No description available.

In 2002, the North Carolina General Assembly made several changes to the system of popular elections for the state\'s appellate courts, including the removal of partisan labels from the ballot, starting with the 2004 elections. This particular change presents an opportunity for a natural experiment in which to observe any differences that may have appeared between how the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled before and after the reform, contributing to a line of literature on the impact of institutional arrangements (including selection systems) on judicial decision-making. The thesis examines whether any detectable differences appeared between judicial behavior and the decisional output of the North Carolina Supreme Court in its partisan era (1995-2004) and in its nonpartisan era (2005-2011). Based on analysis of several different characteristics of the Court\'s decisions and individual justices\' votes in these eras, I find no evidence to suggest that the nonpartisan system was associated with justices behaving in more "nonpartisan" ways. If there was any change, it was that during the nonpartisan era, the behavior of the justices was more in line with what would be expected of partisans than it had been in the partisan era. At least in North Carolina, changing the selection method of state supreme court justices from partisan to nonpartisan elections was not followed by less partisan behavior. / Master of Arts

<p>Abstract</p><p>The topic of this thesis is electoral systems and electoral reform in Zambia. In Africa, democratization is on its way in many countries. However, the democratic upswing in the early 1990s was in most countries followed by a standstill. In recent years the tendency has been a renewal of democratization which makes it possible to reach new heights. As a part of this recent democratic progress questions regarding constitutional reform and electoral reform have been raised. It is within that context that this thesis has its setting. In search for the incentives behind electoral reform the purpose of this thesis revolves around what the consequences are of the current electoral system in Zambia. A complimentary purpose is how an electoral reform can take place and what it might result in.</p><p>A qualitative literature study with a hermeneutic approach has been used in this thesis. A theoretical framework has been created which focuses on different types of electoral systems and their respective consequences on the political system. Important key points of electoral reform have been discussed to give an understanding and foundation for the analysis. The result of the study is that there are several negative consequences with the current electoral system in Zambia. The negative effects range from minority and gender marginalization, lacking representation, weak governments with lacking legitimacy and wasted votes. Some surprising positive traits include the absence of ethnic politization, from time to time a strong opposition and possibilities of coherent policing. It is also believed that there is a profound support for an electoral reform with in many levels of the country and there are.</p> / <p>Sammanfattning</p><p>Denna uppsats tar sin start i valsystem och valreform i Zambia. Demokratisering är ett vanligt tema i Afrika och många länder är i full gång med att befästa sin nyvunna mark. Det demokratiska uppsving som kunde ses i början av 1900-talet följdes i många länder utav ett stillestånd i utvecklingen. På senare år har en tydlig tendens kunnat ses där demokratiseringen på nytt har tagit fart. Som en konsekvens av denna nytända demokratisering i Afrika har frågor kring valsystem, valreform och dess effekter på det politiska systemet börjat att cirkulera. Det är i det sammanhanget som uppsatsen finner sig.</p><p>På uppdrag att finna vad som driver valreform, cirkulerar syftet med denna uppsats kring vilka konsekvenser det nutida valsystemet har i Zambia. Ett kompletterande syfte, eller frågeställning, för analysen vidare mot valreform och vilka utsikter som finns. En kvalitativ literaturstudie med en hermeneutisk ansats har använts i denna uppsatsen. Ett teoretiskt ramverk har skapats som fokuserar kring olika valsystem och deras respektive konsekvenser för det politiska systemet. Teorier kring valreform har också beskrivits och diskuterats fär att ge en förståelse och bakgrund till analysen. Slutsatsen för uppsatsen är att det finns många negativa kopplingar till valsystemet I Zambia. De tydligaste effekterna är att minoriteter och kvinnor blockeras från att delta i parlamentet, att svaga regeringar har funnits trots ett pluralistiskt valsystem som i sig självt har resulterat i en legitimitetsbrist och bortfallna röster. En del positiva inslag kunde även hittas, däribland en saknad av etniska konflikter, en stundom stark opposition och en möjlighet till sammanhängande politik. Som en del av resultatet verkar det också som att det finns ett stöd för en valreform på många olika nivår i Zambia. Detta anses vara nödvändigt om Zambia vill fortsätta att utveckla sin demokrati.</p>

