Voting rights for nationals of the Southern African Development Community countries living in member states

ABSTRACT

The right to vote remains one of the most critical ways in which individuals influence government. However, the disenfranchisement of certain classes of people – notably non-citizen residents – is the norm in Africa, whereas many countries in Europe recognise the right of non-citizen residents to vote as a key element in the continent's political integration. In the Southern African Development Community (SADC), where the political integration of the region is recognised as an essential contributor to economic integration, the question of extra-national forms of regional citizenship and voting rights does not receive sufficient attention. This article looks at SADC and selected countries within SADC, to determine whether laws and treaties can be amended and developed to broaden the scope of citizenship and extend the right to vote to non-citizen residents.     

Guns 'N jobs: The FDR legacy

The intrusion of war is likely to alter the standard economic voting calculus. A wartime economy is not expected to deliver the same political benefits or costs, in terms of presidential approval or votes in an election, as does a peacetime economy. The Roosevelt presidency presents a perfect target to examine economic voting in wartime. Using monthly polling data on presidential approval from late 1937 to 1945, we demonstrate that the American public suspended standard economic-voting logic during World War II. One explanation for this suspension is the enormous size of U.S. military spending. Using data on government spending from 1929 to 1950, we show that military spending had a huge effect on unemployment while the effect of non-military spending proves negligible and non-significant. It was military spending triggered by war, not the New Deal, that vanquished the Great Depression.     

The emerging political economy of austerity in Britain

This paper uses data from the British Election Study's Continuous Monitoring Surveys to investigate reactions of the British public to the economic crisis and the austerity policies the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government has adopted to deal with it. Multivariate models informed by competing valence and positional theories of electoral choice are employed to study the impact of these reactions on support for the Conservative Party and Prime Minister David Cameron and evaluations of the Conservatives' ability to handle important issues. Analyses indicate that there is widespread and growing pessimism about the prospects of resolving the economic crisis in the near future. Since the crisis began in 2008, the dynamics of these bearish attitudes have been closely linked to rising unemployment rates. Differing positions regarding the Coalition's austerity policies exert sizable effects on party support, but these attitudes have not negated the force of valence politics considerations such as party leader images, partisan attachments and global assessments of party performance.     

Revitalizing the United States‐Japanese alliance

Abstract

While the notion that subjective economic perceptions as well as objective economic conditions affect electoral outcomes has long been explored in advanced democracies and new democracies, evidence of the link between the economy and elections has been rarely found in East Asian countries. As economic issues have become salient since the 1997 financial crisis, political leaders’ capacity to manage the economy has become one of the most important criteria in electoral choice in East Asia. This paper examines how economic issues influenced the results of the 2007 presidential election in South Korea. By making use of the 2007 Presidential Election Panel Study, this study examines the continuity of and changes in the Korean voters’ electoral behavior. This study describes the political situation in the post-1997 financial crisis period under two liberal governments in Korea and introduces the processes and characteristics of electoral campaigns in the 2007 presidential election. This paper then explores the link between the economy and vote choice, focusing on whether economic issues were salient among the electorate, whether retrospective or prospective economic voting was prevalent among Koreans, and how the voters supported Lee Myung Bak across age groups, regions, and parties in the 2007 presidential election.     

Do Labour Parties Suffer from Declining Turnout? Evidence from Norwegian Local Elections

The argument that declining voter turnout harms social democratic parties has received little support in research on national elections, but partisan consequences of declining turnout in local elections has been less explored. Norwegian local elections – where both turnout and support for the Labour Party have declined since the early 1960s – are used as a test case. Analyses of aggregate data gave no systematic support for the hypothesis that Labour suffers from lower turnout. Declining turnout and declining Labour Party vote were not causally related, and the correlation between the two variables seemed to be the result of other long-term social changes. Analyses of survey data pointed to three flaws in the premises on which the hypothesis was based. First, the effect of declining turnout on the biased class composition of the abstainers was ambiguous. Second, the Norwegian Labour Party suffers less from differential turnout than before as a result of declining class voting. Third, the Labour Party may suffer from a demobilisation of the working class, but the party may also benefit from a demobilisation of the young.     

