The Chinese Nationalist Party's (KMT) assets referendum and the anti-corruption referendum took place alongside the Legislative election in January 2008. The same year, the other national referendums on joining UN and returning to UN were held with the Presidential election in March. In the Legislative election, while 59 percent of electorate voted, turnout rate for the referendums are surprisingly low to 26 percent. In the Presidential election, in spite of a high turnout rate of 76 percent, turnout rate for the referendums are merely 36 percent. What is the reason for people to vote in elections but not on referendums? Partisanship probably explains people¡¦s turnout on referendum, but I suspect that there are more factors. This research provides a framework and a model of voting participation in referendum. Base on my analysis of Taiwan¡¦s Election and Democratization Study(TEDS), I find the following: First, Partisanship is the only factor which affect the referendums in the Legislative election and the Presidential election. However, people¡¦s partisanship reflects their values and leads to take or not to take referendum ballots. Other important factors of referendum voting participation are political interest, identity of Taiwanese or Chinese, What newspaper is used to read, unification-independence issue and perspectives on the relation between President and Legislative Yuan. Second, with identity of Taiwanese or Chinese and unification-independence issue, we could infer that attitudes about referendum issue affect referendum voting participation behavior. Finally, by the electors that prefer to check and balance between the executive power and the legislative power likely decide to take referendum ballots, we could assume that some voters who realize and support referendum system intend to vote on referendum.

Due to resource-saving and efficiency consideration, electronic voting (e-voting) gradually replaces traditional paper-based voting in some developed countries. An anonymous e-voting system that can be used in elections with large electorates must meet various security requirements, such as anonymity, uncoercibility, tally correctness, unrecastability, verifiability, and so on. Especially, the uncoercibility property is an essential property which can greatly reduce the possibility of coercion and bribe. Since each voter can obtain one and only one voting receipt in an electronic voting system, coercers or bribers can enforce legal voters to show their voting receipts to identify whether the enforced voters follow their will or not. It turns out that the coercion and bribe will succeed more easily in digital environments than that in traditional paper-based voting. In this dissertation, we analyze four possible scenarios leading to coercion and discover that the randomization property is necessary to blind-signature-based e-voting systems against coercion. Based on this result, we extend our research and come up with two provably secure randomized blind signature schemes from different cryptographic primitives, which can be adopted as key techniques for an electronic voting system against coercion and bribery.

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Due to convenience and efficiency, electronic voting (e-voting) techniques gradually replace traditional paper-based voting activities in some developed countries. A secure anonymous e-voting system has to satisfy many properties, such as completeness, tally correctness, and uncoercibility, where the uncoercibility property is the most difficult one to be achieved. Since each voter can obtain a voting receipt in an electronic voting system, coercion and bribe (vote-buying and vote-selling are included) become more and more serious in electronic voting environments than traditional paper-based voting environments. Unfortunately, most of the solutions, like receipt-freeness or untappable channels, proposed in the literature, are impractical owing to lack of efficiency or too complicated to be implemented. It will make uncoercible e-voting systems unacceptable by the people. In order to cope with the drawbacks of the previous schemes, this thesis will present a generic idea, which is independent of the underlying cryptographic components, on electronic voting to achieve the uncoercibility property and other requirements. The proposed method is an efficient and quite practical solution to match the current environments of electronic voting.

On the subject of what affect voters¡¦ vote choice, political scientists for a long time emphasize three answers: party identification, candidate orientation, and issue orientation. About issue orientation, Rational Choice Theory assumes that human are rational pursuing maximizing self- interests. When voters are making their vote decisions, they would observe the issues positions of competing parties or candidates, comparing with their own positions, and then vote the party or the candidate who can represent their own positions best. Spatial Theory, from Rational Choice Theory, takes those abstract issue positions into some issue space. Both the issue positions of voters and parties could be presented by some points in the space, and the length and direction between the points can represent the differences between issue positions. There are several different models in Spatial Theory, and different models advocate different ways about how voters use the points in issue space to form their evaluations to competing parties or candidates. In this paper, we take the viewpoints of Spatial Theory to research the issue voting behavior of Taiwanese voters. First, we try to know the spatial distribution of voters¡¦ issue positions. Then we inspect the association between voters¡¦ social back- ground elements and issue position. Finally, we test three models of Spatial Theory, proximity model, directional model, and RM mixed model, to know how Taiwanese voters use issue positions to form their party-evaluation.