Voter frustration in the US is driven largely by partisanship and gridlock in Congress. This paper seeks to understand the root causes of gridlock and look at alternative methods for eliminating it. I find that while the media focuses on polarization as the root cause of gridlock, the checks and balances system plays an equally significant role, and that the interaction between the party system and the governmental structure of the US government creates incentives that cause gridlock to form. Recent reforms have failed to successfully address gridlock because they do not change the polarized party system or the barriers to policy-making in government. After acknowledging the failure of recent reforms, I consider a new set of reforms: electoral system reform. The field of electoral systems provides many policy alternatives with profound tradeoffs, many of which make gridlock obsolete. Majoritarian systems create single-party majorities and reduce checks on majority power, allowing the majority party to implement their platform tempered through voter approval rather than checks on their power. Proportional systems retain checks and balances through the creation of governing coalitions, but the parties in power have stronger incentives to cooperate and compromise than under the current polarized US system. I propose a system for evaluating electoral systems and compare them in terms of accountability, legitimacy, effectiveness, representativeness, and complexity. Finally, I propose two electoral reforms, informed by the study of electoral systems, that are both feasible and increase the ability for third parties to gain seats in the legislature. The first, proportional representation for House members, creates small to medium-sized proportional Congressional districts at the state level to reduce the threshold for party entry. The second, Alternative Vote (ranked-choice) for Senate, proposes switching to a preference ranking system for Senate elections further remove barriers to third parties. These reforms should undermine the polarized two-party system and create new incentives for cooperation in Congress.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・論文博士 / 博士(地域研究) / 乙第12940号 / 論地博第18号 / 新制||地||62(附属図書館) / 32150 / (主査)教授 玉田 芳史, 准教授 岡本 正明, 准教授 中西 嘉宏 / 学位規則第4条第2項該当 / Doctor of Area Studies / Kyoto University / DFAM

O presente estudo tem como objetivo verificar a participação e a influência de Rui Barbosa na reforma eleitoral para introdução do voto direto no Brasil que, resultando na Lei Saraiva (1881), acabou por excluir os analfabetos do direito de voto. Esta pesquisa também busca: investigar qual era o liberalismo que Rui Barbosa representava e qual a posição assumida por ele no contexto da reforma eleitoral; examinar por que, para o governo e as elites, até mesmo para a grande maioria dos parlamentares liberais, especialmente no que se refere a Rui Barbosa, que se posicionou fortemente pela “exclusão” dos analfabetos do direito de voto, o voto dos analfabetos passou a ser um problema, o que não era até então; e, constatar qual o entendimento de classe social que norteava o pensamento de Rui Barbosa no momento em que ele afirmou que a reforma eleitoral, ao excluir o analfabeto do direito de voto, não estaria constituindo uma exclusão de classe. O presente estudo realiza uma interface entre a História Social e a História Política. Pois, essa pesquisa procura relacionar questões políticas com as suas correlativas questões sociais. Assim, apesar de minha atenção estar voltada continuamente para uma figura de destaque da política nacional, o então deputado Rui Barbosa, essa dissertação busca não se limitar somente às suas ações isoladas, mas sim, verificar como que posições e decisões dos políticos nacionais se refletiram e afetaram a vida das grandes massas. Mais especificamente, como que as ações tomadas por políticos brasileiros, em um dado momento da nossa história, decidiram quem poderia e quem não poderia, daí em diante, ter o direito de participar da vida política do país. / The present study aims to verify the participation and influence of Rui Barbosa in the electoral reform to introduce direct voting in Brazil that, resulting in the Saraiva Law (1881), turned out excluding the illiterate of the right to vote. This research also seeks to investigate what was the liberalism that Rui Barbosa represented and what position had been taken by him in the electoral reform; to examine why, to the Government and the elites, even for the vast majority of liberal parliamentarians, particularly in relation to Rui Barbosa, who strongly had positioned himself in favor of "excluding" the illiterate of the right to vote, the vote of the illiterate became a problem, which was not until then; and to see what had been the understanding of social class that had been Rui Barbosa’s guidance at the time when he said that the electoral reform’s disenfranchising the illiterates of voting rights, would not be an exclusion of class. The present study provides an interface between the Social History and Political History. Therefore, this research seeks to link political issues with its correlative social issues. So, despite my attention be continuously focused on a prominent figure of the national politics, the Congressman Rui Barbosa, this dissertation will not be limited only to their actions, but rather, verify how national politicians' decisions and positions reflected and affected the lives of the lower class. More specifically, how the actions taken by Brazilian politicians, at any given moment in our history, decided who could and who could not, thereafter, be entitled to participate in the political life of the country.

