Essay I (with Mattias Öhman): Fluoridation of the drinking water is a public policy whose aim is to improve dental health. Although the evidence is clear that fluoride is good for dental health, concerns have been raised regarding potential negative effects on cognitive development. We study the effects of fluoride exposure through the drinking water in early life on cognitive and non-cognitive ability, education and labor market outcomes in a large-scale setting. We use a rich Swedish register dataset for the cohorts born 1985-1992, together with drinking water fluoride data. To estimate the effect we exploit intra-municipality variation of fluoride, stemming from an exogenous variation in the bedrock. First, we investigate and confirm the long-established positive relationship between fluoride and dental health. Second, we find precisely estimated zero effects on cognitive ability, non-cognitive ability and education. We do not find any evidence that fluoride levels below 1.5 mg/l have negative effects. Third, we find evidence that fluoride improves labor market outcome later in life, which indicates that good dental health is a positive factor on the labor market. / Essay II: Motivated by the intense public debate in the United States regarding politicians’ backgrounds, I investigate the effects of electing a candidate with earlier experience from elective office to the House of Representatives. The U.S. two-party-system with single-member election districts enables me to estimate the causal effect in a RD design where the outcomes are measured at the election district level. I find some indications that candidates with earlier elective experience are more likely to be members of important congressional committees. I also find some indications that directed federal spending (pork barrel spending) is higher in those districts were the elected representative had earlier elective experience prior of being elected to the House, but the effect manifests itself some years after the election. In contrast, I find no robust or statistically significant effects for personal income per capita or unemployment rate in the home district. / Essay III: This paper uses Swedish and Finnish municipal data to investigate the effect of changes in voter turnout on the tax rate, public spending and vote-shares. A reform in Sweden in 1970, which overall lowered the cost of voting, is applied as an instrument for voter turnout in local elections. The reform increased voter turnout in Sweden. The higher voter turnout resulted in higher municipal taxes and greater per capita local public spending. There are also indications that higher turnout decreased the vote share for right-wing parties. I use an individual survey data set to conclude that it was in particular low income earners that began to vote to a greater extent after the reform. / Essay IV (with Lovisa Persson): In a theoretical model where voters and politicians have different preferences for how much to spend on basic welfare services contra reception services for asylum seekers, we conclude that established politicians that are challenged by right-wing populists will implement a policy with no spending on asylum seekers if the cost is high enough. Additionally, adjustment to right-wing populist policy is more likely when the economy is in a recession. Voters differ in their level of private consumption in such a way that lower private consumption implies higher demand for basic welfare services at the expense of reception of asylum seekers, and thus stronger disposition to support right-wing populist policies. We propose that this within-budget-distributional conflict can arise as an electorally decisive conflict dimension if parties have converged to the median voter on the size-of-government issue.

In one of the most controversial and interesting election cycles in American history, Republican nominee, Donald Trump prevailed over his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. To many, his victory was shocking, if not completely unexpected, yet the circumstances that catalyzed such a defeat lie in the characteristics of his supporters, made up of several classes, races, and identities. Among them are the multifaceted Asian American population – diverse ethnically and politically. This thesis aims to unravel the reasons for which many Asian Americans gave their vote to Trump on November 8, 2016 through distinctions between their ethnic groups and demographics. It also suggests that Asian Americans who supported Trump believe that they are different from other minorities – the “model minority,” and highlights the importance of nonprofit research that has disaggregated the Asian subgroups. With these observations and analysis in mind, the American public and politic can no longer reduce the voting behavior of Asian Americans to a monolithic entity.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Despite analysts' predictions and assertions prior to the 2016 presidential election, the Hispanic vote did not prove decisive. Donald Trump's victory elucidates a new electoral calculus, one that will be ruled simultaneously by changing demographics and the backlash against such change. While Hispanic voters largely supported Hillary Clinton, structural and individual impediments hinder their access to the voting booth and their turnout on election day. This thesis explores the reasons why the Hispanic electorate did not prove decisive in the 2016 presidential election. It further illuminates the changing Electoral College map, in which the Midwest and the Rustbelt are determined by an older white electorate and the South and Southwest are determined by an influx of minorities and immigrants, namely the Hispanic electorate. The 2016 presidential election illustrates the demographic changes and subsequent backlash that will persist over the next decade. A growing Hispanic population and electorate will eventually alter the political calculus of national and state elections, but turnout among white voters will continue to prove decisive in the near future. White backlash and transactional voting (e.g. economic, religious) clearly clinched Trump's success in crucial swing states, ultimately securing his Electoral College win. A review of polling prior to the 2016 election, as well as case studies of economic transactional and Hispanic Trump voters, demonstrates the breakdown across party and state lines that ensured Trump's Electoral College victory, despite a large and expanding Hispanic electorate. While it will continue to grow exponentially, it is unlikely that the Hispanic electorate will prove decisive as soon as the 2020 presidential election, but it will inevitably determine national and state elections within the next decade.

