The way in which elections are run is changing, as radical reforms or experiments have been introduced across the world. This text establishes why election administration might be used by political elites to win and maintain power. It identifies the role of elite interests in shaping election administration in USA, UK and Ireland.

In this groundbreaking battery of dispatches from the heartland of America, Matt Taibbi tells the full story of the Trump phenomenon, from its tragi-comic beginnings to the apocalyptic election.

Full of sharp, on-the-ground reporting and gallows humour, his incisive analysis goes beyond the bizarre and disturbing election to tell a wider story of the apparent collapse of American democracy. Taibbi saw the essential themes right from the start: the power of spectacle over truth; the end of a shared reality on the left and right; the nihilistic rebellion of the white working class; the death of the political establishment; and the emergence of a new, explicit form of white nationalism.

From the thwarted Bernie Sanders insurgency to the aimless Hillary Clinton campaign, across the flailing media coverage and the trampled legacy of Obama, this is the story of ordinary voters forced to bear witness to the whole charade. At the centre of it all, "a bumbling train wreck of a candidate who belched and preened his way past a historically weak field" who, improbably, has taken control of the world's most powerful nation.

This is essential and hilarious reading that explores how the new America understands itself, and about the future of the world just beyond the horizon.

The 2010 General Election represented a pathbreaking contest in Political Communication. The TV debates changed forever the feel of the campaign. This book brings together key commentators, analysts and polling experts to present readers with a unique and valuable insight into the development of political communication in British Politics.

The newest volume in the Elections in Israel series focuses on the twentieth Knesset elections held in March 2015 following the collapse of the third Netanyahu government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's main opposition party, the Zionist Camp, ran a negative personalized election campaign, assuming that Israelis had grown tired of him. Netanyahu, however, achieved a surprising and dramatic victory by enhancing and radicalizing the same identity politics strategies that helped him win in 1996. The Elections in Israel 2015 dissects these and other campaigns, from the perspective of the voters, the media and opinion polls, the political parties, and electoral competition. Several contributors delve into the Left and Arab fear mongering Likud campaign, which produced strategic identity voting. Other contributions analyze in-depth the Israeli party and electoral systems, highlighting the exceptional decline of the mainstream parties and the adoption of a higher electoral threshold. Providing a close analysis of electoral competition, legitimacy struggles, stability and change in the voting behavior of various groups, partisanship, personalization and political polarization, this volume is a crucial record of Israeli political history.

Understanding public opinion is integral to modern democracies. Social research and opinion polls give people the opportunity to express their views and provide an efficient way to measure public opinion. This book illustrates how public opinion polling matters in politics, in the public sphere, and more generally in globalized economies. It presents results from opinion polls in more than 30 countries, especially 12 in-depth case studies from various countries around the world.

The 2005 UK General Election promised to be a hard-fought contest. Drawing upon contributions from a range of experts, this book explains the basis upon which the election was fought. Combining analysis of the party campaigns with a longer-term assessment of the handling of key issues, the volume provides a definitive guide to how the election was won and lost. Academic analyses of social, political and territorial factors in how the UK voted are complemented by outsider views and constituency profiles, in a rigorous, lively and accessible manner.

In the past several decades, the country has seen some incumbent presidents win second terms by margins previously believed to be unattainable, yet has witnessed defeats of more incumbents than at any time in our national history. These outcomes are directly related to the presence of television and to the changing nature of incumbency. The relationship between incumbency and television news reporting has replaced partisanship as the leading determinant of voter choice in presidential elections since 1960. By showing how various recurring patterns in televised news reporting of presidential elections and of the presidency itself have actually enhanced the reelection prospects of some incumbents while undermining others, and how these patterns have influenced the campaigns of other leading political figures, the author provides us with a new means of understanding elections to come.

