Few recent studies have shown how Mexico, like many other Latin American countries at the beginning of this century, has adopted new policies and programmes in order to maintain and (re)build economic, social and cultural bonds with its migrant communities in the US, who represent about 15 percent of Mexico's population. Less research has been conducted on the constitutional reforms and electoral laws that allow Mexicans abroad to participate politically in their home country's domestic affairs from afar. Employing a transnationalist approach to international migration and democratization studies, this thesis is the first major study of the politics of Mexican emigration to the US and the impact of migrants' electoral participation in their home country's affairs presented in political and institutional terms. The main question is how and with what consequences did the Mexican state extend formal political membership to its emigrant population both at the national and subnational level. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, this thesis shows that the implementation of emigrants' political rights in Mexico has resulted from cross-border coalition formations between US-based political migrant groups and domestic non-PRI political parties (mainly the centre-left PRD) in a context of democratization and decentralization unfolding in Mexico, as well as the country's insertion in the global economy. In turn, although only a small number of Mexican migrants have taken advantage of these opportunities for cross-border political action to date, the opening up of the Mexican political system creates new challenges to the incipient democratic practice. For instance, the growing influence of migrants and migrant organisations in domestic politics, the complexities of representing and being accountable to constituencies abroad and to a limited extent, the transformation of traditional political structures, especially in communities with high levels of emigration.

Simple voting games (SVGs) are mathematical idealisations of decision-making by a council or board for example the EU Council of Ministers or the UN Security Council. -- The theory of SVGs includes structure-preserving mappings. Until now, these have not been organised in a category. -- We start in the most natural way, with the objects of the category being SVGs conceived as sets of sets of voters and arrows being isomorphisms, bloc formation and inclusion maps. -- An alternative category, or sequence of categories, of SVGs, is simple to define. Co is the category with two objects and a single non-identity arrow between them. Cn+i is the arrows category of Cn. Encouragingly, the category-theoretic duals, products and coproducts correspond to duals, meets (products) and joins (coproducts) in SVGs. This category is a partial order. We develop a new notation for SVGs and have almost immediate proof of substantial results, for example the construction of the constant-sum extension of a game and the fact that the Banzaf-Penrose measure for a bloc of two voters is equal to the sum of the Banzaf-Penrose measures for the two voters. -- The Cn are also lattices. We can find the bipartitions as a sublat-tice which is also Boolean algebra. -- Lattice homomorphisms between the Cn correspond to structure-preserving mappings of SVGs. We can build another category with these. -- We also have a bijective mapping between SVGs and ordered pairs of a simplicial complex and its Alexander dual. This connects the theory of SVGs with topology.

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The powers of Central and East European presidents have been subject to a number studies. Paradoxically, only few scholars have tried to explain how presidents actually use them. This thesis maps and explains patterns in the activism of democratic presidents in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). It proposes a new theoretical framework for the study of presidential activism, defined as the discretionary use of formal presidential powers, and argues that it can be explained by the constitutional setting and the political environment. To test these hypotheses, the study employs a nested analysis approach. Thereby, the patterns of presidential activism are assessed using an original data set on the use of presidents’ legislative powers in nine CEE democracies between 1990 and 2010, and the thesis provides one of the first cross-country empirical analyses of the actual use of presidents’ reactive powers to date. Based on the predictions of the statistical model 12 president-cabinet pairings from four countries (Estonia, Hungary, Poland, 4.) are selected for in-depth case studies. The qualitative analysis then uses the results of 65 semi-structured elite interviews and ample source material to examine the validity of the statistical results. A particular focus is placed on the use of presidential vetoes and presidential activism in government formation, censure and dismissal. The study finds most of the hypotheses confirmed. Most prominently, the findings show that popular presidential elections, cohabitation between president and government as well as a low seat share of the government are the most important predictors of presidential activism. These factors are not only strongly correlated with a more frequent use of powers, but the mechanisms of effect are also demonstrated in case studies. Furthermore, the qualitative analysis suggests intra-governmental divisions as an additional explanatory factor which should be included in future studies of presidential activism.