Cette thèse porte sur le déclin de la participation électorale dans les dix démocraties post­communistes qui ont intégré l’Union européenne en 2004 et 2007. Ces pays ont connu la plus forte baisse de participation électorale observée en régimes démocratiques depuis la Deuxième Guerre mondiale. Afin de comprendre ce phénomène, la thèse adopte une approche qui est à la fois systématique, théorisée, quantitative et comparative. Elle est structurée autour d’un nouveau schéma directeur conceptuel pour l’étude de la participation électorale au niveau agrégé. Ce cadre théorique distingue quatre types de facteurs qui affectent la participation en fonction de la nature et la temporalité de leurs effets. Le rôle de chaque type dans le déclin post­communiste est théorisé et considéré l’un après l’autre. Les sections empiriques emploient des méthodes quantitatives et une comparaison à l’intérieur des dix pays mais également avec d’autres démocraties établies ou nouvelles. Elles analysent plusieurs bases de données originales, dont la principale contient pratiquement toutes les élections législatives intervenues dans le monde démocratique entre 1939 et 2010. Les résultats remettent en cause l’idée selon laquelle le déclin participatif est principalement dû à un désenchantement démocratique. Ils montrent qu’au moins six autres facteurs causaux y contribuent. Ils tiennent aux contextes de démocratisation, aux changements institutionnels et aux évolutions dans la composition des électorats. La magnitude exceptionnelle du phénomène étudié est, ainsi, le produit d’une multiplicité des causes. / This dissertation studies the puzzling decline of voter turnout in ten post­communist democracies that joined the European Union in 2004 and 2007. These countries experienced the most spectacular erosion of electoral participation in democratic regimes since World War Two. To solve this puzzle, my dissertation follows a systematic, theory­based, quantitative and comparative approach. It is structured by a newly­conceived master conceptual scheme for the study of aggregated voter turnout. This theoretical framework distinguishes between four types of turnout drivers based on the nature and temporality of their effects. The role of each type in the post­communist decline is theorised and considered in turn. The empirical sections employ several types of quantitative methods and intra­ but also inter­regional comparisons with established and other new democracies. They draw on several original datasets, the most important of which comprises the quasi­totality of democratic legislative elections held around the globe between 1939 and 2010. The results question the conventional wisdom that the post­communist turnout decline is mostly due to citizens’ dissatisfaction. Instead, they show that it is driven by no less than six other causes that relate to democratisation, institutional change and shifts in the composition of the electorate. It is the multiplicity of causal factors that explains the unparalleled startling magnitude by which voting rates decreased in the ten countries at hand. Besides solving the central puzzle, this dissertation yields a number of new middle­range theories and insights that pertain to electoral participation in both new and established democracies.

In this work, we investigate the general structure and the concepts behind the contemporary electronic voting schemes, with special emphasis on voter verifiable preferential voting, homomorphic tallying and voter privacy. We firstly propose a modification in the Single Transferable Voting (STV) method to be applied to large scale elections with electoral barriers. Our proposal prevents the loss of votes and distributes them securely to the second or higher choices of their voters. This method is most suitably used in e-voting with the voter verifiable &ldquo / Pr&ecirc / t &agrave / Voter: All-In-One&rdquo / scheme that utilizes mix-networks for anonymity. We present a case study considering 2007 Turkish Parliamentary Elections to demonstrate the effect of preferential voting on the election systems that have electoral barriers. After the mathematical formulation of the election procedure, we calculate the wasted votes in 2007 elections and present simulation results for 69 election regions (that have no independent parliament members) by using a combination of &ldquo / modified STV and d&rsquo / Hondt&rdquo / methods, according to four different, politically unbiased scenarios on the distribution of secondary vote choices. Additionally, we modify the &ldquo / Pr&ecirc / t &agrave / Voter: All-In-One&rdquo / scheme by proposing three security enhancing modifications in its ballot construction phase: 1) ballot serial number, 2) digital signature of the first clerk in the mix-net, 3) different random numbers for each row of the ballot. Finally, we demonstrate the potential of multiplicative homomorphic algorithms like RSA for homomorphic tallying. The idea is based on the association of each candidate on the electronic ballot with a prime number, and unique prime factorization of the general vote product. We propose novel randomization methods for homomorphic RSA tallying, and discuss the performance and complexity of the scheme with such randomizations. Our suggestion for an auditable and verifiable e-voting scheme that employs homomorphic RSA tallying with proper randomization has advantages over El Gamal and Paillier tallying, such as having the least encryption complexity and strong anonymity resistant to unlimited computational power.

Measures of American inequality offer sparse coverage of subnational units and rely on surveys of self-reported family and household incomes. This dissertation details the development of new inequality datasets at the county, state, and national levels from alternative lenses: sector wages; industry earnings; and average incomes. Sector and industry data are particularly rich, detailed, consistent, and reliable. These new metrics from underutilized data sources contribute to debates over the lived effects of inequality. American economic inequality concentrates in some places more than others, arising from different causes. This dissertation considers ecological associations between inequality, voter turnout, and election outcomes at the state and county levels and multilevel models of individual participation and candidate preference, with voters nested within their state contexts. Aggregate voter turnout has been lower in states with higher levels of income inequality for the last several presidential elections, though this relationship did not strengthen with rising inequality. Likewise, some inequalities have strong associations with state- and county-level presidential election outcomes in certain years, but the patterns are irregular. Multilevel models of voters in states do not indicate a strong relationship among inequality per se and individual behavior. / text

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Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

NY, Univ., Dep. of Economics, Diss.--Rochester, 2004. / Kopie, ersch. im Verl. UMI, Ann Arbor, Mich. - Enth. 3 Beitr.