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This article provides an overview of the political situation in Senegal, focusing on President Macky Sall's presidency and the challenges faced by the younger generation. It discusses the accusations and legal cases against opposition candidate Ousmane Sonko, as well as President Sall's attempts to consolidate power and secure a third term. Despite the concerns raised about the democratic model in Senegal, the article highlights the resilience of democracy, as demonstrated by the peaceful election in March 2024. The text concludes by emphasizing the importance of institutional reform and greater inclusion of women in the government. [Extracted from the article]

This article explores the concept of fair value of voting rights in a just liberal democratic society, with a focus on equal political liberty and unencumbered access to the ballot. The author criticizes restrictive voter ID laws and argues that societies committed to equality should make it easier, not harder, for citizens to vote. The historical context of voting rights in the United States, particularly for black citizens, is highlighted, emphasizing the need to guarantee fair value through unencumbered access. The article also discusses the varying opinions of Supreme Court Justices on voting rights and the disproportionate impact of voter ID laws on marginalized communities. The author asserts that the burden should be on states to justify making voting more difficult and emphasizes the importance of equal participation in the political process. [Extracted from the article]

To what extent are political parties responsive to voters before and after elections (that is, during the campaign and in office)? And what explains responsiveness at both of these stages: agenda-setting and decision-making? We argue that parties are more responsive at the agenda-setting stage than at the decision-making stage, and that responsiveness tends to be mediated by the type of promise (change versus status quo, and issue salience), and type of government (majority versus minority, and left- versus right-wing). This research focuses on the Portuguese case using data from party manifestos between 1995 and 2015, as well as surveys of Portuguese citizens. Findings generally support our expectations, although with some differences between parties as a whole and governments. Our results have important implications for understanding opinion–policy linkages and mandate-responsiveness, as well as more broadly for 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]

How did the pandemic impact turnout of young voters living in university communities? Leveraging the mandatory vacating of Florida college students living on campuses and drawing on administrative data from Florida's voter file, we argue that on-campus registered young voters who had to leave their university housing in the days prior to Florida's 2020 Presidential Preference Primary (PPP) were less likely to turn out compared to adjacent off-campus young voters because they lost the opportunity to cast early in-person and Election Day ballots. Using a difference-in-differences (DiD) design, we find that on-campus students, in part because they had early and Election Day voting available to them on campus in the 2020 general election, were more likely than comparable off-campus student-aged registered voters to cast ballots in the November election. Our study has important implications for academic debates concerning the turnout effects of convenience voting reforms and the ability of voters to cast ballots prior to Election Day. [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]

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]

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]

This article examines the coverage of Indonesia's 2024 presidential election by Tempo, a respected Indonesian publication known for its critical stance towards the ruling regime. It discusses the concerns of pro-democracy groups regarding electoral fraud and the declining trajectory of Indonesia's democratization process. The article explores the factors associated with electoral fraud, including access to state resources and manipulation of electoral rules. It also highlights the systematic involvement of public and state actors in electoral fraud, such as the abuse of state institutions and the influence of political parties. Tempo's coverage sheds light on the issue of electoral fraud in Indonesia's democracy and raises questions about the country's ability to effectively address this issue and restore democracy. [Extracted from the article]

The main aim of this chapter is to analyse under‐determination, generalisation, vagueness, and ambiguity in the speaker's self‐reference strategies used in Catalan parliamentary debate and Twitter. Parliaments are one of the main arenas where politicians develop their activity. On the other hand, Twitter allows politicians to build their own public image and to be in touch with voters, and citizens in general, in a more direct way. The theoretical background of the analysis includes the classical studies on deixis and on person deixis in Catalan; Goffman (1981)'s participation frameworks; functional linguistics and the ethnography of communication, and Twitter communication analysis. In this corpus‐driven analysis, parliamentary discourses and tweets of two members of the Parliament of Catalonia are analysed. The corpus has been drawn from their speeches in the 2020 general politics debate and from the Twitter messages they published in the same period, in autumn 2020. [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]

