The Temporary Importance of Role Models for Women's Political Representation

This article investigates the supply side of women's political representation by focusing on how the election of female politicians affects the motivation of women to run for office in other units. The analysis relies on an original data set of over 1,500 municipal elections in Switzerland, starting with the first election after the introduction of women's suffrage. In the first election in which women could participate, the election of a woman in a given municipality was associated in the next election with an additional female candidate in 10% of its neighbors. The relationship decreases over time, fades away after 16 years, and is driven primarily by new female candidates in units where no female incumbents are running for reelection. These findings suggest that role models are important for improving women's representation, but only in its early stages. This conclusion could be relevant for understanding the political representation of other underrepresented groups.     

The 2011 general and presidential elections in Singapore

For the first time in Singapore's history, two elections were held in a year. In 2011, Singaporeans voted in a general election on 7 May and in another competitive presidential election on 27 August. Faced with a stronger opposition force and an emboldened electorate, the ruling People's Action Party won the elections but achieved the worst results since the country's independence.     

The 2013 South Tyrolean Election: The End of SVP Hegemony

The results of the 2013 South Tyrolean elections, held on 27 October, caused major changes in the political system of the autonomy. For the first time since the Second World War the South Tyrolean People's Party (SVP) lost its absolute majority. While the German secessionist parties increased their electoral support, the Italian parties suffered heavy electoral losses, thus leading to an under-representation of Italian speakers in the political institutions. The election report shows how the electoral results affect the South Tyrolean system of ethnic proportional representation, which is characterized by an increasing asymmetry.     

Departmental elections and the changing landscape of French politics

The departmental elections of March 2015 redrew the French political landscape, setting the new terms of electoral competition in advance of the regional elections of December 2015 and, more critically, the presidential election of April–May 2017. These elections saw the far-right National Front (FN) come top in both rounds only to be outmanoeuvred by the mainstream parties and prevented from winning a single department. As a case study in vote–seat distortion, the elections highlighted a voting system effective in keeping the FN out of executive power but deficient in terms of democratic representation and inadequate as a response to the new tripartite realities of France's changing political landscape.     

The impact of women above the political glass ceiling: Evidence from a Norwegian executive gender quota reform

Women have historically been underrepresented in democratic assemblies, particularly in top positions with executive powers. Most gender quota reforms address this by mandating a more equal gender representation on election lists. In contrast, a 1992 legislative reform in Norway required parties' candidate lists for the local executive board to comprise at least 40% politicians of each gender. This legal change was not only exogenously imposed by a higher-level government, but also generated distinct quota-induced constraints across Norwegian municipalities. We exploit the resulting variation in ‘quota shocks’ using a difference-in-differences design to identify the quota's effect on women's political representation as well as local public policies. We find that more women enter the executive board after the reform, though spill-overs on women's representation in the local council and on the probability of a female mayor or top administrator are weak. We also find no consistent evidence for shifts in public policies due to increased representation of women in positions with executive powers.     

How campaigns promote the legitimacy of elections

Why do people see elections as fair or unfair? In prior accounts, evaluations of the election depend on people's candidate preferences, where supporters of the winning candidate tend to call the election fair while those on the losing side feel it was unfair. I argue that perceptions of election fairness reflect not just the election outcome, but also the campaign process. Using a set of multilevel models and data from the 1996–2004 American National Election Studies, I explore the consequences of campaign experiences in shaping people's evaluations of the fairness of a presidential election. I find that as campaign competition increases, people are less likely to translate their feelings about the candidates into their evaluations of the election. Rather than alienating citizens, competitive campaigns mitigate the effects of prior preferences in a way that promotes the legitimacy of elections.     

How elections matter: A study of U.S. senators

Policy representation implies not only congruence between constituent and representative preferences, but also the ability of representatives to perceive and adjust to changing constituent preferences. This paper examines the extent of such representation among U.S. senators. It shows that a senator's voting behavior strongly affects his chances of election, but that senators demonstrate only a limited ability to adapt to changing constituent preferences.     

Defeat of the People's Army? The 2015 British general election and the UK Independence Party (UKIP)

The 2015 general election in Britain saw a major attempt by a relatively new party - the UK Independence Party (UKIP)- to secure elected representation. While UKIP received nearly four million votes, the party left the 2015 general election with just one Member of Parliament. Our evidence, drawn from analysis of British Election survey data and in-depth qualitative interviews with activists, suggests that UKIP's campaign was a major factor in its inability to translate widespread support into elected representation. While the party pursued a targeted campaign, this had only a modest impact on its own vote. UKIP's lack of resources, inexperience and inability to operationalize highly effective, targeted local campaigns severely hamstrung the party and prevented it from converting support into MPs at Westminster.     

Jean Thiriart in Cairo and Bagdad

ABSTRACT

In the ‘poor’ result achieved by Jean-Marie Le Pen in the 2007 presidential elections, many commentators saw the demise of the Front National. However, when asked by a journalist whether it was the end of her father's political career, Marine Le Pen smilingly replied: ‘I don't think so. In any case, this is the victory of his ideas!’ In this question and answer lies the whole story of the Front National and its impact on mainstream politics in the past two decades. First, Le Pen's defeat was exaggerated, the same way his victory had been in 2002. What Mondon argues in this paper is that the 2002 presidential elections did act as an ‘earthquake’ within French politics. However, this ‘earthquake’ did not trigger a tsunami of support for Jean-Marie Le Pen, but rather a tidal wave of misinformation and misunderstanding as to the real significance of the election results. By concentrating on the 2002 and 2007 presidential elections, Mondon highlights how this reaction led to the consecration of right-wing populist politics, best exemplified in the landslide election of Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007. He also provides an insight into the slippery slope Sarkozy's government took after its election, leading to an extremely rightward-leaning 2012 presidential campaign and new heights for the Front National.     

