Das Ziel der Arbeit besteht darin, die Einstellung der Wiener Bevölkerung zu e Democracy, e Partizipation und e Voting zu ermitteln. Gleichzeitig ist zu erläutern, ob die Wiener Vertrauen in diese neuen Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien haben und wie kompetent sie im Umgang mit den neuen Medien sind. Dabei stellt sich auch die Frage nach der Existenz einer "digital divide" (Digitale Kluft), wobei es für uns wichtig ist herauszufinden, ob der Zugang zu und die Kompetenz im Umgang mit dem Internet von demographischen Variablen abhängig sind und wie damit umgegangen werden kann. Um diesbezügliche Kennzahlen herauszufinden, wird ein Blick auf die quantitativen Nutzungszahlen geworfen. Einleitend werden die Grundbegriffe und Definitionen von e Government und e Democracy beschrieben. Danach werden die Möglichkeiten, die mit Hilfe der Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologie den Bürger in den politischen Meinungsbildungsprozess einbeziehen können, dargestellt. Maßgeblich ist dabei, einerseits, das e Voting als eine weitere Option neben den bestehenden Möglichkeiten der persönlichen oder brieflichen Stimmabgabe, und andererseits, die elektronische Deliberation, welche eine aktive und eine passive elektronische Partizipation umfaßt. Das bedeutet, die Bürger nehmen aktiv an der Diskussion politischer Themen teil bzw. bringen ihre Meinungen ein, wie sie sich auch passiv über solche Themen informieren. Es ist anzunehmen, dass mit e Voting nicht nur der elektronische Vorgang der Stimmabgabe, sondern auch ein begleitendes, interaktives, behördliches e-Informationsangebot eingeführt werden soll. / Series: Working Papers on Information Systems, Information Business and Operations

This thesis explores subjective and objective understandings of civic duty, obligation and good citizenship. Despite the importance of these drivers of behaviour, a lack of empirical understanding about what these drivers are and how they are understood has left a significant gap in our understanding of voting behaviour. My research contributes to the field by examining three central themes; Are duty, obligation and good citizenship understood the same? Are one or more of these traits suitable for cross-national research? Can a new conceptual model of civic duty help further the use of civic duty in studies of voting behaviour? In order to do this, this thesis analyses the following issues: (1) objectively exploring duty, obligation and good citizenship (2) analysing subjective understandings of these concepts (3) demonstrating individual level drivers of these concepts (4) demonstrating the impact of institutions, and cross-national differences have upon duty, obligation and good citizenship (5) showing how these concepts relate to voting behaviour (6) by testing and proving that a new approach to measuring civic duty can provide a model that explains not only long term immutable voting habits, but why individuals may vote out of duty sometimes, and abstain at others and (7) finally providing substantial evidence from what is an exploratory study to help in the formation of future representative research and to demonstrate the importance of taking civic duty seriously in forthcoming voting behaviour research. Using the theoretical and philosophical literature, I argue that despite the empirical literature treating obligation, good citizenship and civic duty as the same concept and driver of voting behaviour, that individuals understand these traits uniquely, and that they are all separate motivators, with duty being contingent on external forces (social capital) and obligation being contingent on personal or inward pressures. I argue that given the limited literature on good citizenship, there is no clear idea of what it means and that good citizenship will be contingent on what an individual deems to be "good". Finally, I argue that old models of civic duty are outdated, and that a new conceptual framework of duty needs to be introduced to accurately demonstrate how individuals understand it, and actually demonstrate its impact upon individual level voting behaviour. Using data from a pilot study, with an embedded survey experiment (N=735) collected in the United Kingdom, the United States, New Zealand, Australia and Ireland, I demonstrate that not only are duty, obligation and good citizenship understood differently, but the drivers of the concepts are significantly different. While obligation shows no relationship to voting behaviour within or across countries, good citizenship appears to be a good driver of second order elections while civic duty appears to drive first order and high saliency elections. Duty appears to be contingent upon external factors, while good citizenship appears to be contingent upon the behaviour of politicians, and citizenship education suggesting a social contract type relationship. Institutional factors appear to indirectly impact voting behaviour with a mediating effect on the strengths of duty and good citizenship. Finally, evidence suggests that previous notions of an "immutable" sense of duty are unfounded, and that an individuals’ sense of duty is contingent on a range of internal and external pressures. The first empirical chapter focuses on individual level understandings of duty, obligation and good citizenship, before the second empirical chapter expands this to look at cross-national differences in the understanding of, and drivers of duty obligation and good citizenship. Finally, the third empirical analyses a new model of civic duty and suggests that its previous use has been limited by ineffective measures. While the evidence presented in this thesis is exploratory and not generalisable or representative of any of the countries sampled, the evidence from the sample strongly suggests that future development of the study of civic duty, and further analysis of how duty, obligation and good citizenship are understood in representative samples are needed to confirm the findings presented in this thesis, and build upon what is a successful pilot study. This research finds its limitations in the number of survey items available to build a complete picture of all drivers of individual understandings of duty, obligation and good citizenship.

