The main aim of this thesis is to examine the agenda setting effects of Twitter users by exploring the use of hashtag #UgandaDecides and the retweet (RT) activity during the 2016 presidential election. I do this by applying the first level agenda setting theory which holds that the news media sets the public agenda. I apply a qualitative analysis using #UgandaDecides as a unit of analysis to collect tweets that received the most retweets to establish the actors tweeting during the study period. I conduct content analysis to establish the key issues/topics that received the most attention as per their level of frequency and prominence received through their retweet activity. Results in this thesis show that different actors were involved in determining the topics/issues on the twitter public agenda during the 2016 Uganda presidential election. For the pre-election period, the news media set the agenda by influencing the topics/issues for discussion as seen by the number of the retweets from their tweets. However, on Election Day, the public mainly ordinary citizens were more active in determining what topics/issues were discussed on Twitter, manifesting signs of reverse agenda setting. In this thesis, I thus conclude that Twitter can be empowering as it provides a space for ordinary citizens to participate in political discourse and that in a restrictive media environment, both media and public can use twitter as a participatory platform. The aspects of reversed agenda setting shown in this study are indicative of the changing media environment and how new power relations between different actors calls for the revision of the traditional agenda setting theory that the news media sets the public agenda.

This thesis studies how Liberal Democrat members and supporters use Internet tools to mobilise volunteers within local election campaigns. It also identifies who is most likely to use these tools and who is most likely to perceive that they are useful. Existing studies of the use of Internet tools to mobilise volunteers are limited because they have typically focused upon the Internet-as-a-whole, instead of breaking it down into smaller, more meaningful categories. It is important to study Internet tools individually as they each have different features and some are more deeply integrated into mobilisation practices than others. Therefore, this thesis addresses this limitation by focusing upon three specific Internet tools: Facebook, Twitter and email. It uses data generated from a participant observation, survey and series of semi-structured interviews. Similarly, few studies have been carried out in England or within the context of second order elections. As a result, this thesis explores the perceptions of grassroots activists in relation to English local elections, thus offering a relatively unique perspective upon the link between Internet tools and volunteer mobilisation. The findings confirm that it is beneficial to analyse Internet tools individually because there are significant differences in how they are used, in addition to who uses them and who perceives them to be useful. Email is the most commonly used; it is also perceived to be the most useful for mobilising volunteers and increasing membership. Younger people are more likely to use Facebook and Twitter and to perceive that they are useful tools, whereas older people are less likely to do so. This emphasises the importance of younger supporters, as the party would find it more difficult to reach online audiences without them. This thesis argues that people that become involved as a result of Internet tools are less likely to remain heavily involved over the long-term. For instance, externally elected public officials are less likely to join online or use Internet tools to mobilise volunteers and increase membership. This fits with a wider pattern of engagement amongst party elites and long-term members. It emphasises the importance of using a combination of online and offline tools to mobilise volunteers and increase membership.

This dissertation investigates the relationship between elections and authoritarian rule with a focus on the case of China's adoption of elections at the grassroots level. In this dissertation, I look at the incentives facing Chinese local governments in choosing between holding competitive elections or state-controlled elections, and how the selection of electoral rules shapes the public's preferences over political institutions and influences the citizens' political behaviors, especially voting in elections and participation in contentious activities. The overarching theme in this dissertation proposes that the sources and consequences of Chinese local elections are conditioned on the state-owned resources and the governing costs. When the amount of state-owned resources to rule the local society is limited, the paucity of resources will incentivize authoritarian governments to liberalize grassroots elections to offset the governance costs. The various levels of election liberalization will lead to different consequences in the public's political behavior. An abundance of state-owned resources not only discourages rulers from sharing power with the local society, but also supplies the rulers with strong capacity to obtain loyalty from voters when elections are adopted. As a result, elections under authoritarian governments with an abundance of state-owned resources will see more loyalist voters than elections with authoritarian governments with fewer state-owned resources. In addition, the varieties of election practices will exert impacts on public opinion toward the authoritarian government: awareness of elections will enhance public trust in the government and decrease the public's intention to challenge the incumbents' authority while at the same time increasing the public's faith in the institutions, thereby encouraging the public to adopt official channels to air their grievances. The analysis of the village-level as well as individual-level survey data and cases lends empirical supports to the argument. First, I find that the governing costs—measured by the size of labor force—are significantly and positively associated with the likelihood that local officials allow the villagers to freely nominate candidates. Second, I find that party members are more likely to vote in rural elections than urban elections while urban elections attract citizens with higher levels of democratic consciousness. The rural-urban divide in voter type indicates that the possession of economic resources by rural grassroots governments helps mobilize rural loyalist voters to participate in village committee elections, whereas the lack of such resources by urban governments discourages regime loyalist but encourage democratic voters to turn out to vote in urban elections. Third, I find significant evidence that citizens who are aware of grassroots elections are less likely to engage in contentious activities such as protest, strikes or demonstrations. Yet, the awareness of elections also encourages citizens to more frequently adopt, shangfang (petition), a government-sponsored conflict resolution mechanism, than those who are not aware of such elections. The implications of these findings suggest that the capability of state in controlling resources is vital to the success or failure of elections in stabilizing authoritarian regimes. The findings also provide an assessment on the substantial influence of the rural and urban grassroots elections in China's subnational democratization.

