This book is a history of the emergence and development of the concept of proportional representation and its relation to political theory within the context of nineteenth-century British party politics focusing on Thomas Hare (1806-1891).

What trends are shaping contemporary political communication and behaviour in Canada, and where are they heading? What's Trending in Canadian Politics? examines political communication and democratic governance in a digital age. Exploring the effects of conventional and emerging political communication practices in Canada, contributors investigate the uses of digital media for political communication, grassroots-driven protest, public behaviour prediction, and relationships between members of civil society and the political establishment. Original and timely, this interdisciplinary volume lays robust theoretical and methodological foundations for the study of transformative trends in Canadian political communication.

Referendums are playing an increasingly influential role in the process of European integration. Starting with the entry of a first wave of new European Community members in the 1970s, this instrument of popular decision making has grown ever more important. Later stages in the enlargement process of the European Union have led to even more referendums. Indeed, European integration was seriously jeopardized when Danish voters first rejected the Maastricht Treaty and France's citizens almost joined them. Yet we know very little about how referendums affect the integration process. This landmark study bridges this gap in two ways. First, it offers a thorough comparative analysis of referendums that have occurred so far in the process of European integration. Utilizing a detailed study of voting behavior by citizens in these referendum campaigns, Simon Hug argues that understanding this behavior is of crucial importance if we want to accurately assess the impact of referendums on European integration. The author then draws on his comparative data to analyze the likely consequences of referendums based on those that have taken place and proposals for new initiatives. With its detailed empirical analysis and theoretical foundation, this book makes an important contribution both to the study of referendums and to our understanding of institutional reform and integration within the EU.

She has a plan! Get informed about the policies of Massachusetts Senator turned presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren. This concise guide will help you decide quickly if Warren deserves your vote for the Democratic nomination and to take on Donald Trump. Warren's strong economic background sets her apart; the senator from Massachusetts defines herself as a capitalist first and seeks to make capitalism more equitable for all. She has already proposed sweeping anti-corruption reforms, refused PAC donations to her campaign, rolled out plans for college debt forgiveness and a tax on the super wealthy. Her background as a Harvard economist, author of The Two-Income Trap, and experience as an economic advisor to Barack Obama positions her well to make change happen. Warren's campaign also features popular Democratic talking points--rebuilding the middle class, ending corruption in Washington, making voting laws more democratic, bringing our troops home and stopping endless war--but it's her experience that sets her apart. From working the campaign trial for Hillary Clinton to weathering President Trump's refrain of "Pocahontas" in reference to her claimed Native American heritage, Meet the Candidates 2020: Elizabeth Warren: A Voter's Guide is your complete handbook to Elizabeth Warren's resume, campaign, and what America would look like if she won the presidency in 2020. The Meet the Candidates 2020 series is the informed voter's guide to making a decision in the 2020 Democratic primary and presidential election. Each book gives an unbiased, political insider's analysis of each contender, featuring: candidate interviews; an introduction by campaign advisor, Democratic Coalition co-founder, and Dworkin Report host Scott Dworkin; and compilation and writing by Occupy Democrats Editor at Large Grant Stern. In two hours of reading, you'll understand their defining characteristics, credentials, campaign issues, challenges, presidential chances, and everything else you need to know to decide who should challenge Donald Trump. Whether it's for Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Julian Castro, Cory Booker, or another, Meet the Candidates is what you need to make an informed vote for president in 2020.

Is Donald Trump's "War on the Media" new news, fake news, or business as usual? Presidents have always "used" the media and felt abused by it. Tried and true vehicles such as press conferences, routine speeches and the State of the Union address have served presidents' interests and received significant coverage by the print media. As new technologies have entered the media spectrum, the speed and pervasiveness of these interactions have changed dramatically. President Obama ushered in the social media presidency, while President Trump has become the tweeter-in-chief. This book shows how each of these developments affects what is communicated and how it is received by the public.

The right to vote is the foundation of democratic government; all other policies are derived from it. The history of voting rights in America has been characterized by a gradual expansion of the franchise. American Indians are an important part of that story but have faced a prolonged battle to gain the franchise. One of the most important tools wielded by advocates of minority voting rights has been the Voting Rights Act. This book explains the history and expansion of Indian voting rights, with an emphasis on seventy cases based on the Voting Rights Act and/or the Equal Protection Clause. The authors describe the struggle to obtain Indian citizenship and the basic right to vote, then analyze the cases brought under the Voting Rights Act, including three case studies. The final two chapters assess the political impact of these cases and the role of American Indians in contemporary politics.

