About special indigenous representation in Peru: An approach from the viewpoint of indigenous leaders. Following the numerous indigenous uprisings in the 1990´s, scholars have paid close attention to indigenous politics in Latin America, with their main focus placed on the construction of indigenous movements, as well as indigenous identity. In contrast, very few contributions deal with institutional designs to promote indigenous people’s access to formal politics. This paper addresses the topic of descriptive representation of indigenous people in formal decision-making spheres, with the main focus on the Parliament. It outlines the benefits associated with descriptive representation of minorities, as well as two cases of interest: Mexico and New Zealand. Based on interviews conducted during the summer of 2009, the article provides insight into the indigenous leaders´ assessments regarding this issue. It also includes a look at the magnitude of recent indigenous representation in Parliament. The final section presents a brief review of some strategies to include indigenous people informal power structures. / Se aborda la representación especial o descriptiva de poblaciones indígenas en espacios formales de decisión, con foco en el ámbito parlamentario y en la potencialidad de un diseño en esta línea para el caso peruano. Como marco, el trabajo reseña los beneficios asociados a la representación descriptiva de minorías, así como dos casos de interés: México y Nueva Zelanda. Se presenta la opinión sobre este tema de líderes indígenas peruanos, cuyos testimonios fueron recogidos durante el verano de 2009. El texto incluye una breve descripción del marco normativo peruano, como también una mirada a la magnitud de la representación indígena reciente en el Parlamento. La última sección presenta notas a modo de conclusión, y una reseña sucinta de algunas estrategias ensayadas para incluir a poblaciones indígenas en espacios formales de poder.

This thesis aims to explore the link between women’s descriptive representation and substantive representation in the 20th National Assembly of the Republic of Korea according to the different conceptualization of women’s substantive representation. First, the link between women’s descriptive representation and substantive representation is examined by investigating whether women legislators introduce bills for women’s interests and succeed in passing such bills more than men. Plus, women legislators’ impact on the introduction of bills for women’s interests and success to pass such bills is explored separately according to different definitions of women’s interests, feminist and traditional women’s interests. This thesis also seeks to compare the influence of quota women with non-quota women on introducing bills for women’s interest and being able to pass such bills. The effect of legislators’ gender and quota women on women’s substantive representation is analyzed by running multivariate OLS regressions. The result strongly supports the positive impact of female legislators on the substantive representation of women. The regression analysis result indicates that being female is positively and significantly related to all types of women’s substantive representation, except the introduction of traditional women’s interests bills. The positive effect of the female legislators is more robust on the introduction of feminist women’s interests bills than the passage of them. However, the positive effect of the female legislators is stronger on the passage of traditional women’s interests bills than the introduction of them. When I compare the connection between women’s descriptive representation and substantive representation according to the different definitions of women’s interests, female legislators are more positively related to feminist women’s interests than traditional women’s interests. The result mildly supports the positive moderating effect of quota women on the link between women’s descriptive representation and substantive representation. These findings indicate that women legislators and quota women improve women’s substantive representation in the Republic of Korea. Specific effects of female legislators and quota women on women’s substantive representation are varied depending on different aspects of substantive representation and different definitions of women’s interests.

This dissertation is comprised of three papers, which aim to improve our knowledge of how democracy and legislature size matter for ethnic representation among political leaders. The first paper introduces the Global Leadership Project (GLP), which provides the first dataset to offer biographical information on an array of leaders (i.e. members of the executive, the legislature, the judiciary and other elites) around the world. Personal characteristics and identities of political leaders influence their behavior in elective office, and thus carry implications for the course of politics and policy. The GLP encompasses 145 nation-states and 38,085 leaders, each of whom is coded along 31 parameters, producing approximately 1.1 million data points in a cross-sectional format centered on 2010-13. This data allows comparison of the demographic characteristics (i.e. gender balance, age, ethnicity, education, languages spoken, education, and tenure) of leaders within countries, across countries, and across regions. The second paper examines the causal mechanism of how democratization increases ethnic descriptive representation through a longitudinal case study of Kurdish representation in the Turkish parliament from 1920 until 2011. It argues that ethnic descriptive representation increases in a competitive democracy because out-parties collaborate with ethnic groups to gain electoral advantage over their rivals. In Turkey, the collaboration of emerging out-party actors with the Kurds explains the rise of Kurdish descriptive representation. Through process tracing, this paper examines this collaboration, explaining the precarious increase in Kurdish descriptive representation in Turkish political history. The third paper argues that larger legislatures foster greater ethnic descriptive representation regardless of regime type. Theoretically, larger legislatures provide more "room" to pay off key elites, improve the inclusion of disadvantaged groups by diminishing the value of a seat, and are less subject to stochastic features that might upset descriptive representation. The argument is tested with a series of cross-national research designs drawing on the GLP database. A new disproportionality index of Ethnic Representation is created with the aggregated data at the national level. The argument is also tested with Two-Stage Least Squares analysis where the variation in population size is taken as an instrument of legislative size. / 2031-01-01T00:00:00Z

Since the 1990s, many countries have become more ethnically diverse. The structure of the people, the demos, is changing. According to Robert Dahl’s fourth criterion of what a democratic process is, the people should have control over the political agenda. Previous research has shown a significantly lower political participation and representation of immigrants in the political and media sphere in Sweden. Do the people really control the agenda? This thesis examines the representation of people with a foreign background from outside Europe on Swedish debate pages by collecting a sample of writers' names from three established Swedish newspapers; Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet, and Aftonbladet, during the time period 1992–2022. Using a name algorithm to determine country of origin, the results show an increase in representation to the point of 2002. From 2002 to today, the representation of non-European foreign background on Swedish debate pages has decreased.

