This dissertation focuses on the issue of registration of foreign residents (EU and non-EU) for the 2012 local elections in Belgium. The goal of this study is twofold. First, it aims at identifying and analyzing the factors explaining variations in foreigners’ registration between municipalities. The second objective is to understand how and why these explanatory factors have an impact on their decision to register. A mixed-methods approach is used to provide a broad and comprehensive picture of the registration of foreign citizens. It is assumed that foreigners’ registration rates for municipal elections vary according to the formal and discursive political opportunities at the local level. I also argue that the political opportunities approach needs to be combined with other predictors that are specific to migrant groups. The quantitative results indicate that the presence of a left-wing mayor in the municipality displays a strong positive and significant association with both EU and non-EU registration. Moreover, the results provide a strong support for the hypothesis relating to outreach actions: municipalities organizing many foreign voter outreach actions are more likely to achieve high foreigners’ registration rates than municipalities that organize no action or only a limited number. In addition, the findings show that foreigners’ registration does not depend only on political opportunities, but also on specific characteristics of foreigners relating to their migration process. First, the residential instability has a negative impact on both EU and non-EU registration. Second, municipalities with a high percentage of non-EU residents with the nationality of a country where one of the languages spoken is French or Dutch are slightly more likely to achieve high registration of non-EU nationals. It has been shown that political context matters for foreigners’ registration, but several questions emerge about the way it does matter. Based on the statistical results, three typical and three deviant municipalities were selected to disentangle the causal mechanisms between the presence of a left-wing mayor and foreigners’ registration on the one hand, and between the organization of outreach actions and foreigners’ registration on the other hand. The qualitative part of this study examines the theoretically widely supported, but empirically understudied assumption that citizens perceive opportunities in their socio-political context, and that their perception influence whether or not they will register on electoral lists. It emphasizes the interactions between actors and the political context and it takes into account causal mechanisms that link macro-level political opportunities and micro-level electoral participation. The case studies demonstrate that the decision to register does not always depend directly on perceived favorable political context but that more subtle and indirect elements such as the perception of the municipal climate as welcoming and the feeling of integration, influence greatly registration and should therefore receive more attention. / Doctorat en Sciences politiques et sociales / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

I reassess the influence of presidential approval on state legislative election outcomes, incorporating the period from the 1940s to the 1970s in my analysis. Previous research finds that presidential approval has a significant effect, but such findings may be biased-they focus on elections after the 1970s, when the president was more visible to the public. Using an original state partisan balance dataset, I measure the effects of presidential approval and find that it has as much influence on state legislative elections from the 1940s to the early 1970s. These findings may engender concerns of state legislative accountability-if state legislators’ electoral prospects become increasingly reliant upon assessments of the president than themselves, they are less likely to feel beholden to voters and uphold their interests.

No description available.

This thesis analysed the representation of women as voters, politicians and relatives of politicians in the newspaper coverage of every elections from 1918 until 2010; in order to offer historical context to the existing literature about women, media and politics. Content analysis and feminist critical discourse analysis were employed to track the changes and continuities in their mediated representations across the twenty five elections studied. The study shows that across time, the representation of voters changed the least. Voters tended to be constructed as mothers and thrifty housewives whose political views stemmed from their familial roles and domestic responsibilities. The extent to which they were depicted as politically engaged and were quoted did increase over time however they continued to be predominantly written about rather than allowed to speak for themselves. Contrary to the results of previous studies, politicians were not associated with stereotypically feminine policy areas, but were instead gendered through their construction as important representatives for women voters and their campaign styles. Over time the proportion of items offering negative evaluations increased. The proportion which made personalised references to their appearance or age, and included their voices peaked during the 1960s and 1970s and then declined so that contemporary politicians are as likely to experience both as their interwar forebears. The results from 2010 however suggested that personalisation may once again be increasing. The role of relatives in electoral coverage changed the most of the three groups. During the interwar years they were depicted as active political campaigners whose contribution was largely welcomed, after war their role became more focused on their personal lives. The coverage also became increasingly focused on the wives of party leaders. By the late 1980s, leaders wives were once again constructed taking an active role in the campaign but these interventions were portrayed as illegitimate and threatening to democracy. The coverage of relatives became increasingly personalised over time focusing on their appearance and its appeal to the electorate. The newspaper coverage of women in electoral campaigns has always been, and continues to be gendered in specific ways. Women have consistently had their level of political activity trivialised and their voices marginalised. They were domesticated through the construction of their political priorities and campaign styles and they received personalised coverage which was undeniably gendered. In effect women were routinely linked to the private sphere, rendering their political participation in the public domain problematic.