Party systems are crucial elements for the functioning of political systems and representative democracies. With several European countries experiencing significant changes recently, it is necessary to update our knowledge. This volume analyses party system changes in Europe in the 21st century by considering several dimensions such as interparty competition, the cleavage structure, electoral volatility and the emergence of new actors. The book describes the principal continuities and changes in party systems in Europe; analyzes the main explanations for these trends; and assesses the impact of the crisis on the patterns observed. By considering a wide range of Western and Eastern European countries, and focusing on the 'parameters' of party system change, this book seeks to fill an important gap in the literature through a comparative analysis of the evolution of party systems in Europe over the last decades. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of political parties, party systems and politics, electoral behavior as well as more broadly to European politics, comparative politics. political representation and the quality of democracies.

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.

The unexpected shift from the election of Barack Obama and the post-racial hope to the racial confrontations in the Trump era begs the question: Why did such a big volatile swing happen in such a short period of time? Uncertainty reigns in volatile political times. This book aims to provide a systemic model for understanding how political volatility throughout the U.S. history has had its root in two competing racial and religious groupings. Moreover, the groupings grounded in white supremacy and egalitarianism have collided, contested, and facilitated the configuration and reconfiguration of the atomic political structure. As demonstrated in this book, the antagonism between the two competing identity groupings led to a history of political volatility in the United States. Contrary to the endless "political deadlocks" suggested by the scholars of American political development, this book explains how and why the two orders persist, reach peaks of volatility, and why one temporarily achieves prominence over the other. Going beyond the simplistic view of racial and religious hierarchy, this book provides an account rooted in structural tensions, strategic imperatives, opportunities, and threats on collective actions.

Across the country, races for judgeships are becoming more and more politically contested. As a result, several states and cities are now considering judicial election reform. Running for Judge examines the increasingly contentious judicial elections over the last twenty-five years by providing a timely, insightful analysis of judicial elections. The book ties together the current state of the judicial elections literature, and presents new evidence on a wide range of important topics, including: the history of judicial elections; an understanding of the types of judicial elections; electoral competition during races; the increasing importance of campaign financing; voting in judicial elections; the role interest groups play in supporting candidates; party organizing in supposedly non-partisan elections; judicial accountability; media coverage; and judicial reform of elections.

Running for Judge is an engaging, accessible, empirical analysis of the major issues surrounding judicial elections, with contributions from prominent scholars in the fields of judicial politics, political behavior, and law.

Contributors: Lawrence Baum, Chris W. Bonneau, Brent D. Boyea, Paul Brace, Rachel P. Caufield, Jennifer Segal Diascro, Brian Frederick, Deborah Goldberg, Melinda Gann Hall, Richard L. Hasen, David Klein, Brian F. Schaffner, and Matthew J. Streb.

This book examines the evolution of the Catholic vote in the United States and the role of Catholic voters in the 2020 national elections more specifically. There is a paucity of academic books on Catholic voters, even though Catholics comprise nearly one-quarter of the US national popular vote and commonly are called the "swing vote." Scholars of religion and politics tend to focus heavily on the evangelical right, thus overlooking the powerful influence of Catholic voters who, by the accounts in this volume, were critical to the presidential election of President Joe Biden. To understand the intersection of religion, politics, and election outcomes in the US requires an analysis of the role played by Catholics. Among key topics covered in this volume are whether Biden's Catholic identity was key to his achieving a larger percentage of the Catholic vote than achieved by Hillary Clinton in 2016; the role of the Catholic bishops in US elections; the critically important role of the Catholic Latino vote in US elections; the conservative Catholic and evangelical alliance in US politics; and the distinctive politics of social justice Catholics and socially conservative Catholics.

A New Statesman Book of the Year With every presidential election, Americans puzzle over the peculiar mechanism of the Electoral College. The author of the Pulitzer finalist The Right to Vote explains the enduring problem of this controversial institution. Every four years, millions of Americans wonder why they choose their presidents through the Electoral College, an arcane institution that permits the loser of the popular vote to become president and narrows campaigns to swing states. Most Americans have long preferred a national popular vote, and Congress has attempted on many occasions to alter or scuttle the Electoral College. Several of these efforts-one as recently as 1970-came very close to winning approval. Yet this controversial system remains. Alexander Keyssar explains its persistence. After tracing the Electoral College's tangled origins at the Constitutional Convention, he explores the efforts from 1800 to 2020 to abolish or significantly reform it, showing why each has failed. Reasons include the complexity of the electoral system's design, the tendency of political parties to elevate partisan advantage above democratic values, the difficulty of passing constitutional amendments, and, importantly, the South's prolonged backing of the Electoral College, grounded in its desire to preserve white supremacy in the region. The commonly voiced explanation that small states have blocked reform for fear of losing influence proves to have been true only occasionally. Keyssar examines why reform of the Electoral College has received so little attention from Congress for the last forty years, and considers alternatives to congressional action such as the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and state efforts to eliminate winner-take-all. In analyzing the reasons for past failures while showing how close the nation has come to abolishing the institution, Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? offers encouragement to those hoping to produce change in the twenty-first century.

