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This dissertation explores how institutional settings regulating the media and campaigns affect voter participation. The broader question is what types of political communication systems are likely to produce the most engaged and participatory citizens as well as equal participation. Assuming that political participation is affected by its underlying costs and benefits, I hypothesize that political communication systems that lower information costs for voters have higher turnout levels and reduce upper class bias. Political communication systems are measured by media systems, access to paid TV advertising, and campaign finance laws. In the country-level turnout models, investigating seventy-four electoral democracies, I find that public broadcasting systems increase voter turnout, while changing the effect of paid advertising. Public broadcasting systems that allow paid TV advertising have a higher turnout levels than those that ban paid advertising. Conversely, paid advertising in private broadcasting systems have a negative marginal effect on voter turnout. On the other hand, campaign finance laws that allow more money to enter election campaigns increase voter participation. So campaign contribution and spending limits depress turnout and public finance increases it. The hierarchical models in Chapter 6 show that political communication systems also change the relationship between individual socioeconomic status and voter participation. Generally political communication environment that lower information costs for voters reduces socioeconomic bias for voters. Public broadcasting systems, access to paid TV ads, and free TV time, thus, mitigate the effect of education on voting. Additional investigation also shows that the age gap between voters and nonvoters is conditioned by different types of political communication systems. Both partisan press and public direct funding promote younger citizens’ participation, thus decreasing the generation gap. In contrast, campaign contribution/expenditure limits enlarge such gap. Broadcasting systems also affect the effect of age on voting. Because older people spend more time watching television than younger ones, the type of broadcasting system has a disproportionately larger impact on older citizens. / text

To be able to see if voter turnout can be enhanced, studying income is of interest. This researchpaper attempts to answer the following thesis question: “How can voter turnout in the 2016 presidential election be explained by income?” The conclusion drawn is that income, measured in GDP per capita, does affect voter turnout, however the exact influence is hard to determine.This research paper agrees with Wolfinger & Rosenstone (1980), that income rather plays a role until a voter has received a point where they can attain a “modestly comfortable standard of living”. Beyond this threshold, there are other variables and preferences that determine voter turnout. Therefore, COVI, that studies the cost variable within the utility hypothesis model, cannot explain voter turnout in relation to income. To better address voter turnout based on income, one would have to use a more extensive index and include other variables andpreferences.

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The right to vote is one of the fundamental rights of citizens in democratic countries. In the United States, however, this action is preceded by the obligation to register. Election registrations are still seen as a limiting element of electoral law. The aim of this work is to find out how the registration was influenced in the past and what influenced the number of registered citizens and voter participation in the presidential elections in 2016. The first part deals with federal electoral registration reforms and looks at the current situation. The second part consists of a research in which the relationship determination is utilized by the Pearson correlation coefficient. The work concludes that the ratio of registered age to eligible voters has not increased, although the demographic curve continues to rise. In the case of factors that may affect the number of registered, the direct relationship has not been established. On the contrary, a direct correlation has been shown in the case of the same factors with the turnout in the presidential election.

Political campaigning has become a multi-million dollar business. A substantial proportion of a campaign's budget is spent on voter mobilization, i.e., on identifying and influencing as many people as possible to vote. Based on data, campaigns use statistical tools to provide a basis for deciding who to target. While the data available is usually rich, campaigns have traditionally relied on a rather limited selection of information, often including only previous voting behavior and one or two demographical variables. Statistical procedures that are currently in use include logistic regression or standard classification tree methods like CHAID, but there is a growing interest in employing modern data mining approaches. Along the lines of this development, we propose a modern framework for voter targeting called LORET (for logistic regression trees) that employs trees (with possibly just a single root node) containing logistic regressions (with possibly just an intercept) in every leaf. Thus, they contain logistic regression and classification trees as special cases and allow for a synthesis of both techniques under one umbrella. We explore various flavors of LORET models that (a) compare the effect of using the full set of available variables against using only limited information and (b) investigate their varying effects either as regressors in the logistic model components or as partitioning variables in the tree components. To assess model performance and illustrate targeting, we apply LORET to a data set of 19,634 eligible voters from the 2004 US presidential election. We find that augmenting the standard set of variables (such as age and voting history) together with additional predictor variables (such as the household composition in terms of party affiliation and each individual's rank in the household) clearly improves predictive accuracy. We also find that LORET models based on tree induction outbeat the unpartitioned competitors. Additionally, LORET models using both partitioning variables and regressors in the resulting nodes can improve the efficiency of allocating campaign resources while still providing intelligible models. / Series: Research Report Series / Department of Statistics and Mathematics

