Fernando Mendez
Biographic Data
| ID | 4371071 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Fernando Mendez |
| GIVEN NAMES | Fernando |
| FAMILY NAME | Mendez |
| SIGNATURE | MENDEZ F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Zurich |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0462-5086 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 132 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Does Islamist terrorism still affect political attitudes
Recent literature suggests that citizens in Western democracies have become desensitized to Islamist terrorism and that Islamist attacks therefore no longer evoke the same changes in political attitudes as before. However, this hypothesis remains undertheorized and has not been systematically tested. We develop a theoretical framework that positions desensitization alongside alternative trajectories of public responsiveness and subject it to two …
Improving issue representation with candidate‐level voting advice applications
Voting advice applications (VAAs) have proliferated in recent years. However, most VAAs only match their users with parties, at least in part because creating a VAA matching voters to individual candidates tends to be more labour‐intensive. This could be an important missed opportunity. Candidates may deviate from the party line, but voters are often unaware of the policy platforms of individual candidates and therefore rarely hold them accountab…
Mapping the European Landscape of Citizens’ Initiatives
Rising public dissatisfaction with representative democracy has sparked interest in bottom-up forms of direct democracy, such as citizens’ initiatives. Yet, systematic data on actual practice remain scarce. This article maps citizens’ initiatives across 46 Council of Europe states, covering both agenda initiatives and citizen-initiated referendums. Drawing on an original database of nearly 7’000 initiatives launched between 1990 and 2020, we reve…
Do Voting Advice Applications Affect Party Preferences? Evidence from Field Experiments in Five European Countries
Voting advice applications (VAAs) are online tools that provide voters with personalized information on the extent to which their policy views match those of political parties or candidates. These tools have proliferated across advanced democracies in recent years and become integral parts of electoral campaigns, especially in multi-party systems. However, it remains unclear to what extent voters actually make use of VAAs to inform their voting p…
Reconceptualizing Dimensions of Political Competition In Europe: A Demand-side Approach
Scholars seeking to understand political competition in Europe have proposed various models of political dimensionality. While most scholars draw on data from the supply side of politics (political parties), demand-side (voter) studies remain few. In this article we compare the two approaches. The main difference is that while supply-side approaches suggest a single model of dimensionality that can be applied to all EU countries, demand-side appr…
EU Cohesion Policy under the Media Spotlight: Exploring Territorial and Temporal Patterns in News Coverage and Tone
This article explores the territorial and temporal patterns of EU cohesion policy media coverage. The topic content and tone of news are analysed using topic modelling and sentiment analysis techniques, which are applied to a new corpus of over 4,000 English and Spanish news stories from the period 2010 to 2017 across three territorial levels. In line with our theoretical expectations, we found significant differences in the tone used across terr…
Post-crisis Political Normalisation? The 2018 Presidential Elections in the Republic of Cyprus
This article takes stock of the most recent presidential election in the Republic of Cyprus and connects it to broader currents in post-crisis European political settings. Although the elections took place against a backdrop of improving economic prospects, the crisis has left its political mark in a number of areas we identify that include a growing political fragmentation, the rise of the far right and increased voter abstention. The empirical …
Does receiving advice from Voter Advice Applications (VAAs) affect public opinion in deeply divided societies? Evidence from a field experiment in Northern Ireland
Despite the global growth in the use of Voter Advice Applications (VAAs), which advise users on how similar their own policy views are to the policy positions of the political parties, there have been few field experiments that isolate the causal effects of VAA use on party support. Nor has there been much investigation of how VAAs may help to ameliorate ethnically based voting divisions by refocusing voter attention on other issues. This article…
Contested Sovereignty: Mapping Referendums on Sovereignty over Time and Space
The recent proliferation of referendums on sovereignty matters has fuelled growing scholarly interest. However, comparative research is hindered by the weaknesses of current compilations, which tend to suffer from conceptual vagueness, varied coding decisions, incomplete coverage and ad hoc categorizations. Based on an improved conceptualization and theory-driven typology, this article presents a new dataset of 602 sovereignty referendums from 17…
What drives fidelity to internet voting? Evidence from the roll–out of internet voting in Switzerland
Spatial maps in voting advice applications: The case for dynamic scale validation