This volume, the second of a multi-volume reference work, presents county and district demographic data and the geographical location of American congressional districts between 1789 and 1942. Volume II is considerably different from its predecessor, United States Congressional Districts, 1788-1841 (Greenwood Press, 1978), largely due to the increasing amount of census information available during successive decades in the 19th century. United States Congressional Districts and Data, 1843-1883 emphasizes the statistical description of districts, including occupational categories and agricultural output, as well as racial and other characteristics of the population. Thus, it reflects the increasing usefulness to social scientists of the United States census. References to individual congressmen have been eliminated in this volume, and the bulk of it is devoted to aggregating data by each district. Presenting these data at the county level should enable researchers to get a better feeling for the data and to visualize, through maps, the variations within each district.

Germany remains a leader in Europe, as demonstrated by its influential role in the on-going policy challenges in response to the post 2008 financial and economic crises. Rarely does the composition of a national government matter as much as Germany's did following the 2009 Bundestag election. This volume, which brings together established and up-and coming academics from both sides of the Atlantic, delves into the dynamics and consequences surrounding this fateful election: How successful was Chancellor Angela Merkel's leadership of the Grand Coalition and what does her new partnership with the Free Democrats auger? In the face economic crisis, why did German voters empower a center-right market-liberal coalition? Why did the SPD, one of the oldest and most distinguished parties in the world self-destruct and what are the chances that it will recover? The chapters go beyond the contemporary situation and provide deeper analyses of the long-term decline of the catchall parties, structural changes in the party system, electoral behavior, the evolution of perceptions of gender in campaigns, and the use of new social media in German politics.

Thomas Lundberg critically examines the claim that party list-elected members of Britain's devolved assemblies are somehow 'second-class' representatives. The Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly are elected by the controversial mixed-member proportional (MMP) system. Empirical evidence compares British representatives to their MMP-elected counterparts in Germany and in New Zealand. Although list-elected representatives in Britain do appear to have a different constituency role, these representatives add an important element of pluralism to Britain's majoritarian politics.

This book gives a full account of past experience, present structures and processes, and probable developments, of the voters- party-electoral systems nexus in twenty-one advanced Western democracies. The analysis is based on an original 1945-2007 comparative data set including all relevant political and institutional variables.

This revised and updated edition remains the only book-length rhetorical analysis of national political debates from 1960 to the present. The contributors, all rhetorical critics, answer important questions about political debating in the United States, including: Why is the press involved in political debates? Why are debates likely to be an enduring part of our presidential campaigns? Why are some candidates successful as debaters while others are not? Chapter authors offer insight into the goals commonly shared by political debaters and the rhetorical strategies most frequently used by national political debaters. By providing an overall analysis of a variety of debate practices, this book demonstrates how debates have become more than just campaign spectacles, but rather complex, calculated political events with significant consequences. Predebate, debate, and postdebate strategies are considered in depth in these microanalyses. Scholars and students of speech communication, particularly those concerned with political communication, will find this volume noteworthy, as will those in the related disciplines of political science, history, and journalism.

THIS book or some related work has occupied me spasmodically over rather a long period, in fact ever since I listened to the class lectures of Professor A. K. White on the possibility of forming a pure science of Politics. Mter an earlier version of Part I had failed to obtain publication in 1947, some chapters appeared as articles, and I am obliged to the editors of the journals mentioned below for permission to reprint this material, sometimes in a modified form. When I first attempted publication I was unacquainted with the earlier history of the theory, and, indeed, did not even know that it had a history; and the later additions to the book have largely been by way of writing the present Part II. This historical section does not include the important recent work, Social Ohoice and Individual Values (1951), of Professor Kenneth J. Arrow; but it does include all the mathematical work on committees and elections appearing before the middle of this century which has come to my notice, although the last item in it is dated 1907. No doubt there is much important material which I have failed to see. The theorizing of the book grew out of a reading of the English political philosophers and of the Italian writers on Public Finance. At a very early stage I was helped to find the general lines of development by discussion with my colleague Professor Ronald H.