Over the course of the past 30 years, states across the nation have adopted early in-person voting laws. The bulk of academic literature on early in-person voting revolves around the policy’s effect on turnout. This research was conducted over the course of several decades, in different electoral contexts, measuring a diverse array of laws, and remains inconclusive. Meanwhile, the political discussion of voting rights and electoral reform has become increasingly polarized. The divisive views on early voting both in the academic community and in the political realm are indicators of a distinctive evolution of early voting. I argue that early voting reforms were implemented in three unique eras, characterized by different political motivations and an evolving early electorate. I use case studies in Texas, Florida, Missouri, and Massachusetts to explain this theory and provide a framework for more ordered future research.

Prior to the presidential elections in December 2007, Kenya was viewed as one of the few politically stable and economically prosperous countries in Africa, a paradigm for other African countries to emulate. At least this was the view held widely in the Western world. Missing in this analysis were the growing ethnic tensions which, although not a new phenomenon to Kenya (the precedence was established during the colonial era), had grown increasingly volatile during the past two decades. The 2007 controversial election results revealed even sharper bitterness and divisions among Kenyans. Ethnic lines were drawn and the country experienced two months of violence that left more than 1,000 people dead and 300,000 people homeless. With ethnic identification increasingly becoming a polarizing force in political competitions in Kenya, it is in the best interest of the Kenyan government to reform its electoral policies and procedures to generate a change in incentives which promote civic nationalism as a way to counter the negative aspects of an ethnically diverse nation. There are three key areas of the current electoral system where this process of change can begin: changing the current voting system of first-past-the-post (FPTP) to a closed list Proportional Representation (PR) system, redefining and creating mechanisms for better developing enforcing rules for political parties and campaigning, and finally, reforming the Electoral Commission of Kenya to make it the predominate authority on electoral activities in Kenya. Using Kenya as a case study, this thesis focuses on how electoral reform can be utilized as one way to decrease the use of ethnicity as a political tool which currently creates unnecessary tensions.