Popular support for the British National Party (BNP) in England reached unprecedented high levels during the early twentieth century. The BNP won a number of local council and European Parliament seats on the back of this popularity. This study seeks to provide a case study of one such poll success: Nuneaton 2008. Evidence from Nuneaton, a BNP success not previously studied, will be used to test the literature already generated addressing other locations of ‘breakthrough’, including Burnley and Stoke (Burnett 2011; Rhodes 2009). The thesis seeks to explain why the BNP was able to win elections where there had previously been no appetite for far right politics. The research focuses on the role of demand and supply-side factors contributing to the electoral success of the BNP in 2008, showing that any analysis of the far right has to be multivariate in nature. The demand-side variables identified and analysed are: socioeconomics, immigration and Islamophobia. The supply-side factors assessed are political opportunity structures, the BNP campaign strategy and the role of the media. A mixed-method approach was undertaken which included interviews with voters and politicians, focus groups, a questionnaire capturing the views 308 constituents, and archival research of socioeconomic data and newspaper reports. The findings of this research indicate that the BNP’s electoral breakthrough in Nuneaton was multivariable in nature, and it is reasonable to argue that particular variables were more significant than others. Immigration stands out as the most prominent variable. In addition, the role of the media, the press in particular, was of great significance in explaining breakthrough in Nuneaton through the sanitising and legitimising of negative stereotypes of immigrants, asylum seekers and Muslims. This case study also suggests that Islamophobia should be regarded as a key factor. Indeed, Islamophobia was an important part of the jigsaw and conflates with a number of variables tested in this thesis. In sum, this research broadly corroborates the existing literature. It does however suggest that socioeconomics has been overplayed to a degree in previous studies, while Islamophobia has been underplayed.

Magister Legum - LLM / This paper gave an insight into the novelties as well as the deficiencies of the provisions related to democratic elections and their implementation framework. It examined the potential effectiveness or otherwise of a binding treaty which is not yet enforced on the basis of past experience. In effect, it shed light on the possible measures that could be taken to guarantee its realisation and to circumvent the shortcomings in ensuring its effective implementation. / South Africa

Magister Artium - MA / This research sought to understand the nature of election-related conflict and what needs to be done to arrest the eruption of such conflict in Lesotho. It sought the opinions of selectively respondents who have been involved in the conflicts in different ways. The interviews and documented literature revealed that what constitutes a background to election-related conflict involves issues that are many and varied. Among others such issues include the following: weak political institutions, use of vulgar language by political leadership, and the weak economy that intensifies neo-patrimonial tendencies. The research concluded that all the factors associated with the eruption of illegitimate conflicts during and after general elections in Lesotho are a result of the politicians' desire to retain or capture national resources to satisfy their selfish interests and those of their cronies. The conflicts could be minimised if the country's economy could be transformed to provide the politicians with alternatives of economic survival outside the structures of government. Furthermore, to minimise the conflict, the country should consider establishing electoral courts. These have the potential of speeding up the resolution of electoral grievances, in the process preventing them from graduating into serious conflicts. / South Africa

In what can rightly be said to be one of the most dramatic geopolitical shifts in modern times, the collapse of communist regimes in Central Europe and the former Soviet Union brought about dramatic changes in the entire region. As a consequence, wide ranging political, economic, and social transformations have occurred in almost all of these countries since 1989. The Slovak Republic, as a newly democratic country, went through the establishment of the electoral and party systems that are the central mechanisms to the formation of almost all modern democratic governments. The primary research purpose of this dissertation was to describe and explain regional variations in party support during Slovakia’s ten years of democratic transformation. A secondary purpose was to relate these spatial variations to the evolution of political parties in the post-independence period in light of the literature on transitional electoral systems. Research questions were analyzed using both aggregate and survey data. Specifically, the study utilized electoral data from 1994, 1998, and 2002 Slovak parliamentary elections and socio-economic data of the population within Slovak regions which were eventually correlated with the voting results by party in the 79 Slovak districts. The results of this study demonstrate that there is a tendency among voters in certain regions to provide continuous support to the same political parties/movements over time. In addition, the socio-economic characteristics of the Slovak population (gender, age, education, religion, nationality, unemployment, work force distribution, wages, urban-rural variable, and population density) in different regions tend to influence voting preferences in the parliamentary elections. Finally, there is an evident correlation between party preference and the party’s position on integration into European Union, as measured by perceived attitudes regarding the benefits of EU membership.

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. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

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. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate