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The article explores the role of politicians in representative democracies and their impact on decision-making processes. It highlights the potential for bad apples, or unethical and incompetent politicians, to compromise the democratic process. The article suggests that conscientious politicians may need to compromise their moral convictions to resist bad apples and gain necessary support. It also discusses the benefits of public deliberation in empowering politicians to make informed compromises and resist the influence of bad apples. The article emphasizes the complexities and challenges of achieving political competence in representative democracies. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Dados - Revista de Ciências Sociais is the property of DADOS and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In a democratic regime, voting is crucial to making collective decisions. Unfortunately, although this activity has great significance and value, little effort has been made to improve the way we vote. Paper ballots are still the most used method, although this method is relatively simple, brings many inconveniences, and represents a contradiction to the modern world and its advances. This paper mostly focuses on a review study of blockchain-based voting systems. It aims at identifying the strategies and the guidelines as well as provides a comprehensive end-to-end electronic voting system based on blockchain, with the help of cryptographic techniques such as zero-knowledge proofs to improve privacy. The novelty of this paper is that we tackle the limitations of electronic voting systems found in the literature, including cost, identity management, and scalability problems. Our purpose is to provide key elements for organizations on how to design their proper electronic voting system based on blockchain technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What drives partisan competition over the pursuit of legislative majorities in contemporary congressional elections? While conventional wisdom suggests that the chances of a legislative majority is largely predicated on the public's ideological policy preferences or national standing of the president, there is little work assessing the dynamics of partisan competition over the course of the electoral cycle. Leveraging over 60 years of new generic congressional ballot data measuring the monthly preference of the mass public's partisan presence for the congressional majority, this paper finds that partisan competition for the majority largely centers on the national policy mood and the public perception of presidential performance rather than partisan conflict. This paper validates the importance of these findings relating to partisan competition for the legislative majority by showing that this electoral competition plays a significant role in predicting the national normal popular vote and partisan seat turnover from 1960 to 2020. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many U.S. states require election workers to check signatures on ballots returned by mail, causing tens of thousands of ballots to be rejected at each general election. This paper applies Bayes' theorem, along with findings from prior research, to show how rejection rates are likely to vary under plausible assumptions about signature checker accuracy and the prevalence of invalid signatures. This approach yields a pair of predictions. On the one hand, given findings from research on handwriting forensics, the Bayesian analysis implies election workers are more likely to wrongly reject valid ballots for purported signature mismatch than to correctly reject invalidly signed returns. On the other hand, research on election workers as problem-solvers suggests they may try to minimize the wrongful rejection of ballots. I find empirical support for each prediction, including signs that election workers learn from past errors to calibrate signature rejection rates downwards. This suggests election worker discretion may be an unexpected source of resilience against laws otherwise liable to disenfranchise eligible voters, although I also discuss conditions under which such discretion may conflict with democratic norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents several news on business developments. Topics discussed include Pixelle Specialty Solutions introducing a new portfolio of premium ballot papers for U.S. elections, CMG becoming the exclusive Alwan software distributor in North America, and the digitization trend in print and packaging, driven by sustainability and automation efforts.