For decades, voting-by-mail and the use of ballot drop boxes has substantially grown within the USA, and in response, many USA election officials have added drop boxes to their voting infrastructure. However, existing guidance for locating drop boxes is limited. In this article, we introduce an integer programming model, the Drop Box Location Problem (DBLP), to locate drop boxes. The DBLP considers criteria of cost, voter access, and risk. The cost of the drop box system is determined by the fixed cost of adding drop boxes and the operational cost of a collection tour by a bipartisan team who regularly collects ballots from selected locations. The DBLP utilizes covering sets to ensure each voter is in close proximity to a drop box and incorporates a novel measure of access to measure the ability to use multiple voting pathways to vote. The DBLP is shown to be NP-hard, and we introduce a heuristic to generate a large number of feasible solutions for policy makers to select from a posteriori. Using a real-world case study of Milwaukee, WI, U.S., we study the benefits of the DBLP. The results demonstrate that the proposed optimization model identifies drop box locations that perform well across multiple criteria. The results also demonstrate that the trade-off between cost, access, and risk is non-trivial, which supports the use of the proposed optimization-based approach to select drop box locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2012, California's voters passed a ballot initiative that scaled back the state's "Three Strikes" sentencing law and permitted certain individuals who were serving 25‐to‐life prison terms to petition for resentencing and potentially release. Using analysis of original qualitative interview data supplemented with court administrative records, this study examines how characteristics of courtroom workgroup members; their intergroup dynamics; political, professional, and administrative considerations; and allocated resources were perceived by court officials to facilitate or impede the implementation of this reform in county courts. Availability of staff and budget was associated with a higher proportion of completed case dispositions in the first 2 years of implementation, but resources were not the only factor associated with timely case processing. Courtroom actors' seniority, experience, and professional security facilitated agreement on processes, schedules, and other details. Small, stable, close‐knit groups established routine procedures and developed expertise more quickly, but could not always avoid bottlenecks or delays. Less stable workgroups had higher rates of denial of petitions for resentencing. Positions toward Proposition 36 shaped by political, professional, or other priorities were perceived to influence some elected DAs' positions and line prosecutors' behavior, manifesting in cooperation, opposition, or mixed messages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2022, the Welsh Government announced plans to increase the size of the Welsh Parliament/Senedd Cymru, a culmination of two decades of elite-level argument over whether more members should parallel the institution's growing suite of legislative and fiscal powers. While an expanded legislature may improve the Senedd's capacity to scrutinise the executive, opposition has focused on increased costs that detract from core public spending. Using a novel survey experiment conducted in the 2021 Welsh Election Study, we assess public attitudes and find that support for expanding the Senedd is limited to those with a strong Welsh-only identity and pro-autonomy preferences. Although appeals to holding the executive to account do not broaden this base of support, a framing that the Senedd should be comparable in size to legislatures in Scotland and Northern Ireland does have a positive effect on voters with more median constitutional preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since gaining independence in 1980 and changing its name from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, this southern African nation has been plagued with political violence and economic instability. Corrupt and incompetent officials, mostly from the ruling ZANU-PF party, have caused bouts of rampant inflation which turned into hyperinflation, wrecking what had once been a thriving economy. After a period of relative economic stability from 2009 to 2016, the economy appears once again to be in a tailspin. The overthrow of long-time leader Robert Mugabe in 2017 was seen initially as ushering in a new era, but elections in 2018 and 2023—were flawed by official intimidation and corruption. The United States is not positioned to have a significant impact on Zimbabwe's future trajectory. However, it should take a more clear-eyed approach to do what little it can given the current global context. At a minimum, this requires the production of a realistic strategic plan, which in turn requires important strategic choices to be made, including what is the winning aspiration being sought in US-Zimbabwe relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consumer sentiment is considered an important indicator of changes in household spending. However, the evidence of the causal relationship between sentiment and consumption is mixed and scarce. We address this gap using data from the monthly Florida Consumer Attitude Survey, which captures party affiliation, consumer sentiment, and spending intentions since 1991. We employ political partisanship as an instrument for sentiment and find a significant effect of sentiment on spending intentions. Finally, we provide evidence that spending intentions relate to actual spending and show that spending increased among counties with a larger share of Republican voters following the 2016 presidential election. [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]

This article provides an overview of the political right in Canadian history and its impact on Canadian politics. It discusses the merger of conservative parties in 2003 and the creation of the People's Party of Canada in 2018. The article also examines recent issues associated with the political right, such as restrictions on transgender youth and opposition to mandatory health measures. It emphasizes the complexity and ongoing influence of the political right in Canada, while acknowledging the limited success of social conservatives and the extreme right in shaping right-wing political parties. The text explores various perspectives and concerns of the political right on issues such as the market, big government, immigration, and the power of institutions. It concludes by highlighting the ongoing importance of the political right in Canadian politics, including the role of right-wing populists and radical right elements. [Extracted from the article]

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]