Abstract Election to provide opportunities and pipelines for political participation, related to the development of political system and the implementation of democratic politics, the regime is peaceful, orderly transfer of tools, is also an important democratic process, which is a democratic country to maintain political legitimacy of the main Methods, but also non-democratic countries in transition towards a democratic system of government an important mechanism, and voting is the most popular political participation of citizens, the most common, is also close to the general public most likely a form of participation. The study use the visit information of Taiwan elections and democratization investigation in 2006 that relating to Kaohsiung Mayor election survey data, in order to investigate factors influencing the choice of the voters from the social psychology study ways to survey the Michigan Model in party Identification, candidate evaluation, campaign issues and other variables in the voting model of the importance. Finally, we attempt to identify influencing the choice of Kaohsiung people to vote deciding factor. This study showed that, the five social background of voters (including the gender, age, ethnic group, educational level, families income) and party Identification, candidate evaluation, campaign issues, ethnic identity, these five variables and four intermediate variables were significantly associated. Particularly, the ethnic identity is a very important effect and these four intermediary variables also have very significant influence for choice of the voters voting. Polynomial logistic regression was used to establish the simple and complete model in order to check variables and intermediary variables between the relations of voter choice. In simple model was found that party Identification, the five candidate evaluation and the three campaign issues affect the voters choice definitely, especially the party Identification, the relatively reliable in the candidate evaluation and the remedial for the Love River, the completion of Singuang Ferry Wharf in the campaign issues, but to understand that ethnic identity with regard to the voters intention was not significant affects. In complete model showed that the nine variables (including the age, ethnic group, educational level, families income and the party identification, more ability to work, to understand that the people demand, relatively reliable, the most enthusiastic service to the people, remedial for the Love River, the completion of Singuang Ferry Wharf and the incident of walking fees) affect the voting choice of the voters. In particular, age, party identification, have more ability to work, relatively reliable, remedial for the Love River, the completion of Singuang Ferry Wharf were the most important explanatory variables and have significant relevance to the election with the support of the mayor candidates. Party Identification, candidate evaluation, campaign issues, and the ethnic identity of these four variables is a pretty good model that ability to explain the voting behavior. Key words: Voting choice, Party Identification, Candidate evaluation, Campaign issues, Ethnic identity

This research explores whether ¡§party identification, candidate orientation, ethnic identification and issue orientation,¡¨ the four intermediate variables of election, are correlated to the results of Taipei mayor elections in 2002 and 2006. The data in this research are mainly based on the interview broadly carried out to collect facts for ¡§the study on democratization through election¡¨ executed by Professors Huang Chi and Huang Siu-Twen in 2002 and 2005. It is with these data that this research compares the voting behavior of the voters in the two mayor elections in an attempt to find out the deviation of election for further studies. Each individual voter has of his own a variety of social backgrounds which inevitably form to some extent a connection with each of the four intermediate variables. In examination of the connection just mentioned, it is obvious that of all the voter¡¦s backgrounds the place of birth is probably the most potential and influential, and has a significant connection with each of the four factors. However, an evaluation of the connection between the voting preference and the four factors indicates that the four factors are apparently convincing in justification of the results of the second Taipei mayor election in 2006. In addition, a detailed analysis of the connections between voter¡¦s social backgrounds and his voting preference shows that the voter¡¦s place of birth plays an important role in making his voting preference. Other social backgrounds except the voter¡¦s educational level are slightly related to the voting preference in the Taipei mayor election in 2006. Based on the analysis mentioned above, it is understood that there are many variables which will influence the voting preference. Of all the intermediate variables, however, the four factors of party identification candidate orientation ethnic identification and issue orientation are perhaps most crucial and decisive. By means of the analysis and evaluation of the four factors functioning in the recent elections, it is discovered that the people here in Taiwan are relatively better educated and have made a tremendous progress in democracy. It seems that Taiwan has already developed into a nation of two-party politics.

<p>The aim of this study is to investigate how non-profit engagement influence voting in school election, but also how the school has influenced the pupils to vote and if there are any differences between a big and a small town.</p><p>The methods which have been used for this study are quantitative and qualitative, both questionnaires and interviews. To be able to see differences between a big and a small town the study was carried out in one school from each category of town.</p><p>By examine the empirical material and analyse it with theories which are used for this study we have come to the conclusion that there are no obvious differences between pupils in the big town and the small town. Pupils in both schools were pretty engaged in associations, though had the pupils from the small town some higher level of engagement. Moreover, both schools had a high participation for the election. The result of the study showed that there were no noticeable tendencies on if the pupils choose to vote depending on engagement in associations.</p><p>Furthermore, both schools were very engaged in the school election indeed. The small town school did not give a connection between the school’s engagement and the pupils’ willingness to vote. However the big town school had a greater connection between the school’s engagement and the pupils’ willingness to vote.</p>

Thesis (M.A.), Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2000. / Bibliography: leaves 92-95.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2004. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 153-155).