This book explores the problems associated with regulating the funding of political parties and election campaigns in a timely assessment of a topic of great political controversy. From interest in Obama's capacity to raise vast sums of money, to scandals that have rocked UK and Australian governments, party funding is a global issue, reflected in this text with case studies from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and the United States. Taking an interdisciplinary approach with leading scholars from politics, geography and law, this text addresses key themes: contributions, spending controls, the role of broadcasters and special interests, and the role of the state in funding political parties. With regulatory measures apparently unable to change the behaviour of parties, why have existing laws failed to satisfy the demands for reform, and what kind of laws are necessary to change the way political parties behave? The Funding of Political Parties: Where Now? brings fresh comparative material to inform this topical and intractable debate, and assesses the wider implications of continuing problems in political funding. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, political theory, policy and law.

In this collection of blog posts, op-eds, musings and rants, Griffin chronicles the road to the 2012 GOP nomination following the candidates, the campaigns, debates, and debacles that may well result in the next leader of the free world.

For many in Britain the issue of the country's membership of the European Union is the biggest political decision of their lifetime. It affects their livelihoods, their communities, the life chances of their children and their grandchildren and, above all, their sense of themselves. The existential nature of what is at stake is, perhaps, the reason the rift in British society is so deep. Geraint Talfan Davies, writes as a committed European, but also from the perspective of Wales - of the UK's nations, the one that he argues has most to lose from Brexit. His diary takes us through Auschwitz, a German car factory, and a European Cup Final. He explores the potential impact of Brexit on our universities and our cultural life. He also takes us through a clutch of referendums - on devolution in Wales and on independence in Scotland - charting the interplay of devolution and the European issue. Closely involved in the Europe referendum, he is critical of the campaign for not expressing a sense of idealism, and, writing just as the Parliamentary debate approaches its climax, he makes the case that the Labour Party must steel itself to stop Brexit.

Electoral and parliamentary arenas play a crucial role in the configuration and dynamics of modern polities. This book explores the practices of citizenship and unveils the fabric of representation in the Iberian countries, during a significant period of liberal politics, that is, from its apogee to its collapse (from the 1870s to the 1920s). Part One examines the evolution of electoral norms and behaviour, as well as the recruitment profile of MPs. Portugal and Spain share fundamental features, such as the extensive clientelistic mobilisation of voters, the dissemination of fraud and corruption, the supremacy of governmental parties and the prevalence of the politics of notables. Part Two focuses on Parliament, questioning constitutional models, internal procedures, legislative action and political activity, as well as coetaneous perceptions and images of the institution and its actors as portrayed in novels, newspaper chronicles, cartoons and photographic reports. This collection of essays offers a detailed and cogent analysis, as well as a vivid picture, of the politics of representation in Portuguese and Spanish liberalism, revealing significant similarities and differences through cross-country comparisons.

The 2002 campaign and election was one of the most dramatic in the history of the Federal Republic. An unprecedented last minute swing narrowly re-elected the Social Democratic-Green government of Chancellor Schroeder. The campaign featured the first-ever American style television debate between the two candidates for the chancellorship. Foreign policy, particularly the refusal of Schroeder to support the Iraq policies of US President George W. Bush, played an unusually important role. In the aftermath of the election the government was faced with a deteriorating economy and the charge of the opposition that it had deliberately mislead voters during the campaign. In this volume, distinguished experts from both sides of the Atlantic analyse these and other critical issues. Their work is based on extensive research in Germany and Washington, which included interviews with major political figures and the collection of new campaign and election data. Contributors: William Patterson, E. Gene Frankland, Clay Clemens, Christian Soe, Gerald R. Kleinfeld, David Patton, Dieter Roth, Mary N. Hampton, Ferdinand Breitbach, Irwin Collier, Helga Welsh, Stephen Szabo.

