The study of patron-client politics is new to the study of Hong Kong political science. This book examines whether patron-client relations are critical to the electoral victory of candidates; how the political elites cultivate support from clients in order to obtain more votes during local elections; and tests the extent to which whether patron-client relations are crucial in order for candidates to obtain more ballots during elections. Covering patron-client politics and public administration in Hong Kong; the electoral dynamics including the Chief Executive elections and the Legislative Council elections; the cooptation of key elites by using patron-client mechanism; the study of the committees and elites who have been politically co-opted; the appointment mechanisms that have played a crucial role in patron-clientelism; and finally the China factor in the entire processes and politics of patron-client politics. Bruce Kwong finds that the better candidates cultivate patron-client relations, the greater their chance of winning the election; and the smaller the size of the electoral constituency, the greater the impact of patron-client relations. Finally, the book stresses the role of Beijing as a powerful patron shaping the Hong Kong Chief Executive and the latter's clients and analyzes the political implications and long-term consequences of patron-client politics in Hong Kong.

In 1990, Nicaragua's Sandinista government was toppled in an election that every major American news organization and pollster predicted they would win in a landslide. Why the Nicaraguan upset and why did the U.S. media get it so wrong? Through an examination of American coverage of Nicaragua since the Cuban Revolution, Why Nicaragua Vanished provides intriguing answers to these questions, and for the first time tests media coverage of a major foreign policy crisis against an independent analysis of the events covered. Robert S. Leiken offers valuable insights into how the media shapes Americans' opinions about the world, and in the process he challenges American cultural stereotypes. Beautifully written, Why Nicaragua Vanished is perfect for all interested in the media, foreign policy, Latin America, or U.S. intellectual life.

The elections of 1998 bear out the thesis of this book: so far, the Republicans in Congress are operating more like an old minority party than the new majority party they've become. Still, Congress has changed under Republican leadership and the Republicans have changed, too. This volume of original essays by leading congressional scholars explores the impact of the Republican majority on Congress with attention to the history of the institution and party characteristics present and future. For students and scholars alike, the new majority of an old minority provides a laboratory for political analysis that demonstrates lasting effects. As Republicans learn to govern, the country will no doubt learn something, too.

The 2012 American elections were highly competitive, with the unusually close partisan balance making the elections an opportunity for each of the two major parties. This book assembles leading political scientists and political journalists to explain the 2012 election results and their implications for America's future. In addition to assessing election results, the book examines the consequences of the large ambitions of the Obama presidency and the political and policy risks entailed in the pursuit of those ambitions. It also explores Congressional elections and policymaking since 2008, and how they affected election results in 2012. The book promises a more coherent focus than that evident in similar edited works, achieved through a limited number of chapters and clear definition of chapter content.

The first edition of this book offered one of the first social science analyses of Barack Obama's historic electoral campaigns and early presidency. In this second edition the authors extend that analysis to Obama's service in the presidency and to his second campaign to hold that presidency. Elaborating on the concept of the white racial frame, Harvey Wingfield and Feagin assess in detail the ways white racial framing was deployed by the principal characters in the electoral campaigns and during Obama's presidency. With much relevant data, this book counters many commonsense assumptions about U.S. racial matters, politics, and institutions, particularly the notion that Obama's presidency ushered in a major post-racial era. Readers will find this fully revised and updated book distinctively valuable because it relies on sound social science analysis to assess numerous events and aspects of this historic campaign.

The first edition of this book offered one of the first social science analyses of Barack Obama's historic electoral campaigns and early presidency. In this second edition the authors extend that analysis to Obama's service in the presidency and to his second campaign to hold that presidency. Elaborating on the concept of the white racial frame, Harvey Wingfield and Feagin assess in detail the ways white racial framing was deployed by the principal characters in the electoral campaigns and during Obama's presidency. With much relevant data, this book counters many commonsense assumptions about U.S. racial matters, politics, and institutions, particularly the notion that Obama's presidency ushered in a major post-racial era. Readers will find this fully revised and updated book distinctively valuable because it relies on sound social science analysis to assess numerous events and aspects of this historic campaign.

