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This paper aims to use the stereotype content model to explore the extent to which voter admiration for presidential candidates mediates the charismatic leadership – voting behavior relationship. The paper also seeks to test whether system justification beliefs moderate the mediated relationship.

Using data collected both before and after the 2008 US presidential election, this paper tested the hypothesized relationships using a conditional indirect effects model with 126 undergraduate students enrolled in the psychology department and business school of a large university in the USA.

Results demonstrated that admiration mediates the charismatic leadership – voting behavior relationship. Moreover, this mediated relationship varied by system justification beliefs.

These results suggest that charismatic leaders arouse specific emotions (i.e. admiration) in followers and that emotional arousal inspires followers to act on the behalf of the leader. However, this relationship only holds when people are motivated to embrace change. This suggests that not all followers will be responsive to charismatic leaders.

For political leaders, these findings suggest that being charismatic is important when change motives are high, but it may be less important when stability is highly valued.

The paper demonstrates that charismatic leaders do arouse the emotions of followers and that such emotions motivate followers to engage in behaviors on behalf of the leader.

In observational data, access to information is associated with lower levels of corruption. This chapter reviews a small but growing body of work that uses field experiments to explore the mechanisms behind this relationship. We present a typology for understanding this research based on the type of corruption being addressed (political vs. bureaucratic), the mechanism for accountability (retrospective vs. prospective), and the nature of the information provided (factual vs. prescriptive). We describe some of the tradeoffs involved in design decisions for such experiments and suggest directions for future research.

Drawing on cognitive theories of information and democracy, this paper argues that carefully designed voting advice applications (VAAs) strengthen voter competence by matching voters’ preferences on important policy issues with parties' relevant positions on those issues.

To examine the causal effect of information acquisition on voting willingness, we employed a lab experiment on the pioneering VAA program in Taiwan: iVoter. Our participants consisted of 120 undergraduates who were randomly assigned to be treated (two groups) or controlled (one group). Each participant of the respective treatment groups was provided with full or partial information. The purpose was to identify the ideological distance between the participant and the respective political parties. Individuals in the control group did not receive the respective information prior to their decision on whether to vote or not.

Those who received full relevant information were most willing to vote in the forthcoming elections. We furthermore found VAA utilization to be positively associated with other aspects of democracy, such as political enthusiasm, civic duty and political efficacy.

This paper aims to contribute to the development of VAAs and to democracy as a whole by confirming a causal link between receiving relevant information and voting willingness.

One of the concepts most commonly evoked in order to characterize and explain the zig-zag trajectory of political dynamics in the Islamic Republic of Iran has been the “middle class.” Yet there is no scholarly consensus on a fundamental approach to identification and measurement of the middle class. Rather, the category of the middle class is both a category of analysis – long debated within social theory – as well as a category of practice – routinely deployed in political behavior and social distinction. In order to better conceptualize and understand the formation and role of Iran's middle classes in the country's sociopolitical dynamics, theories of class formation in the global South should be rearticulated away from a reified notion of the middle class as a transhistorical subject. To do so, this chapter is divided into four sections. First, internal debates over the role of Iran's middle classes in the country's recent political history are assessed and data from the 2016 Iran Social Survey is used to test a long-standing demographic assumption on the class dynamics of electoral behavior. Second, the tradition of theorizing the social power of middle classes is reassessed, drawing on the growing scholarly attention to the heterogenous origins and differentiated internal composition of middle classes across the global South. Third, a typology is proposed of four middle classes across the twentieth century shaped by varying state attempts at “catch-up” development. These types are then applied in a revisionist telling of the making and unmaking of middle classes in postrevolutionary Iran. Finally, implications of this framework beyond Iran are sketched out for global waves of protest in the twenty-first century.

For the AFL-CIO, the 2000 presidential election was a test of a revised political action program that concentrated resources on “issue based” political education and intensive member contact. Using quasi-experimental methods, I evaluate the effect of direct mailings, telephone calls, and workplace mobilization on the presidential preferences and voting rates of members from a Milwaukee area local union. Results indicate that only workplace mobilization successfully communicated the labor-endorsed candidate and shifted preferences toward that candidate. Voting rates were higher among union members that received a get-out-the-vote telephone call prior to the election.

We investigate the implications of the misalignment between manager and shareholder interests and the effects of initial ownership stakes and reinvestment of unpaid dividends on managerial self-dealing.

We collect and analyze data from controlled laboratory experiments with an experimental setting which captures the role of ownership in managerial considerations.

We see the emergence of both investor-aligned outcomes and managerial self-dealing outcomes. We find that increasing managers’ initial endowment of shares makes it harder for managers to coordinate on an outcome and lowers return on investment. Moreover, allowing managers to reinvest unpaid dividends results in a transfer of wealth to management.

The results and the conclusions are drawn upon data from the particular setting we investigate. Generalizing them beyond the specific setting should be done with caution.

Higher managerial ownership stake means that managers have a greater incentive to reward shareholders, but we find that it may also imply a more difficult coordination problem between managers – sometimes to the detriment of shareholders.

This study is the first to consider the direct relationship between managers’ portfolios and voting decisions regarding dividends and investment levels.

The 2005 APSR article by John Alford, Carolyn Funk, and John Hibbing presented data from the Virginia 30,000 Health & Lifestyle Questionnaire (VA30K), AARP twin studies, and an Australian twin study (ATR) to test their hypothesis that political attitudes are influenced by genetic as well as environmental factors. Political attitudes, they suggested, were expected to be highly heritable and particularly so on issues most correlated with personality. They employed survey responses from the Wilson–Patterson Attitude Inventory to measure political attitudes. To gauge heritability, they utilize the 2:1 genetic ratio between monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twins. The authors argued that while previous studies in political attitudes had concentrated on measuring the influence of environmental variables, their test added explanatory power by considering heritability (Alford, Funk, & Hibbing, 2005).

This study aims to predict popular contributors through text representations of user-generated content in open crowds.

Three text representation approaches – count vector, Tf-Idf vector, word embedding and supervised machine learning techniques – are used to generate popular contributor predictions.

The results of the experiments demonstrate that popular contributor predictions are considered successful. The F1 scores are all higher than the baseline model. Popular contributors in open crowds can be predicted through user-generated content.

This research presents brand new empirical evidence drawn from text representations of user-generated content that reveals why some contributors' ideas are more viral than others in open crowds.

This research suggests that companies can learn from popular contributors in ways that help them improve customer agility and better satisfy customers' needs. In addition to boosting customer engagement and triggering discussion, popular contributors' ideas provide insights into the latest trends and customer preferences. The results of this study will benefit marketing strategy, new product development, customer agility and management of information systems.

The paper provides new empirical evidence for popular contributor prediction in an innovation crowd through text representation approaches.