Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1936. / Typescript. Includes abstract and vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 303-311).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1996. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [403]-423).

This thesis looks at the life and political influence of William Jennings Bryan, and his work as a champion of the rights of the common man.

In this dissertation project, I make three separate contributions on how we can improve aggregate election forecasting models with respect to modeling choices, interpretability, and performance. Two of the three papers are applications to particular cases, the U.S. and France specifically, while the third points to a cross-national pattern in polling errors. The first paper addresses how we can make more reasonable prior choices for key parameters – such as the variability of non-sampling error – by using past pre-election polls. I showcase this approach on U.S. presidential elections. The second paper shows how to create and aggregate predictions in a multi-party contest while keeping the individual forecasts intact. This is useful to see convergences or divergences in the forecasts which might affect our confidence in the aggregate prediction. I develop a new aggregate forecasting model for French presidential elections to demonstrate this idea. The last paper shows and investigates a pattern in polling errors. We see that across multiple countries and electoral systems, polling errors favor the lesser party in two-party contests, i.e. polling errors favor Democratic candidates in Republican states and vice versa. We demonstrate a simple adjustment procedure based on this pattern to reduce the mean absolute polling error. We achieve a 16% reduction in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

No description available.

Why is black partisan identification so one-sidedly Democratic forty years past the Civil Rights movement? A black/non-black political dichotomy manifests itself through one-sided African-American partisanship. Racial consciousness and Republican hostility is the basis of the black/non-black political dichotomy, which manifests through African-American partisanship. Racial consciousness forced blacks to take a unique and somewhat jaundiced approach to politics and Republican hostility to black inclusion in the political process in the 1960s followed by antagonism toward public policy contribute to overwhelming black Democratic partisanship. Results shown in this dissertation demonstrate that variables representing economic issues, socioeconomic status and religiosity fail to explain partisan identification to the extent that Hostility-Consciousness explains party identification.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / I examined a panel of all 50 states over a period of 30 years between 1981 and 2010, estimating a random effects model to examine the relationship between the party of a state’s governor and changes in pretax and transfer income inequality. Though the literature has quite consistently shown that income inequality increases more quickly under Republican governors or when policies favored by Republicans are implemented, I find no evidence to support this, though this is perhaps because I did not allow a long enough lag time for new policies to have an effect. I did, however, find that pretax income inequality increases more quickly under Democratic presidents than under Republicans, in spite of the fact that all previous research shows the opposite to be true. I suspect that this unusual finding is the result of a quirk in my 1981-2010 time frame, namely the effects of the shift in welfare policy under the Clinton administration in the 1990s.