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Democracy depends upon the competition between candidates or ideas. However, practices or procedures sometimes preclude the consideration of the full range of options. Can campaign spending predict who wins elections? What explains why incumbent electoral security is only rarely threatened? Can committees or individuals in Congress stifle the will of a legislative majority? Essay #1. Politicians spend vast sums of money in order to win or retain a seat in Congress; does it predict who will win? In this essay I present a forecast model for elections to the US House of Representatives that specifically includes a measure of campaign spending.The advantages of the new model are that it relies on publicly available data, its results are easy to interpret, and the forecasts are comparable to other models.Essay #2. For a variety of reasons, incumbents expect to win reelection. There are few explanations for why that advantage occasionally seems to disappear. In this essay, I synthesize the literature on incumbency advantage, congressional redistricting, and voter behavior. I present evidence from the 2006-2010 election cycles suggesting that congressional districts drawn with the expectation of consistent partisan loyalty rates left incumbents susceptible to national tides brought about by temporary asymmetric departures from partisan voting norms. Essay #3. Although there is a large literature devoted to analyses of legislative committee gate keeping, Crombez, Groseclose, and Krehbiel (2006) argued that formal gate keeping is explicitly ruled out in most deliberative bodies. In this essay, I examine the historical development of rules and procedures in the US House of Representatives which explain the lack of formal gate keeping rules. I present evidence of non-majoritarian outcomes in the House despite it being a majoritarian body. I conclude the essay by suggesting a new definition of gate keeping based on the ability to alter the probability of proposal success on the floor instead of the formal ability to kill legislation. / Government

<p>How does violence affect political participation and voting behavior? Why does a violent context push some to be politically active, while others decide to stay at home? Our current understanding of political behavior is mostly derived from analyses conducted in a peaceful and democratic context, or in post-conflict periods. However, citizens in many developing countries make their political decisions in the midst of violence.</p><p>The dissertation's central argument is that political participation and voting behavior largely depend on the context surrounding the individual. In particular, the level of criminal violence greatly impacts 1) citizens' decision to participate politically, 2) their forms of participation, and 3) the logic of their vote choice. Faced with violence, voters are generally pushed away from electoral politics. I argue that those that do decide to take part of the electoral process will consider their evaluations of security when deciding to punish or reward the incumbent government. While some may be inclined to take further action and demand peace through non-electoral participation, such a decision carries certain risks that are not easily overcome. I contend that social networks can encourage participation by shaping the understanding of crime, as well as the perception of costs and benefits associated with participation amid violence.</p><p>To evaluate this argument, I draw on a rich array of sources. I designed an original post-electoral survey that took place in Mexico a few days after the 2012 presidential election. I also created a novel newspaper databank of protests against crime in Mexico during the 2006-2012 period. In addition, together with Guillermo Trejo, I developed a unique dataset on criminal violence in Mexico. My statistical evidence is complemented with participant observation in marches for peace and qualitative in-depth interviews with victims and non-victims of crime in four Mexican cities.</p><p>Statistical evidence shows that violent criminal activity depresses electoral turnout. Voters living in violent contexts are less likely to participate in elections. Victims of crime are significantly less likely to participate in elections. However, faced with rising violence, active voters are able to consider both economic and insecurity evaluations in their assessments of government performance and voting decisions. Overall, as a voter's evaluation of national security worsens, her likelihood of supporting the incumbent national party and government diminishes. At the same time, while institutional channels are not attractive to victims of crime, societal accountability mechanisms are also available to citizens affected by insecurity. Victims of crime and those connected to mobilizing networks are more likely to participate in protests against insecurity than non-victims and "socially disconnected" individuals.</p> / Dissertation

Election boycotts are a common occurrence in unconsolidated democracies, particularly in the developing world, with prominent examples from recent years occurring in Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and Ethiopia. Despite the frequent occurrence of boycotts, there are few studies available in the scholarly literature concerning the effectiveness of electoral boycotts, particularly as a strategy of opposition parties seeking to bring about the end of electoral authoritarian governments. This paper is based in the democratization literature, with a particular focus on the behavior and vulnerabilities of hybrid or electoral authoritarian regimes. Using an original dataset with global coverage including hybrid regimes from 1981 to 2006, this paper uses event-history analysis to determine the efficacy of boycotts in national elections among other risk factors thought to undermine electoral authoritarian regimes as well as the possibilities for subsequent democratization occurring following both contested and boycotted electoral processes.

