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I examine the relationship between the electoral security of congressmen, measured as vote margins in the previous election, and the support Members of Congress offer to their party. I develop a theory that predicts safe members will be more willing to support than vulnerable members and leaders demand more loyalty from safe members than vulnerable. This arrangement is rational and beneficial for leaders and both types of members. Using an OLS regression, I find basic support for my theory.

I examine the relationship between the electoral security of congressmen, measured as vote margins in the previous election, and the support Members of Congress offer to their party. I develop a theory that predicts safe members will be more willing to support than vulnerable members and leaders demand more loyalty from safe members than vulnerable. This arrangement is rational and beneficial for leaders and both types of members. Using an OLS regression, I find basic support for my theory.

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This dissertation surveys electoral change in Great Britain during the period between 1979 and 1996. It analyzes the long-term factors and the short-term dynamics underlying the evolution of three aspects of the electorate: party identification, voting intentions and party support in inter-election periods. Drawing on cross-sectional and panel data from the British Election Studies and public opinion polls, I investigate the impacts of long-term socialization and short-term perceptions on voters' political decisions. I hypothesize that, over the last four elections, perceptual factors such as evaluations of party leaders and issues, particularly economic concerns, emerged as the major forces that account for the volatility in electoral behavior in Britain. Accordingly, this study is divided into three sections: Part I probes into the evolution in party identification across age cohorts and social classes as illustrated in trends in partisanship. Part II focuses on changes in voting intentions as affected by perceptual factors and party identification. Part III investigates the public's support for governing parties by analyzing the dynamics of aggregate party support during inter-election periods.

The 2006 Swedish parliamentary election was a historic election with the largest bloc transfer of voters in Swedish history. The 2002-2006 incumbent Social Democratic Party (S) received its lowest voter support since 1914 as roughly 150,000, or 8%, of the 2002 S voters went to the main opposition, the conservative Moderate Party (M). This became the most decisive factor in ousting S from power after 12 years of rule. As a result, the M-led Alliance (A) with the People's Party (FP), the Center Party (C), and the Christian Democrats (KD) won the election. Natural Disasters and National Election makes the novel contribution of proposing two natural disasters, the Indian Ocean’s 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami and 2005 Storm Gudrun (Erwin), which struck only two weeks following the tsunami, as major events that impacted government popularity in the 2006 election and contributed to the redistribution of voter support, within and across party-blocs. The core findings from this thesis show that the S government’s poor crisis response to Gudrun, which is the hitherto most costly natural disaster in Swedish history, alone has an estimated effect of a magnitude that likely contributed to the 2006 historic regime shift, while the tsunami also seems to have mattered. The tsunami is particularly interesting, as S’s poor international crisis response to the event constitutes the first natural disaster situation to knowingly have affected an election on the other side of the planet. Moreover, to some degree voters recognized the active opposition by C as effective representation and rewarded the party for its strong stance on the poor handling of both events by S. In fact, the active voice of C concerning these disasters likely helped move the party from the periphery of party politics to becoming the third-largest party in Swedish politics. In sum, this research investigates accountability and effective party representation via retrospective voting, which is an essential mechanism for the legitimacy of democracy. Findings suggest that the average Swedish voter indeed may be voting retrospectively to hold publically elected officials accountable, which suggest a healthy status of the retrospective voting mechanism and Swedish democracy.

During the past two decades, extensive research efforts have focused on the conventional wisdom that the economy has a direct influence on a party's destiny. This hypothesis rests on the implicit assumption that the linkages between macroeconomic variables such as inflation and unemployment and party support are direct and unmediated. As the present study indicates, however, objective economic measures only serve as a proxy for the invisible force that drives voters' party support. Once the relevant variables, namely, the perceptual factors of the electorate, are controlled for, variables that describe the state of the objective economy fail to exert their "magic" on political behavior.

Populism is on the rise, anti-globalism, nationalism, and xenophobia run rampant, andtraditional mainstream parties seem unable to curb the tide. Sweden is no exception, eventhough it in some cases seems like it should be, with the populist party the SwedenDemocrats gaining more support by each passing election. In this thesis, the rise of theSweden Democrats and the slow decline of the mainstream Social Democrats and ModerateParty are explored and explained through the use of the term issue alignment. The thesisexamines if the reason for mass migration from the established mainstream parties is due tothe Sweden Democrats being better aligned with voters’ stance on issues and policy.Furthermore, the thesis investigates if the mainstream parties’ voter loss is due to worseningalignment, but not finding any significant decline over time. Similarly, the thesis investigatesif the improving national vote results of the Sweden Democrats are due to improvingalignment between the party and the voters, again, finding no proof for this theory. TheSweden Democrats’ level of issue alignment with voters has not improved consistently overthe period, and similarly, the mainstream parties’ level of issue alignment has not decreasedconsistently over the period.