<p>I examined coverage of the 1997 Canadian federal election by 14 media organizations (including three 1television networks and 11 regionally important newspapers), analysing the relative importance of major election issues, and evaluating the reporting of the technical details of pre-election polls. The media played a passive role in covering the election, seldom evaluating party platforms, and emphasizing only those issues that the leaders of the major political parties introduced into the campaign. National unity dominated media coverage despite public opinion polls initially showing that voters had little interest in the issue. Only the NDP stressed health care and job creation -issues that the electorate considered most important -but the NDP was afforded less coverage than the other major parties, and coverage of these issues suffered as a result.</p> <p>Election coverage was also characterised by an emphasis on pre-election polls, where recently released poll results set the tone of coverage for other election stories. An analysis of the methods of 17 Canadian polling firms showed that there was much similarity in their survey practices. All firms used some form of probability sampling, and none used substandard methods, lending legitimacy to the media's reporting of preelection polls. The emphasis on polling results was accompanied by poor technical reporting, however.</p> <p>Finally, I examined published polling data for the five month period prior to the election to chart the dynamics of the campaign. I found that two events -the election call and the televised leaders' debates-apparently affected trends in voting intentions. During the course of the campaign, the Liberals and Bloc Quebecois experienced a decline in support, while the Reform Party and PC Party enjoyed increases in support. PC support seems to have been buoyed by the popularity of its leader, Jean Charest, following his performance in the English-language leaders' debate.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

A body of research has established the political relevance of Social Media (SM) platforms for populist parties, claiming that populist politicians utilize a ‘bypassing-strategy’. However, the rather reluctant employment of Facebook and Twitter by German citizens other than, for example, media professionals and politicians, raises questions of the utilization intention for public actors. Even though multiple scholars already indicated the necessity of research on the ‘embeddedness of digital tools’ in journalists’ routines (Jungherr, 2016: 374) such studies remain scarce. Therefore this study aims to shed light on how power is exercised by political actors through the use of SM within Chadwick’s (2017) hybrid media system. In order to do so it firstly examines the existence of references to the Twitter and Facebook pages of politicians of the German right-wing populist party AfD within the coverage of four German newspapers about the party during the final phase of the 2017 General Federal Election campaign. Secondly, by employing issue competition theory, issues and topics that three AfD politicians communicated about on their SM pages are compared with those that the party has been covered in relation to in newspaper articles. The findings of the quantitative content analysis on the newspaper articles showed only few cases in which AfD politicians’ SM statements were quoted. In regard to issue competition theory, the quantitative mapping of issues and topics in newspaper coverage about the AfD as well its politicians’ SM statements however, demonstrate prevailing similarities between the issues and topics that dominated the newspaper coverage about the party as well as its politicians SM pages. A thematic analysis on the latter found three themes that suggest a possible explanation for the few cases in which newspaper articles referenced SM statements: All three politicians used SM differently to promote, circulate and comment on issues and topics which influenced whether statements originated from the platform or from other contexts, such as rally events, tv debates, media article etc. These different types of content distributed and published on the politicians’ SM pages could be a possible explanation for the limited instances in which SM statements were quoted by newspaper articles. These findings suggest that the AfD did indeed pursued a bypassing strategy and employed SM platforms to directly communicate with its supporters. However, future studies should continue research on the embeddedness of SM statements in contexts other than campaigning times. Furthermore insights from qualitative interviews with politicians about their utilization strategies and journalists regarding their possible hesitance to quote politicians’ SM Statements, that may be grounded in professional standards, are necessary in order to obtain a more complete assessment of the role of SM for political actors in navigating the hybrid media system.

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Voting is a fundamental decision making instrument in any consensus-based society. It is employed in various applications from student body elections, reality television shows, shareholder meetings, to national elections. With the motivation of better eciency, scalability, speed, and lower cost, voting is currently shifting from paper-based to the use of electronic medium. This is while aiming to achieve better security, such that voting result reflects true opinions of the voters. Our research focuses on the study of cryptographic voting protocols accommodating a flexible ballot structure as a foundation for building a secure electronic voting system with acceptable voting results. In particular, we search for a solution suitable for the preferential voting system employed in the Australian Federal Election. The outcomes of the research include: improvements and applications of batch proof and verication theorems and techniques, a proposed alternative homomorphic encryption based voting scheme, a proposed Extended Binary Mixing Gate (EBMG) mix-network scheme, a new threshold randomisation technique to achieve receipt-freeness property in voting, and the application of cryptographic voting protocol for preferential voting. The threats and corresponding requirements for a secure secret-ballot voting scheme are rst discussed. There are significant security concerns about the conduct of electronic voting, and it is essential that the voting results re ect the true opinions of the voters - especially in political elections. We examine and extend batch processing proofs and verifications theorems and proposed applications of the theorems useful for voting. Many instances of similar operations can be processed in a single instance using a batch technique based on one of the batch theorems. As the proofs and verications provide formal assurances that the voting process is secure, batch processing offers great efficiency improvements while retaining the security required in a real-world implementation of the protocol. The two main approaches in cryptographic voting protocols, homomorphic encryption based voting and mix-network based voting, are both studied in this research. An alternative homomorphic voting scheme using multiplicative homomorphism property, and a number of novel mix-network schemes are proposed. It is shown that compared to the mix-network approach, homomorphic encryption schemes are not scalable for straight-forward adaptation of preferential systems. One important requirement of secret-ballot voting is receipt-freeness. A randomisation technique to achieve receipt-freeness in voting is examined and applied in an ecient and practical voting scheme employing an optimistic mix-network. A more general technique using threshold randomisation is also proposed. Combination of the primitives, both the homomorphic encryption and mixnetwork approach, yields a hybrid approach producing a secure and ecient secret-ballot voting scheme accommodating a exible ballot structure. The resulting solution oers a promising foundation for secure and practical secret-ballot electronic voting accommodating any type of counting system.

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L’objectif de cette recherche est de découvrir la nature de l’appui au Bloc québécois lors des élections canadiennes de 2019. Dans le contexte de la diminution de l’appui à la souveraineté au Québec, cette recherche s’appuie sur l’hypothèse suivante : la résurgence du Bloc en 2019 peut être attribuée à la capacité du parti à transcender le clivage souverainiste-fédéraliste en réussissant à capturer l’électeur francophone moyen dans la province. En lien avec cette hypothèse, cette recherche se pose deux questions centrales : dans un premier temps, quels sont les sous-groupes d’électeurs que l’on retrouve au sein de cette coalition bloquiste et quel est le lien avec l’appartenance partisane provinciale, et dans un deuxième temps, quels facteurs et enjeux ont permis de rallier ces électeurs sous la bannière bloquiste? Cette recherche répond à ces questions en utilisant les données québécoises d’un sondage post-électoral national mené en 2019 par les professeurs Erick Lachapelle et Richard Nadeau de l’Université de Montréal et administré par la firme Léger Marketing. Les résultats de l’analyse de sondage confirment l’hypothèse de la coalition, les résultats montrant que le soutien au Bloc en 2019 était constitué de 47,1% d’adhérents du Parti Québécois et de 45,5% d’adhérents de la Coalition Avenir Québec. En outre, cette recherche révèle que si 75,5 % des péquistes ont voté Bloc en 2019, seulement 43,0% des caquistes en ont fait de même, suggérant que le Bloc a réussi à rallier une catégorie spécifique de caquistes. En somme, cette recherche révèle que ce sont les partisans nationalistes modérés de la CAQ qui ont permis la résurgence du BQ en 2019, et que l’appui au projet de loi 21 a été un facteur déterminant dans leur vote pour le BQ, alors que les partisans du PQ étaient plus fortement en appui à la souveraineté. / The goal of this research is to uncover the nature of Bloc Québécois support in the 2019 Canadian election. In the context of dwindling support for sovereignty in Quebec, this research theorizes that the resurgence of the Bloc in the 2019 election can be attributed to the party’s ability to cut across the sovereigntist-federalist divide and capture the median Francophone voter in the province. Following this, this research seeks to answer two central questions: Based on provincial party affiliation, what are the different sub-groups of voters that can be found within the 2019 BQ coalition, and what issues and factors have rallied these voters behind the Bloc? This research answers these questions using Quebec data from a nationwide post-electoral survey conducted by Professors Erick Lachapelle and Richard Nadeau from Université de Montréal in 2019 and carried out by Leger Marketing. The survey analysis results confirm the coalition hypothesis, with findings showing that 2019 Bloc Québécois support is constituted of 47,1 % of Parti Québécois adherents and 45,5 % of Coalition Avenir Québec adherents. Furthermore, this research finds that whereas 75,5% of péquistes voted for the BQ in 2019, only 43,0% of caquistes did so, showing that the party was able to capture a specific category of CAQ adherents. In sum, this research finds that it was the moderate nationalist CAQ adherents that gave the Bloc Québécois a boost in 2019, and that support for Bill 21 was a determining factor behind their vote for the BQ, whereas Parti Québécois adherents felt more strongly about sovereignty.