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Awareness of voter dissatisfaction has prompted various attempts at institutional reform in Westminster political systems. Such reforms have attempted to increase the influence of backbench members, strengthen the role of committees and improve opportunities for public participation. Those pushing for change argue that such changes will have a positive impact on popular estimations of politics and the political system. In the absence of a clear understanding of the predictors of voter dissatisfaction, however, it is not clear what reformers are reacting to, nor what voters see as the source of their malaise. This paper examines voter satisfaction with democracy in Westminster systems in an effort to determine which factors can best account for declining confidence, satisfaction, efficacy and trust in politics. It pays particular attention to the influence of electoral systems, the role of politicians, and other civic institutions to determine whether the Westminster system itself is producing citizen malaise, or whether certain design features can be held responsible. In its analysis the paper relies on data from election studies in Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young adults have since long been identified as a group of the electorate least likely to vote. Recent research suggests, however, that turnout among young cohorts is declining rapidly in some countries. It does so at a much faster pace than the turnout among older age groups. In sum, today's youth turns out at lower levels than their parents or grandparents did when they were young. Consequently, the turnout gap between younger and older voters enlarges. The trend towards a widening generational divide has been particularly well documented in Canada and Great Britain. In other countries, such as Sweden and the Netherlands, the turnout difference between younger and older citizens is however stable through time. This paper contributes to the literature on youth participation by assessing the age gap in voter turnout in a longitudinal and comparative way. After observing patterns in the age gap in turnout, competing hypotheses explaining trends are put to the test. Using time-series cross-sectional analysis, the impact of both characteristics of elections and characteristics of voters on the age gap are assessed. The focus is exclusively on Western democracies for which the age gap can be estimated through election survey data. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political disengagement of young people is a common theme across many of the mature democracies. One element of this disengagement is a cluster of characteristics and proclivities that might be termed "political inattentiveness." This inattentiveness among the young comprises three key elements: low levels of political knowledge, a relative lack of political interest and inattention to politics in the media. This paper seeks to advance our understanding of political inattentiveness among the young by assembling longitudinal data for six countries: Canada, the United States, Britain, Sweden, the Netherlands and Norway. The surveys are used to trace differences between young and old in political knowledge, interest and media attentiveness from the 1950s to the present day. This longitudinal and comparative analysis helps establish which dimensions of political attentiveness have changed most notably, the timing of these changes and the degree of cross-national divergence and convergence. In addition to the empirical contribution, the paper also assesses the implications of the findings for different theoretical accounts of political disengagement among the young. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines homogeneity and heterogeneity in preferences for public policy, across income and education levels and party identification, and across policy domains in the US, UK, and Canada. Do preferences differ across segments of the public at particular points in time? What about over time â€" do we observe a uniform swing across different groups (parallel publics) or does the flow of opinion differ across party, income, and education? Our data on public preferences for government spending show cross-sectional heterogeneity across certain sub-aggregates in some domains, but overall very high levels of over-time homogeneity in trends across groups. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite limited electoral and governmental reward, third parties commonly contest elections under single-member-district plurality (SMD-p) electoral rules. Even under the strong party duopoly of the United States, third parties continually contest local, state, and national elections. In this paper, we relax the assumption that third party candidates are motivated solely by the rewards of office and examine the incentives for them to contest elections under variations in electoral volatility and competition. We propose a curvilinear (U-shaped) relationship between electoral competition and third party participation. When electoral competition is either very low or very high we expect the number of third party candidates to be high, due to increased opportunity to draw attention to policy issues or affect the election outcome. We expect a positive relationship between electoral volatility and third party candidacies, since high volatility signals a de-aligned electorate. We test our claims using district-level data in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States from 1980-2000. The results of negative binomial regressions indicate that third parties are more likely to contest elections when electoral uncertainty is high. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares how the legal academies in Canada, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand shaped the roles that their respective courts assumed under the Canadian Charter, the British Human Rights Act, and New Zealand?s new bill of rights. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares secessionist mobilization strategies in federal and unitary environments. The cases are Scotland, Quebec, and South Carolina. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a formal model to predict the circumstances under which voters (in plurality elections) will abandon their most-preferred candidate to cast a PROTEST VOTE. We then test these predictions on survey data from Canada and the UK. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electoral competition has long been held as a required and essential component of a smoothly functioning democracy. This common wisdom suggests that representative responsiveness is likely to decrease as the level of general election competitiveness falls off. The closer the election the more uncertain the incumbent member of the legislature is about her ability to get reelected, which motivates her to work harder to win votes (i.e. campaign harder, spend more time in the district, secure more pork projects, modify voting behavior in the legislature, etc.). In turn these activities should increase voter satisfaction and efficacy. This final linkage is what we take up here. Namely, do voters in districts that have competitive elections demonstrate higher levels of efficacy and higher levels of satisfaction with the representative and with the legislature itself? Using survey data from the most recent elections in three western democracies with single member district systems (UK, Canada, and the U.S.) we find no such connection. Rather, the winner/loser dichotomy is primal. Electoral competitiveness has no measurable effect on voters either in terms of satisfaction with their representative or with more abstract variables like efficacy. This finding has important implications for democratic theory and for redistricting. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]