A study of processes of political party formation and change in new democracies. This book argues that to understand party organizations we need to focus on politicians' electoral strategies. The framework is used to analyze political party development in the new democracies of East Asia (South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia.)

The definitive guide to the General Election is now in its seventeenth edition. The renowned series from Nuffield College, Oxford, which has covered every postwar British election, provides the authoritative, highly readable description of the background, the campaign and the results. David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh provide thoroughly documented coverage and analysis of the campaigns from party headquarters and from the constituencies.

The topic of electoral reform is an extremely timely one. The accelerated expansion of the number of new democracies in the world generates increasing demands for advice on the choice of electoral rules; at the same time, a new reformism in well established democracies seeks new formulas favoring both more representative institutions and more accountable rulers. This book addresses the theoretical and comparative issues of electoral reform in relation to democratization, political strategies in established democracies and the relative performance of different electoral systems. Case studies on virtually every major democracy or democratizing country in the world are included.

The International Almanac is the only up to date source for the history of election results in the Western world from their origins to the present. It provides clear and authoritative information for 25 different countries, ranging alphabetically from Australia to the USA, and geographically across four continents, including Japan and new Mediterranean democracies as well as old Anglo-American and Scandinavian democracies. Each chapter gives a comprehensive list of all parties that have contested one or more elections, its vote at each election and percentage share of the poll, and the number of seats won in the national assembly. The results have been checked from original sources in more than 15 languages. The new edition of the Almanac brings election results up to date and incorporates fresh materials from historical research, while retaining the features that have made the volume the authoritative book on elections.

This volume aims to provide consolidated analyses of the 2019 European elections and explanations about the future of the European party system, in a context in which the EU has to face many challenges, including the erosion of electoral support for mainstream parties and the increasing success of populist parties. The structure of the book is designed to combine the overall view on the role of elections in shaping the future European project with relevant case studies. The reader is given a perspective not only on the results of the European Parliament elections as such, but also on how these results are related to national trends which pre-exist and what kind of collateral effects on the quality of democracy they could have. Contributors include: Jan Biba, Sorin Bocancea, Dora Bokay, Radu Carp, Jozsef Duro, Tomas Dvorak, Alexandra Alina Iancu, Ruxandra Ivan, Petra Jankovska, Malgorzata Madej, Cristina Matiuta, Sergiu Miscoiu, Valentin Naumescu, Gianluca Piccolino, Leonardo Puleo, Alexandru Radu, Mihai Sebe, Sorina Soare, Tobias Spoeri, Jeremias Stadlmair, Martin Stefek, Piotr Sula, and Jaroslav Usiak.

In 1994, the Republican Party won control of the House of Representatives for the first time since 1954 and the Senate for the first time since 1986, bringing to an end the longest uninterrupted period of single party rule in the entire history of the United States Congress. In this text, scholars from Britain and the United States document these developments and evaluate their significance. They aim to answer the following questions: what political messages did the 1994 election results carry?; how significant were the institutional changes introduced?; how distinctive was Newt Gingrich's style and strategy?; how conservative was the legislation enacted by the 104th Congress?; how in the course of a single Congress was President Bill Clinton able to evolve from political irrelevant to major policy player?; how were despondent congressional Democrats able to recover to play an important role in shaping legislative outcomes?; are there many similarities with the Republican Congress which faced President Harry Truman in the 1940s?; and what is the significance of the 104th Congress for the future development of this complex institution and the governing of America.

This timely book presents a critique of binary majority rule and provides insights into why, in many instances, the outcome of a two-option ballot does not accurately reflect the will of the people. Based on the author's first-hand experience, majority-voting is argued to be a catalyst of populism and its divisive outcomes have prompted countless disputes throughout Europe and Asia. In like manner, simple majority rule is seen as a cause of conflict in war zones, and of dysfunction in so-called stable democracies. In order to safeguard democracy, an all-party power-sharing approach is proposed, which would make populism less attractive to voters and governments alike. In geographically arranged chapters, well-tested alternative voting procedures (e. g. non-majoritarian Modified Borda Count) are presented in case studies of Northern Ireland, Central Europe, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Russia, China, North Korea and Mongolia.