This article discusses the legal case of Rachel Andrews, a blind voter in the UK who challenged the lack of accessibility for disabled individuals in the voting system. The court dismissed her claim, stating that progress had been made in providing accommodations for disabled voters and that the right to vote is not absolute. The government subsequently amended the rules to require returning officers to provide equipment and support for disabled voters, but disability rights groups have expressed concerns about potential barriers. The effectiveness of the new rules will be tested in the upcoming 2024 general election. The case highlights the challenges of legal reform and the unintended consequences of litigation. [Extracted from the article]

In many democracies, citizens complain that elections do not provide palatable options - none of the candidates are particularly appealing. More candidates imply more choice, and could potentially increase participation. However, too many candidates may overburden voters and thus discourage participation. In this paper, we use election results and experimental data to show that more candidates results in less participation. Effects are apparent even when comparing ballots with two or three candidates and are not assuaged by party labels. Our results suggest that too much choice on election day can be just as bad as too little. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the paper "The best Condorcet‑compatible election method: Ranked Pairs" (Munger in Const Polit Econ 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-022-09382-w), the author identifies Tideman's ranked pairs method as the best single-winner voting method, while the Schulze method (Schulze in Soc Choice Welf 36(2):267–303, 2011; The Schulze method of voting, 2018. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.02973v12.pdf) comes in a close second. Munger (Munger in Const Polit Econ 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-022-09382-w) writes: "Beatpath (Schulze) emerges as Ranked Pair's chief competitor". In this comment, I will show that the scenario that Munger uses to argue against the Schulze method is not possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a smart contract-based multi-candidate self-tallying voting scheme in order to guarantee the privacy of ballots in the case of multiple candidates. This scheme uses the ElGamal cryptosystem to ensure the security of the ballots, and combines it with a Distributed Encryption algorithm to make the voting scheme have self-tallying features, and guarantees the correctness of the intermediate data through zero-knowledge proofs. The experimental results show that the scheme improves the voting efficiency without compromising the security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1950, exiles from all across Latin America met in Havana for a congress. The event's purpose was to unite those striving for a democratic Latin America, free from US imperialism and Soviet totalitarianism. This current of opinion was not marginal: it was enthusiastically backed by millions of voters in largely free elections across the continent. However, very little has been written on democracy in Latin America, particularly during the period explored in this paper, 1940–1960. Recent scholarship on the period has instead focused on the ideological struggle between capitalism and socialism. In this paper, I highlight two democratic congresses held in Latin America in 1950 and 1960, under the title Conferencia Interamericana Pro Democracia y Libertad. The conferences served as a forum to delineate a common definition of democracy for the continent, and to explore how it could take hold in Latin America. This paper thus reveals an ideological current independent from the superpowers, which tried to democratise the region against what participants identified as the twin evils of imperialism and totalitarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does party system polarization mobilize voters? Polarization is increasingly shaping democratic competition across Europe. While often perceived to be negative, polarization can be an effective remedy against voter disengagement. This paper investigates two distinct, but often conflated mechanisms, which could explain why polarization leads to mobilization. Spatial polarization of parties diversifies electoral options at the ballot, while affective polarization mobilizes based on emotional considerations. This article then shows the link between polarization and turnout across 22 European countries. The results are complemented by a difference-in-differences analysis of German local elections. However, voting results alone do not inform about the mechanism at play. Survey data is used to show that negative affect appears to be the main driver of voter participation. Party polarization thus has ambivalent consequences for democracies: It mobilizes the electorate, but its effect is driven by negative emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining the impacts of ranked choice voting (RCV) on voter efficacy is important as more areas consider adoption. The greater number of choices provided by longer RCV ballots may introduce opportunities for voters to misunderstand the ballot, make errant marks, or accidentally mark two or more candidates for one ranking, resulting in voidable ballots due to "overvoting." Using ballot data from the 2013 general election, the 2017, and 2021 New York City democratic mayoral primaries, this paper asks whether voidable overvote ballots are more concentrated in constituencies with lower levels of educational attainment, average household incomes, and differing racial make-ups, and if this relationship is more pronounced under RCV than traditional elections. In the first RCV election in 2021, voters in locations with lower levels of educational attainment and median household incomes had higher shares of overvote voidable ballots than those in locations with higher educational attainment and incomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most e-voting schemes make use of central servers. Users