How election dynamics shape perceptions of electoral integrity

In recent years a growing literature focuses on how and why some election processes are viewed as having integrity while others lack it. Some scholars examine how a state's characteristics (e.g. its economic development, the education levels of its citizens, and their experience with elections) shape the voting process while others study how individual voters view the process and their role in it. The relative importance of election dynamics themselves and the process of their evaluation, however, remain unclear. What stages of the election process are most important when people evaluate elections? We argue that a better understanding of how election dynamics shape perceptions of election integrity is crucial because theoretically this process is at the heart of democratic representation and because from a policymaking standpoint these dynamics vary more over time than individual and state-level factors. This paper explains why certain parts of the election cycle are critical to determining how an election is judged—especially the fairness of election laws and media access, the conduct of election authorities, and the use of political violence. Empirical results using new data on 121 elections held in 109 countries during 2013, 2014, and the first half of 2015 are supportive of our argument.     

President Donald Trump: A Case Study of Spectacular Power

Donald Trump's election as president certainly startled many, though not all political observers. In this article, I offer my own observation that Mr Trump's election represents a developmental progression of America's electoral system from a political process to an entertainment process. The effect of the office of the president now is to distract and entertain. I will aim to convince readers that his election as America's president is not an anomaly, but rather represents how the politics of image and representation now work as an everyday event and should be treated as part of a reality that we should now take for granted.     

WorkChoices and Howard's Defeat

This article seeks to perform two tasks. It seeks to first detail the changes to the industrial relations system entailed in WorkChoices (set against the background of previous Howard government policies in this field), analyse the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU's) campaign against it and the Australian Labor Party's (ALP's) industrial relations policy in response to it, and belated changes to WorkChoices. Second, it seeks to examine the extent to which WorkChoices (and the industrial relations issue) was decisive in Howard's defeat. This will be done by using Newspoll surveys to plot the revival of ALP electoral support against salient events leading up to the election, drawing upon early post election assessments and existing studies, and also examining the results of the Australian Election Study 2007 to see whether this new evidence confirms the importance of industrial relations in the election outcome.     

From Imperium to Internet: the National Alliance and the American extreme right

Led by William Pierce, a former officer in the National Socialist White People's Party, America's National Alliance has achieved particular notoriety as a result of Pierce's authoring of a genocidal political thriller called The Turner Diaries. Pierce argues, both in his fiction and elsewhere, for the recruitment of an elite that will one day lead to an armed struggle against The System. The argument of others on the extreme right in the United States, however, that only individuals or at most small cells can successfully overthrow the state represents a grave challenge to the Alliance's groupuscular logic.     

The introduction of a proportional representation system in Japan

In 1982 Japan broke with all precedent and enacted a proportional representation system for the election of part of the Upper House. The motives of the parties were mixed and the new arrangements raised many practical and constitutional problems. Essentially the new law confused the concepts of equality and fairness. However, in the first election under the new system on 26 June 1983 party strengths were very little changed.     

Balancing district and party seats: The arithmetic of mixed-member proportional electoral systems

Mixed-member proportional electoral systems (MMP) are widely praised because they combine the direct, personal election of MPs from single-seat constituencies with a proportional seat allocation. However, the size of the proportional tier matters for the question of whether the system's overall proportionality is preserved. Hence, a key challenge for constitution-makers and scholars is finding the right balance between district and proportional seats, so as to maximise district representation and guarantee proportional representation.This paper develops the first theoretical model that helps to locate this sweet spot for district and party seats. The novel solution builds on Taagepera's “logical models” about party sizes. The model is tested on 58 national parliamentary elections under MMP rules.     

Electoral Ambiguity and Political Representation

We introduce a Downsian model in which policy‐relevant information is revealed to the elected politician after the election. The electorate benefits from giving the elected politician discretion to adapt policies to his information. But limits on discretion are desirable when politicians do not share the electorate's policy preferences. Optimal political representation generally consists of a mixture of the delegate (no discretion) and trustee (full discretion) models. Ambiguous electoral platforms are essential for achieving beneficial representation. Nevertheless, electoral competition does not ensure optimal representation: The winning candidate's platform is generally overly ambiguous. While our theory rationalizes a positive correlation between ambiguity and electoral success, it shows that the relationship need not be causal.     

‘Rivers of Blood’ and Britain's Far Right

This article examines the impact of Enoch Powell's speech on Britain's numerous right‐wing fringe groups and their response—in particular, that of the National Front, who benefitted the most from Powell's intervention on race and for a brief moment became Britain's fourth political party. It begins by looking at the growth of post‐World War II British fascism and how its emphasis switched from anti‐Semitism to anti‐colonial immigration. Throughout the piece, the relationship between Britain's far right and the Conservative party is examined to show how Powell inadvertently blurred the lines between the two. The article concludes with the 1979 general election victory of Margaret Thatcher who, by adopting Powellite themes but in more measured tones, destroyed the National Front's dream of an electoral breakthrough.