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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]

: This paper is an investigation of the judicial norm of consensus in four national high courts: the High Court of Australia, the Supreme Court of Canada, the South African Supreme Court of Appeals (and Constitutional Court) and the House of Lords (Law Lords) in the United Kingdom. Research on consensual norms in the U.S. Supreme Court is outlined first. Then, after reviewing the methods of cointegration and suggesting an alternative to the Caldeira and Zorn (1998) procedure, this paper will explore the applicability of these methods to the location of consensual norms in different institutional contexts. Specifically, the importance of opinion-writing tradition and institutional legitimacy will be highlighted. Finally, aggregated opinion-writing data for each court will be analyzed. The results illustrate the importance of considering institutional variations when searching for evidence of consensual norms cross-nationally. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares recent court decisions regarding alien detention in three countries. It is a case study that explores the effects of international forces on courts, and examines ways in which comparative constitutionalism can illuminate the dynamics of immigration policy. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decade there has been a proliferation of research on the relationship between diversity and redistributive social welfare policy. In conceptualizing the independent variable, diversity, the paper argues for distinctions between diversity as richness and diversity as evenness. In the dependent variable, redistributive welfare policy, the paper argues for looking beyond measures of generalized trust and spending on welfare to measures such as labor market policy and electoral reform. In terms of causal mechanisms, the paper argues for looking as well at the organizational capacity of the minority groups and policy framing. The usefulness of such concepts are demonstrated by looking at the case of Australia in the early 20th century which faced considerable diversity in that 20 percent of its population was Catholic, a minority population stigmatized by many Protestants. Yet up to the 1930s, Australia was one of the most progressive nations in the world, with considerable unionization, electorally successful labor parties, compulsory voting, and high levels of social welfare spending, while simultaneously raising Catholics to levels of political representation never before seen in Australian history. Brief comparisons with the United States and Canada are drawn. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I develop a formal model of vertical party integration in federal systems. Vertical integration occurs when candidates for different legislative bodies in the same area share party labels. Parties face a tradeoff between the economies of scale that come with a common party organization and the need to be responsive to the preferences of voters within their jurisdiction. As the distributions of preferences within sub-national units diverge, this tradeoff becomes more acute for politicians in sub-national units with relatively extreme preferences..x000d..x000d.I use this model to analyze the relationship between national and sub-national party systems in Canada and Australia. Parties in Australia retain a high level of integration between the state and federal levels, while in Canada parallel party systems have develop in many provinces. Applying a hierarchical Bayesian model to national survey, I provide evidence that the sub-national distributions of preferences are more dissimilar in Canada than in Australia and that vertical party integration is weakest in those provinces and states that are the most unusual relative to the national distribution of preferences, consistent with the predictions of the model. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Systematic comparison of news coverage of men and women candidates across democratic systems allows for comparison of how the news media influence the election of women to political office, and how political institutions and context may influence gender differences in newspaper coverage of election candidates. We compare newspaper coverage of male and female candidates in the most recent national elections in Australia, Canada, and the United States. We find gender differences in the amount and type of coverage of contemporary campaigns, and these differences take different forms under different political contexts. This research represents the initial piece of a larger project in which we will examine patterns in coverage across a larger set of post-industrial democracies, over a series of elections. In this way, our initial findings remain tentative, and our final conclusions will be based on a larger body of evidence. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Men are often portrayed in various types of media with more facial prominence than women (?face-ism?). We found that face-ism also exists in online presentations of politicians in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Norway. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]