Larry Sabato, one of the leading experts in American politics, has brought together respected journalists and academics from across the political spectrum to examine every facet of the 2012 election, and what its development and outcome will mean for the nation moving forward. In frank, accessible prose, each author offers insight that goes beyond the headlines, and dives into the underlying forces and shifts that drove the election from its earliest developments to its dramatic conclusion. Contributing authors joining Larry Sabato with chapters in the book include: Professor Alan Abramowitz of Emory University; Professor Diana Owen of Georgetown University; Jamelle Bouie of American Prospect; Professor James Campbell of SUNY-Buffalo; Political writers and commentators Kyle Kondik and Geoff Skelley of the University of Virginia Center for Politics; Michael Toner, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission; Karen E. Trainer of Wiley Rein LLP; Nate Cohn of The New Republic; Rhodes Cook, formerly of Congressional Quarterly; Robert Costa of National Review; Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics; and Professor Susan MacManus of the University of South Florida. Following Sabato's introductory analysis, the contributors provide a comprehensive review of everything in play during the 2012 elections, including the controversial roles that unprecedented amounts of money and media played in deciding who would occupy the Oval Office as well as pivotal seats in Congress. They also explore the nominating processes, conventions, and futures of both the Democratic and Republican parties, and what recent geographic and demographic electoral realignments might mean for America's politics beyond 2012.

In this book, a distinguished group of presidential campaign staff, journalists, and political observers take us inside the 2016 race for the Republican and Democratic nominations 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 2016 is essential reading for anyone interested in the inner workings of national political campaigns.

Goes beyond European confines and gives a comprehensive view of religious party strength, exploring different regions and religions, over a long period of time. Presents a theoretically robust critique of Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations.

"Referendums and Democratic Government" deals with the role of different forms of referendums in modern representative democracies. It analyzes the referendum from the point of view of social choice theory and various theories of democracy. The institutions of referendums are analyzed in 22 democracies, and referendums in Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland are analyzed as case studies. Different forms of referendums are classified according to how they are initiated and how their agenda is set. It is argued that various types of referendums have been justified by arguments based on different normative theories of democracy as referendum is not a unitary phenomenon.

First published in 1995, the aim of this book is to review various aspects of the process of democratic transition in Hungary over the period of its first post-communist, freely elected parliament between 1990 and 1994. The studies collected in this book attempt to put them in the context of longer-term trends in Hungarian politics. Hungary offers an example of the problems of political change common to Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Eastern Bloc but also demonstrates a relatively stable and successful transformation built on a unique experience under communist rule that helped prepare it for a market-orientated economy transition and political pluralism.

Across the Western world, people are desperate for a radical shift in politics and for new kinds of politicians. Primary defeats for established figures and shock results in referendums are becoming the norm, while outsiders are shaking up political cultures. In this book, Ali Milani, a rising star in the UK's Labour Party, brings a unique perspective to the key political issues we're facing in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and shows how young people from all walks of life can engage in politics to transform our country and the world. Drawing on his rollercoaster campaign against Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the UK's 2019 general election and his time in Bernie Sanders' campaign team, he aims to inspire a new generation, including the disenfranchised, disillusioned and marginalised, to raise their voices and change mainstream politics for the better.

Everything you need to know about Vote by Mail! Successful campaign manager and three-term mayor of Ashland, Oregon, Catherine Shaw presents the must-have handbook for navigating local campaigns. This clear and concise handbook gives political novices and veterans alike a detailed, soup-to-nuts plan for organizing, funding, publicizing, and winning local political campaigns. Finding the right message and targeting the right voters are clearly explained through specific examples, anecdotes, and illustrations. Shaw also provides in-depth information on assembling campaign teams and volunteers, canvassing, how to conduct a precinct analysis, and how to campaign on a shoestring budget. The Campaign Manager is an encouraging, lucid presentation of how to win elections at the local level.The sixth edition has been fully revised to include new and expanded coverage of contemporary campaign management-from digital ads and new social media tools to data-driven voter targeting tactics and vote by mail strategies.

Luke Perry's inaugural Pivot in the Palgrave Studies in US Elections series examines the impact of Donald Trump on the 2018 midterm campaigns in Central New York, particularly competitive campaigns for NY-19, NY-22, and NY-24. Providing a contextual foundation for these races-considering factors such as incumbency advantage, history of party control of the seat, registered party members, statewide electoral norms, fundraising, and polling-Donald Trump and the 2018 Midterm Battle for Central New York then analyzes the positions and rhetoric of these GOP reelection campaigns, paying particular attention to the continuity and variance in relation to Trump's personal, populist, and negative campaign style. When examined alongside the results of the midterm election, the outcomes illustrated how the president hurt more than helped House GOP incumbents, revealed the quality of candidates, proved how campaigns and grassroots organizing matter, and demonstrated that moderate Democrats were more successful than progressive ones.