In light of recent developments in Quebec politics, this article takes a critical look at two controversial elements surrounding the legitimacy of the 1995 referendum on Quebec sovereignty, namely (1) the rejection of ballots on polling day and (2) the effect of the rally for Canadian unity held on October 27, 1995. This analysis mobilizes aggregated historical data from Élections Québec as well as individual-level survey data collected by Canadian Facts Limited in October 1995 (n = 930). The results reveal no attitudinal predictors of ballot rejection across Quebec ridings. Analyses suggest, however, the existence of a statistically significant impact of the love-in rally which may have boosted the NO option a few days before the vote, particularly outside of Montreal. This research aims to contribute to the public debate on the transparency of democratic processes in referendums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Georgia poll workers came under fire for alleged election fraud in the 2020 presidential election, but the accusations stood in stark contrast to the author's own experiences as a poll worker in North Carolina during the same election. The author, a photographer, visited a few precincts in central North Carolina to ask volunteers why they became poll workers and to discuss their duty to ensure all voters who showed up were able to cast a ballot and have it counted. Some poll workers talked about voting rights; many described their own voting history and the changes they've witnessed. Others talked about misinformation and the news media. All mentioned integrity, asking themselves: As a citizen and as a poll worker, what can I do to help ensure that each person in my community has the opportunity to vote on Election Day and have that vote counted? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, titled "Meeting the Moment for Democracy," discusses the author's personal experiences and reflections on voting as a Black woman in America. The author emphasizes the importance of voting as a birthright and a symbol of equality, while acknowledging the historical struggles faced by women and people of color to gain full access to the franchise. The article also highlights the challenges to democracy posed by former President Donald Trump's false claims of voter fraud and the need for a diverse coalition of Americans to protect voting rights. The author calls on readers to defend democracy by participating in the upcoming election and championing the rights of all Americans. [Extracted from the article]

The article explores the emergence of right-wing intellectualism among young people in Argentina. It focuses on influential authors and influencers who challenge progressivism and promote conservative values, attracting a diverse audience. The article discusses the shift in youth culture from left-wing to right-wing ideologies and the impact of this movement on the upcoming presidential elections. It emphasizes the need to understand the cultural and social factors that shape the political beliefs of this new generation. [Extracted from the article]

Objective: While they were once viewed as largely local or candidate‐centered contests, recent American elections have come to be dominated by national forces such as presidential politics and partisanship. Prior research on voter behavior in this new era of nationalized politics, however, has largely focused on more high‐profile contests and has not examined voter decision making across multiple levels of government. Methods: Our study uses cross‐sectional (2006–2020) survey data from the Cooperative Election Study to explore the determinants of partisan loyalty and defection across both national and subnational American elections. Results: We find consistent evidence that citizens increasingly rely upon national forces—specifically partisan‐ideological sorting and presidential approval—to make decisions about candidates up and down the ballot. We also find mixed evidence that evaluations of the national economy inform defection behavior. Conclusion: These findings indicate that the national political forces shape voter behavior in national and subnational contests in effectively identical ways. Thus, the evidence supports the notion that all (electoral) politics are now national. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

USAID democracy promotion programs might not only influence the democracy levels, but also increase the likelihood of revolutionary uprisings in the recipient states. Democracy promotion can strengthen political opponents of the incumbent regime via support for alternative media, civil society groups and political parties, on one hand, and, on the other, support democratic institutions that in contrast to autocracies are more tolerable towards political opponents and thus allow more room for expressing political will on the streets. Since democracy aid targets "democrats" who are less prone to exert armed violence, the authors expect it to be associated with unarmed uprisings. Using logit regression models, they find that the volume of the USAID financial democracy assistance appears to be a significant predictor of unarmed revolutionary destabilization, but its effect is relatively weak. Some particular sub-sectors of democracy assistance have an impact on revolutionary destabilization, namely: civil society, elections, human rights and media assistance. These correlations might be partly explained by the fact that USAID assistance goes disproportionately to anocracies. This aid tends to increase the probability of revolutionary destabilization in two ways – directly (through strengthening political opponents of the regime) and indirectly (through increasing the number of anocracies in the world). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

