Suchergebnisse

This article examines how immigrant women's social networks affect their propensity to vote and to participate in unconventional political activities, as well as their knowledge of politics and government services and programs. Our primary source of data is a telephone survey of women living in Canada's two largest metropolitan areas. Our findings show that contrary to the social capital literature, bonding ties do not exert strong negative effects on political incorporation, while bridging ties are not as helpful as hypothesized. What is important for immigrant women are the resources that are embedded in their social networks.

With over 45% of the popular vote in the provincial election of 2009, the New Democratic Party elected members in 31 of Nova Scotia's 52 constituencies – enough to form a majority government in the House of Assembly. For the first time in Nova Scotia's history, neither the Liberals nor the Progressive Conservatives hold power. Given the growing convergence among the parties' policy platforms, the change in government does not indicate an ideological shift in the province. Instead, it is a signal of general frustration with the two traditional governing parties and a consequent willingness to try something new.

The authors investigate self-reported voter turnout and ethnic political activity across four-plus generations of Mexican Americans. Using a 1999 national survey, multivariate results indicate that the likelihood of Mexican American voting increases largely in a monotonic manner across generations while participation in ethnic political activity begins to decline after having one parent born in the United States. These results raise the question of whether disadvantaged ethnic populations necessarily benefit politically from assimilating given that gains in voting that accrue across generations are accompanied by declines in ethnic political activity among later generations.

Given the upturn in young-voter turnout in 2004, this study updates an analysis of the 2000 election to determine if coverage in youth-oriented magazines remained superficial, strategic, and cynical. Quantity of coverage increased 69% over 2000 (coverage in Rolling Stone increased 300%) despite a decrease in women's magazines' coverage. There was no difference in the largely strategic, cynical, and biased coverage between the two elections. Despite a "wartime" election, the magazines rarely published stories focusing on the Iraq war. The study suggests that resurgent interest in politics among young people was not mirrored in popular magazines they read regularly.

The "vote" urban residents cast when they make decisions about public services has implications for service delivery in local government. We utilize probability data from one of the nation's largest municipalities to explore potential gender disparities in willingness to pay for local public services: whether men and women differ in their general orientation toward paying for services; whether any gender gaps are exacerbated in particular service areas; and whether any gender disparities have implications for community governance. Men and women report strong predisposition to paying generally, although glaring gender gaps exist that are both theoretically and practically insightful.

Résumé Cet article fondé sur un important corpus de recherche montre la place spécifique qu'occupe la permanence aussi bien pour le député que pour ses usagers. Pour ces derniers, qui sont le plus souvent proches politiquement du député, elle est avant tout un guichet de type social. Les interventions à caractère individuel priment sur celles faites à titre collectif. Pour le député, la permanence est une institution indispensable mais dont les effets – qui sont pourtant réels – ont un impact difficile à quantifier s'agissant de l'amélioration du vote personnel en sa faveur.

In the January issue of PS, papers by William Mayer
and by Lonna Atkeson and Cherie Maestas investigate reforms of the
party nomination procedure for presidential candidates. In order to
avoid the amplification of name recognition and early fundraising
advantages, as these effects resulted from the "frontloading" of
state nominations ('08 Tsunami Tuesday), broader "spacing" between
primary dates may be required. But such an expansion of the
sequential voting principle carries an unfortunate disadvantage
ignored in the papers. This disadvantage is the, however unintended,
consequence of candidates manipulating their program in accordance
to methods through which votes are being cast.

Résumé Étudier les élections municipales dans les très petites communes (moins de 2 500 habitants) offre l'occasion de voir comment les électeurs s'approprient les règles électorales. Le mode de scrutin en vigueur dans ces communes accorde aux électeurs une grande liberté puisqu'ils peuvent par exemple rayer, panacher ou voter pour une liste complète. Cependant, l'enquête réalisée à L. révèle que les subtilités de ces élections sont inégalement connues des habitants ; suivant leur degré d'extériorité (ou d'insertion) au village, les électeurs font un usage différent de ce mode de scrutin.

In an assessment of representative democracy in Australian local government, this paper considers long-run changes in forms of political representation, methods of vote counting, franchise arrangements, numbers of local government bodies and elected representatives, as well as the thorny question of constitutional recognition. This discussion is set against the background of ongoing tensions between the drive for economic efficiency and the maintenance of political legitimacy, along with more deep-seated divisions emerging from the legal relationship between local and state governments and the resultant problems inherent in local government autonomy versus state intervention.

The October 2008 issue of PS published a symposium
of presidential and congressional forecasts made in the summer
leading up to the election. This article is an assessment of the
accuracy of their models.At its most basic level, the Economic Expectations and
Time-for-a-Change Model performed well in that it successfully
forecast a Barack Obama victory. It was in estimating the two-party
vote that the model underperformed. The point estimate was off by
just under five percentage points. While not terrible, the model did
not perform as well as it did in earlier years.

In this paper we examine the impact of tax contracts as a novel institution on elections, policies, and welfare. We consider a political game in which three parties compete to form the government. Parties have policy preferences about the level of public-good provision and benefit from perks when in office. A government raises taxes for both purposes. We show that tax contracts yield moderate policies and lead to lower perks by avoiding the formation of grand coalitions in order to win government. Moreover, in polarized societies they unambigously improve the welfare of the median voter.

The pay-as-you-go social security system, which suffers from dwindling labor force, can benefit from immigrants with birth rates that exceed the native-born birth rates in the host country. Thus, a social security system provides effectively an incentive to liberalize migration policy. The paper examines a political- economy, inter-generational, mechanism through which the social security system influences voter attitudes in favor of more liberal immigration regime. We demonstrate that the Markov equilibrium, with social security, consists of more liberal migration policies, than the corresponding Markov equilibrium with no social security.

International audience ; It usually happens that the alternatives to be voted on in committees are chosen or sponsored by some particularly active committee members. For example, in parliaments, some representatives and some government members are known to be especially active in introducing bills on which the whole committee will later vote. It appears that parliamen- tary agendas--namely amendment and successive elimination voting rules--are vulnerable to strategic behavior by groups of individuals introducing motions which are not their most preferred alternatives. Our aim in this paper is to evaluate how frequently this type of be- havior arises.

For decades economists and political scientists have sought to identify variables that influence the electoral success of public officials. Most of the existing literature focuses on the determinants of federal elections. This study examines elections to the Virginia House of Delegates and finds that campaign expenditures, incumbency status, party affiliation, and district voting tendencies all are significant predictors of electoral success. Additionally, this study finds that the returns to campaign expenditures, in terms of the additional votes that they generate, vary based on incumbency, party affiliation, number of opponents in the race, and over time.

In this paper we examine the impact of tax contracts as a novel institution on elections, policies, and welfare. We consider a political game in which three parties compete to form the government. Parties have policy preferences about the level of public-good provision and benefit from perks when in office. A government raises taxes for both purposes. We show that tax contracts yield moderate policies and lead to lower perks by avoiding the formation of grand coalitions in order to win government. Moreover, in polarized societies they unambiguously improve the welfare of the median voter.