are obliged to trust these servers, which represent a vulnerability of the scheme. In the last few years, a very small group of schemes has been published that overcomes this handicap by using a peer-to-peer (P2P) approach. These are known as boardroom e-voting schemes, whereby users take the role of the servers. They act as managers of the process: they cast votes, keep a record of them, and verify the cryptographic operations made by others. Nevertheless, ballots must fulfill certain constraints which conflict with the possibilities of recent debate tools. These tools allow users to decide what to vote on, thus enabling the ballot frame to remain unknown before the voting process. The scheme presented here is a new boardroom voting protocol. It provides privacy, eligibility, and verifiability among other relevant features. The key advantage of this system is its high degree of flexibility, due to the absence of a need to impose any constraint on the ballots. This paper includes experimental results with two debate groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue that because of the advent of Artificial Intelligence, the secret ballot is now much less effective at protecting voters from voting related instances of social ostracism and social punishment. If one has access to vast amounts of data about specific electors, then it is possible, at least with respect to a significant subset of electors, to infer with high levels of accuracy how they voted in a past election. Since the accuracy levels of Artificial Intelligence are so high, the practical consequences of someone inferring one's vote are identical to the practical consequences of having one's vote revealed directly under an open voting regime. Therefore, if one thinks that the secret ballot is at least partly justified because it protects electors against voting related social ostracism and social punishment, one should be morally troubled by how Artificial Intelligence today can be used to infer individual electors' past voting behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decade, E-voting has received great attention due to its advantages in efficiency and accuracy. Fan et al. presented a novel E-voting system named HSE-Voting by utilizing homomorphic signcryption. The HSE-Voting system was claimed to gain a provable security goal under the standard proof. In this paper, we illustrate that their scheme may suffer from some potential security issues. On the one hand, the voting information could be recovered by the authentication center (AC). On the other hand, any malicious voter could disrupt the voting system undetected by locally modifying his ballot. In order to increase the resilience of the voting system to risks, an improvement of the HSE-Voting system is developed. Our improved system fixes the above security weaknesses but increases the computation cost on the AC side by a small amount. In addition, the proposed scheme satisfies voter anonymity, ballot privacy, and verifiability of election results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Nova Tellus is the property of Instituto de Investigaciones Filologicas - UNAM and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article from the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society delves into the rise of Edward E. "Eddie" Sadlowski in the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) during the 1970s. Sadlowski, a reformer, challenged the established leadership of the union, advocating for progressive unionism and worker rights. Despite his unsuccessful bid for the international union presidency in 1977, Sadlowski's legacy includes advocating for women's rights and increased union participation. The article sheds light on Sadlowski's working-class background, grassroots campaign strategies, and criticisms of the USWA leadership's complacency and lack of worker representation. [Extracted from the article]

The 1838 congressional race between John T. Stuart and Stephen A. Douglas in Illinois was marked by allegations of fraud and corruption, with Stuart ultimately emerging as the victor. Despite the contentious nature of the race, Stuart and Douglas maintained a sense of mutual courtesy and amity. The election had a lasting impact on Illinois politics, leading to changes in the state constitution regarding voting rights and ballot procedures. [Extracted from the article]

On January 6th, 2021, a mob of more than 2,000 Trump supporters stormed the Capital—at his urging—in an effort to halt counting of electoral college votes from the 2020 Presidential Election. Vandalism, injury, and loss of life ensued. Although the actions of Trump and the insurrectionists were alarming, the structural factors that gave rise to this offense are arguably even more troubling. In this paper, we outline three "criminogenic antecedents" that provided individual actors an opportunity to incite insurrection: (1) a lack of clarity and consensus in conceptualizations of crime, which has resulted in an ambiguous, contentious, and limited foundation from which to respond to crimes of the powerful; (2) a resultant pattern of symbolic punishments that fails to control these offenses; and (3) Congressional deviance, which virtually ensures that this environment of nonfeasance will continue. We conclude the analysis by proposing policy ideas that will hopefully strengthen our democracy and reduce the risk of something similar happening in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although political parties are not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, the two-party electoral system is wellestablished in American elections and gerrymandering naturally occurs to benefit the party that controls both a state's legislative chambers and the governor's office. Tracing the evolution of partisan gerrymandering and examining the gerrymandering practices, this research finds that redistricting manipulation enabled by two-party electoral system, is a tale as old as time and it has continued for over two hundred years, rising or falling depending on the intensity of partisan politics. In 21st century, political