The purpose of this study is to examine the interaction of two variables which may influence employee voting behavior. These variables are the leadership style of the supervisor and the employee personality trait of locus of control. The hypothesis held that the interaction of supervisory style and employee locus of control will result in significant differences in the vote in representation elections. The implicit assumption was that certain combinations of leadership styles and employee internality or externality would influence employee voting behavior. Based on the weight of the evidence, it was concluded that the interaction of supervisory style and employee locus of control does not influence voting behavior; that a significant relationship appears to exist between satisfaction with supervision and voting behavior; and that supervisory Consideration appears to be related to voting behavior, and may result in high levels of satisfaction with supervision.

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.

Diploma thesis "The Preferential voting of the Koalice voters in the elections for the Chamber of Deputies in 2002. Never more with the KDU-ČSL into the coalition" is concerned with the preferential voting of the Koalice voters in the elections in 2002 in selected electoral districts which are The Liberec Region, The Hradec Králové Region and The Zlín Region. The thesis focuses especially on the question in how big municipalities gained the KDU-ČSL and the US-DEU canditates the highest support from voters, wheter there was a connection between the distribution of preferential votes for the KDU-ČSL candidates and theUS-DEU voters of the Koalice in 2002 with distribution of preferential votes for these parties by the Čtyřkoalice voters in the regional elections in 2000; whether the structure of municipalities, in which the Koalice voters in 2002 and the KDU-ČSL and the US voters in 1998 in the elections for the PSP ČR bestowed the highest and the lowest percentage of preferential notes, was different; whether the proportion of preferential votes for the KDU-ČSL and the US-DEU candidates was connected with a local variability of the chosen sociodemografic variables and what was the distribution of regional electoral support of the best succesful candidates in 2002. The basic level of the almost whole...

The purpose of this research is to identify major factors that can be used to explain and predict the process of growth in union membership as represented by union victories in certification elections. The emphasis of this research is on organization and social-structural level factors. The logistic regression procedure reveals that organization level variables are most significant in explaining union victories in certification elections. Among the organization level variables, Unit Size, as defined by the NLRB, is the most significant variable in each year of the study and across all industrial classifications.