The Myth of Media Globalization: Why Global Media Is Not Truly Globalized,by Kai Hafez

Political discussion is often seen as a potential shortcut to enlightened voting. If uninformed individuals receive useful information from their discussion partners, then they can make quality decisions at the ballot box without incurring the costs of becoming informed. Discussion partners, however, have biases and these biases are reflected in what they say about candidates. If individuals accept messages from sources with different preferences, they could end up supporting candidates who benefit their discussion partners instead of themselves. This article argues that egos will often accept messages from individuals with an incentive to mislead. Instead of evaluating the messenger, individuals evaluate the messages. When the messages are all in accord, individuals support the candidate suggested by the messages even if the messengers are all biased. This article presents the results of a group-based experiment in which ego networks were exogenously determined by the researcher. In the experiment, egos tend to vote for their party's candidate, but they defect with greater frequency when they receive messages from members of a different party. This willingness to listen to the other side has detrimental effects for the quality of their decisions.     

A Watershed in White House Journalism: Explaining the Post-1968 Rise of Aggressive Presidential News

Presidential journalism is known to have grown substantially more aggressive through the 1970s and beyond, but a definitive explanation for this trend remains elusive. Some suggest that events surrounding Vietnam and Watergate transformed the professional norms of journalism. However, the trend could also be a more superficial and transitory response to other circumstantial factors that converged in the same time period, such as president-level characteristics (the prevalence of Republicans, Washington outsiders, and more vigorous news management efforts), the political environment (the rise of official discord), and the economic environment (a downturn in the business cycle). This study disentangles these various factors and assesses their relative success in explaining trends in journalistic conduct in the postwar era. Data are drawn from a large sample of presidential news conferences from 1953 through 2000, focusing on the aggressiveness of journalists' questions. The results strongly support the normative shift hypothesis, although economic factors have also been consequential. These results suggest a punctuated equilibrium model of journalistic change in relations between the White House press corps and the presidency.     

The Social Basis of Voting Correctly

A large literature has established that people learn from political discussion, and some scholars suggest that people will make better choices if they engage in political discussion with opinion leaders. To establish that discussion promotes better vote choices, however, we have to create a measure of rational choice to test the impact of discussion. Recently, scholars have used Lau and Redlawsk's voting correctly measure to test the impact of various influences on the rationality of vote choice. Using this new measure of rationality—voting correctly—I determine whether political discussion has the predicted positive impact. To test this theory, I use 2000 American National Election Study survey data, and show that greater political discussion with knowledgeable discussants leads to more correct voting.     

Nonviolent revolutions: civil resistance in the late 20th century

Why do young Africans participate less in elections than their older counterparts? Given Africa's growing youth bulge, this constituency represents a numerically important voting bloc, and their lower participation in elections could undermine the legitimacy of the region's democratic trajectory. We address this question through a multi-level model that relies on individual-level data from the Afrobarometer surveys and country-level data for 19 of the region's more democratic countries. We classify Africa's youth as belonging to two categories, those aged 18–24 and those aged 25–35. We find that key determinants of the youth's voting behaviour include their access to political knowledge and information as well as their perceptions of the electoral context and party system. In the latter regard, the efficacy and fairness of elections and the degree of partisanship increase the youth's decision to vote, while the length of party incumbency is a deterrent to turnout. These findings hold important implications by highlighting that Africa's youth not only need to be exposed to greater fora for learning about the political process and party options but also that political parties in the region need to become more relevant to this constituency.     

Passed,regulated, or applied? The different stages of emigrant enfranchisement in Latin America and the Caribbean

ABSTRACT

When are emigrants really enfranchised? Lengthy lags exist between some reforms that de jure introduced external voting and their application. In the blooming literature on emigrant enfranchisement, these lags remain unexplained. We argue that this hampers our understanding of enfranchisement processes as having different legal and political stages. With data on Latin American and Caribbean states since 1965 until the present, we investigate why some states in this region have delayed the regulation and application of external franchise while others have implemented it right after enactment. We propose hypotheses to understand these reforms as episodes marked by different contexts, engineered by different agent coalitions and embedded into larger processes of political change. In particular, we suggest that enfranchisement processes are composed of three stages: enactment, regulation, and first application. Our findings suggest that the process of adoption of external voting is shaped by the legal mechanism of enactment and the stability of political coalitions.