polarization and gerrymandering have been feeding off each other. When the redistricting process is manipulated by entrenched partisan gerrymanders, it has become counterproductive to fair representation, competitive election, and translating public will into policies. As long as the foxes are allowed to guard the hen houses, partisan politicians will continue to abuse "one person, one vote" principle and pick voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of rules for resolving majority cycles in elections have been proposed in the literature. Recently, Holliday and Pacuit (J Theor Polit 33:475–524, 2021) axiomatically characterized the class of rules refined by one such cycle-resolving rule, dubbed Split Cycle: in each majority cycle, discard the majority preferences with the smallest majority margin. They showed that any rule satisfying five standard axioms plus a weakening of Arrow’s Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA), called Coherent IIA, is refined by Split Cycle. In this paper, we go further and show that Split Cycle is the only rule satisfying the axioms of Holliday and Pacuit together with two additional axioms, which characterize the class of rules that refine Split Cycle: Coherent Defeat and Positive Involvement in Defeat. Coherent Defeat states that any majority preference not occurring in a cycle is retained, while Positive Involvement in Defeat is closely related to the well-known axiom of Positive Involvement (as in J Pérez Soc Choice Welf 18:601–616, 2001). We characterize Split Cycle not only as a collective choice rule but also as a social choice correspondence, over both profiles of linear ballots and profiles of ballots allowing ties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voters, like consumers, experience choice overload when presented with too many similar options. The literature on consumer behavior finds overwhelmed consumers often opt out of making a decision altogether. Yet, how large candidate fields affect American voter behavior remains unexplored. I use an aggregate-level analysis leveraging exogenous changes to Louisiana's electoral institutions and an individual-level analysis to investigate the effect of varying quantities of choice on ballot rolloff in U.S. House elections. Ballot rolloff is the phenomenon where voters turn out to vote, yet abstain in a given election. I find that an electoral institution that incentivizes candidate entry causes 5.7–7.1 percent more ballot rolloff, and also that individuals are more likely to rolloff when there are more candidates running in their House election. Louisiana is simply the best case to explore a phenomenon that is likely occurring in party primaries throughout the U.S.—choice overload at the ballot box. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the influence of stigmatization on vote choices, little attention has been given to the impact of social stigma on voters' selection of voting procedures. To bridge this gap, our study focuses on Sweden, where the open-display ballot system at polling stations potentially compromises vote secrecy. Using survey data from the Swedish National Election Studies in 2014 and 2018, we examine the relationship between citizens' voting procedure choices and their support for a highly stigmatized radical right party, the Sweden Democrats. Our findings reveal that voters of the Sweden Democrats are more inclined to vote in advance, particularly in districts with low general party support, indicating a high level of stigma. We argue that advance voting can be seen as a strategy to safeguard vote secrecy when voting for stigmatized parties within an institutional context featuring public displays of ballots. In addition, our research sheds light on the importance of electoral integrity in maintaining the confidentiality of voters' choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses controversial judicial decisions and the protection of judges from political attempts to remove them from office. It emphasizes the importance of judicial independence in a modern democracy and highlights instances such as Trump v United States and the Miller cases. The text also explores the UK's constitutional safeguards for senior judges, including security of tenure, and recounts the 1973 attempt to remove Sir John Donaldson. The article concludes by contrasting the UK's strong tradition of judicial independence with the US's impeachment mechanism for federal judges, reflecting on the implications of controversial decisions on judicial legitimacy. [Extracted from the article]

Heuristics are used to compensate for the limitations of human cognitive capacities. However, little is known about how voters decide what cue to use when multiple cues are available. Exploiting the institutional features of elections for the nonpartisan position of superintendent of education in South Korea, we demonstrate that voters may choose an "ecologically rational" heuristic in a given context, taking into account the trade-off between the cognitive costs and the accuracy of inference associated with different cues. Our analysis shows that the three cues—ballot order, partisan color, and ideology —are commonly used in the absence of party labels, and their relative importance varies with the electoral context. In areas with large school-age populations and in races without an incumbent, contexts where the demand for information is conceivably high, the importance of the partisan color cue increases. We further present individual-level evidence suggesting that voters with higher levels of political sophistication and interest rely more on the ideology cue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A permutation is called Grassmannian if it has at most one descent. The study of pattern avoidance in such permutations was initiated by Gil and Tomasko in 2021. We continue this work by studying Grassmannian permutations that avoid an increasing pattern. In particular, we count the Grassmannian permutations of size m avoiding the identity permutation of size k, thus solving a conjecture made by Weiner. We also refine our counts to special