Michal Mochtak

Radboud University | RU

Electoral disputes accompanied by violent outbreaks have become an emerging problem in societies under transformation, in authoritarian regimes, as well as in young democracies. The truth is that many politicians elected to office, their supporters, and political activists have altered their perceptions of electoral competition in a form of zero-su...

How do politicians in postwar societies talk about the war past? How do they discursively represent vulnerable social groups created by the ended conflict? Does the nature of this representation depend on the politicians' ideology or their record of combat service? We answer these questions by pairing natural language processing tools and a large c...

How do voters in consolidating democracies see electoral integrity? How does election affect the change in perception of electoral integrity among these voters? What role does winning play in seeing an election as free and fair? Building on the theory of the winner-loser gap, we answer these questions using original two-wave panel surveys we conduc...

The paper presents an original corpus of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs press conferences. The dataset is a unique source of information on official positions and diplomatic narratives of China mapping almost two decades of its foreign policy discourse. The corpus contains almost 23,000 question – answer dyads from 2002 to 2020 ready to be...

Building on the original corpus of OSCE monitoring reports, the article analyses quarter of century of election monitoring in Europe and assesses the congruence of OSCE written assessments with expert views. We show that, overall, the OSCE monitoring reports are highly correlated and congruent with expert assessments. More importantly, the level of...

Whereas marketing performance measurement (MPM) and market orientation (MO) are among the most studied marketing concepts, there is still a lack of knowledge about the configurations leading to high business performance. Therefore, we performed a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) in the context of 150 manufacturing SMEs combining c...

The article analyses over two decades of parliamentary debates in Bosnia–Herzegovina in order to understand the role of war past in the political reconciliation of Bosnian elites. We show that the discourse of war identified in the Parliament of Bosnia–Herzegovina structurally differs from the mainstream notion of Bosnian politics. The patterns det...

Using survey and social network evidence from Southeast Europe, we advance the understanding of conspiracy theories and politics related to the coronavirus pandemic in three ways: (1) we show that beliefs in coronavirus conspiracy theories are related to ideological support for a nationalist vision of society and socialist vision of the economy; (2...

Expression of sentiment in parliamentary debates is deemed to be significantly different from that on social media or in product reviews. This paper adds to an emerging body of research on parliamentary debates with a dataset of sentences annotated for detection sentiment polarity in political discourse. We sample the sentences for annotation from...

“Chinese influence” has become a hot topic among politicians, media, and pundits. Academic studies dealing with the subject, however, generally take a much more cautious position. This paper suggests an innovative approach of studying political influence using data from the UN General Assembly voting and speech records. Utilizing the latest advance...

We studied prewar public discourse by analysing the origin, content and sentiment of more than 4,000 letters written by people from all walks of life and published in the Belgrade broadsheet Politika loyal to the regime of Slobodan Milošević during the three years directly preceding the Yugoslav wars. Our analysis combined lexicon-based tools of au...

Does the public perception of governments' coronavirus pandemic responses actually make a difference to their electoral fortunes? In this research note, we answer that question by presenting the preliminary results of a survey of more than 3,000 voters in Croatia and Serbia conducted on a dedicated mobile app and web platform directly preceding par...

In spite of growing interest in democratization and electoral competition after ethnic conflict, we know little about the impact of ethnic violence on voter choice in post-conflict societies. This article uses an original dataset of local-level electoral results, communities’ exposure to war violence, and candidates’ ethnicity derived from names in...

Over the past four decades, there has been a proliferation of interest in the causes, consequences, and dynamics of contestation over collective memories across a variety of fields. Unfortunately, collective memories—particularly those of traumatic experiences of violence such as wars and revolutions—have been largely absent from party politics res...

Efforts to combat the COVID-19 crisis were characterized by a difficult trade-off: the stringency of the lockdowns decreased the spread of the virus, but amplified the damage to the economy. In this study, we analyze public attitude toward this trade-off using a survey-embedded experiment conducted with a quota sample of more than 7,000 respondents...