Providing a unique resource for readers seeking to understand the relationship between presidents, parties, and Congress, this book offers a new explanation of the motivations, strategies, and impacts of presidential midterm campaigns. Congress has been shaped by an unlikely force-presidential involvement in midterm campaigning. This book argues that midterm campaigning is a presidential Trojan horse and that in undertaking it, presidents have brought their parties to heel; indebted individual representatives and senators to them; and broken the ability of Congress to effectively check the executive office. Midterm Campaigning and the Modern Presidency looks at why presidential midterm campaigning emerged during the post-war period and why it did not emerge sooner; it then describes how presidents have shrewdly coordinated their midterm actions to not only shore up their immediate needs but also to remake in their own image both their party and Congress as a whole. Not merely about any particular election or candidate, the book shows that presidential midterm campaigning has a lasting impact on the behavior of Congress and on the future course of American political affairs. Examines all presidential midterm campaigning from 1954 (the inception of the "imperial" presidency) through 2014 Includes case studies of nine presidents as midterm campaigners: Johnson, Taft, FDR, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Clinton, Bush, and Obama Shows that presidents use campaigns not to aid their own party but to reshape it around their own ideological preferences Explains the relationship between presidential midterm campaigning and the U.S. party system Explores how presidential midterm campaigning affects subsequent Congressional behavior and federal elections

According to numerous scholars and pundits, JFK's victory in 1960 symbolized America's evolution from a politically Protestant nation to a pluralistic one. The anti-Catholic prejudice that many blamed for presidential candidate Alfred E. Smith's crushing defeat in 1928 at last seemed to have been overcome. However, if the presidential election of 1960 was indeed a turning point for American Catholics, how do we explain the failure of any Catholic--in over forty years--to repeat Kennedy's accomplishment? In this exhaustively researched study that fuses political, cultural, social, and intellectual history, Thomas Carty challenges the assumption that JFK's successful campaign for the presidency ended decades, if not centuries, of religious and political tensions between American Catholics and Protestants.

'A pioneering and important study.' David Denver, University of Lancaster 'This study is long overdue. It will inevitably attract a great deal of interest.' James Mitchell, University of Sheffield 'The debates on ethnic minority electoral participation have been bedevilled by methodological problems and political disputes. Shamit Saggar's sensitive analysis and careful use of the British Election Study data make this an important and authoritative contribution to the understanding of ethnic minority politics." Zig Layton-Henry, University of Warwick The central concern of "Race and Representation" is the political integration of Britain's ethnic minorities. The book provides a direct and extensive comparison between the voting behaviour of ethnic minorities and the electorate as a whole. The book pioneers innovative use of the British Election Study and features the results of the 1997 ethnic minority election study. It also contains an in-depth look at party strategy with regard to ethnic minorities, ethnic minority attitudes on key issues and policies, and the lessons to be learned from the performance of black and Asian parliamentary candidates. In particular, the analysis aims to uncover whether electoral abstention, orientation towards issues and party alignment are primarily circumstantial, as existing research suggests is the case among the white population. It is a major re-examination of the role of ethnicity in shaping political outlook and voting choice. The book will be essential reading for students, teachers and scholars interested in the involvement of Britain's ethnic minorities in the democratic process. It will also have extensive appeal among activists, policy-makers and opinion formers concerned with ethnic diversity, race relations and political inclusion.

An analysis of the 2009 European elections in each of the 27 member states of the newly enlarged European Union, and assessment of the European Parliament in 2004-2009. This book looks at the implications of low turnout for the future of European Union democracy and accountability.