classes such as odd Grassmannian permutations and Grassmannian involutions. We prove most of our results by relating Grassmannian permutations to Dyck paths and binary words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the use of land ballots by the Queensland Government in the mid-20th century as a policy tool to promote agriculture and address population growth. The study focuses on central Queensland and includes personal accounts from individuals who won land through ballots. While the article highlights the success stories of these new farmers, it also acknowledges the challenges they faced, such as limited infrastructure and low commodity prices. Despite these difficulties, many balloters were able to establish thriving agricultural enterprises, leading to increased local population, regional development, and improved infrastructure. The article provides a balanced perspective on the benefits and costs associated with land ballots and offers historical references for further research. [Extracted from the article]

When we study the beginning of our democracy, we have to begin in Philadelphia. Two pieces provide significant and noteworthy details about events that led to the creation and development of a fledgling democracy and are related directly to our current political times. These two Philadelphia stories have more in common with each other ... and today's current events ... than you might think. The first, "It Happened Here in 1797," contrasts dramatically with the sad events of Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob stormed the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., to try to overcome an election. Instead of a change of government by blood, knives, or bullets, we had a change mandated by ballots in Philadelphia on March 4, 1797. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Courts prosecuting corruption serve a critical horizontal accountability function, but they can also play a role in moments of vertical accountability when voters can sanction corrupt candidates. This article documents the strategic use of corruption lawsuits, demonstrating the presence of an electoral cycle in filing new corruption accusations against politicians. Using an original dataset of daily corruption complaints filed in federal courts against members of Argentina's main political coalitions between 2013 and 2021, we document increased corruption accusations against and by politicians in the periods immediately preceding an election. A second dataset of daily media coverage of corruption accusations in two leading newspapers suggests that corruption is more salient before elections, offering politicians a temporal focal point to prepare and launch especially impactful lawsuits. Our findings shed new light on using courts for accountability and debates about the so-called 'lawfare' in Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on what is the relationship between religiously motivated violence and political competition? We are interested in understanding how increased levels of political competition can lead to outbreaks of different types of religious violence. We analyze national elections in India, France, and Germany from 2000 to 2015 and utilize a research design that uses natural language processing to examine text sources from English and foreign language media reports to create event-data to test our claims regarding the relationship between political competition and religious violence. Our findings indicate that political competition influences the propensity for religious violence in some of these states but not all and that incorporating foreign language media sources provides significant benefits, especially regarding the occurrence of religious violence that is non-lethal in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Uncertainty is ubiquitous in elections, and candidates and parties often intentionally create uncertainty to benefit themselves. However, there is no consensus in existing research on how parties balance the trade-off between distinction and broad appeal without alienating their supporters. This paper proposes a novel theory that a party's brand structures when strategies that blur or obfuscate a party or candidate's position are effective. In particular, I argue voters respond negatively to appeals that signal brand deviation from co-partisans on issues that are central to their party's brand. Outside of the brand, the trade-offs between clarity and ambivalence will be weaker. I test these expectations in two survey experiments on a quota sample of the United States population. I find that the efficacy of blurred electoral varies by the brand centrality of an issue, the blurring strategy deployed, and the co- or out-partisan status of the receiver. These findings have implications for our understanding of how parties can navigate the costs and benefits of clear brands and blurred appeals in contemporary party competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of the university in the demise of democracy. In a country which was once seen as the world's leading democracy, albeit one in which the democracy was harnessed to the requisite constraints of a republic, almost half of the population believe that the last two elections were stolen, and Presidents Trump and Biden were not legitimate. Democracies in Western Europe are equally factious. What prevails now in the West is a general inability for voters to be able to put aside personal differences and accept defeat at the ballot box. The willingness to accept defeat and be able to trust your political opponents not to destroy the institutions of the nation is the prerequisite for the preservation of a democratic system. The dominant factions which face each other with unmitigated suspicion can broadly be classified as the tertiary educated urban professional classes who are allied with globalist and corporate "leaders," and the more regionally based and non-professional classes. More specifically, I focus on the class interests of the pedagogical classes, particularly those employed in the tertiary sector and the media (loosely construed as the class which makes a living from crafting, monitoring and disseminating ideas); the technocratic character of that class; the metaphysical ideas that have propelled the empowerment of that class and its importance as educators; the ideological consensuses that have triumphed in the academy in the twentieth century; and how the ideology of emancipation that has been forged in universities, and the managerial revolution that has enabled the corporatization of the university, have contributed to the demise of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