The dimensionality of the Scottish political space: Results from an experiment on the 2011 Holyrood elections
This article introduces Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) as a data-generating tool that can be used to measure the positions of party supporters in multidimensional policy space. It begins with an overview of the state of the art as regards methods for locating parties on a common policy space, in terms of how data are gathered and also in terms of how policy dimensions are identified and measured. We then use a dimension reduction technique to …
Elections and the Internet: On the Difficulties of ‘Upgrading’ Elections in the Digital Era
Across Europe policy‐makers have adopted programmes to modernise their elections by offering citizens remote forms of Internet voting. This article adopts a comparative perspective on the roll‐out of e‐voting systems across three pioneer European states. The empirical puzzle that animates this inquiry is why, contrary to optimistic initial expectations, has it been so hard to implement Internet voting? To shed light on the dynamics involved this …
Constitution-making, constitutional conventions and conflict resolution: Lesson drawing for Cyprus
This paper is concerned with the analysis of the proposal for a constitutional convention for Cyprus1 as a potential conflict resolution mechanism. Like many concepts in the social sciences, the concept of a constitutional convention is a fuzzy construct. Despite this, we argue that the concept can still serve as useful analytical heuristic for examining a variety of constitution-making options that are pertinent to the conflict. In putting forwa…
Direct Democracy in the European Union: How Comparative Federalism can Help us Understand the Interplay of Direct Democracy and European Integration
In recent decades Europe's political landscape has been marked by a notable rise in the use of mechanisms of direct democracy such as the referendum and the citizens' initiative. Our focus in this article is on the national referendums directly connected to the European Union (EU) integration process, a subject which is receiving increasing scholarly attention. Two interrelated questions are asked. First, how do these specific mechanisms of direc…
The European Union and cybercrime: Insights From Comparative Federalism
This article analyses the emergence of a European Union policy on cybercrime from the perspective of comparative federalism. To this end, it draws on insights from federal polities to explain how policy-makers in the United States, Switzerland and the European Union have responded to the challenge posed by criminality on the internet and the impact of different federal structures on policy outcomes. Two claims are put forward: first, we expect to…
Contested Sovereignty: Mapping Referendums on Sovereignty over Time and Space
The recent proliferation of referendums on sovereignty matters has fuelled growing scholarly interest. However, comparative research is hindered by the weaknesses of current compilations, which tend to suffer from conceptual vagueness, varied coding decisions, incomplete coverage and ad hoc categorizations. Based on an improved conceptualization and theory-driven typology, this article presents a new dataset of 602 sovereignty referendums from 17…
Reconceptualizing Dimensions of Political Competition In Europe: A Demand-side Approach
Scholars seeking to understand political competition in Europe have proposed various models of political dimensionality. While most scholars draw on data from the supply side of politics (political parties), demand-side (voter) studies remain few. In this article we compare the two approaches. The main difference is that while supply-side approaches suggest a single model of dimensionality that can be applied to all EU countries, demand-side appr…
Spatial maps in voting advice applications: The case for dynamic scale validation
The dimensionality of the Scottish political space: Results from an experiment on the 2011 Holyrood elections
This article introduces Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) as a data-generating tool that can be used to measure the positions of party supporters in multidimensional policy space. It begins with an overview of the state of the art as regards methods for locating parties on a common policy space, in terms of how data are gathered and also in terms of how policy dimensions are identified and measured. We then use a dimension reduction technique to …
Does receiving advice from Voter Advice Applications (VAAs) affect public opinion in deeply divided societies? Evidence from a field experiment in Northern Ireland
Despite the global growth in the use of Voter Advice Applications (VAAs), which advise users on how similar their own policy views are to the policy positions of the political parties, there have been few field experiments that isolate the causal effects of VAA use on party support. Nor has there been much investigation of how VAAs may help to ameliorate ethnically based voting divisions by refocusing voter attention on other issues. This article…
Do Voting Advice Applications Affect Party Preferences? Evidence from Field Experiments in Five European Countries
Voting advice applications (VAAs) are online tools that provide voters with personalized information on the extent to which their policy views match those of political parties or candidates. These tools have proliferated across advanced democracies in recent years and become integral parts of electoral campaigns, especially in multi-party systems. However, it remains unclear to what extent voters actually make use of VAAs to inform their voting p…