While invalid voting is often treated as protest behavior in an electoral context, its association with actual political protests has not yet been empirically demonstrated. The relative scarcity of research on the topic is likely due to the hybrid nature of invalid voting as a both formal and informal political gesture. The novel availability of event-based data for public protests in Latin America allows for testing whether their occurrence is connected with changes in spoiled and blank ballots. Using an appropriate dynamic regression model covering variations in the 148 intervals between Latin American legislative elections in the 1979–2021 period, this study finds a strong connection between the emergence of antigovernment protests and surges in invalid voting (and vice versa). This relationship still holds at parity of economic conditions and it is reinforced by a lack of alternation in the party of power. Conversely, the appearance of workers' strikes appears to work as a substitute for this behavior, which is also chosen by voters when democracy deteriorates, while corruption has no independent impact on invalid voting. Overall this work's findings promise to send the research agenda on invalid voting in a new direction, previously unexplored because of an absence of fitting data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A serious challenge facing Western democracies is the falling propensity of successive cohorts of citizens to vote. Over the last 50 years, newly eligible voters – particularly from poorer backgrounds – have become less likely to vote in their first elections, and more likely to develop habits of non‐voting. This trend has prompted greater interest in policies with the potential to increase first‐time voter turnout, such as lowering the voting age or compulsory political education. Despite a growing academic interest in volunteering as a means of youth political expression or route to civic revival, however, the promotion of youth volunteering has not been seriously considered as a potential tool to help address generational turnout decline. An extensive literature argues that volunteering can increase first‐time voter turnout, but it is hindered by the limited use of panel data and failure to account for confounding and selection effects. It has not, moreover, considered the potential for the effects of childhood volunteering to be conditional on prior political socialisation, particularly the influence of parents, which is necessary to assess its potential to reduce turnout gaps reflecting socio‐economic status. This study uses the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study and structural equation modelling to overcome these limitations and examine the impact of childhood volunteering on the turnout of newly eligible voters. It shows that for most young volunteers there is no significant benefit, but for the children of politically disengaged parents, volunteering does have a significant, positive effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International election observation has been scrutinized over the past two decades by scholars trying to explain its aim, scope, and consequences. As it is now a standard practice in democratizing countries, scholarly literature has almost reached a consensus on the ability of observers to deter election-day fraud, one of the most positive unintended consequences of election observation. Using data from the 2004 Ukraine presidential election, this article extends our knowledge through a natural experiment on polling station-level election results. I will show that observation during counting does not have a stronger effect than observation during opening and/or polling. Results support previous studies showing the usefulness of election observation in reducing election-day fraud but add an important finding that deserves further scholarly attention. [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 2020, Arizonans approved Proposition 207, the Smart and Safe Arizona Act, which legalized recreational marijuana sales. Previous research has typically used non‐spatial survey data to understand marijuana legalization voting patterns. However, voting behavior can, in part, be shaped by geographic context, or place, which is unaccounted for in aspatial survey data. We use multiscale geographically weighted regression to analyze how place shaped Proposition 207 voting behavior, independently of demographic variations across space. We find significant spatial variability in the sensitivity of voting for Proposition 207 to changes in several of the predictor variables of opposition and support for recreational marijuana legalization. We argue that local statistical modeling approaches provide a more in‐depth understanding of ballot measure voting behavior than the current use of global models. Related Articles: Branton, Regina, and Ronald J. McGauvran. 2018. "Mary Jane Rocks the Vote: The Impact of Climate Context on Support for Cannabis Initiatives." Politics & Policy 46(2): 209–32. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12248. Brekken, Katheryn C., and Vanessa M. Fenley. 2020. "Part of the Narrative: Generic News Frames in the U.S. Recreational Marijuana Policy Subsystem." Politics & Policy 49(1): 6–32. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12388. Fisk, Jonathan M., Joseph A. Vonasek, and Elvis Davis. 2018. "'Pot'reneurial Politics: The Budgetary Highs and Lows of Recreational Marijuana Policy Innovation." Politics & Policy 46(2): 189–208. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12246. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The February 2024 issue of Politics & Policy covers a wide range of topics, including fake news and elections, food security, internet governance, gender, geoeconomics, corruption, and policy feedback. One article examines debates on digital rights in the Internet Governance Forum, highlighting the privacy implications of personal information stored by intelligent algorithms. Another article explores the impact of fake news on public opinion and the democratic tradition during the 2020 presidential election. Other articles discuss gender differences in education policy, perceptions of corruption, the effects of gender political inclusion on environmental performance, food security in African countries, the management of Nigeria's natural resource revenues, local variations in voting behavior on recreational marijuana legalization, China's foreign policy, and the intersection of Hindi cinema, public sphere, and Dalits. The research provides valuable insights for scholars studying elections and the democratic process, as well as readers interested in fake news and its impact on public opinion. It offers in-depth analysis of important issues during the 2020 election and emphasizes the public's steadfast support for democratic values. Another article examines China's information control and censorship policies on the internet, finding that the government restricts citizens' freedom of speech and access to information through content filtering and censorship. This article is crucial for scholars studying internet governance and freedom of speech, as well as readers interested in China's information control. It provides insights into the Chinese government's practices and their implications for citizens' rights. [Extracted from the article]