British parties have pioneered the use of 'one-member, one-vote' ballots to select their leaders. However, the elections of Jeremy Corbyn (Labour) and Liz Truss (Conservative) prompted calls to return leadership selection to parliamentarians. Critics claim that party members are non-centrist and liable to impose unsuitable leaders on MPs. This weakens the cohesion of parliamentary parties, undermining the functioning of Britain's majoritarian democracy. This article assesses the major parties' leader-selection systems. It goes beyond existing research by identifying and applying four evaluative criteria for selection institutions : legitimacy, parliamentary acceptability, leader-eviction and timeliness. It shows that most criticisms of one-member, one-vote are overstated because the latter is heavily mediated by ex-ante and/or ex-post parliamentary controls, for example, nomination thresholds and confidence votes. One-member, one-vote generally produces leaders acceptable to MPs; 'unsuitable' ones typically arise when the parliamentary controls fail. However, key institutional weaknesses are identified: legitimacy in the Conservatives' system and leader-eviction in Labour's. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent theories of democratic representation push beyond 'minimalist' notions that only rely on periodic elections to connect officials and constituents. For example, Jane Mansbridge (2019) calls for 'recursive representation', which seeks ongoing, two-way interaction between representatives and their constituents. Given the scale and complexity of modern representative democracies, how can such ambitious proposals be translated into practice? We analyze two Deliberative Town Halls (DTHs) convened with a Federal Member of Australian Parliament in 2020 to discuss a complex issue, mitochondrial donation, ahead of a parliamentary debate and conscience vote on this issue. Drawing on interviews with participants, we argue that democratic innovations such as DTHs can contribute to realizing recursive representation when three criteria are met: authenticity, inclusion, and impact. We discuss the significance of each criterion and the role of DTHs in advancing recursive representation in a parliamentary system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Africa Spectrum is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article discusses the experiences of Paul and Patricia Bokulich, white Catholic civil rights workers, during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. They participated in the Selma to Montgomery March and continued their activism in Greene County, Alabama, working to empower African American voters and support Black candidates for political office. The article also mentions the Summer Community Organizing and Political Education (SCOPE) project, where volunteers were sent to southern communities to focus on voter registration and political education. It highlights the challenges faced by SCOPE workers in Allendale, South Carolina, including resistance from white residents, but also the connections they formed with the local community. The text briefly mentions the experiences of SCOPE workers in Savannah, Georgia and the marriage of two SCOPE workers, Paul and Pat. It also provides background information on Greene County, Alabama, and the impact of the Voting Rights Act on African American registration. The article concludes by discussing the experiences of Paul and Pat Bokulich in Greene County, their support for Reverend Thomas Gilmore's campaign for sheriff, and their eventual departure from the South. They believe their presence and actions had a positive impact and emphasize the importance of nonviolence, goodness, and love in fighting injustice. [Extracted from the article]

Voting for a candidate that is no longer alive at the time of election may be considered a wasted vote. Nevertheless, there are instances in which such a vote means to overcome the legal limitations and choose how to be represented. This article aims to illustrate how such a behavior can be calculated when citizens vote for a dead candidate to nullify an electoral law that they consider unfair. This is driven by what we call electoral process nullification, which is the political equivalent of jury nullification. We use evidence from the local elections organized in September 2020 in a Romanian commune of approximately 3,000 inhabitants. A dead candidate won the elections with 64% of the votes. Our results draw on semi-structured interviews with people who voted for that candidate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voters' beliefs about the strength of political parties are a central part of many foundational political science theories. In this article, we present a dynamic Bayesian learning model that allows us to study how voters form these beliefs by learning from pre-election polls over the course of an election campaign. In the model, belief adaptation to new polls can vary due to the perceived precision of the poll or the reliance on prior beliefs. We evaluate the implications of our model using two experiments. We find that respondents update their beliefs assuming that the polls are relatively imprecise but still weigh them more strongly than their priors. Studying implications for motivational learning by partisans, we find that varying adaptation works through varying reliance on priors and not necessarily by discrediting a poll's precision. The findings inform our understanding of the consequences of learning from polls during political campaigns and