The problem of this thesis is to determine the relationship of political promises made by the elected candidates for governor with their achievements in relation to these political promises. From such an evaluation, it is hoped to determine the value of different types of political promises, and thus be more able to judge properly candidates seeking the office of governor.

Issues concerning immigration and asylum have attracted considerable news media coverage in countries of the Global North such as the United Kingdom during recent decades. The UK national press famous for its longevity, mass appeal and partisanship has been uniquely placed to report on and provide commentary about issues of social change such as these, especially as they have become more prominent in UK party politics. This thesis therefore analyses the press coverage of immigration issues in seven national newspapers during the final week of general election campaigns between 1918 and 2010 in order to provide a historical context to these recent developments. Using content analysis and critical discourse analysis methods, the study assesses several aspects of the representational pattern of immigration coverage and offers a perspective which emphasises continuities and contrasts across time and across the press. Over two empirical chapters, the content analysis provides a thorough profile of the coverage in terms of its volume, the news presence and access of social actors, the balance of supportive and critical voices in coverage, the lexicon used to describe immigrants and immigration processes and the themes of debate. The findings suggest that immigration has become a low-threshold political issue within recent campaigns, for which there is a core element of detailed discussion but an unprecedented expansion in superficial reference to such issues. The prominence, politicisation and problematisation of immigration have combined to frequently provide critical voices with a prominent platform. Meanwhile, supportive voices and those of immigrants were mostly marginalised. There was relatively little variation in the thematic dimension of coverage over time and to some extent across the press. A third empirical chapter offers a critical discourse analysis of the headlines in three main areas of coverage: precarious routes comprising forced and irregular migration, numbers and immigrants as voters and candidates. These aspects of the debate are examined in terms of our and their rights and responsibilities to reveal how the press has constructed the ethics and politics of immigration qualitatively.

This study provides a detailed, empirically based examination of the institutional dynamics of the new parties and political groupings that have emerged Poland, the largest country of the former Soviet bloc, since the collapse of communist rule in 1989. It draws upon and utilises the models developed in the contemporary West European party literature as an analytical framework with which to examine the main parties from a structural and organisational perspective and considers how they approximate to these taxonomical ideals. It examines the six main parties and political groupings around which the Polish party system appeared to be consolidating in the run up to the 1997 parliamentary elections. The study considers: the internal distribution of power and modes of representation with the parties; the role of the party bureaucracy; the relationship between the parties and their electorates; the development of parties as membership organisations; and the relationship between parties and the state. It concludes that the new Polish parties are strong at the level of state institutions and appear capable of fulfilling their role in terms of structuring elections, institutions and recruiting elites. However, they are also likely to develop as remote and somewhat distant institutions that are weak at the societal level. Given that the nature of the links between parties and their electorates are likely to remain fairly shallow, the new parties are likely to prove less successful at aggregating societal interests and relatively ineffective in mobilising the citizenry and integrating them into the political process. The study, therefore, draws broader conclusions about the process of party development in post-communist Eastern Europe at the same time as augmenting the relatively undeveloped literature on internal party dynamics.

1 Abstract in English Thesis Presidential Elections in the history of the Czechoslovak state confronts individual successful Presidential Elections in the history of the Czechoslovak state from 1918 to 1992. Thesis describes its legislative forms (written level from acts) and its real processes (practical level from shorthand record and other sources) too. These two levels are compared to each other. Except it, the thesis compares Presidential Elections in the democratic state and in the period, when the Communist Party controls the Elections. Why I choose this theme? I would like to answer on some questions from introduction, for example: Does something connect something individual Presidential Elections? What was characteristic for the Elections in the democracy and in the communistic regime? Was there something unconstitutional from the Elections? Can knowledge of the historical evolution contribute discussions about the Presidential Election at present? The thesis is divided to seven chapters. First chapter has two subchapters, the first one (in four parts) is about legal regulations of the Presidential Election from 1918 to 1920, the second one describes first T. G. Masaryk's presidential election. It was uncontrolled election with acclamation. Second chapter presents in first subchapter (and its four...