The paper analyses more than 20 years of evidence on electoral violence as reported by OSCE monitoring mission reports. It identifies prevailing trends of electoral violence in the OSCE participating states in order to better understand how the phenomenon is understood and framed by the leading international monitoring organizations in the region....

sentenceR is a language-agnostic utility designed for sentence tokenization of raw text in R. Using the UDPipe POS tagging pipeline, the package automatically extracts sentences with their appropriate indexes (hence the “crowbar” logo as a reference to extraction). The package works with any of the 100+ language models natively provided by UDPipe p...

The paper analyses almost fifteen years of Croatian parliamentary debates and identifies a discourse of war legacies. Using the latest advancements in natural language processing, the paper utilizes models based on latent semantic analysis and discusses how politicians talk about war in terms of common narratives and shared frameworks. Using a comp...

Employing the framework of conflicting goals in democracy promotion as a departure point, the paper addresses the issue of arms exports to non-democratic countries as an important research topic which points to a reconsideration of certain fundamental conceptual and normative commitments underpinning democracy promotion. Empirically, we remind of t...

This article analyzes a structure of relations among the members of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Parliament of the Czech Republic, as reported through their memberships in bilateral and multilateral groups of friendship which establish professional contacts between the Chamber of Deputies and foreign parliaments. We approach the...

The paper addresses the question of what settings are empirically relevant for the occurrence of electoral violence in the region of Western Balkans and what theoretical paths may cover their logic. Electoral violence has been part of the electoral arenas in the region for decades and although it has evolved and in some cases disappeared, a number...

wars are extreme events with profound social consequences. political science, however, has a limited grasp of their impact on the nature and content of political competition which follows in their wake. that is partly the case due to a lack of conceptual clarity when it comes to capturing the effects of war with reliable data. this article systemat...

The institution of power-sharing has over the past years become known as a mechanism for conflict resolution and even a factor of democratization. While power-sharing proved certain effectiveness in overcoming political crises, its positive impact on democratization is contested. Although existing research has focused extensively on the relationshi...

Since the end of the Cold War there have been a number of cases where the democratization process has been turbulent, or even violent. Addressing electoral violence, its evolution and impact in the Western Balkans, this book explores the conflict logic of election and tries to understand its basic patterns. Two decades of electoral competition in t...

The paper identifies and analyses the acts of electoral violence that occurred during the 2011 parliamentary and 2012 presidential elections in the Russian Federation, and connects them with the practices of modern authoritarian regimes. The analytical tool employed is based on an electoral violence research framework, which provides insight into t...

The article focuses on an analysis of incidents of electoral violence in Serbia in the period of 1990–2014. The main objective is to identify potential sources of contentious behavior in the electoral arena and, using a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), to select potential causal paths that can explain it. Theoretical discussion c...

This paper addresses the influence of organized crime on the performance of democracy in the Czech Republic and seeks to determine which dimensions of its political system (if any) are most endangered. We construe organized crime in terms of corruption networks, questioning in effect the predominant understanding of these two concepts as distinct o...

Taking as its starting point the existing theoretical debate on electoral violence, this paper analyses election-related violence in Montenegro in the country’s post-communist era. The objective is to gather data concerning violence tied to national elections for president and parliament, and to identify patterns present in the data. The role playe...

The paper addresses the question of what sort of influence organized crime may have on democratic performance in the Czech Republic and which dimensions of its political system (if any) are endangered most. We define organized crime narrowly in terms of corruption networks, questioning in effect the predominant understanding of these two concepts a...

The paper analyses collective violence in Ecuador from the end of September 2010. The situation was characterized as a Coup d'état when violent clashes between hostile camps were identified. The president was attacked by rebellious units of state police that had protested against the planned cuts of benefits and salaries in the law enforcement sect...

Abstrakt Text analyzuje kolektívne násilie v Ekvádore z konca septembra 2010. Situácia bola charakterizovaná ako pokus o štátny prevrat (Coup d'état), pričom sa v jeho priebehu eskalovalo násilie medzi nepriateľskými tábormi. Prezident bol napadnutý vzbúrenými jednotkami štátnej polície, ktoré protestovali proti plánovaným škrtom v silových zložkác...