The first part of this Thesis asks whether we can devise voting rules that allow strategic voters to express the intensity of their preferences. As opposed to the classical voting system (one person - one decision - one vote), we first propose a new voting system where agents are endowed with a fixed number of votes that can be distributed freely between a predetermined number of issues that have to be approved or dismissed. Its novelty, and appeal, relies on allowing voters to express the intensity of their preferences in a simple manner. This voting system is optimal in a well-defined sense: in a setting with two voters, two issues and uniform independent priors, Qualitative Voting Pareto dominates Majority Rule and, moreover, achieves the only ex-ante (incentive compatible) optimal allocation. The result also holds true with three voters as long as the valuations towards the issues differ sufficiently. Experimental evidence is provided supporting equilibrium predictions and showing that Qualitative Voting is better able to replicate the efficient outcome than Majority Rule. More generally in a setting with an arbitrary number of voters and issues, we show: (1) that a mechanism is implementable only if it does not undertake interpersonal comparisons of utility; (2) the impossibility of implementing strategy-proof mechanisms that are sensitive to the voters' intensities of preferences and satisfy the unanimity property. The second part of the Thesis studies the interaction between politicians' strategic behaveiour and voters' turnout decision: politicians diverge to motivate citizens to vote and they adapt their policies to the most sensitive voters -thus less sensitive voters abstain on the grounds of perceiving politicians being too similar. Moreover, citizens in central/moderate positions abstain. We find support for our predictions using NES data: (1) a perceived low difference between the Democratic and Republican parties tends to decrease a citizen's probability to vote and (2) moderate citizens vote less.

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This thesis describes my attempt to envisage electronic voting as a tool for political engagement by challenging the conventional understanding of the role of technology in democracy as only facilitating ' politics' referring to the means, structures and mechanisms that enable governing. This entails the reappropriation of voting as a tool that embeds methods for dissent to be democratically manifested, and the discovery of novel ways with which voting systems can be designed to encourage citizen involvement in political processes; from setting up polls and political canvassing to voting and political deliberation. I materialize this novel conceptualization of voting by introducing a design framework that enables us to rethink the capacities of systems to support various democratic contexts. We instantiate this framework for the design and development of novel voting prototypes that we later deploy in collaboration with local communities in Newcastle upon Tyne and Cambridge in order to gain an understanding of how their affordances and contextual parameters influence political participation. As a result, in this thesis we present a number of case studies incorporating new designs, empirical methods and findings that begin to explore this conceptualisation of voting as a tool for political engagement. More specifically, we explore: (i) the reappropriation of voting as not only supporting the doing of politics, but also the participation of the involved stakeholders in a political process; (ii) the capacities of voting systems that enable this profound citizen participation to be materialised in local contexts and the possible change that might result from this; and (iii) the contextual parameters affecting citizen engagement in voting such as the system's ownership and the authority to drive political agendas. In doing so, we offer new insights into the potential of voting to support political engagement and participation.

If elections are instruments of democracy, are governing parties more likely to address citizens’ concerns when pressures from electoral competition arise? This research tests expectations from the competitive theory of democracy and argues that government responsiveness, between elections, is more likely to occur in presence of a set of electoral incentives. This dissertation’s focus is on government attention to public issue priorities on three policy venues (executive speeches, public spending and legislation) across a range of policy domains in Canada, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This research shows that government responsiveness to public priorities is higher in more symbolic policy venues and tends to decrease in more substantive policy venues. Similarly, electoral incentives seem to have a more beneficial effect on responsiveness in the agenda-setting stage than in the policy-making stage. This suggests that incentives from electoral competition do not have the same impact on responsiveness when government attention is considered and that theories of party competition have a delimited applicability to the study of dynamic representation.

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