The goal of this diploma thesis is to verify hypotheses that the current legal framework of election law is in accordance with constitutional principles. Furthermore, author's intention is to highlight parts of the statute which may violate the Constitution. Such verification or rejection of hypotheses is deduced from the answers on the research questions, for instance if the voting system used within the course of the election to the Czech House of Representatives and if is desirable to modify the voting system and, if relevant in what manner (by what means). In order to answer these questions, the author applied the method of analyzing primary and secondary information sources, their interpretation and deduction of relevant conclusions. This thesis is divided into twelve chapters (incl. preface and conclusion, resume and bibliography) provided that the merit of the work can be found from chapter five to chapter eight. The second chapter is devoted to theoretical elaboration of individual voting systems. The following chapter discusses the evolution of the voting system used within the course of Czech and Czech-Slovak parliamentary elections in the 20th century. Fourth section of this paper is dedicated to constitutional establishment of the voting system used within the actual Czech parliamentary...

Master of Science / Department of Journalism & Mass Communications / Sam Mwangi / This study examines what function presidential candidate e-mail messages serve. Are messages being sent out most frequently as an acclaim, a defense, or an attack? Are these messages attempting to reach the undecided voter or mobilize the already-committed? Furthermore, are these messages getting into policy discussion? Taking into consideration the commonalities between presidential rhetoric and propaganda theory, a content analysis was conducted on 280 official campaign emails from the 2012 Romney and Obama Campaigns covering the span of September 16, 2012 to November 6, 2012. Specifically, this study investigates the prevalence of “acclaim” messages versus “attack” messages, compares messages dealing with character to those dealing with policy, codes messages as being either informational content, involvement and engagement, or mobilization, and analyzes the differences of messages sent by presidential candidates in 2012. In all, 82.6% of candidate e-mails were coded as an “acclaim” message, and the majority of candidate messages (59.1%) fell under “involvement and engagement”, meaning they requested an initial commitment be made by the recipient. Fifteen percent of messages were coded as being related to character, while policy messages made up 20% of all messages. Romney held an edge in overall number of “attack” messages sent out at 25%, compared to just 6.4% sent out by Obama. Results seem to suggest that persuasion of the undecided voter was not the purpose of presidential e-mail messages in the 2012 election.

Thesis advisor: R. Shep Melnick / The United States now has an extensive, publicly controlled, and bureaucratic system of election regulation. Until roughly a century ago, however, elections were viewed as private party contests subject to minimal state regulation. We examine how this changed, considering in particular the role played by the courts, given that for much of the nineteenth century they viewed the parties as private, constitutionally protected associations. We consider how and why the libertarian argument concerning free speech came to prominence in the campaign debate, and find that at first neither the reformers nor the courts at any level viewed this as a fundamental obstacle to--or even an issue to be considered in--the regulation of money in politics. This shift from a private to a public electoral system had a significant impact on American democracy that has not often been examined. To understand these changes, we examine the arguments put forth by advocates of cam-paign finance reform from the nineteenth to the latter part of the twentieth centuries. We focus on how the proponents justified these laws and how state and federal courts responded to these arguments, paying particular attention to court rulings on the constitutionality of these unprecedented statutes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to the evolution of their jurisprudence in this regard during the twentieth century. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

This paper examines to what extent gender equality correlates with electoral violence, through a quantitative study of 220 elections that have taken place in sub-Saharan African countries between 1990 and 2008. As such, it has a two-folded purpose. First, to contribute empirically to research about the causes of electoral violence by introducing a new variable. Second, to put to test previous research that argues in favour of a correlation between gender equality and peace. Accordingly, this paper hypothesises that higher levels of gender equality correlate with lower levels of electoral violence. In support of previous research, an initial bivariate regression demonstrates a strong negative relationship between the two variables of interest. The association is only slightly weakened in the sequencing multivariate regression, when controlling for democracy, ethnic fractionalisation, majoritarian electoral systems, GDP per capita, whether an incumbent is running for office, ongoing civil war, and whether the election is the first to take place after a war. The main finding of this thesis is that there is a robust negative correlation between gender equality and electoral violence, which is affected by other variables but not dependent on them.

by Kwok-man Lui. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1989. / Bibliography: leaves 167-172.

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