In recent decades, scholars have found that the influence of Great Powers in recognition politics is fairly big. They choose whether or not to recognize entities as states and other countries...Show moreIn recent decades, scholars have found that the influence of Great Powers in recognition politics is fairly big. They choose whether or not to recognize entities as states and other countries simply follow. Scholars have stated that in fear of costs of contravention, small states are being pressured to align recognition policy by extensive military, economic and diplomatic resources of major actors in world politics. Following the path of prior research on how Great Powers influence non-Great Powers on recognition policies, this paper aims to explain how extensive economic resources can be used to push other system members in certain recognition positions. Using data from the Correlates of War project and the World Trade Bank this paper argues that trade interdependence does, in fact, correlates with alignment of recognition policy with the U.S. With that said, no hard evidence has been found that the U.S. is willingly using trade as leverage to push states towards the recognition of Israel and the nonrecognition of Palestine.Show less
Recent studies have found an effect between political candidates being active on the social media platform Twitter and the amount of preference votes they receive in elections. These papers all use...Show moreRecent studies have found an effect between political candidates being active on the social media platform Twitter and the amount of preference votes they receive in elections. These papers all use the same candidate-based approach, where they research whether the use of Twitter and other Twitter features have an impact on the amount of votes each candidate receives. This paper will use a new party-based approach and seeks to find out wether the content political parties post on their Twitter accounts has an effect on the amount of preference votes the party together receives. To do so 5.114 tweets, sent during the campaign for the Dutch national elections of 2021 from 34 different political parties, have been analyzed and categorized. These tweets formed the independent variabele ‘share of personalized tweets’. A tweet is considered ‘personalized’ when the content of the tweets is about one or more candidates, who are not the list puller of the party. The share of personalized tweets has been analyzed together with the share of preference votes the parties received. No significant effect was found between these two variables.Show less