One of the most significant events in European politics the past two decades is the emergence of radical right-wing parties, mobilizing against immigration and multiethnic societies. Such parties have established themselves in a large number of countries, often with voter shares exceeding ten and sometimes even twenty percent. Many of these parties exert a real influence on the policy within respective country. The emergence of the recent wave of radical right-wing party politics has generated a large and growing literature, spanning a variety of dimensions-such as ideology, voting, and policy impact. This volume will cover all these dimensions, but it will in particular focus on two questions: why is it that the working class tends to be especially attracted by the radical right-wing parties? And what does the radical right-wing parties growing electoral successes mean for Social Democracy and the traditional left in Europe, which are meeting growing competition from the radical right over working class voters? Bringing together the leading scholars within this field, this book makes a unique contribution by focusing on the relationship between class politics and the radical right.

Though the courts have been extremely active in interpreting the rules of the electoral game, this role is misunderstood and understudied-as, in many cases, are the rules themselves. Law and Election Politics illustrates how election laws and electoral politics are intertwined, analyzing the rules of the game and some of the most important-and most controversial-decisions the courts have made on a variety of election-related subjects. More than a typical law book that summarizes cases, Mathew Streb has assembled an outstanding group of scholars to place electoral laws and the courts' rulings on those laws in the context of electoral politics. They comprehensively cover the range of topics important to election law-campaign finance, political parties, campaigning, redistricting, judicial elections, the Internet, voting machines, voter identification, ballot access, and direct democracy. This is an essential resource both for students of the electoral process and scholars of election law and election reform.

Music has prehistoric roots and has throughout history been shown to have a significant effect on humankind. Under this premise, our book explains how music has been used in American presidential campaigns during the country's history. We describe the ways that song use has evolved over the last two centuries, including how initial campaign songs took existing music and added new lyrics, how music became more and more intertwined with the campaigns and their messages in the nineteenth century, how campaign songs are now largely taken from existing popular music tunes, and how the Internet is quickly changing music's relationship to presidential campaigns. Ours is ultimately a book about the use of music and American political development, as it describes how political transformations such as America's changing party structure and technological advancements like radio have affected music's use in presidential campaigns.

Including chapters on Indonesia, India, Thailand, China, the Philippines, Japan, Malaysia, Korea, Vietnam and international suffrage connections, Women's Suffrage in Asia engages in debates on suffrage in the region by raising issues unique to the country's case studies presented. It explains why the history of suffrage is neglected in the nationalist historiography and untangles the connections between culture, nationalism and colonialism in the context of women's struggles for suffrage.

Elections are in trouble with general low levels of interest and turnout; Jeanette Morehouse Mendez and Rebekah Herrick suggest that if candidates looked more like America does, these problems would decrease. They call these elections where candidates differ in key social demographic traits descriptive elections. They predict that races that have candidates of different race and/or gender will see higher voter turnout out, because voters will be more interested in these races and will have less alienation and indifference. In addition, they predict that voters' stereotypes/gender preferences, as well as elite behavior, can contribute to greater voter engagement. They also predict that campaigns in these elections will discuss a wider variety of issues, and the media will do likewise. They test their expectations by examining the gender mix of candidates in gubernatorial, congressional, and state legislative races. The results suggest that voters in mixed-gender and women-only elections have less alienation, less indifference, and greater interest. They also are more likely to vote. The results offer more modest evidence that campaigns and media coverage differ in these races. Thus the authors conclude that voters' gender stereotypes and preferences have a larger effect on voters' engagements in descriptive elections.

American and European political scientists have claimed that subnational elections almost always record lower voter turnout than national elections. In Japan, however, municipal elections often record considerably higher turnout than national elections, particularly in small towns and villages. Institutions, Incentives and Electoral Participation in Japan theoretically and empirically explores this puzzling 'turnout twist' phenomenon from comparative perspectives. Based on the rational-choice approach, the book hypothesizes that relative voter turnout in subnational vs. national elections is determined by the relative magnitudes of how much is at stake ('election significance') and how much votes count ('vote significance') in these elections.

A data-rich historical picture of American elections and the American electorate, from 1789 to the present. A Statistical History of the American Electorate adds a new, never explored dimension to study of the nation's political system. Rusk has examined thousands of pieces of information and masses of historical and contemporary numerical data on elections to draw a new picture of our evolving voting ways and byways. His book adds immeasurably to the abundant literature about actual results and voting returns from specific elections by gathering data over time - 200 years - and casting it into historical patterns. The material in each of his eight chapters is introduced with an essay that explains the data and its importance, and sets it all in context. Chapters include: Election Laws and Suffrage. Lists and dates election laws that define the eligible electorate. Describes qualifications such as property owner-ship, paying taxes, residency, sex, literacy, and many more. Also discusses popular electoral participation such as the initiative and referendum. Voting Participation. Lists three forms of voting participation - turnout, mobilization, and eligibility - as percentage values by the nation, region, and state. This analysis casts light on voter activity as well as the portion of citizens entitled (or barred) from participating at different times in U.S. history. Presidential, House, Senate, and Gubernatorial Voting. These four chapters show partisan vote percentages at the national, regional, and state level for Democratic, Republican, and Other categories and the Democratic percent of the major two-party vote. The author uses conventional designations of political parties as well as newly designed alternative descriptions that give a more accurate reflection of the partisan nature of each state. Measures of Voting Behavior. Using data from the other chapters, Rusk shows over 200 years of party competition, partisan swing, split-ticket voting, partisan strength and many other dimensions of the electoral system. No other volume brings together such a rich variety of information and sets it in an analytical context. A must-purchase for scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, libraries with political science collections, and anyone interested in the American electoral system.

First published in 1974, this study of British political culture provides a radical critique of contemporary theories of working class deference and voting patterns. Drawing not only on previously unpublished opinion poll data but also the evidence of his own surveys, the author provides convincing evidence for his reformulation of the deference and civility themes, which he sees in terms of a theory of social order in class stratified societies. Comparative data from other European countries support this approach. The book ends with some incisive comments on the implications of the revised class perspective for comparative political research and future studies of British political culture.

The increased use of direct democracy measures across the United States has brought attention to the individual petitioner however their motivations and goals continue to be an enigma. Drawing on behavioral, historical and legal analysis to provide a more concrete depiction of these individuals, expert contributors examine the true personalities, motivations and expectations, successes and failures of petitioners in the direct democracy process and how they culminate in policy formation across the United States. Six typologies; the zealot, the victim, the amateur, the lawyer, the professional, and the politician are identified and later applied to four key policy areas, taxation, health, the environment and education. A lucid contribution to the existing literature on direct democracy and an excellent resource for studying how petitioners are able to influence their communities beyond the ballot box.

The world is increasingly becoming less democratic and this trend has not left Southeast Europe untouched. But instead of democratic breakdown what we are witnessing is a gradual decline and the rise of competitive authoritarian regimes. This book aims to give a country-by-country overview of how illiberal politics has led to a decline in democracy and the re-emergence of autocratic governance in Southeast Europe, more specifically in the Western Balkans. It defines illiberal politics as the everyday practices through which ruling parties undermine democratic institutions in order to remain in power. Individual chapters examine recent political developments and identify practices of illiberal politics that target electoral institutions, rule of law, media freedom, judicial independence, and enable political patronage, while several thematic chapters comparatively explore cross-regional patterns. This book addresses academics, policymakers, and practitioners with professional interest in Southeast Europe or democratic decline and is both timely and relevant as the European Union attempts to reengage with the countries of the Western Balkans. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies.

This book explores the argument that Portugal has been an exception to the trend of political upheaval and electoral instability across Southern Europe following the financial crisis and the bailout period. It does so by mapping and exploring in-depth three key dimensions: the governmental arena, the party system and citizens' political attitudes. The five chapters in this edited volume show that a number of factors combine to make Portugal not only a very stimulating case study, but also an exception within the South European panorama: the stability of its party system, and that of the mainstream parties' electoral support in particular; the quick recovery of political attitudes after the end of the bailout period (2011-2014); the absence of competitive populist challengers until 2019, despite high levels of populist attitudes amongst the citizenry; the successful and stable union between anti-austerity parties supporting the socialist government (dubbed the 'Contraption') and its adoption of an 'austerity by stealth' model. This book shows that it is possible to combine critical junctures and political stability, responsiveness and responsibility, through the study of one of the most intriguing cases in Southern Europe in the last decades. The Exceptional Case of Post-Bailout Portugal will be of interest to students, researchers and scholars of Political Science and European Studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, South European Society and Politics.

The process of electoral change is accelerating in contemporary democracies, and this book explains why. The emergence of Green parties in the 1980s and recent far right parties, Brexit and Trump's 2016 victory are parts of this overall process. Political Realignment tracks the evolution of citizen and elite opinions on economic and cultural issues from the 1970s to the 2010s-and the impact of these changes on electoral politics and public policy. Citizen positions on these cleavages have realigned over time, producing a similar realignment in the structure of the party systems to represent these demands. Economic issues remain important, now joined by divisions on cultural issues as a backlash to modernization. Assembling an unprecedented time series of empirical evidence, this study explains the new forces of elector change in both Europe and the United States.

The first elections reference specifically created to support students and teachers in U.S. government course Student's Guide to Elections is an informative and engaging reference tool for young researchers seeking information on voting, the electoral process, and the history of U.S. elections. It offers accessible access to the key topics in high school U.S. government and U.S. history curricula. A comprehensive, single-volume resource, it features essays, encyclopedic entries, and primary source documents, to help students understand the history and significance of the U.S. electoral process. The user-friendly design includes boxed features, time lines, photos, maps, charts, tables, and political cartoons. Student's Guide to Elections is the first title in a brand new Student's Guide series from CQ Press. Uniquely, the Student's Guide series of books is written so that students need no prior knowledge to understand the essays, encyclopedia entries, or primary sources in these resources. With the 2008 presidential election looming in November, this volume will prove to be an indispensable resource for high school and public libraries, and a teaching resource for courses on U.S. government and political system.

A repeat of the Florida debacle in the 2000 presidential election is the fear of every election administrator and scholar of U.S. elections. Despite the relatively complication-free 2008 election, we are working with fairly new federal legislation designed to ease election administration problems. The implementation of the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) raises the question, how effective have reforms been? Could another Florida happen? Helping America Vote is focused on the conflict between values of access and integrity in U.S. election administration. Kropf and Kimball examine both what was included in HAVA, and what was not. There are specific issues that the legislation de-emphasizes which the authors argue are important. Widespread agreement that voting equipment was a problem made technology the centerpiece of the legislation, and it has remedied a number of pressing concerns. But, there is still reason to be concerned about key aspects of electronic voting, ballot design, and the politics of partisan administrators. It takes a legitimacy crisis for serious election reforms to happen at the federal level, and seemingly, the crisis has passed. However, the risk is still very much present for the electoral process to fail. What are the implications for democracy when we attempt reform? Our lack of attention to ballots and administrative structures could cause another legitimacy crisis.

When survey research, statistics, and electronic data processing were first introduced, they held out promise that a new level of political knowledge would be created. Applied to the study of voting behavior, survey research promised an understanding of the factors determining the outcome of an election, that political history could be based on rich and current data, and that we could begin to understand the role of elections in constitutional democracy. The truth as Peter B. Natchez shows, is that despite the opportunity provided by this revolution, voting studies have failed to make significant contributions to democratic theory or political history.

The findings of voting studies have spread from the universities into the political system with a rather grim message. In its simplest form the message is this: the electorate does not measure up to the task thrust upon it by democracy. The studies conclude that voters choose candidates for reasons having little relevance to the success of the political system, and little relevance even to politics. Thus political science, in shifting from an optimistic focus on theory to a strong emphasis on empiricism, became a source of pessimism.

One cannot study democracy or the democratic process without a point of view on democracy. The scientific method requires a point of view: science is not only a method for discovering reality, but for addressing well-structured questions. Natchez identifies goals for democracy, freedom and tolerance, and consciousness in decision making. Elections serve two functions; one, filling constitutional offices, and two, a symbolic function rooted in democratic experience that is more ambiguous, but no less vital as a part of regime analysis. A political science that connects these two aspects of voting will require an analysis of why voters vote the way they do to fill offices; but, more importantly, it will also require an understanding of the symbolic function of elections.

This book is a political history of democratic elections in Poland from the first fully competitive parliamentary elections in 1991 to the unexpected, most recent election in 2007. Until now, there has been no equivalent study covering similar developments in this, or any other, post-communist country; this book fills the gap and provides a detailed electoral perspective on the trajectory of political development in the context of post-authoritarian change. It also provides an invaluable account of the evolution of electoral processes and institution-building in the context of democratic regime development. The major themes of the book centre on the complex, problematic development of Poland's political parties and the parties' failure to gain public support and win the confidence of the electorate. Frances Millard examines the failure of Polish elites; the lack of a stable party system and how elections have had a destabilizing effect, and she argues that the interaction of leadership volatility, party volatility, and electoral volatility have created uncertainty and undermined political parties as effective vehicles of representation. Poland is a large and important country, worthy of study in its own right, but equally many of the problems experienced are not unique to Poland; so this book also constitutes a comparative benchmark for analysis of democratic developments elsewhere.

A repeat of the Florida debacle in the 2000 presidential election is the fear of every election administrator and scholar of U.S. elections. Despite the relatively complication-free 2008 election, we are working with fairly new federal legislation designed to ease election administration problems. The implementation of the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) raises the question, how effective have reforms been? Could another Florida happen? Helping America Vote is focused on the conflict between values of access and integrity in U.S. election administration. Kropf and Kimball examine both what was included in HAVA, and what was not. There are specific issues that the legislation de-emphasizes which the authors argue are important. Widespread agreement that voting equipment was a problem made technology the centerpiece of the legislation, and it has remedied a number of pressing concerns. But, there is still reason to be concerned about key aspects of electronic voting, ballot design, and the politics of partisan administrators. It takes a legitimacy crisis for serious election reforms to happen at the federal level, and seemingly, the crisis has passed. However, the risk is still very much present for the electoral process to fail. What are the implications for democracy when we attempt reform? Our lack of attention to ballots and administrative structures could cause another legitimacy crisis.

Drawing on classic and contemporary scholarship and empirical analysis of elections and public expenditures in 80 countries, the author argues for the existence of primary and secondary laws of politics. Starting with how basic elements of politics-leadership, organization, ideology, resources, and force-coalesce in the formation of states, he proceeds to examine the operations of those laws in democracies and dictatorships. Primary laws constrain the support that incumbents draw from the electorate, limiting their time in office. They operate unimpeded in democracies. Secondary laws describe the general tendency of the state to expand vis-a-vis economy and society. They exert their greatest force in one-party states imbued with a totalitarian ideology. The author establishes the primary laws in a rigorous analysis of 1,100 parliamentary and presidential elections in 80 countries, plus another 1,000 U.S. gubernatorial elections. Evidence for the secondary laws is drawn from public expenditure data series, with findings presented in easily grasped tables and graphs. Having established these laws quantitatively, the author uses Cuba as a case study, adding qualitative analysis and a practical application to propose a constitutional framework for a future Cuban democracy. Written in an engaging, jargon-free style, this enlightening book will be of great interest to students and scholars in political science, especially those specializing in comparative politics, as well as opinion leaders and engaged citizens.

The conventional wisdom that parliamentary elections are now, more than at any time in the past, determined by voters' assessments of party leaders has been fiercely contested by comparative electoral research. To overcome the obvious mismatch between customary expectations about the role of party leaders and the conclusions drawn by scholarly research in the field, this book provides an innovative framework for the study of voting behavior in light of the ongoing personalization of politics. Through analysis of election study data from Britain, Germany and the Netherlands, this book highlights the progressive inability of social-psychological models of voting to account for individuals' choices. Throughout the last four decades, voters' attitudes towards party leaders have apparently become a crucial determinant of their feelings of affinity with certain parties. Once the role of leaders as drivers of partisanship is taken into account, their electoral effect emerges as a force that can - more often than not - make the difference between victory and defeat.