Economic voting theory assumes that voters focus their attention on the recent past. But testing this assumption is difficult and past research remains inconclusive. I estimate voters' economic time frames using a new model that measures the economic vote and voter myopia at the same time. I show that voter myopia is real and that after around a year and a half, economic voting affects half in size. After five years, they approach zero. My findings have positive implications.

Do members of parliament (MPs) transform campaign promises into subsequent actions once in office? While previous research often finds congruence between election pledges and policymaking activities in legislatures at the political party level, we know less about this relationship at the individual MP level. By assembling novel data on issue emphasis in Japanese candidate manifestos and legislative positions, we study whether campaign communication is a meaningful signal of legislative activities.

In countries where regulatory enforcement is erratic or unpredictable, governments often face a trade-off between stable investment and effective regulation. In China, for instance, firms respond to regulatory uncertainty by cultivating political ties or bribing local officials to protect them from unexpected interventions. These ties mitigate perceived threats to investment, but also obstruct leaders from regulating widespread risks—such as illegal pollution.

Party system institutionalization has been traditionally viewed as an essential condition for the consolidation of democracy (Mainwaring, 1999; Hicken and Kuchonta, 2014; Casal Bértoa, 2017). However, there is a far less agreement in the literature about what institutionalizes party systems in the first place. Seeking to fill this gap, the current paper, building on a mixed-method approach, aims to provide an answer to the question of how such institutionalization occurs and why the degrees of institutionalization vary across countries.

Understanding the determinants of electoral turnout has long been the focus of political science, with important meta-analyses from Geys (2006) and Smets and Van Ham (2013). These and other studies have been used to understand the cost of voting. However, one potential cost of voting that is not well understood is voter identification (ID) laws. Currently, findings on voter ID laws are mixed and only exist within the United States (Highton 2017). Yet it is important to understand voter ID in a comparative context because the costs of voting may be different outside of the US.

The latest generation of data-powered technologies such as Data Science and Artificial Intelligence are being widely used across the private sector and seem to have potential for the public sector also. However, past governments have struggled to maximise the potential of successive generations of information technology, lagging decades behind firms. This talk considers how these data-powered technologies can be developed from a public sector perspective.

The phenomenon of foreign actors employing directed political communication to sway the politics of another country is easier and more prevalent than ever. Disinformation campaigns do not solely transmit deceitful political information abroad, but they also aim at changing pre-established attitudes regarding politics and democratic institutions. Powerful non-democratic states have both the means and the incentive to spread such discourse to democratic and un- democratic countries.

Ambassador Rytis Paulauskas is the Permanent Representative of the Republic of Lithuania to the United Nations since May 2021. Prior to his appointment to the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Lithuania to the United Nations, Mr. Paulauskas served as Director of Information and Public Relations Department of his country’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs from 2016 to 2021. He was Permanent Representative of the Republic of Lithuania to the UN and other International Organizations in Geneva between 2012 and 2016. Amb.