motivational learning in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that pre-nineteenth-century elections at a sub-national level have an important place in the history of 'modern' voting practices. It does this through a discussion of unusually well-documented election disputes in eighteenth-century London parishes. Previously neglected records of litigation in the ecclesiastical courts reveal that parish elections in this period generated arguments which did not take place at a parliamentary level until the following century: arguments over votes for women, votes for religious minorities, and the secret ballot. Customary electoral rules came under increasing pressure in the early eighteenth century as London's population grew and changed in character. In some parishes, this produced a narrowing of the traditional ratepayer franchise, allowing only male Anglican ratepayers a vote in parish elections. Elsewhere, groups or individual residents successfully pushed for a more inclusive franchise which allowed ratepaying women, Dissenters, and Jews a voice in parochial politics. Similarly mixed practices emerged with regard to electoral procedure: residents who feared the overbearing influence of their neighbours pressed for a secret ballot, while others insisted on the merits of an open poll. These cases illustrate the importance of small-scale local institutions as key sites of innovation in the history of electoral reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the apportionment problem, a fixed number of seats must be distributed among parties in proportion to the number of voters supporting each party. We study a generalization of this setting, in which voters can support multiple parties by casting approval ballots. This approval-based apportionment setting generalizes traditional apportionment and is a natural restriction of approval-based multiwinner elections, where approval ballots range over individual candidates instead of parties. Using techniques from both apportionment and multiwinner elections, we identify rules that generalize the D'Hondt apportionment method and that satisfy strong axioms which are generalizations of properties commonly studied in the apportionment literature. In fact, the rules we discuss provide representation guarantees that are currently out of reach in the general setting of multiwinner elections: First, we show that core-stable committees are guaranteed to exist and can be found in polynomial time. Second, we demonstrate that extended justified representation is compatible with committee monotonicity (also known as house monotonicity). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little is known about why candidates decide to make use of emotional messages when campaigning for a political office, and under which conditions this is more likely to happen. We focus on the use of fear and enthusiasm appeals and assume that these are a function of profile of candidates and the nature of the context in which the election takes place. We use a new large-scale comparative dataset which includes information about campaigning strategies for 636 candidates having competed in 133 presidential and parliamentary elections in 101 countries between June 2016 and March 2020, based on judgments of 2000+ domestic and international experts. Our results show that candidates benefitting from a comparative advantage (incumbents and frontrunners) tend to rely on enthusiasm appeals, more extreme candidates prefer fear to enthusiasm, and more competitive races tend to foster the use of fear appeals. These findings have important implications for electoral competition, communication theory, and political marketing. All data and materials are openly available for replication. Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15377857.2021.1930327. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Gestion et Management Public is the property of Association Internationale de Recherche en Management Public (AIRMAP) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Theories of electoral accountability emphasize voters' ability to evaluate individual officeholders, which incentivises officials to demonstrate their quality. Before the Australian ballot was introduced in the US at the turn of the twentieth century, however, most ballot designs constrained voters' ability to distinguish individual candidates. Previous scholarship argues that ballot reform led to the rise of candidate-centred politics and the decline in party influence in the twentieth century. We reassess the evidence for this claim and implement the most comprehensive analysis to date on the secret ballot's effects on outcomes related to distributive politics, legislator effort, and party influence. Using an improved research design, we find scant evidence that ballot reform directly affected legislator behaviour, much less that it transformed political representation. While the Australian ballot may have been a necessary condition for the eventual rise of candidate-centred politics, ballot reform did not by itself reshape American politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is a review of the book "Bullets to Ballots: Collective De-Radicalization of Armed Movements" edited by Omar Ashour. The book explores the transformation of armed movements into unarmed political and social activism. It examines various armed groups from around the world, including national liberation movements and Middle Eastern groups like the Islamic State. The review highlights two chapters focused on the African National Congress's transition from armed struggle to negotiated state power in South Africa. The authors argue that the ANC's decision to end its armed struggle and pursue political power was influenced by factors such as the inability to win militarily, the ANC's politics favoring political democracy, and international pressure through divestment campaigns. The leadership of Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo is credited with making the choice to seek their goals through the political process and avoiding a potential civil war. [Extracted from the article]