O crescimento do número de parlamentares evangélicos ao longo das últimas legislaturas acompanha o crescimento populacional de brasileiros evangélicos em todo o Brasil. Esta lógica faz sentido a partir do momento em que o eleitorado evangélico passa a buscar opções e candidatos que possam vir a representar seus interesses no Parlamento em concordância com os princípios da religião, o que ocasiona, também o crescimento de candidatos que se utilizam do discurso da religião para atrair votos dos fiéis. A presente pesquisa tem como objetivo analisar se os candidatos evangélicos possuem um perfil de financiamento de campanha eleitoral diferente de outros candidatos. Mais especificamente, analisamos o volume de arrecadação dos candidatos evangélicos; assim como, as diferentes fontes de arrecadação de recursos; como o dinheiro é gasto nas campanhas; e se a arrecadação possui um efeito diferenciado nos votos obtidos e no sucesso eleitoral. Estudaremos as eleições de 2014 para os cargos de Deputado Estadual e Federal, realizando um estudo comparativo entre candidatos evangélicos e não evangélicos. A metodologia utilizada consistirá na regressão linear multivariada e, também, na regressão logística. / The growing number of evangelical parliamentarians over the past legislatures accompanies population growth of evangelical Brazilians. This happen from the moment that evangelical electorate goes to seek options and candidates who may represent their interests in Parliament in accordance with the principles of religion, and there is also the growth of candidates who use the religion speech to attract the votes of this group. This research aims to analyze whether the evangelical candidates have a different election campaign financing profile of other candidates. Moreover, we analyze the total funds of the evangelical candidates; as well as the different sources of fundraising; how money is spent in the campaigns; and whether the total funds have a different effect on votes and electoral success. We will study the 2014 elections for Federal Deputy and State Deputy, performing a comparative study between evangelical and non-evangelical candidates. The methodology will be multivariate linear regression and logistic regression.

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

This dissertation seeks to understand how democratic elections can coexist with a significant number of politicians implicated in criminal wrongdoing. Specifically, it seeks answers to three questions. Why do parties nominate candidates with criminal backgrounds? Why do voters vote for them? And what does their proliferation mean for democratic accountability? To address these questions, I draw on a wide body of quantitative and qualitative evidence from India, the world's largest democracy. I argue that parties are attracted to criminal politicians because they have access to financial resources that allow them to function as self-financing candidates. Whereas the prevailing consensus in political economy suggests that voters support "bad politicians" because they lack adequate information on candidate quality, I develop an alternate theory that suggests well-informed voters can display rational behavior by voting for such candidates. Specifically, in contexts where social divisions are highly salient, voters often desire a representative who they perceive can protect group-based interests most credibly. In such settings, criminality can serve as a useful signal of a candidate's credibility. As a result, parties selectively field criminal candidates in those areas where social divisions are most pronounced. The implications of this study are far reaching because they suggest that information about a candidate's criminality is not only available, but actually is central to understanding the viability of his candidacy. Thus, there are circumstances in which "bad politicians" can in fact be compatible with democratic accountability. Empirically, this dissertation makes use of a unique, author-constructed database of affidavits submitted by more than 60,000 candidates contesting state and national elections between 2003 and 2009. This dataset contains detailed information on candidates' financial and criminal records from 37 elections, which I analyze using state-of-the-art quantitative methods. I complement these quantitative analyses with qualitative fieldwork conducted in three states, including an in-depth exploration of the case of Bihar, a state in north India.