Several recent studies on information shortcuts and electoral vote choice show that challenges to classic democratic theory are largely exaggerated. Namely, there is now convincing evidence towards Americans having the ability to cast votes that are representative of their own political preferences. Research on such heuristics largely depend on presidential election data however, and it remains uncertain how voters respond to less salient elections where candidate information may not be as apparent and electoral communication efforts are more dismal. This study utilizes a voting correctly measure previously developed to analyze the ability of voters during Senate elections. Special attention in this study is given towards individual characteristics and campaign characteristics. First, individual characteristics, such as social and demographic variables, are expected to have an effect on voting correctly based on previous political behavior studies noting group disparities among political interest, knowledge, engagement, and turnout. Second, campaign characteristics are hypothesized to have an effect on quality voting based on literature explaining how campaigns matter in an informational sense. The findings reported in this study provide lackluster evidence towards the ability of voters to make preferred decisions based on limited information and minimal campaign effects on correct voting.

This study examines whether firms' decisions to offer company stock in defined contribution (DC) plans are explained by managers' corporate control motives. Using a large sample of proxy voting outcomes, I find that employee ownership in DC plans is significantly and positively associated with the level of voting support for management sponsored proposals. This suggests that managers encourage employee DC holdings in company stock in order to receive higher voting support in favor of management. The effects of employee ownership on voting outcomes are significantly greater in subsample tests than in full sample tests: management proposals opposed by Institutional Shareholder Services, management proposals of close votes, director election votes receiving more than 20% of votes withheld, and say-on-pay frequency proposals.

Neste artigo utiliza-se a reforma constitucional brasileira de 1988 para investigar o impacto da extensão do direito de voto sobre a composição dos gastos públicos. Posterior ao processo de democratização a nova constituição estendeu o direito de voto aos analfabetos, o que representa uma mudança exógena na composição do eleitorado proporcionando uma clara estratégia de identificação. Uma vez que as taxas de analfabetismo variam consideravelmente entre os municípios, pode-se testar se políticas de gastos públicos favoráveis aos mais pobres sofreram elevações mais acentuadas nos municípios com maiores taxas iniciais de analfabetismo. Os resultados obtidos sugerem que o gasto com transferências se elevou mais acentuadamente naqueles municípios que exibiram maior percentual de eleitores analfabetos. Tudo o mais constante, uma mudança de um desvio padrão na taxa de analfabetismo está associada a uma elevação de 1,5 pontos percentuais na razão transferências/gasto total. / In the first paper, we explore Brazils 1988 Constitutional reform to investigate how a major change in the franchise affected the pattern and level of public spending. After redemocratization, the new Constitution extended the franchise to illiterate citizens previously not allowed to cast their votes. This exogenous change in the composition of the electorate is the base of our identification strategy. Since illiteracy rates varied substantially across municipalities, we are able to test whether pro-poor public expenditures increased more in municipalities with higher initial illiteracy rates. We do find that transfers rose more sharply in municipalities harboring more illiterate voters. The second paper studies the relationship between democracy and growth in a crosscountry analysis using data for years 1950-2005. Using econometric duration models to evaluate the impact of modernization hypothesis we find evidence supporting the exogenous modernization theory, in the sense that democracy has more duration in a richest and more educated country. But the duration of dictatorship isnt reduced by economic growth or rise of educational attainment. The last paper surveys the literature about the empirical comparison between directional and proximity models. We discuss the data collected process, estimation strategy and results, focusing in the post 1999 works. Theres no indication of superiority for neither of the theories, suggesting that the field is still active.

This thesis explores the role of the media in voting behaviour in Turkey in terms of the 2010 constitutional referendum. The media is a very important tool for both providing information and entertainment for people in Turkey. Thus, it can be claimed that the media are very powerful and have a large influence on audiences. In this study, I seek to explore the media’s power over citizens’ political choices. In other words, this thesis aims to reveal the affect the media content has on voters. To achieve this goal, I have chosen to analyse the 2010 referendum because of its special characteristics, which differentiate it from other referendums and elections in Turkey. Although there are many studies which examine the media effects on voting in the literature, these generally concentrate on developed democracies. Furthermore, general elections and presidential elections are more common in the field. The number of studies searching for the media’s effect on referendum voting in Turkey is very limited. For this reason, I prioritise referendums and the media systems to provide a better understanding of the Turkish case, as a developing democratic country. In addition to this, media content and public opinion constitute the main data for the methodological part of the study. In order to identify the influence of the media in the 2010 referendum, I employ a three-step method including firstly, an analysis of the public opinion survey data to understand voter preferences; secondly, media content analysis to see the media coverage on the referendum issue and the salience of the referendum in the media and; as the third and final step of the analysis, I link the public opinion data and the media content. My contribution to the field is the analysis of the media effects on referendum voting with a systematic and an extensive methodological approach, which is supported by the analysis of the media system in Turkey, as an example of developing country. I expect to contribute a comprehensive analysis of the referendum voting in respect of the media nested with the voter preferences to the literature on politics in Turkey.