EU Cohesion Policy under the Media Spotlight: Exploring Territorial and Temporal Patterns in News Coverage and Tone
This article explores the territorial and temporal patterns of EU cohesion policy media coverage. The topic content and tone of news are analysed using topic modelling and sentiment analysis techniques, which are applied to a new corpus of over 4,000 English and Spanish news stories from the period 2010 to 2017 across three territorial levels. In line with our theoretical expectations, we found significant differences in the tone used across terr…
Post-crisis Political Normalisation? The 2018 Presidential Elections in the Republic of Cyprus
This article takes stock of the most recent presidential election in the Republic of Cyprus and connects it to broader currents in post-crisis European political settings. Although the elections took place against a backdrop of improving economic prospects, the crisis has left its political mark in a number of areas we identify that include a growing political fragmentation, the rise of the far right and increased voter abstention. The empirical …
What drives fidelity to internet voting? Evidence from the roll–out of internet voting in Switzerland
Elections and the Internet: On the Difficulties of ‘Upgrading’ Elections in the Digital Era
Across Europe policy‐makers have adopted programmes to modernise their elections by offering citizens remote forms of Internet voting. This article adopts a comparative perspective on the roll‐out of e‐voting systems across three pioneer European states. The empirical puzzle that animates this inquiry is why, contrary to optimistic initial expectations, has it been so hard to implement Internet voting? To shed light on the dynamics involved this …
The European Union and cybercrime: Insights From Comparative Federalism
This article analyses the emergence of a European Union policy on cybercrime from the perspective of comparative federalism. To this end, it draws on insights from federal polities to explain how policy-makers in the United States, Switzerland and the European Union have responded to the challenge posed by criminality on the internet and the impact of different federal structures on policy outcomes. Two claims are put forward: first, we expect to…
Direct Democracy in the European Union: How Comparative Federalism can Help us Understand the Interplay of Direct Democracy and European Integration
In recent decades Europe's political landscape has been marked by a notable rise in the use of mechanisms of direct democracy such as the referendum and the citizens' initiative. Our focus in this article is on the national referendums directly connected to the European Union (EU) integration process, a subject which is receiving increasing scholarly attention. Two interrelated questions are asked. First, how do these specific mechanisms of direc…
The European Union and cybercrime: Insights From Comparative Federalism
This article analyses the emergence of a European Union policy on cybercrime from the perspective of comparative federalism. To this end, it draws on insights from federal polities to explain how policy-makers in the United States, Switzerland and the European Union have responded to the challenge posed by criminality on the internet and the impact of different federal structures on policy outcomes. Two claims are put forward: first, we expect to…
Constitution-making, constitutional conventions and conflict resolution: Lesson drawing for Cyprus
This paper is concerned with the analysis of the proposal for a constitutional convention for Cyprus1 as a potential conflict resolution mechanism. Like many concepts in the social sciences, the concept of a constitutional convention is a fuzzy construct. Despite this, we argue that the concept can still serve as useful analytical heuristic for examining a variety of constitution-making options that are pertinent to the conflict. In putting forwa…
Direct Democracy in the European Union: How Comparative Federalism can Help us Understand the Interplay of Direct Democracy and European Integration
In recent decades Europe's political landscape has been marked by a notable rise in the use of mechanisms of direct democracy such as the referendum and the citizens' initiative. Our focus in this article is on the national referendums directly connected to the European Union (EU) integration process, a subject which is receiving increasing scholarly attention. Two interrelated questions are asked. First, how do these specific mechanisms of direc…
Elections and the Internet: On the Difficulties of ‘Upgrading’ Elections in the Digital Era
Across Europe policy‐makers have adopted programmes to modernise their elections by offering citizens remote forms of Internet voting. This article adopts a comparative perspective on the roll‐out of e‐voting systems across three pioneer European states. The empirical puzzle that animates this inquiry is why, contrary to optimistic initial expectations, has it been so hard to implement Internet voting? To shed light on the dynamics involved this …
The dimensionality of the Scottish political space: Results from an experiment on the 2011 Holyrood elections
This article introduces Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) as a data-generating tool that can be used to measure the positions of party supporters in multidimensional policy space. It begins with an overview of the state of the art as regards methods for locating parties on a common policy space, in terms of how data are gathered and also in terms of how policy dimensions are identified and measured. We then use a dimension reduction technique to …
