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Voting with their Feet: Migration, Partisanship, and Party-Safe Elections in FloridaHussain, Rezwan 07 November 2011 (has links)
Political scientists have long noted that congressional elections are often uncompetitive, often extremely so. Many scholars argue that the cause lies in the partisan redistricting of congressional districts, or “gerrymandering”. Other scholars emphasize polarization created by a fragmented news media, or the candidate choices made by a more ideological primary electorate. All these explanations identify the cause of party-safe elections in institutions of various kinds.
This dissertation, by contrast, presents a structural explanation of uncompetitive elections. My theory is that population composition and patterns of migration are significant causes and predictors of election results in Florida. I test this theory empirically by comparing the predictions from four hypotheses against aggregate data, using the county as the unit of analysis.
The first hypothesis is that Florida can be divided into clearly distinguishable, persistent partisan sections. This hypothesis is confirmed. The second hypothesis is that Florida voters have become increasingly partisan over time. This hypothesis is confirmed. The third hypothesis is that the degree of migration into a county predicts how that county will vote. This hypothesis finds some confirmation. The last hypothesis is that the degree of religiosity of a county predicts how that county will vote. This hypothesis is confirmed.
By identifying the structural causes of party-safe elections, this study not only contributes to our understanding of elections in Florida, but also sheds light on the current polarization in American politics.
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System Breakdown: The Dispute Elections of 1876 and 2000Pflanz, Kristina January 2005 (has links)
Thesis advisor: Marc Landy / The election of 2000 was the most tumultuous election of the present day - an election that involved numerous lawsuits and was ultimately decided by the votes of Supreme Court Justices. What many Americans do not know or remember is that there was another election in 1876 with largely similar circumstances - disputed electoral votes (in Florida again) and a winner (Rutherford B. Hayes) produced by a Supreme Court Justice. This essay aims to examine these two elections in detail in order to demonstrate the flaws of the U.S. Constitutional system and the different manners in which they were resolved. The second part of the essay aims to determine whether the purported illegitimacy of the two winners (Hayes and Bush) affected their respective presidencies. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2005. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science. / Discipline: College Honors Program.
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Interactive Voice Response Polling in Election CampaignsBrunk, Alexander Crowley 30 January 2015 (has links)
Since the early 2000s, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) has become a widely popular method of conducting public opinion surveys in the United States. IVR surveys use an automated computer voice to ask survey questions and elicit responses in place of a live interviewer. Previous studies have shown that IVR polls conducted immediately before elections are generally accurate, but have raised questions as to their validity in other contexts.
This study examines whether IVR polls generate measurably different levels of candidate support when compared to live interviewer polls, as a result of non-response bias owing to lower response rates in IVR surveys. It did so by comparing polling in 2010 U.S. gubernatorial and U.S. Senate elections that was conducted using both live interviewers and IVR. The findings suggest that in general elections, IVR polls find fewer undecided voters compared to surveys conducted using live interviewers. In primary elections, IVR polls can show larger support than live interview polls for a more ideologically extreme candidate who has high levels of support among more opinionated and engaged voters.
Implications are that journalists and other consumers of polling data should take into account whether a poll was conducted using IVR or live interviewers when interpreting results. IVR polls may tend to over-sample more engaged and opinionated voters, often resulting in smaller percentages of undecided respondents, and higher levels of support for specific candidates in certain contexts. / Master of Arts
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The Emotional Economy of Sex, Fear & Violence / On Politics & Emotion in Occidental Media DiscoursesBartscherer, Sheena Fee 20 June 2024 (has links)
Die hier vorgelegte kumulative Dissertation befasst sich mit der Frage des emotionalen
Sprachgebrauchs als Teil der öffentlichen politischen Kommunikation in abendländischen
Demokratien. Durch die Anwendung etablierter Erkenntnisse und Ansätze aus den Bereichen der affektiven Neurowissenschaften und der Neurolinguistik zu emotionalem Sprachgebrauch, wird versucht neue Perspektiven und Analysetechniken für die Sozial- und Politikwissenschaften herauszuarbeiten, die sich mit der rhetorischen Gestaltung und Funktion öffentlicher politischer Kommunikation befassen. Im Rahmen dieser Bemühungen habe ich einen sequenziellen Mixed-Methods-Ansatz entwickelt, eine neopragmatische Diskursanalyse (NPDA), die auf der bestehenden Methodologie der Pragmatischen Soziologie der Kritik (PSC) basiert. Diese Methode ermöglicht es, die Argumentationsstrategien und -muster von Akteuren abzuleiten und ihre Verwendung von hochgradig erregender emotionaler Sprache (via HAEWWörterbuch) nachzuzeichnen. In zwei separaten Fallstudien habe ich diesen neu entwickelten Ansatz angewendet, um (1) die US-Präsidentschaftswahlkämpfe 2016 von Trump und Clinton
zu analysieren sowie (2) öffentliche Reden britischer Parteiführer:innen der Conservative und
der Labour Party von 1900 bis 2019. Ich habe festgestellt, dass emotionale Sprache in der
gesamten untersuchten (politischen) Kommunikation vorkommt und dass sie hauptsächlich
eine Highlighter-Funktion in den Argumentationen der Akteure einnimmt. Politische
Kommunikation, als eine spezifische Ausformung menschlicher Kommunikation, scheint
immer ‚emotional‘ zu sein. / This cumulative dissertation addresses the issues of emotive language use as part of
public political communication in occidental democracies. By applying established
findings and approaches from the fields of affective neuroscience and neurolinguistics on emotive language use, the here presented dissertation intends to offer new perspectives and analytical techniques for the social and political sciences, concerned with understanding the rhetorical design and function of public political communication. As part of these efforts, I developed a sequential mixed methods approach, a neopragmatist discourse analysis (NPDA), which is based on the existing methodology associated with the Pragmatic Sociology of Critique (PSC). This method allows for the deduction of actors’ argumentative strategies and patterns and to detect their use of highly arousing emotive language (via HAEW dictionary). In two separate case studies I applied this newly developed approach, analysing (1) the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaigns of Trump and Clinton as well as (2) public speeches of British party leaders from the Conservative and Labour Party from 1900 – 2019. I found that emotive language appeared throughout all analysed (political) communication and that it mainly served a highlighting function within actors’ argumentations. Political communication, as a specific form of human communication, seems to always be ‘emotional’.
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