1,721,052 research outputs found
Patterns of party switching in the Italian Chamber of Deputies 2008-2011
No full textThis article contributes to the existing literature on legislative party switching by exploring this phenomenon in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, Legislature XVI, 2008- .
In the time span under consideration (2008-2011) almost one sixth of the MPS have switched parliamentary party on at least one occasion.
Our research re-evaluates hypotheses proposed in the literature using an original data set and tests a new event based model of party switching. The analysis shows that policy tensions constitute one of the main motivations for party switching, and the determinants of switching have different effects during the lifetime of a legislature
Candidates in 2013 Italian General Election : Evidence from the Italian Candidate Survey
No full textChanges in electoral politics in contemporary democracies have contributed to shifting the focus of research from parties to individual candidates. The 2013 Italian Candidate Survey (ICS) has collected original survey data with the aim of gaining new insights into the role of political elites, looking in particular at the candidates running for office in the last Italian general election. Based on interviews with individual candidates, the ICS provides a tool for analysing party members; and for comparing them with voters in several ways. In this paper, we spell out the main features of our research that was conducted within the framework of a larger project that examined political representation in Italy between 2013 and 2015. Moreover, we offer three examples of potential applications of ICS data. First, we present a model of political representation favoured by Italian candidates that matches with a well-known typology of political representation. Second, we utilize our ICS data to estimate candidates’ policy preferences and to assess the level of congruence with their voters. Finally, by comparing the distribution of candidates’ self-placements and their own party mean position on the left-right scale, we show how our data can be used to explore intra-party cohesion
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Party Competition in the 2013 Italian Elections : Evidence from an Expert Survey
No full textIn this article, we examine the structure of party competition in Italy in the February 2013 elections. We rely on the spatial approach to party competition to analyse the most salient dimensions of the policy space in the Italian context. Our analysis is based on quantitative estimates from expert survey data. These data highlight the salience of the socioeconomic policy dimension and capture the change in the importance of the EU dimension. Finally, this study provides an analysis of potential coalition governments in the aftermath of the 2013 general election that is grounded on the spatial approach to coalition formation
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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