Looking at the post-socialist cases of Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Ukraine and Russia, this dissertation asks whether rapid development of political markets in post-socialist polities represents the anomaly of post-socialist transformation or, perhaps, it represents the normal trajectory of the evolutionary development of democratic institutions. The study has a cross-disciplinary approach, incorporating insights and analyses from different disciplines. To answer the research question in this study, a comprehensive (comparative case study) research strategy is employed. The cases were selected based on the notion that they represent a subset of a larger set of post-socialist democratic polities with very similar transformational trajectories although different in a range of historical, cultural, and geopolitical aspects. All selected cases experienced a relatively painful transformation of social, political and economic institutions. However, the success of these transformations varies across these cases. Also there is a substantial variation in the strategies of reforms, pace of changes and extent of public and elite support for the changes.Particular electoral practices and their correlation with distinct institutional and media environments are examined by combining macro-level contextual data with micro-level data. The conclusions about the degree of professionalization, the impact of the ongoing mediatization of electoral politics, the variety of campaign styles and the consequences of these changes in the nature of political campaigns for electoral democracies in post-socialist countries and worldwide are drawn.The study provides empirical support for an argument that rapid development of political markets in post-socialist polities is not an anomaly of post-socialist transformation, but, rather, is a reflection of the radical changes that are being faced by the modern democratic polities. The study suggested potential dangers caused by spread of modern political marketing techniques. This problem is even more acute in post-socialist countries than in established democracies. These countries have not inherited the robust system of democratic guarantees in the form of institutions or traditions. The effects of adaptation of modern forms of political institutions functioning could be much more unpredictable.

Most studies that have examined parties that challenge the political establishment have focused their attention on certain types of 'anti-political-establishment parties' (a-pe parties), such as left-libertarian parties or right-wing populist parties. It is argued here that before moving on to an exploration of the reasons behind the electoral success or failure of specific a-p-e parties, one should take a closer look at the preconditions for the success of a-p-e parties in general. This makes it necessary to avoid any 'time-specific' or 'ideology-specific' explanations. Consequently, only those explanatory variables that could be tested at any point in time and for any a-p-e party regardless of its position on the left-right political scale were included in this study. Six hypotheses that fulfilled these criteria were selected to be tested using data from nineteen advanced industrial democracies covering the entire 1945 to 1999 time period. These hypotheses stress the importance of the electoral system, political traditions, the economic conditions of a country, the colluding behaviour of the establishment parties, certain party system features and the 'availability' of voters. In contrast to prior research which has often emphasized the importance of socioeconomic and institutional factors, the results of the bivariate and multivariate analyses suggest that political variables explain much of the variance in the level of electoral support for a-p-e parties in different democracies, at different points in time. Thus, the economic situation of a country as well as the electoral system do not appear to have a significant impact on the electoral fortunes of a-p-e parties. On the other hand, anti- political-establishment parties thrive in an environment where and when the establishment parties are fairly close to each other ideologically and where and when weak partisan attachments make voters available to their appeals. In addition, the behaviour of the establishment parties, especially the mode of interaction between them and the main opposition is very important. That is, a-p-e parties profit from collusion between the main establishment parties, especially in an environment that is characterized by mutual distrust between the governing party(ies) and an opposition that is excluded and sometimes even ostracized.

This study examines the impact of perceived personality traits of the political party leaders on voting decisions in the 2000 Canadian federal election, replicating Richard Johnston's research that is based on the 1997 election. Employing data from the 2000 Canadian Election Study (CES), the research uses Ordinary Least Squares regression analysis to estimate how evaluations of leader personality traits over two aggregated dimensions - competence and character - moved votes. The changes in the design of the 2000 CES from prior years created many difficulties in assessing voters' evaluations of the party leaders and limited the comparability of the results from the study. The key methodological differences are: (1) leaders were not evaluated individually; (2) it did not measure the degree of applicability of the trait labels; (3) it included significantly fewer leader personality questions, and (4) the "new ideas" variable does not fall squarely into either the competence and character domains and seems to favour the new Alliance Party leader. This study finds that leader effects are more critical to the parties struggling for their political survival. A counterfactual party leader-switching exercise suggests that the distance between the frontrunner parties and the others was too great for leader-switching effects to make a difference in determining which parties would form the government and the Official Opposition and whether the winning party would form a majority or minority government. Joe Clark improved his party's standing during the campaign and helped it to retain its official party status while evaluations of Stockwell Day declined. The relevance of judgements of Day and Clark on pre-election vote intentions moved in the same direction as voters' respective evaluations of the leaders over the campaign. This study confirms that campaigns can have an effect on voters. The study supports earlier research findings that suggests that Canadian elections are vulnerable to leader effects. Conventional wisdom that is driven by the media's focus on the personalities suggests that leaders are significant factors in Canadian federal elections, but the empirical research reported in this study and others before it suggest otherwise.

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What is the meaning of the right to vote, and the concurrent right to play a meaningful role in the electoral process as guaranteed by s. 3 and informed by the equality provisions of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms? These questions, and whether the current Canada Elections Act adequately respects them are considered in light of jurisprudence concerning democratic rights including the Supreme Court's recent Figueroa decision. / The English Jenkins Commission is examined, as are the lessons to be learned from the experiences of Germany, South Africa, Italy, and New Zealand with proportional representation voting. At home, the tentative steps toward voting reform in Quebec, British Columbia, PEI, and the work of the Law Commission of Canada are discussed. Finally, basic goals for voting reform are suggested and measured against model recommendations. The prospects for reform ultimately depend on a rebalancing of the values of democracy and power.

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