The EU, over time, has garnered international recognition and acclaim as a successful agent of democratisation in third countries. The transitions of Greece, Spain and Portugal in the 1980s coupled with the recent Eastern enlargements of the EU into erstwhile communist space attest to the success of the EU in fostering tangible democratisation. However, as the EU rapidly approaches its institutional capacity, questions remain as to its viability as an agent of democratisation in the post-enlargement setting where the EU can no longer offer full membership as an incentive for political and economic reform. This thesis attempts to examine the viability of the EU as a democratic facilitator in the post-enlargement setting, through examination of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), a policy described by the EU as ‘everything but institutions’. Two mechanisms of normative transfer relative to the ENP were identified in the literature: conditionality, where the EU attaches incentives for successful political and economic reform, and socialisation, a newer notion whereby norms are transferred via interaction through generating close links with domestic actors. It was ascertained that in the context of the ENP, socialisation represented the dominant mechanism for normative change; conditionality was still utilised as a mechanism, however its scope had reduced greatly. To illuminate the phenomenon of EU democratic promotion, the case study of Armenia was chosen, a small but politically intriguing state in the EU’s Eastern Neighbourhood which had experienced (as is the case with the majority of post-Soviet states) stagnation and regression of the democratisation process since independence. Two facets of the EU’s democratisation strategy inherent in the ENP were chosen as empirical research areas: free and fair elections and interaction with domestic civil society organisations (CSOs). Free and fair elections offered evaluation of the conditionality aspects of the ENP through examining the 2008 Armenian presidential election. Interaction with domestic Armenian CSOs presented a rich phenomenon to examine the impact of socialisation in the ENP through utilising a case study examining four democratically minded NGOs. Ultimately, this thesis contends that through the ENP, the EU can no longer effectively wield conditionality as a viable mechanism of normative change and currently lacks the tools or a suitable environment to initialise normative transfers through socialisation. Consequently, it is argued that the EU has had little effect in facilitating democratisation in Armenia since the advent of the ENP.

O presente estudo tem como objetivo verificar a participação e a influência de Rui Barbosa na reforma eleitoral para introdução do voto direto no Brasil que, resultando na Lei Saraiva (1881), acabou por excluir os analfabetos do direito de voto. Esta pesquisa também busca: investigar qual era o liberalismo que Rui Barbosa representava e qual a posição assumida por ele no contexto da reforma eleitoral; examinar por que, para o governo e as elites, até mesmo para a grande maioria dos parlamentares liberais, especialmente no que se refere a Rui Barbosa, que se posicionou fortemente pela “exclusão” dos analfabetos do direito de voto, o voto dos analfabetos passou a ser um problema, o que não era até então; e, constatar qual o entendimento de classe social que norteava o pensamento de Rui Barbosa no momento em que ele afirmou que a reforma eleitoral, ao excluir o analfabeto do direito de voto, não estaria constituindo uma exclusão de classe. O presente estudo realiza uma interface entre a História Social e a História Política. Pois, essa pesquisa procura relacionar questões políticas com as suas correlativas questões sociais. Assim, apesar de minha atenção estar voltada continuamente para uma figura de destaque da política nacional, o então deputado Rui Barbosa, essa dissertação busca não se limitar somente às suas ações isoladas, mas sim, verificar como que posições e decisões dos políticos nacionais se refletiram e afetaram a vida das grandes massas. Mais especificamente, como que as ações tomadas por políticos brasileiros, em um dado momento da nossa história, decidiram quem poderia e quem não poderia, daí em diante, ter o direito de participar da vida política do país. / The present study aims to verify the participation and influence of Rui Barbosa in the electoral reform to introduce direct voting in Brazil that, resulting in the Saraiva Law (1881), turned out excluding the illiterate of the right to vote. This research also seeks to investigate what was the liberalism that Rui Barbosa represented and what position had been taken by him in the electoral reform; to examine why, to the Government and the elites, even for the vast majority of liberal parliamentarians, particularly in relation to Rui Barbosa, who strongly had positioned himself in favor of "excluding" the illiterate of the right to vote, the vote of the illiterate became a problem, which was not until then; and to see what had been the understanding of social class that had been Rui Barbosa’s guidance at the time when he said that the electoral reform’s disenfranchising the illiterates of voting rights, would not be an exclusion of class. The present study provides an interface between the Social History and Political History. Therefore, this research seeks to link political issues with its correlative social issues. So, despite my attention be continuously focused on a prominent figure of the national politics, the Congressman Rui Barbosa, this dissertation will not be limited only to their actions, but rather, verify how national politicians' decisions and positions reflected and affected the lives of the lower class. More specifically, how the actions taken by Brazilian politicians, at any given moment in our history, decided who could and who could not, thereafter, be entitled to participate in the political life of the country.