters are more likely to support a candidate advocating moderate policies. This implies an incumbency advantage: incumbents’ broad-appeal strategies help maximise their votes, whereas opposition parties have limited strategy options.