The aim of this thesis is to overcome the simplistic idea of homo economicus, by exploring the voting behaviour of heterogeneous agents whose actions are also influenced by their view of social justice and altruism. The thesis consists of four essays which explore the role of non-economic variables in defining individuals preferences. The first essay develops the path-breaking approach initiated by Alesina and Angeletos (2005). It takes in consideration citizens' demand for fairness, and analyses their political choices in a multidimensional scenario. We show how including fairness explains various observed correlations between inequality, redistribution and growth. The second essay analyses the connection between ideology and public schooling. It presents a model in which individuals care about their personal wealth, as well as about the public expenditure, which is allocated by the government between education and the public good. The third essay deepens the analysis of the connection between the ideas of fairness and redistribution and how these evolve over time, and considers a society in which two instruments are available: an income tax and a wealth tax. To avoid double taxation of income, a tax differential is computed, which means that the income tax is subtracted from the wealth tax. The fourth essay analyses the current British Government's "Big Society" plan, which is based on the idea that granting more freedom to local communities and volunteers will compensate for a withdrawal of public agencies and spending. The main conclusion that can be drawn from this thesis is that ideology and altruism deeply influence individuals' preferences and behaviour and can affect political elections and economic fundamentals.

Magister Philosophiae - MPhil / Despite the fact that South Africa in terms of its Constitution and foreign policy believes in making human rights central to its activities, on many occasions in the UNHRC, it has been found voting opposite to these values. In this regard, it has been found aligning itself with the countries known for poor human rights records. Subsequently, this raises the question of whether the current foreign policy of South Africa is still driven by the high regard for human rights. As a result, this paper endeavours to look specifically at the voting records and patterns of the Government of South Africa as a member of the UN Human Rights Council (2008-2010 and 2013-2015). It will assess such a record with a view to determine whether the Government's foreign policy is in compliance with its international human rights obligations.

This thesis identifies and examines factors that shape voters' choice in Maxixe district in order to understand how voters decide in general in Mozambique. It is a case study of Maxixe district, one of the fourteen districts of Inhambane Province in southern Mozambique, which is historically a stronghold for the ruling Frelimo party. It is an interesting region for study because it is an economic hub and a cosmopolitan town, with a multi-ethnic population comprising three ethnolinguistic groups, yet at times it has been assumed to be a homogeneous region. As such, one cannot rush to conclude that ethnicity plays a major role in politics and voting behaviour. Yet no studies on voting behaviour have been conducted in this region. The study is based on four theoretical frameworks commonly used in election studies, namely the sociological, socio-psychological, rational choice and the cognitive awareness approaches. Methodologically, it prioritises the social constructivism paradigm, case study research design and qualitative research approach. Findings confirm that ethnicity does not determine party choice or voting behaviour in Maxixe. Age forms an important cleavage among voters as the elderly always vote for Frelimo while younger voters are more independent. Party identification influences voting choice to some extent, but mainly for strategic purposes. While the economy determines voting behaviour to some extent, voters do not use their dissatisfaction to punish the incumbent ruling party and political sophistication does not influence voting. / Thesis (DPhil)--University of Pretoria, 2017. / Political Sciences / DPhil / Unrestricted

In a representative democracy the people's representatives are expected to do what the people would do if they were present in person. To attain this ideal requires that the legislature in its composition embodies the politically relevant diversity that exists within society, and that the legislature has power to act. These two requirements are prevalent among significant theories of representation, post- Charter court rulings, and the commonly accepted expectations of the people themselves. Typically, the composition of the BC legislature is not representative; and the legislature lacks power to act. The Single Member Plurality electoral system manufactures majorities in the legislature where none exist among the people. Most voters are not represented in the legislature, and the artificial majorities give cabinet undue power. When cabinet has too much power, the concept of responsible government is subverted, MLAs lose their independence, and are beholden to their political party, instead of their constituents. Replacing the Single Member Plurality system with the Single Transferable Vote has the potential to give voters more choice, waste fewer votes, bring greater diversity into the legislature, lessen party discipline, weaken the power of the Premier and cabinet, increase the power of the legislature, restore responsible government, render government more responsive to changing public demands, reconnect government to the people, and give voters power over their representatives. Our electoral system is designed to benefit political parties - not people. Therefore, change will not likely originate with parties and party activists. It must come from the people themselves, aided perhaps by the courts. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate