The secret is out and the "experts" aren't pleased. In The Keys to the White House, 1996, prominent political analyst and historian Allan J. Lichtman applies the revolutionary system with which he has analyzed every presidential election since 1860 to this year's landmark contest. While most media coverage will focus on the twists and turns of the campaign trail, The Keys to the White House, 1996 dismisses conventional campaign coverage and convincingly demonstrates why the factors that are truly relevant in electing the president have already been determined. Sure to be as controversial as it is compelling, The Keys to the White House, 1996 debunks numerous myths and sacred cows uncritically accepted by those who analyze presidential elections. Lichtman illuminates the real significance of the economy, ideology, scandal, social unrest, foreign affairs, third parties, and candidates' charisma. Furthermore, Lichtman explains why media coverage and campaign strategies - negative or positive - do not affect the outcome of presidential races.

The primary motivation for this book is to focus on something crucial that is missing in Turkish political science: well-founded theories on the Turkish voter and empiricism in scholarly research. Given the absence of such theories, one could ask what then the best model is for explaining a Turkish citizen's vote choice and political behaviour, and what schools of thought Turkish political science has. Unfortunately, it is not possible to offer a satisfactory response to either question at this point, and among the clear deficiencies in the current literature the primary one is the lack of a robust model explaining how Turkish citizens form their political attitudes, engage in political participation, or cast their votes. With these important questions in mind, this book aims to generate an interest in the theoretical and methodological tools that one can employ to conduct research contributing to the needs of the literature, particularly in political behaviour and political psychology. This book expands our understanding about the processes and the mechanisms of Turkish political behaviour, and contributes to the foundations of theory building in the literature. This book was published as a special issue of Turkish Studies.

Staten Island is New York City's smallest yet fastest growing borough: a conservative, suburban community of nearly a half a million on the fringe of the nation's most liberal, global city. Staten Island: Conservative Bastion in a Liberal City chronicles how this "forgotten borough" has grappled with its uneasy relationship with the rest of the City of New York since the 1920s. Daniel C. Kramer and Richard M. Flanagan analyze the politics behind events that have shaped the borough, such as the opening of the Verrazano Bridge and the closure of the Fresh Kills Landfill. Lost opportunities are discussed, including the failure to construct a rail link to the other boroughs of New York, to adequately plan for the explosive housing boom in recent decades and, some say, to create an independent City of Staten Island. Unlike much of New York City, Staten Island is a place with robust party competition and lively democratic politics with hard-fought campaigns, bitter feuds, and career-ending scandals. Staten Island's two most successful politicians of the twentieth century-Republicans John Marchi and Guy Molinari-defended the borough's interests while defining an urban conservativism that would influence politics elsewhere. In fact, Staten Island has played a pivotal role in the winning electoral coalitions of Republican mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg and continues to spark the imaginations of New Yorkers on a scale that is disproportionate to the borough's relatively small size. Staten Island: Conservative Bastion in a Liberal City will allow readers to gain access to the borough-based roots of New York City's politics. This book will be of special interest to anyone who wishes to understand the dynamics of middle-class life and democratic representation in a global city.

Is the election result in a constituency affected by the amount of campaign spending there? This book, originally published in 1987 was the first major study of this important question. Based on extensive original research, it addresses two main issues: the impact of constituency campaign spending on election results in Britain: and the question of how that impact changes with the level of spending. The author develops a framework for analysing spending and its impact based upon American analyses of campaign expenditures, and focusses on general election results from 1950-83. Consideration is also given to minor parties and to both local and European elections.

The United States is experiencing remarkable demographic changes that are having an important impact on the American electorate. As the minority share of the voting-eligible population continues to grow, the political clout of non-Hispanic whites will further decline. The 2012 election demonstrated that the Democratic Party can secure an Electoral College victory even when it loses badly, in the aggregate, among non-Hispanic whites. This does not mean that white voters are unimportant, however. The political behavior of whites in the decades ahead will largely determine the direction of American politics.

This book examines the political behavior of non-Hispanic whites. It considers the trends within the white vote, how white voters differ geographically, and the primary fault lines among white voters. It also examines how white political behavior changes in response to diversity. It considers whether or not the day is approaching when whites consolidate into a largely homogenous voting bloc, or whether whites will remain politically heterogeneous in the decades ahead

Whereas other books have examined the political behavior of specific social classes within the non-Hispanic white community (working class whites, for example), this is the first book to examine whites as a whole, and provide a useful summary of recent trends within this group and thoughtful speculation about its future.

The second edition of this classic text covers contemporary democracy movements including the Arab Spring and its aftermath, Occupy, and new nations as well as old issues from the Balkans to Africa, from Latin America to Ukraine. The author has traveled widely around the world to take the pulse of transition and to profile journeys toward democracy and journeys away from democracy, too. At the same time, the book addresses important challenges that have emerged in even well-established democracies. These show up in declining voting rates, diminished membership in political parties, and, in some countries including the United States, negative views of central democratic institutions (like the US Congress).

Are elections out of fashion? Does it matter if voters don t show up at the polls? If yes, is legal enforcement of voting compatible with democracy? These are just a few of the questions linked to the thorny problem of electoral abstention. This book addresses the hot question whether there is a duty to vote and if this is enforceable in the form of compulsory voting.

Divided into three parts, Anthoula Malkopoulou begins by expertly presenting the importance of compulsory voting today, situating the debate within the contemporary discussion on elections, representation and democracy. In part two, she questions the historical origins of the idea in Europe. In particular, she examines parliamentary discussions and other primary sources from France, Belgium and Greece, including a few additional insights from other countries, like Switzerland, the Netherlands and Australia. Focusing especially on the years between 1870 and 1930, the reader learns about the historical actors of the debates, their efforts to legitimate punishment of abstention through normative arguments, but also their strategic motivations and political interests. While discussions at the beginning of the century focus on introducing compulsory voting, Malkopoulou criticizes its misuse and discusses the debate over its abolition after the Second World War, exposing the contingency of relevant normative claims today and the conditionality of compulsory voting.

From ancient times until today, you learn about the ideological debates, their political context and how the problems of equal representation and political accountability persist through the ages."

The essays in this collection show how electoral geography has shifted from empiricist activity towards a closer involvement with the wider issues addressed by social scientists. They illustrate the potential contributions that electoral geographers can make towards the understanding of global, national and local societies.

Within an international framework, this work provides a fully comprehensive approach to the geographical coverage of elections. Numerous applications of ides and concepts from human geography are incorporated into a new political context, illustrating the manner in which electoral patterns reflect and help produce the overall geography of a region or state. Discussions of various topics are well supported by numerous maps and diagrams which help clarify arguemnts and serve to define elections within their basic geographical context.

A History of British Elections since 1689 represents a unique single-volume authoritative reference guide to British elections and electoral systems from the Glorious Revolution to the present day. The main focus is on general elections and associated by-elections, but Chris Cook and John Stevenson also cover national referenda, European parliament elections, municipal elections, and elections to the Welsh and Northern Irish assemblies and the Scottish parliament. The outcome and political significance of all these elections are looked at in detail, but the authors also discuss broader themes and debates in British electoral history, for example: the evolution of the electoral system, parliamentary reform, women's suffrage, constituency size and numbers, elimination of corrupt practices, and other important topics. The book also follows the fortunes not only of the major political parties but of fringe movements of the extreme right and left. Combining data, summary and analysis with thematic overviews and chronological outlines, this major new reference provides a definitive guide to the long and varied history of British elections and is essential reading for students of British political history.

This book delves in to the truth about the American political system and the phenomenon of religious African American women voters, offering a new theory, racializing religiosity. This theory attempts to explain the increased progressive political action of religious African American women voters in United States presidential elections from 1964 through 2008. The author presents a historical, political, and empirical analysis of the experiences of African American women voters and their ability to overcome struggles to emerge as a powerful voting bloc.

Electronic Democracy analyses the impact of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) within representative democracy, such as political parties, pressure groups, new social movements and executive and legislative bodies. Arguing for the validity of social perspective in theory building, it examines how representative democracies are adapting to new ICTs. It features a number of comparative studies focusing on the UK, the US, Sweden, Germany, Korea and Australia.

This authoritative book provides a deeply informed overview of one of the most dynamic social movements in Latin America. Focusing on contemporary Indigenous movements in Ecuador, leading scholar Marc Becker traces the growing influence of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), which in 1990 led a powerful uprising that dramatically placed a struggle for Indigenous rights at the center of public consciousness. Activists began to refer to this uprising as a "pachakutik," a Kichwa word that means change, rebirth, and transformation, both in the sense of a return in time and the coming of a new era. Five years later, proponents launched a new political movement called Pachakutik to compete for elected office. In 2006, Ecuadorians elected Rafael Correa, who many saw as emblematic of the new Latin American left, to the presidency of the country. Even though CONAIE, Pachakutik, and Correa shared similar concerns for social justice, they soon came into conflict with each other. Becker examines the competing strategies and philosophies that emerge when social movements and political parties embrace comparable visions but follow different paths to realize their objectives. In exploring the multiple and conflictive strategies that Indigenous movements have followed over the past twenty years, he definitively documents the recent history and charts the trajectory of one of the Americas' most powerful and best organized social movements.

The American cultural landscape has shifted considerably since the 1990s. As church attendance has declined, seculars have increased in number and in political involvement. The economy was supposed to be the most important issue in the 2008 and 2012 elections, but social issues such as gay rights and the status of women actually had a greater impact on vote choice. Moral issues and perceptions of candidate morality had less effect on voters in 2004 than in 2008. These arguments directly challenge the conventional wisdom concerning the 2004 and 2008 elections, which were supposedly decided on the basis of moral values and the economy respectively. Yet in The Politics of Sex, Susan B. Hansen justifies these claims theoretically based on evidence about how voters actually evaluate candidates. Hansen explores trends in public opinion on abortion, gay rights, and the status of women and finds that "values voters" are still crucial in presidential elections, even those supposedly fought over economic or foreign-policy issues. She then analyzes campaign strategies and vote choice to show how Barack Obama made effective use of the liberal trends in public opinion on social issues in 2008 and 2012. Hansen also examines trends in demographics, religious involvement, the institutional setting, and public opinion to predict who in future years benefit from the politics of sex. By providing an historical perspective on the changing impact of morality politics on presidential elections, this book will show how and why the politics of sex now favors the Democratic Party.

Some political observers dubbed the 2008 presidential campaign as 'the Facebook Election'. Barack Obama, in particular, employed social media such as blogs, Twitter, Flickr, Digg, YouTube, MySpace and Facebook to run a 'grassroots-style' campaign. The Obama campaign was keenly aware that voters, particularly the young, are not simply consumers of information, but conduits of information as well. They often replaced the professional filter of traditional media with a social one. Social media allowed candidates to do electronically what previously had to be done through shoe leather and phone banks: contact volunteers and donors, and schedule and promote events. The 2008 Election marked a new era where the candidates no longer had complete control over their campaign message. The individual viewer in a campaign crowd with a cell phone can record a candidate s gaffe, post it on YouTube or Flickr and within days millions will be gasping or guffawing. The traditional campaign, with its centralized power and planning, although not dead, now coexists with an unstructured digital democracy. New Media, Campaigning and the 2008 Facebook Election examines the way social media changed how candidates campaigned, how the media covered the election and how voters received information.

This book is based on a special issue of Mass Communication & Society.

These volumes provide an essential comprehensive work of reference for the annual municipal elections that took place each November in the 83 County Boroughs of England and Wales between 1919 and 1938. They also provide an extensive and detailed analysis of municipal politics in the same period, both in terms of the individual boroughs and of aggregate patterns of political behaviour. Being annual, these local election results give the clearest and most authoritative record of how political opinion changed between general elections, especially useful for research into the longer gaps such as 1924-29 and 1935-45, or crisis periods such as 1929-31. They also illuminate the impact of fringe parties such as the Communist Party and the British Union of Fascists, and also such questions as the role of women in politics, the significance of religious and ethnic differentiation and the connection between occupational and class divisions and party allegiance. Analysis at the ward level is particularly useful for socio-spatial studies. A major work of reference, County Borough Elections in England and Wales, 1919-1938 is indispensable for university libraries and local and national record offices. Each volume has approximately 700 pages.

Women, Politics, and Power provides a clear and detailed introduction to women's political participation and representation across all branches of government and a wide range of countries and regions. Using broad statistical overviews and detailed case-study accounts, authors Pamela Paxton, Melanie M. Hughes, and Tiffany Barnes document both historical trends and the contemporary state of women's political strength across diverse countries. The text considers experiences of women from a range of marginalized groups, including racial, ethnic, and religious minorities; indigenous peoples; and those that face discrimination based on their sexual orientation and gender identity. Readers will learn about cultural, structural, political, and international influences on women's access to political power, about the old and new barriers women continue to face like violence, and about the difference women make once in political office. Dedicated chapters on six geographic regions highlight distinct influences and patterns in different parts of the world. There is simply no other book that offers such a thorough and multidisciplinary synthesis of research on women's political power around the world.

In this book, a distinguished group of presidential campaign staff, journalists, and political observers take us inside the 2012 race for the Republican nomination and general election, guiding us through each candidate's campaign from the time each candidate announced his or her intention to seek the presidency through the primaries, conventions, and up to election day. Meeting under the auspices of the Harvard University's Institute of Politics, the candid discussion allows us to learn about the motivations of each candidate, strategies they deployed, and lessons they learned. In addition, representatives from the major SUPERPACS share their strategies and evaluate their impact in an election characterized by unprecedented campaign spending. Campaign for President: The Managers Look at 2012 is essential reading for anyone interested in the inner workings of national political campaigns.

Linking Citizens and Parties addresses familiar questions about political representation: Are parties responsive to their core supporters or to the public in general? Do parties that adopt centrist policy positions benefit in elections? Does proportional representation encourage party extremism? These fundamental questions about democracy are paired with the empirical observation of Western European democracies during the last thirty years. The study highlights the pathways (mainstream and niche) through which citizens' political preferences are expressed by their political parties. It concludes with a positive evaluation of these democracies as their citizens have access to at least one, and possibly both niche and mainstream pathways.

Ronald Reagan's victory in the 1980 presidential election marked a watershed moment in the history of the United States, heralding the triumph of the American conservative movement. Once a supporter of the New Deal, Reagan had come to symbolize the union of three diverse forms of conservatism-anti-communism, social traditionalism, and libertarianism-that were increasingly intertwined under the banner of the Republican Party. The unlikely development of this new conservative coalition was based upon the larger impacts of the civil rights movement in reshaping the dynamics of the Democratic and Republican parties, the social "backlash" of the Nixon era, the emergence of the religious right, and the economic and political crises that directly set the stage for Reagan's stunning victory. In five original, engaging chapters, The 1980 Presidential Election shows how Reagan's journey to the White House was connected to the wider transformations of post-1945 American history. Supplemented by a fresh collection of primary documents-including previously unpublished transcripts of Reagan's radio addresses of the late-1970s-this book is an ideal introduction to the origins and impact of the American conservative movement.

Going beyond theory and guess based forecasts; this book systematically explores and measures the implications of the growing use of the internet in the American political landscape. Using current election data, the authors specifically challenge the predominant conjecture that the impact of new technology will not affect the electoral outcomes and illustrate that the use of the internet is causing a marked shift in not just who votes, but who wins.

Competition seems to be an inevitable part of present-day elections in the United States. However, recent publications have debated whether we should encourage or discourage competitive elections. In Competitive Elections and Democracy in America, Heather Evans closely examines the debate over competition in elections and questions whether or not they are beneficial for democracy in the US. Evans clearly lays out the basis of the debate over competition and defines what exactly constitutes a competitive election. She then uses an innovative data set that she assembled to analyze the 2006-2010 congressional elections, testing whether the competitiveness of an election affects citizens' political knowledge, political interest, and opinions of Congress, their representatives, and the governmental system as a whole. She subsequently evaluates the positive effects that competitive elections have on constituencies, and in turn gives equal weight to the negative effects. An examination of the effects "ugly" campaigns have on voters is also incorporated, relevant to today's oft-used "mud-slinging" campaign tactics. Evans concludes with a thoughtful and analytical assessment of whether competition is valuable for elections, and how to increase competition if it indeed has merit for political campaigns. Through the book's analyses, Evans demonstrates that competitive elections do have lasting effects on voters that go beyond just the length of a campaign. Her research reinforces the vital role that political competition plays in modern democracies, and offers a careful evaluation of how and why competitive elections affect citizens in the US.

Ronald Reagan's victory in the 1980 presidential election marked a watershed moment in the history of the United States, heralding the triumph of the American conservative movement. Once a supporter of the New Deal, Reagan had come to symbolize the union of three diverse forms of conservatism-anti-communism, social traditionalism, and libertarianism-that were increasingly intertwined under the banner of the Republican Party. The unlikely development of this new conservative coalition was based upon the larger impacts of the civil rights movement in reshaping the dynamics of the Democratic and Republican parties, the social "backlash" of the Nixon era, the emergence of the religious right, and the economic and political crises that directly set the stage for Reagan's stunning victory. In five original, engaging chapters, The 1980 Presidential Election shows how Reagan's journey to the White House was connected to the wider transformations of post-1945 American history. Supplemented by a fresh collection of primary documents-including previously unpublished transcripts of Reagan's radio addresses of the late-1970s-this book is an ideal introduction to the origins and impact of the American conservative movement.

Twenty years after the launch of village elections, the time is ripe to assess the progress and impact of China's most notable political reform. Where have elections been conducted well and where have they been conducted poorly? How have procedures changed over the years and have elections truly transformed how power is exercised in the countryside? What methods are researchers employing to study elections and how have scholars from different disciplines contributed to our knowledge of grassroots politics in China? This book carefully examines the implementation and effects of China's village, township, and people's congress elections, both in terms of democratizing the polity and spurring other changes in state-society relations. The chapters in this book have been published across several issues of the Journal of Contemporary China.

The Mathematics of Voting and Elections: A Hands-On Approach, Second Edition, is an inquiry-based approach to the mathematics of politics and social choice. The aim of the book is to give readers who might not normally choose to engage with mathematics recreationally the chance to discover some interesting mathematical ideas from within a familiar context, and to see the applicability of mathematics to real-world situations. Through this process, readers should improve their critical thinking and problem solving skills, as well as broaden their views of what mathematics really is and how it can be used in unexpected ways. The book was written specifically for non-mathematical audiences and requires virtually no mathematical prerequisites beyond basic arithmetic. At the same time, the questions included are designed to challenge both mathematical and non-mathematical audiences alike. More than giving the right answers, this book asks the right questions. The book is fun to read, with examples that are not just thought-provoking, but also entertaining. It is written in a style that is casual without being condescending. But the discovery-based approach of the book also forces readers to play an active role in their learning, which should lead to a sense of ownership of the main ideas in the book. And while the book provides answers to some of the important questions in the field of mathematical voting theory, it also leads readers to discover new questions and ways to approach them. In addition to make small improvements in all the chapters, this second edition contains several new chapters. Of particular interest might be Chapter 12 which covers a host of topics related to gerrymandering.