Alors que le vote connaît un poids symbolique croissant dans le système français de relations professionnelles, notamment depuis la réforme de la représentativité syndicale de 2008, la science politique et la sociologie des relations professionnelles ne se sont que très marginalement intéressées à la pratique électorale dans le champ professionnel. Au croisement de ces deux disciplines, ce travail de thèse a pour ambition, en s'appuyant sur les modèles explicatifs du vote proposés par la sociologie électorale, de restituer les logiques individuelles, contextuelles et environnementales de la mobilisation et du choix électoral des salariés lors des scrutins professionnels.Pour ce faire, notre travail, qui se concentre sur les salariés du secteur privé, mobilise et croise des matériaux quantitatifs et, dans une moindre mesure, qualitatifs, collectés à plusieurs niveaux : la base de données électorales MARS (Mesure d'audience pour le calcul de la représentativité syndicale), les données des enquêtes REPONSE (Relations professionnelles et négociations d'entreprise) et SRCV (Statistiques sur les ressources et conditions de vie) ainsi qu'une enquête par questionnaire réalisée auprès d'agents de Pôle Emploi.A la lumière de ces matériaux, il apparaît que les comportements électoraux des salariés aux scrutins professionnels, loin d'être inexplicables, dépendent de logiques sociales. Toutefois, si les modèles proposés par la sociologie électorale s'avèrent relativement pertinents, il apparaît nécessaire de les adapter aux spécificités du champ professionnel. Ainsi, à l'image de ce qu'observe Daniel Gaxie dans le champ politique, un « cens caché » de la « démocratie sociale » apparaît. Mais les barrières invisibles mises en évidence sont bien plus liées aux conditions et aux contextes de travail des salariés qu'au capital scolaire dont ils disposent : ce sont les salariés les plus précaires, les moins intégrés professionnellement, les plus jeunes ou encore les salariés des petites entreprises qui sont à la fois moins confrontés au vote et qui, lorsqu'ils peuvent effectivement voter, s'abstiennent significativement plus. De la même manière, si la mobilisation et le choix électoral des salariés dépendent des contextes dans lesquels leurs votes sont produits, ce sont les interactions nouées dans le travail, entre les salariés et leurs représentants ou entre les salariés eux-mêmes, qui sont déterminantes.Mettre ainsi au jour les ressorts des votes des salariés aux scrutins professionnels permet de contribuer non seulement à l'étude des relations professionnelles, mais aussi aux discussions autour des modèles explicatifs du vote en sociologie électorale, d'autant plus que la participation aux scrutins politiques et la participation aux scrutins professionnels s'articulent fortement. / While the vote has a growing symbolic weight in the French system of industrial relations, especially since the reform of union representativeness in 2008, political science as well as industrial relations and labour studies have shown only marginal interest for electoral practices in the professional field. At the crossroads of these two disciplines, this thesis aims to render the individual, contextual and environmental logics of electoral mobilization and choice during workplace elections, building on the explanatory models of voting proposed by electoral political sociology.To this end, our thesis, which focuses on private sector employees in France, mobilizes and combines quantitative and, to a lesser extent, qualitative materials, collected at several levels: the MARS electoral database (Audience Measurement for the Calculation of Union Representativeness), the data from the REPONSE surveys (Industrial Relations and Company Negotiations) and from the 2010 SRCV survey (Statistics on Incomes and Living Conditions) as well as a questionnaire survey carried out among Pôle Emploi employees.In light of these materials, it appears that the workers’ electoral behaviour in professional elections, far from being inexplicable, depends on social logics. However, if the models proposed by electoral sociology prove relatively relevant, it appears necessary to adapt them to the specificities of the professional field. Thus, in the same way as Daniel Gaxie observed for the political field, there appears to be a "hidden census" in "industrial democracy". But the highlighted invisible barriers are much more related to the employees’ working conditions and contexts than to their educational capital: those who are both less likely to face workplace polls and, when they can actually vote, significantly more likely to abstain, are the most precarious employees, the least professionally integrated, the youngest as well as those employed in the smallest businesses. Similarly, if the employees’ electoral mobilization and choices depend on the contexts in which their votes are produced, what is decisive are the interactions in the workplace between the employees and their representatives or between the employees themselves.To reveal the reasons for employees' votes in professional polls helps to contribute, not only to the study of industrial relations, but also to the discussion on the explanatory models of voting in electoral sociology, especially since participations at political and workplace elections are closely linked.

California has been traditionally a Republican state, yet the Republicans have been unable to regain their traditional dominance since their defeat in 1958. The 1958 election represented a fundamental shift in the nature of California politics. More than that, the defeat of the Republicans pointed up a fundamental weakness in the Republican party.

The European Parliament elections have since the 1980's been described as 'second-order national elections', which, among other things, means that they are less important to both political parties and to voters. Scholars have often described political parties as a weak link between the European Union and its citizens. Previous studies of the fulfillment of election promises have mainly focused on national governments, and not national political parties in the European Parliament. The purpose of this descriptive study is to investigate the level of fulfillment of election promises that Swedish parliamentary parties present in their election manifestos for the European Parliament election 2014. Based on previous research, this study tests five hypotheses on the material. By mapping and analyzing 183 election promises from 8 election manifestos, the results show a lower fulfillment level than Swedish governments usually achieve on the national arena. The result showed one possible covariation between which party groups the political parties belonged to and fulfillment, but no clear patterns between the characteristics of the election promise and fulfillment. The results of this study has shown that there is reason to further investigate and try to better understand election promises that are given ahead of European Parliament elections.