Spatial maps in voting advice applications: The case for dynamic scale validation
What drives fidelity to internet voting? Evidence from the roll–out of internet voting in Switzerland
Contested Sovereignty: Mapping Referendums on Sovereignty over Time and Space
The recent proliferation of referendums on sovereignty matters has fuelled growing scholarly interest. However, comparative research is hindered by the weaknesses of current compilations, which tend to suffer from conceptual vagueness, varied coding decisions, incomplete coverage and ad hoc categorizations. Based on an improved conceptualization and theory-driven typology, this article presents a new dataset of 602 sovereignty referendums from 17…
Post-crisis Political Normalisation? The 2018 Presidential Elections in the Republic of Cyprus
This article takes stock of the most recent presidential election in the Republic of Cyprus and connects it to broader currents in post-crisis European political settings. Although the elections took place against a backdrop of improving economic prospects, the crisis has left its political mark in a number of areas we identify that include a growing political fragmentation, the rise of the far right and increased voter abstention. The empirical …
Does receiving advice from Voter Advice Applications (VAAs) affect public opinion in deeply divided societies? Evidence from a field experiment in Northern Ireland
Despite the global growth in the use of Voter Advice Applications (VAAs), which advise users on how similar their own policy views are to the policy positions of the political parties, there have been few field experiments that isolate the causal effects of VAA use on party support. Nor has there been much investigation of how VAAs may help to ameliorate ethnically based voting divisions by refocusing voter attention on other issues. This article…
EU Cohesion Policy under the Media Spotlight: Exploring Territorial and Temporal Patterns in News Coverage and Tone
This article explores the territorial and temporal patterns of EU cohesion policy media coverage. The topic content and tone of news are analysed using topic modelling and sentiment analysis techniques, which are applied to a new corpus of over 4,000 English and Spanish news stories from the period 2010 to 2017 across three territorial levels. In line with our theoretical expectations, we found significant differences in the tone used across terr…
Reconceptualizing Dimensions of Political Competition In Europe: A Demand-side Approach
Scholars seeking to understand political competition in Europe have proposed various models of political dimensionality. While most scholars draw on data from the supply side of politics (political parties), demand-side (voter) studies remain few. In this article we compare the two approaches. The main difference is that while supply-side approaches suggest a single model of dimensionality that can be applied to all EU countries, demand-side appr…
Do Voting Advice Applications Affect Party Preferences? Evidence from Field Experiments in Five European Countries
Voting advice applications (VAAs) are online tools that provide voters with personalized information on the extent to which their policy views match those of political parties or candidates. These tools have proliferated across advanced democracies in recent years and become integral parts of electoral campaigns, especially in multi-party systems. However, it remains unclear to what extent voters actually make use of VAAs to inform their voting p…
Improving issue representation with candidate‐level voting advice applications
Voting advice applications (VAAs) have proliferated in recent years. However, most VAAs only match their users with parties, at least in part because creating a VAA matching voters to individual candidates tends to be more labour‐intensive. This could be an important missed opportunity. Candidates may deviate from the party line, but voters are often unaware of the policy platforms of individual candidates and therefore rarely hold them accountab…
Mapping the European Landscape of Citizens’ Initiatives
Rising public dissatisfaction with representative democracy has sparked interest in bottom-up forms of direct democracy, such as citizens’ initiatives. Yet, systematic data on actual practice remain scarce. This article maps citizens’ initiatives across 46 Council of Europe states, covering both agenda initiatives and citizen-initiated referendums. Drawing on an original database of nearly 7’000 initiatives launched between 1990 and 2020, we reve…
Does Islamist terrorism still affect political attitudes
Recent literature suggests that citizens in Western democracies have become desensitized to Islamist terrorism and that Islamist attacks therefore no longer evoke the same changes in political attitudes as before. However, this hypothesis remains undertheorized and has not been systematically tested. We develop a theoretical framework that positions desensitization alongside alternative trajectories of public responsiveness and subject it to two …
Political science (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (10 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Voting (6 works) · European Union Policy and Governance (5 works) · Advice (programming (4 works) · Economics (4 works)