A common interpretation of the age gap in electoral turnout is that younger cohorts are apathetic and part of a generation that is absent from political life. Still, youth political participation differs across European countries, and cross- national variation in the age gap has been rarely examined in the literature. This paper, therefore, argues that unequal voting in Europe is due not to a lack of interest in the public good but rather to a combination of contextual and individual factors. This study examines young and older individuals' engagement with electoral politics in 26 European countries using the European Social Survey data between 2008 and 2018. Specifically, this study addresses the questions of (1) what context-related factors determine the age gap in voting between old and young citizens and (2) why the age gap in voting is smaller in some countries than in others. The results show that the age gap varies considerably across countries. The OLS and FE regressions results suggest that government expenditure, the share of migrants, and the age of democracy influence the level of age gap in voting. The findings on macroeconomic and immigration factors raise methodological concerns.

Although cryptography based remote voting protocols have been researched since 1981, most of the previous protocols [9], [5], [13] assume the existence of public bul- letins or, in other words, a publicly readable, tamper-proof, append-only log. As blockchain or distributed ledger technology (DLT) offers properties like irreversibil- ity, transparency and decentralization, it is suitable for realization of public bulletin board for the voting system. We see a gap in the research of blockchain based voting systems because there either exists work on just the protocol aspect of the voting system or the performance aspect of the blockchain. As blockchain is a general purpose tool, we believe that there lies opportunities for micro-optimizations that could specifically benefit the voting system. This ushered us to focus our effort on the performance aspect of integration of voting protocol with blockchain. Hence, in this thesis, we first introduce a homomorphic encryption based voting protocol that uses blockchain, Hyperledger Fabric (HLF), as bulletin board. The protocol is de- signed such that it leverages the transaction processing characteristics of underlying DLT. We then created an experiment where we designed a smart contract, set up a blockchain network and exposed the system to 40k concurrent voting transactions to profile the code of HLF. From the profile data, it was found that execution of cryptographic operations constitutes most of the transaction processing time. This led us to benchmark cryptographic libraries for SHA256 and digital signature algo- rithm and integrate the faster library into HLF for better performance. We also found that the transaction manager of HLF does not need read-write locks to ensure transaction isolation in special scenarios, which alleviates the performance drop due to lock contention. Altogether we were able to improve the throughput and latency of the baseline system by more than 30%. Lastly, we make a comparison between public and permissioned DLT based remote voting system and discuss the suitability of permissioned blockchain for the application of voting systems. / Graduate

Past research has confirmed the importance of structural and individual-level factors in predicting voter turnout and citizen trust in the government. In international research particularly, political corruption has been shown to negatively affect citizen trust, though the effect of corruption on voter turnout is mixed. To date, no research has examined the effect of corruption on voting and government trust in the United States over a relatively long period of time. In this dissertation, I aim to answer two primary research questions: how U.S. corruption affects voting and how it affects citizen trust in the government. Using many sources of data for state-level variables, and the American National Election Study (NES) for individual-level variables, I investigate these relationships using multilevel modeling (MLM) of forty-six states and approximately 22,000 individuals in my analysis of voting and forty-one states and about 7,000 individuals in my analysis of political trust. I find that corruption has a small, but significant, negative effect on voting. Surprisingly, I find no effect of corruption on a citizen’s political trust, even after assessing the impact of corruption on four other specifications of trust. I also investigate cross-level interaction effects for each analysis, and find no significant results. I conclude with a discussion of possible explanations for these findings, make policy recommendations with the knowledge gained from this research, and offer suggestions for future investigations.

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Electoral geographers are mostly concerned with mapping the responses of voters to different political candidates, while they also work to explain the factors that influence those responses. Yet most studies do not consider how different geographic contexts can affect the political perceptions of voters. In particular, people who live in close proximity to one another may come to embrace similar beliefs and values, while broader social and economic processes may divide these individuals into separate camps. Thus, electoral studies performed at the local level may produce different results than those done at the regional or national level. In exploring how different scales of analysis can give different interpretations of voting patterns, this research gathered data from a series of elections that took place in Virginia. These elections, which occurred between 2003 and 2006, span a variety of federal and state offices, with each presiding over a certain geographic jurisdiction. The study proceeded to map the results of each election in terms of three different types of geographic areas: precincts, counties, and legislative districts. The maps displayed the majority winners within each of these areas, giving a rough indication of the bases of support for each of the different candidates. The study then determined the number of instances where two neighboring areas both favored the same candidate, as well as the number of cases where they voted for opposing candidates. These data helped to shed light on the autocorrelation structure of voting patterns in Virginia, revealing how people in the same general vicinity tend to vote together. Overall, the results of this study demonstrate that smaller geographic units (e.g., precincts) exhibit greater autocorrelation in voting than do larger areas. This observation agrees with the concept of sectionalism, which asserts that location and culture are key influences on voting behavior. However, the data also suggest that class differences are a major source of electoral cleavage, as people from different social and economic backgrounds tend to settle in different areas. The use of multiple scales of analysis thus presents multiple explanations for the voting trend of a given location. / Master of Science

The purpose of this study is to use Marxist theory of alienation to explain voting patterns among impoverished Southerners. This research is important in explaining the relationship among alienation, religiosity, politics of opposition, and their impact on voting trends in the southern portion of the United States. I will construct a Marxian model based on the literature available and test it by using data in the General Social Survey of 1998. I will construct a concept of class based on the interaction of alienation and income. I will then test it by running multiple linear regressions to see if the hypothesized relationships of positive correlations exist among class and politics of opposition, apathy, and religion. I will also examine the relationship between religion and politics of opposition. And lastly I will see how all of these factors influence political ideology. / Master of Science

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