The role of improved schooling has become controversial because expansion of school investment has not guaranteed improved educational outcomes. This thesis pays attention to why government investments in education have not produced the desire effects of increased educational attainment and higher enrolment rate. We show that the results depend on the methodology. We also provide evidence that the robust association between cognitive skills and economic growth reflects a causal effect of the economic benefits of effective school policy: we find that, countries that improved their cognitive skill, through different facets of school choice, autonomy and accountability over time experienced relative increases in their growth paths. We show that quality of education significantly matter for technological progress and that it is a source of divergence in OECD economies. We also analyse in a dispassionate way, voters influence on public policy especially, that pertaining to public school resource allocation, in one country India we take India because the country’s overall success story hides striking inter- and intra-state variation in literacy rates. There is suggestion that larger districts with more elected legislators and also districts with higher voter turnout benefit from greater allocation of public school resources, which in turn are expected to boost schooling outcomes. In other words, these results highlight the power of democracy in ensuring a better allocation of public school resources in our sample.

Με την βοήθεια τεχνικών για συστήματα αλληλεπιδρώντων σωματιδίων, σκιαγραφήθηκαν και αποδείχθηκαν θεωρήματα για μοντέλα γνώμης και πολιτιστικής δυναμικής. Τα χωρικά αυτά στοχαστικά μοντέλα εξετάζονται ως γενικεύσεις με μια παράμετρο εμπιστοσύνης ε του γνωστού μοντέλου ψηφοφόρου. Το κεντρικό ερώτημα είναι ο καθορισμός της ασυμπτωτικής δυναμικής, η οποία ενδέχεται να εμφανίζει μετάβαση φάσης από μια ποιοτική συμπεριφορά σε κάποια άλλη. Τα παραχθέντα θεωρήματα αφορούν: α) στην επέκταση του θεωρήματος ομαδοποίησης του Lanchier (2012) σε αυθαίρετους γράφους απόψεων, και β) στην εφαρμογή της μεθοδολογίας των Bramson και Griffeath (1989) σε δυο συστήματα με ουδέτερες αλληλεπιδράσεις, την ουδέτερη εκδοχή των κυκλικών συστημάτων σωματιδίων και γ) το μοντέλο Axelrod για την διάχυση των πολιτιστικών περιοχών. Στα δυο τελευταία μοντέλα εξετάζονται τα φαινόμενα τόσο της καθήλωσης (η άποψη κάθε δράστη μεταβάλλεται πεπερασμένα συχνά) όσο και του κατακερματισμού (μη ομαδοποίηση) του άπειρου συστήματος. / By the use of techniques from interacting particle systems, heuristics and proof have been produced for opinion and cultural dynamical models. These stochastic spatial models are investigated as generalizations with a confidence parameter ε of the well-known voter model. The main question is the characterization of dynamics in the asymptotic limit of time, which may exhibit phase transition from one qualitative behavior to another. The produced theorems are: a) an extension of the clustering theorem by Lanchier (2012) to arbitrary opinion graphs, and b) the appropriation of the Bramson and Griffeath (1989) methodology for systems with neutral interactions, namely, a neutral version of cyclic particle systems and c) the model of Axelrod for the diffusion of cultural domains. In the last two models, the studied phenomena is the fixation of the infinite system (each agent changes her opinion finitely often) to a fragmented configuration (non-clustering).

The voting system a government chooses has influence upon the way people vote, as it has some bearing on the average person’s utility received from voting. In the United States the Electoral College system is used to determine who becomes president-elect, but theoretical arguments have been made to support a change in voting structure to Proportional Representation. I developed my model to understand more about how a change in the voting structure would affect voter utility. My contribution to the research question focuses upon relative benefits of one voter in a specific party to another voter in another party. I used an empirical approach, using data pulled from past elections and survey data. My model suggests that Republican voters would receive a higher utility from a change in the voting system from the Electoral College to Proportional Representation. It is unclear whether Democrats would receive a higher benefit, but at least would receive a lesser utility change than that of the Republican voters.

In this study, I investigate how the issue of immigration affects Latino voter turnout. I hypothesize that U.S. Latino citizens who view immigration as highly important and helpful to the United States will be more likely to turn out to vote in midterm and presidential elections. In addition to a contextual analysis on elections in Arizona and California, I perform a probit regression analysis on survey data from Pew Hispanic's 2004 National Survey of Latinos on Politics and Civic Participation. The results are mixed with respect to the initial expectations. While respondents who view immigration as important and helpful are more likely to turn out than those who view immigration as important and hurtful, the results suggest that respondents who find immigration as unimportant may not be less likely to turn out. Further, there are some differences between Latino subgroups, although these differences are minor. Ultimately, the hypotheses presented in this study find moderate support.