Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-02

This thesis argues that blogging can open up a space for free speech and, at times, facilitate wider debate in the relatively authoritarian society of Malaysia. At the same time, blogging is heavily shaped by the prevailing elite groups and political culture in Malaysian politics. The thesis finds that blogging is able to facilitate the forming of a network of alternative or dissenting views but it can also be dominated by existing elite groups in society. The majority of bloggers are highly educated professionals and many of them are media and political elites. The use of blogging by some civil society and partisan bloggers, particularly pro-UMNO bloggers, to remove political rivals by staging a form of “psychological warfare” points to a dominance of factional politics within UMNO in the Malaysian blogosphere during the 2008 general election. Thus, blogging does provide a space for certain liberal democratic practices but it also reflects existing elite groups and political culture in the country. This thesis also argues that blogging does bring about new ways of campaigning in electoral politics. The use of blogging as part of campaigning among opposition politicians is, however, influenced by the wider institutional and societal structures in society. The findings reveal that blogging can provide a space for mobilising political action. It also allows opposition politicians to disseminate information on campaign activities and promote electoral candidates but blogging loses its appeal among politician-bloggers during the campaigning period. Blogging, thus, does not have a simple across-the-board function of promoting liberal democratic practices and transforming new ways of campaigning in electoral politics. This thesis concludes that an examination of blogging has to be situated within its particular social and political environment in order to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of its influence on democracy and political life.

Throughout the course of history, presidential campaigning has evolved commensurate with the advancements in technology. FDR mastered the radio, JFK the television and President Barack Obama, the Internet. In both the 2008 and 2012 Presidential campaigns, President Barack Obama used social media via the Internet to understand the voter better than any candidate before his time. Through revolutionary data collection techniques, both offline and online, the Obama campaign obtained vital electorate information. This data was used by the campaign to: target online social media users who were most likely to become politically engaged; and attempt to influence their voting habits, two of the most crucial measures of a successful presidential campaign. This paper analyzes whether the social media campaign strategy deployed by President Barack Obama in both the 2008 and 2012 elections was successful in its attempt to influence the electorate. This is accomplished by evaluating voter turnout and engagement based on targeted demographic groups. Next, I assess how social media has impacted fundraising in the 2st1 century, particularly following the aftermath of the Federal Elections Campaign Act (FECA) in 1974. Finally, I analyze how social media effectively assisted President Obama’s campaign in mobilizing the electorate both online and offline to his benefit.

This paper examines and analyzes Hillary Clinton's Twitter account activity between July 1, 2016 and August 28, 2016 in an attempt to determine the perception of authenticity on social media and whether Hillary Clinton was effective in improving her image during the 2016 presidential election. This thesis questions whether Twitter is a reliable tool in determining authenticity.