This dissertation seeks to understand the distributive strategies of local politicians in India, a context in which a robust secret ballot is in place and villagers have information on the allocation of selective state benefits due to the high information context of village politics. Specifically, it seeks answers to three questions. Can local politicians in India identity voters' partisan preferences, which is a critical assumption of theory on clientelism in comparative politics? Does a context in which citizens have a great deal of information on the beneficiaries of programs implemented by local governments and villagers and politicians are personally tied to one another pose constraints on targeting strategies relative to work on clientelism, elite capture, and citizen candidate models that predict co ethnic targeting preferences? And do voters perceive that co partisanship vis a vis sarpanch affects their access to selective state benefits and services? To address these questions, I draw on a unique original survey of village council presidents (sarpanch) and citizens across 96 village council areas (gram panchayats) in Rajasthan, India. First, I argue that under a secret ballot, which voters overwhelmingly believe to protect the anonymity of their votes, the clientelistic logic that supports quid pro quo distributive politics does not hold. This has powerful implications for the role we should understand local leaders (who perform brokerage functions) to serve and whom we should expect sarpanch to target with antipoverty benefits implemented through the gram panchayat. I argue that if local politicians cannot identify the partisan preferences of uncertain voters, we should expect local politicians to target benefits in order to maintain their political constituencies, rather than pursuing a vote buying strategy to attract new supporters through a quid pro quo strategy. Second, I argue that the social and political context of the gram panchayat severely constrains sarpanch targeting behavior. In a context in which sarpanch and voters know each other and the latter can directly (or by rumor) observe who received visible and coveted selective benefits, and in which sarpanch and their kin are very likely to live in their village permanently, there is a powerful social cost to providing benefits to the non poor. At the same time, citizens accept that local elections have consequences, which means that some favoritism toward supporters, but not kinship or ethnic lines, is tolerated as long as the pro poor targeting norm is heeded. Finally, I check the validity of my argument on sarpanch distributive strategies by testing for the effect of co partisanship on voters' expectations of receiving selective benefits using a vignette experiment. I randomize partisan cues (Congress or BJP) based on prominent politicians identified by respondents themselves and find support for the claim that partisanship broadly affects access to state benefits. Empirically, I draw on a unique survey of sarpanch and voters across rural Rajasthan. The survey includes two behavioral measures that cross-reference voters within sarpanch surveys. I ask sarpanch to guess sampled voters' partisan preferences and ask them to allocate tokens across these individuals to affect a lottery with a cash prize. I also embed a survey experiment within the voter survey.

This thesis examines the Scottish Conservative party between 1832 and 1868. It focuses on the party's organisation, structure, leadership, and attitudes. It begins by examining the social, occupational, educational, and religious background of its MPs, candidates, and peers. This reveals that the party's composition, while predominantly aristocratic, nevertheless boasted a range of distinctive and often competing interests. The thesis then explores the make-up, organisation and activity of the party on a local constituency level. This illustrates that the party was more inclusive and heterogeneous than might be assumed, and was very active in promoting itself through a wide variety of methods. The party thus had a notable impact on the wider social and cultural life of Scotland throughout the mid-nineteenth century. Following this, the structure and leadership of the Scottish party on a national level is examined. These could be a source of innovation and accomplishment, and their subsequent decline had a marked effect on the party's overall performance. Above this level, the party's role in parliament, governance, and in a British context is explored. It is demonstrated that the Scottish party maintained a modicum of distinctiveness even at Westminster. Moreover, its multifaceted role in Scottish governance gave it significant influence over Scottish society. Finally, the positions of the Scottish party on important political issues are examined, as are the underlying attitudes which determined these positions. The Scottish party contained many competing and overlapping factions, which held a hitherto unsuspected diversity of outlooks. Overall, this thesis illustrates that the Scottish Conservative party had a pronounced effect on many different facets of Scottish politics and wider society, and was itself more complex and more popular than is reflected in the existing historiography. It therefore counters the assumption that Scotland was almost hegemonically Liberal - a finding which has potential implications for scholarship spread across Scottish and British political, social, and cultural history.

The election to the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic took place in 2010. The theses focuses on examining of pre-election polls and election results themselves using some knowledge of game theory and public choice theory. The work describes in detail the methodology of processing election results as it works in the Czech Republic at present. Pre-election polls of selected survey agencies are compared and evaluated here. Further the theses uses an alternative approach to the distribution of seats in the Chamber of Deputies, with a focus on possible impact on the election results both in terms of the different distribution of seats, and in terms of the subsequent formation of possible coalitions. There are also discussed all possible coalitions which were suggested after the elections in 2010.

