The relationship between dimensions of love, personality, and relationship length

The present study examined the associations among participant demographics, personality factors, love dimensions, and relationship length. In total, 16,030 participants completed an internet survey assessing Big Five personality factors, Sternberg’s three love dimensions (intimacy, passion, and commitment), and the length of time that they had been involved in a relationship. Results of structural equation modeling (SEM) showed that participant age was negatively associated with passion and positively associated with intimacy and commitment. In addition, the Big Five factor of Agreeableness was positively associated with all three love dimensions, whereas Conscientiousness was positively associated with intimacy and commitment. Finally, passion was negatively associated with relationship length, whereas commitment was positively correlated with relationship length. SEM results further showed that there were minor differences in these associations for women and men. Given the large sample size, our results reflect stable associations between personality factors and love dimensions. The present results may have important implications for relationship and marital counseling. Limitations of this study and further implications are discussed.

Home bias persistence in foreign direct investments

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the issues related to home bias and foreign direct investments (FDIs). We study the role of physical, cultural, and institutional distances from home on FDI decisions taken by corporations to assess whether the globalization of the past two decades has reduced their influence. Using the ‘home bias’ framework from the finance literature and the gravity model from the economics literature, we utilize a large sample of both developed and emerging markets, using FDI flows of 6263 unique bilateral country pairs over a 30-year period. We find strong empirical evidence of persistent home bias in FDI outflows, and we show that not only physical distance but also cultural and institutional similarities between host and source countries remain a decisive factor in foreign corporate investment decisions. We also show that such home bias is persistent over time and is observed around the world.

The Potential of Participedia as a Crowdsourcing Tool for Comparative Analysis of Democratic Innovations

For two reasons, our capacity for systematic comparison of innovative participatory democratic processes remains limited. First, the category of participatory democratic innovations remains relatively vague when compared to more traditional democratic institutions and practices. Second, until recently there existed no large-sample databases that captured relevant variables in the practice of democratic innovation. The lone exception to these patterns is the Participedia database, located online. Participedia is well placed to respond to the two obstacles to systematic comparative research on democratic innovation. First, its crowdsourced data collection strategy means that many of the cases on the platform are not well known and have not been the subject of sustained academic analysis. Second, the data captured in the articles provides the basis for systematic comparative analysis of democratic innovations both within type (e.g., participatory budgeting, mini-publics) and across types. The platform allows for systematic content analysis of text descriptions and/or statistical analysis of the datasets generated from the structured data fields. This article describes the data about innovative participatory democratic processes available from Participedia, and furnishes examples of the kinds of quantitative and qualitative insights about those processes that Participedia enables.