This thesis consists of three stand-alone chapters studying theoretical models concerning a range of issues that take place within the context of political delegation: tax enforcement, political selection, electoral campaigning. First chapter studies the problem of a small electorate of workers who cannot influence tax rates but can influence their local politicians to interfere with tax enforcement. It develops a two-candidate Downsian voting model where voters are productivity-heterogenous workers who supply labour to a local firm that can engage in costly tax evasion while facing an exogenously given payroll tax collected at the firm level. Two purely office motivated local politicians compete in a winner-takes-all election by offering fine reductions to take place if the firm gets caught evading. Two results stand out. First, equilibrium tax evasion is (weakly) increasing in the productivity of the median voter as a result of the latter demanding a weaker enforcement regime through more aggressive fine reductions. Second, if politicians were able to propose and commit on tax rates as well, then the enforcement process would be interference-free and the tax level would coincide with the median voter's optimal level. These two results underline the fact that from voters' perspective, influencing enforcement policy is an imperfect substitute for influencing tax policy in achieving an optimal redistribution scheme due to tax evasion being costly. In other words, a lax enforcement pattern in a given polity can be indicative of a political demand arising as an attempt to attain a redistributive second-best when influencing tax policy is not a possibility. Second chapter turns attention to the role and incentives of media in the context of ex ante political selection, i.e. at the electoral participation level. It constructs a signalling model with pure adverse selection where a candidate whose quality is private information decides on whether to challenge an incumbent whose quality is common knowledge given an electorate composed of voters who are solely interested in electing the best politician. Electoral participation is costly and before the election, a benevolent media outlet which is assumed to be acting in the best interest of voters decides on whether to undertake a costly investigation that may or may not reveal challenger's quality and transmit this information to voters. The focus of the chapter is on studying the selection and incentive effects of changes in media's information technology. The setting creates a strategic interaction between challenger entry and media activity, which gives rise to two main results. First, an improvement in media's information technology, whether due to cost reductions or gains in investigative strength always (weakly) improves ex ante selection by increasing minimum challenger quality in equilibrium. Second, while lower information costs always (weakly) make the media more active, an higher media strength may reduce its journalistic activity, especially if it is already strong. The intuition behind this asymmetry is simple. While both types of improvements increase media's expected net benefits from journalism, a boost to its investigative strength also makes the media more threatening for inferior challengers at a given level of journalistic activity. Combining this with the first result implies that the media can afford being more passive without undermining selection if it is sufficiently strong to begin with. In short, a strong media might lead to a relatively passive media, even though the media is "working as intended". Third chapter is about electoral campaigns. More precisely, it is a theoretical investigation into one possible audience-related cause for diverging campaign structures of different candidates competing for the same office: state of political knowledge in an electorate. Electorate is assumed to consist of a continuum of voters heterogenous along two dimensions: policy preferences and political knowledge. The latter is assumed to partition the set of voters into ignorant and informed segments, with the former consisting of voters who are unable to condition their voting decisions on the policy dimension. Political competition takes place within a probabilistic voting setting with two candidates, but instead of costless policy proposals as in a standard probabilistic voting model, it revolves around campaigning. Electoral campaigning is modelled as a limited resource allocation problem between two activities: policy campaigning and valence campaigning. The former permits candidates to relocate from their initial policy positions (reputations or legacies), which are assumed to be at the opposing segments of the policy space (i.e. left and right). The latter allows them to generate universal support via a partisanship effect and can be interpreted as an investment into non-policy campaign content such as impressionistic advertising, recruitment of writers capable of producing emotionally appealing speeches, etc. The chapter has two central results. First, a candidate's resource allocation to valence campaigning increases with the fraction of ignorant voters, ideological (non-policy) heterogeneity of informed voters and proximity of candidate's initial position to the bliss point of the informed pseudo-swing voter. The last one results from decreasing relative marginal returns for politicians from converging to pseudo- swing voter's ideal position. Second, even if candidates are otherwise symmetric, a monotonic association between policy preferences and political knowledge can induce divergence into campaign structures. For instance, if ignorance and policy preferences are positively correlated (e.g. less educated preferring more public good) then the left candidate would conduct a campaign with a heavier valence focus and vice versa. Underlying this result is again the decreasing relative marginal returns argument: a candidate whose initial position is already close to that of the informed pseudo-swing voter would benefit more from a valence oriented campaign. An implication of this is that a party that is known having a relatively more ignorant voter base can end up conducting a much more policy focused campaign compared to a party that is largely associated with politically aware voters.

This essay is studying the Parliament parties´ use of negative campaigning in party leader debates in the connected Swedish general election in 2014. The research questions in this essay are: How does the use of negative campaigning appear in the Swedish party leader debates 2014? In what way does the use of negative campaigning differ due to: - The time lasting until the election day? - Whether the party is a government party or an opposition party? - The party’s latest result (positive or negative) in the polls? - The party’s position in the ideological left-right scale? The method used to perform the study is a quantitative content analysis. The objects that are analyzed are four party leader debates connected to the general election 2014. The variables used in the research are Negative and Not negative (in the latest variable both positive and neutral messages are included). The debates analyzed are videos of the entire debates. The total speech time and the use of negative campaigning for each party is calculated in seconds and translated to percent (how many percent each party use to negative campaigning in total for each debate). The results show that negative campaigning is more used during the election process than before it has started. There is no clear pattern between the use of negative campaigning and closeness of the election day. The political parties that are in opposition tend to use more negative campaigning than the parties that are in the government. The polls and the ideological left- right scale shows no significant pattern related to the use of negative campaigning.