O crescimento do número de parlamentares evangélicos ao longo das últimas legislaturas acompanha o crescimento populacional de brasileiros evangélicos em todo o Brasil. Esta lógica faz sentido a partir do momento em que o eleitorado evangélico passa a buscar opções e candidatos que possam vir a representar seus interesses no Parlamento em concordância com os princípios da religião, o que ocasiona, também o crescimento de candidatos que se utilizam do discurso da religião para atrair votos dos fiéis. A presente pesquisa tem como objetivo analisar se os candidatos evangélicos possuem um perfil de financiamento de campanha eleitoral diferente de outros candidatos. Mais especificamente, analisamos o volume de arrecadação dos candidatos evangélicos; assim como, as diferentes fontes de arrecadação de recursos; como o dinheiro é gasto nas campanhas; e se a arrecadação possui um efeito diferenciado nos votos obtidos e no sucesso eleitoral. Estudaremos as eleições de 2014 para os cargos de Deputado Estadual e Federal, realizando um estudo comparativo entre candidatos evangélicos e não evangélicos. A metodologia utilizada consistirá na regressão linear multivariada e, também, na regressão logística. / The growing number of evangelical parliamentarians over the past legislatures accompanies population growth of evangelical Brazilians. This happen from the moment that evangelical electorate goes to seek options and candidates who may represent their interests in Parliament in accordance with the principles of religion, and there is also the growth of candidates who use the religion speech to attract the votes of this group. This research aims to analyze whether the evangelical candidates have a different election campaign financing profile of other candidates. Moreover, we analyze the total funds of the evangelical candidates; as well as the different sources of fundraising; how money is spent in the campaigns; and whether the total funds have a different effect on votes and electoral success. We will study the 2014 elections for Federal Deputy and State Deputy, performing a comparative study between evangelical and non-evangelical candidates. The methodology will be multivariate linear regression and logistic regression.

During the last centuries the alleged democratic deficit in the European Union has been discussed within the area of European studies. This deficit is, according to previous research, present on the national political arena where parties fail to discuss European issues. To describe the democratic link between national political parties and their voters, this essay answers the following question: How do the Swedish political parties discuss issues concerning the European Union in their manifestos for the Swedish parliamentary election of 2018? This is answered by a text analysis of the election manifestos of the Swedish parliamentary parties of 2018. The result is that the “second-order national elections”-hypothesis fail to explain the discussion about EU on the Swedish political arena. Furthermore, the essay finds that the Swedish parliamentary parties to a large extent act as predicted by the theory regarding “issue evolution” presented by Hobolt and de Vries.

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of International Relations in the Faculty of Humanities, Department of International Relations / The electoral process in African conflict ridden societies has largely been synonymous with violence since the inauguration of democratic experiments in the cold war aftermath. The transition to democracy including the role of elections in the process of building democracy has been confronted with challenges and the fate of these nations remained vulnerable. As a remedy to these challenges, external and internal forces have continually encouraged the leaders of the newly multiparty states to test their political legitimacy through inviting the Internatitonal election monitors. As a consequence, international election observation has become widely accepted around the world and is assumed to play an important role in the electoral processes. The presence of these agencies is believed to instil confidence in the domestic people and deter electoral fraud. The Kenyan case shall assess the election trends in 2007-2013 and the performance of election monitors within the international efforts to promote democracy in Africa. The issues they put across, their reports, criticisms and what they prescribed, will be useful in assessing their performance and measuring their impact on democratic governance in Kenya. / XL2018

Analisa o conteúdo do Jornal Nacional na cobertura das eleições presidenciais de 2002 e 2006. Verifica qual foi o papel do maior telejornal do Brasil nas duas eleições. A partir de conceitos e modelos de pesquisa desenvolvidos pelos principais Institutos de Mídia e Política do Brasil, reúne elementos quantitativos e qualitativos para identificar a construção pelo Jornal Nacional do cenário político das eleições. A pesquisa revelou um equilíbrio quantitativo na cobertura do telejornal em 2002 e em parte da campanha de 2006, mas mostrou também a desconstrução de candidatos por meio do noticiário. A discussão em torno do papel do Jornal Nacional começa necessariamente pela discussão do desempenho do noticiário e da Rede Globo durante outros momentos politicamente fortes desde a ditadura militar, portanto a pesquisa relata episódios e mostra aspectos do relacionamento entre televisão e o poder político no Brasil. / It examines the contents of Jornal Nacional in covering the presidential elections from 2002 and 2006. It verifies the role of the major Brazilian TV broadcast news in both elections. It gathers quantitative and qualitative elements to identify the construction of the political scene of the elections made by Jornal Nacional, departing from concepts and research models developed by the main Brazilian institutes of media and politics. The research revealed a quantitative balance in the coverings of the TV broadcasting news in 2002, and part of 2006 campaign as well. However, it also depicted the disarticulation of the candidates image throughout the news. The discussion about the role of Jornal Nacional necessarily starts by analyzing the performance by the broadcasting news and by Rede Globo during the other politically strong periods since the military dictatorship. Therefore the research reports episodes and aspects of the relationship between the television and the political power in Brazil.