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This study examines the mechanisms through which the ruling party won a plurality of votes using a combination of legal changes and manipulative practices during the 2012 parliamentary election in Ukraine. Legal changes in electoral rules—the replacement of proportional representation to a mixed system—helped the ruling party weaken the opposition parties. These changes enabled the ruling party to engage in manipulation and fraud during campaigning and on election day by suppressing competition, crowding out the races with "technical" parties and "clone" candidates, and manipulating the composition of electoral commissions. The change of electoral system also enabled outright fraud on election day. A combination of these techniques disrupted both the contestation and participation dimensions of democracy, effectively pushing Ukraine into a state of competitive authoritarianism.

Research for the EUDO Citizenship Observatory Country Reports has been jointly supported, at various times, by the European Commission grant agreements JLS/2007/IP/CA/009 EUCITAC and HOME/2010/EIFX/CA/1774 ACIT, by the European Parliament and by the British Academy Research Project CITMODES (both projects co-directed by the EUI and the University of Edinburgh).

Between 20 and 22 May 2014, over five million Malawians participated in the fifth election since the re-introduction of multiparty politics in 1994. For the first time since 1994 voters simultaneously cast ballots for president, members of parliament, and local government councilors. Turnout was consistent with earlier multiparty presidential and parliamentary elections, with 71% of registered voters casting votes. Although election day passed peacefully at most polling centers, there were isolated cases of violence in Malawi's two largest cities of Blantyre and Lilongwe as voters protested shortages of voting materials at several polling stations. This forced the Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC) to extend voting for an additional two days in 45 of 4445 polling centers. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

The 2012 Constituency Commission report has recommended a reduction in the number of Dail deputies from 166 to 158 and the number of general election constituencies from 43 to 40, while bringing about changes - some very fundamental in scope - to the majority of the existing Dail constituencies. These changes are detailed in this article, while being placed in the context of previous electoral boundary amendments throughout the history of the Irish state and the processes employed in other states, such as the United Kingdom. The oft quoted contention that the 2012 boundary revisions are the most considerable in scope since those of 1980 is tested and proven with reference to the use of the Kavanagh index of constituency change (KICC scores), with these KICC scores also employed to highlight the regions and constituencies that have been most prone to boundary amendments over the past three decades. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractIn this note, we revisit the work of Carson and Crespinto examine the effect of different redistricting plans on competitiveness in U.S. House elections. Similar to the previous results, our probit estimates on an expanded dataset that includes redistricting cycles from 1972 to 2012 reveal that commission and court-drawn districts experience more competition on average than those drawn by legislatures. These results provide additional support for the hypothesis that one way to increase the competitiveness of congressional elections is to allow extra-legislative bodies to draw congressional district boundaries.

This study essentially considered the relevance of governance networks in election administration in Nigerian. It was acknowledged in the study that governance involves a new process of governing; or a changed condition of ordered rule, or the new method by which society is governed. Governance networks were seen in the study as instruments of public policy-making, in which policy-processes take place. Meta-governance was accepted to be the governance of governance, a tool for steering processes in self-regulating governance networks; and also accepted to be about both facilitating and constraining policy processes. It was upheld in the study that the most critical element of network governance is coordination. But in meta-governance, the most critical requirement goes beyond coordination. In this dimension, in election administration in Nigeria for instance, the meta-governor must be a repository of national interest. And indeed, Nigeria's election administration requires a mainstream interest of governance networks. The consummation of the interests of the governance networks would be the dilution of the influence of political leadership on the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). A meta-governing electoral commission is not in any way an absurdity under Nigeria's democratic evolution. However, this meta-governing electoral administrator will not be a creation of a partisan political leadership but a natural fruition of the actions of the governance networks. DOI:10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n9p177

AbstractThere is a substantial body of literature on nation‐building that, from a variety of theoretical approaches, examines the role of symbolic constructs in the process of construction and consolidation of new nation‐states. Among these works, the dramatic and symbolic aspects of election and their function in the nation‐building project have been investigated by political scientists and anthropologists alike. However, analysis of electoral emblems as constitutive elements in the nation‐building process has been largely missing from most studies of nation‐building and official nationalism. A case study of postindependence India suggests how national belonging was also made to hinge upon on competent democratic participation of the masses in the political life of the country. Central to this process of identity work was the establishment of an independent Election Commission and of strict rules for the design, selection and allotment of election emblems. Conventional accounts have argued that these procedures were introduced primarily for the benefit of the uneducated masses who were suddenly invited to participate in India's democratic process. I argue against this simplistic interpretation. Far from being only tools for the simplification of electoral processes, India's election symbols were one of India's institutional mechanisms designed to nurture the development of a correct democratic conduct and therefore ultimately contributing to the Nehruvian national project.