No description available.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the organization that provides the technical support for the Internet. ICANN is a nonprofit organization based in California and is under contract to the United States Department of Commerce. It has come under attack from many sides because it is contracted through the U.S. government and it is a private entity. One of the main components of the controversy surrounding ICANN is whether it can represent a global society as a private entity and whether that private entity can represent Internet users. I focus my study on ICANN's Board of Directors. I evaluated the Board on the dimensions of descriptive, substantive, and formal representation (Pitkin 1967). Evaluation of ICANN's descriptive representation focused on the Board members' sex, educational backgrounds, and nationalities and compared the geographic representation on the Board to the global distribution of Internet users. The assessment of substantive representation looked at the Board members' votes to determine if patterns could be viewed based on members' descriptive characteristics. Finally, the evaluation of ICANN's formal representation examined its Bylaws, its 2006 contract with the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the California Nonprofit Public Benefit Corporations Code. The analysis found that the descriptive representativeness was low. The ICANN Board does not mirror Internet users: few women have served on the Board, those with technical educational backgrounds dominated, and the regions were not represented proportionate to their use of the Internet. Analysis of substantive representativeness was inconclusive and further investigation is needed. The formal representation analysis suggests that the ICANN Board has been formally representative. / Master of Arts

Comparatively few studies have explored how variations in state governing institutions influence voting behavior. Utilizing lower chamber state legislative election returns from the years 2000 through 2010, and the 2002 through 2010 GSS data series, this dissertation focuses on how US state legislatures influence voting behavior and political attitudes of the American electorate. Specifically, this research takes on a comparative approach and illustrates how institutional differences in the size, capacity, and composition of the US state legislatures affect the electorates’ propensity to vote and how politically efficacious people feel.

<p>The purpose of this dissertation is to map and analyze the spatial and temporal variation in women’s political representation at both the national and local level. In the dissertation it is argued that women’s political representation is the outcome of the interplay between structures, institutions and actors. The perspective is a comparative one, in which quantitative analyses and more qualitative case-studies complement each other. When analysing spatial variation a mainly quantitative approach is taken, while the case-study approach is applied to the temporal variation.</p><p>The first empirical chapter examines whether female representation in the lower houses of the world’s parliaments co-varies with other indicators of the political situation of women in order to ensure the validity of the analysis. In the second empirical chapter female representation in parliaments of the world during the post-war period is analyzed. In the third empirical chapter the focus narrows down to women’s political representation in Western Europe during the post-war period, where both the national and local level is analysed. The fourth empirical chapter consists of case studies of six countries. Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands feature high female representation; France, Greece and Ireland low female representation. In the fifth empirical chapter women’s political representation at the local level in Norway and Sweden is analysed during the post-war period. In the sixth empirical chapter the temporal variation in female representation in a number of Swedish municipalities is analysed, from the introduction of female suffrage in 1921 until 2002.</p><p>The result is that both structures, institutions and actors are necessary to explain the spatial and temporal variation in female representation. There is no direct link between structures and female representation. The structure does affect the actors and co-varies with the institutions, but successful actors as entrepreneurs might boost female representation. Actors are important. The increase in female representation cannot be seen as an automatic process taking care of itself. Conscious actors are necessary both to affect and to monitor the development. An unfavourable structural context might be compensated for by actors and institutions which favour female representation.</p>

In this study, I examine the factors that influence school districts’ commitment to implement ESL (English as a Second Language) education in compliance with the federal Bilingual Education Act of 1968. To explain variation in implementation effort, I focus on several features of the local implementation environment, including the role of Latino descriptive representation. Utilizing data on all public school districts in Texas, I employ a Heckman two-stage estimation procedure that accounts for factors that influence school districts’ decisions to implement bilingual education programs as well as factors that affect the amount of resources school districts are willing to allocate towards bilingual education. The results indicate that Latino school board and teacher representation play a positive and statistically significant role in determining: 1) whether school districts implement bilingual education programs; and 2) the level of expenditures and teacher positions allocated towards bilingual education. Thus, policy implementation outcomes translate into substantive representation.

The purpose of this dissertation is to map and analyze the spatial and temporal variation in women’s political representation at both the national and local level. In the dissertation it is argued that women’s political representation is the outcome of the interplay between structures, institutions and actors. The perspective is a comparative one, in which quantitative analyses and more qualitative case-studies complement each other. When analysing spatial variation a mainly quantitative approach is taken, while the case-study approach is applied to the temporal variation. The first empirical chapter examines whether female representation in the lower houses of the world’s parliaments co-varies with other indicators of the political situation of women in order to ensure the validity of the analysis. In the second empirical chapter female representation in parliaments of the world during the post-war period is analyzed. In the third empirical chapter the focus narrows down to women’s political representation in Western Europe during the post-war period, where both the national and local level is analysed. The fourth empirical chapter consists of case studies of six countries. Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands feature high female representation; France, Greece and Ireland low female representation. In the fifth empirical chapter women’s political representation at the local level in Norway and Sweden is analysed during the post-war period. In the sixth empirical chapter the temporal variation in female representation in a number of Swedish municipalities is analysed, from the introduction of female suffrage in 1921 until 2002. The result is that both structures, institutions and actors are necessary to explain the spatial and temporal variation in female representation. There is no direct link between structures and female representation. The structure does affect the actors and co-varies with the institutions, but successful actors as entrepreneurs might boost female representation. Actors are important. The increase in female representation cannot be seen as an automatic process taking care of itself. Conscious actors are necessary both to affect and to monitor the development. An unfavourable structural context might be compensated for by actors and institutions which favour female representation.