Political parties in the United Kingdom are increasingly focusing their constituency-level campaigns on marginal seats; such a focus has been echoed by academic researchers studying the effectiveness of intense constituency campaigning in boosting local electoral outcomes. Yet there has been little investigation into the impact of the redirection of campaigning resources on safe constituencies; while existing research suggests that intense campaigns are effective in boosting local electoral outcomes, it is possible that a relative lack of campaigning may be harmful. This thesis addresses this gap by exploring in detail the detrimental impact of low level campaigning on both turnout and vote share in safe constituencies by the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats. The study is situated within the literature of campaign effectiveness, also drawing on theories of voter behaviour. It offers a critical evaluation of existing research into constituency campaigning, contending not only that a lack of campaigning can be harmful, but also that these effects are impacted by nuances of local incumbency and party differentials. To explore this, the thesis conducts a quantitative examination of the effects of constituency campaigning conducted at UK general elections from 1987 to 2010. It also expands existing literature in two ways; by formulating and applying a refined way in which to measure relative levels of campaigning, and also exploring the potential of leader visits as a measure of local campaigning for the first time in the UK. The focus on rebalancing attention towards safe constituencies places the concept of marginality at the core of this thesis. In exploring the concept in detail, potential explanations for the origins of marginality are considered, drawing on theories of population stability and party support bases. Using a refined measure of relative levels of campaigning, a link is established between marginality and campaigning, which also considers the important role of incumbency. When exploring the impact of low levels of campaigning, the results indicate that in many cases there is a harmful impact on both turnout and vote share, although the effects are greater for the latter. The findings suggest that local incumbency is a central factor in deciding the detrimental impact of low levels of campaigning, with such campaigns run by opposition parties resulting in far greater declines in their vote share when compared to equivalent campaigns run by incumbents. In an era of increasing focus on marginal constituencies during election campaigns, this thesis explicitly considers the impact of a lack of campaigning in safe constituencies, the role of incumbency and also applies new measures. In doing so, new empirical insights are produced into the importance of constituency campaigning in the UK, through an approach both rooted in and building upon existing studies.

This paper seeks to examine the impact of electoral websites on young people’s electoral engagement, focusing on the 2012 London Mayoral and US Presidential election. It does so by employing an innovative research design to connect the supply and demand side of the equation, including quantitative content analysis and an innovative experiment that allows for qualitative evaluation as well as for an examination of the causal effects of exposure to specific websites. The three specific types of websites examined in each election are: youth mobilization websites, the official candidate campaigning websites and Vote Advice Applications. We explore the effects of these websites on behavioural, cognitive and attitudinal aspects of engagement: likelihood of voting, attention to news, internal and external efficacy and political trust. Research to date on the effect of electoral websites on young people has produced mixed results on political engagement and efficacy (e.g. Tedesco, 2007; Xenos and Kyoung, 2008). We find no direct effect on young people for voting across the websites but we do find a number of significant effects across the other variables, which are occasionally found only amongst those with the lowest pre-existing levels of engagement. This leads us to conclude that the web can create a pathway to participation for young people but this is dependent on the specific type and attributes of the website, the election context and the young person themselves.

Scholars and political candidates have frequently viewed online political participation as a weaker and less meaningful form of political involvement than traditional, offline activities. This thesis presents an overview of the literature on political participation and the Internet in order to understand the origins of this view and why participation on social media may be uniquely meaningful in comparison with other Internet-based activities. Examination of social media using Resource Theory and Social Identity Theory justify this unique status by highlighting and rationalizing social media's exceptional capacity to build and maintain weak-tie networks while also generating an intimacy between constituents and candidates. Social Identity Theory also provides an argument for the potential of social media for reaching and mobilizing first-time participants through its capacity to passively reach and attract constituents for non-political, personal and identity-serving reasons. This thesis then shows how social media-enable first-time participants may be more inclined to continue and expanding their participation over time, thereby substantially affecting participation trends in the United States. Using case studies composed of qualitative data collected on candidate views of the Internet and social media in U.S. House campaigns, this thesis examines the state of Web campaigning in 2010 in comparison to the theoretically "archetypal" Web campaign in order to provide indications of whether the prescribed theoretical activities deliver meaningful citizen engagement and valuable returns to campaigns. / Master of Arts

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