Ambiguity in election games

We construct a model in which the ambiguity of candidates allows them toincrease the number of voters to whom they appeal when voters have intense preferences for one of the alternatives available. An ambiguous candidate may offer voters with different preferences the hope that their most preferred alternative will be implemented. We find conditions under which ambiguous strategies are chosen in equilibrium. These conditions include the case in which there is an outcome that is a majority winner against all other outcomes but is not the most preferred outcome for a majority of voters. It is shown that if the number of candidates or parties increases, ambiguity will not be possible in equilibrium, but a larger set of possible policies increases the chance that at least one candidate will choose to be ambiguous in equilibrium.

Election Day Registration Guide, 2008

As of January 1, 2008, Iowa law allows you to register to vote on Election Day at the polling place for the precinct you currently live in. After showing proper identification you may register and vote at the precinct the same day. Please open file for more information.

ELECTION LAWS OF IOWA 2011

This publication contains all election laws either included in the 2011 Iowa Code or to be included in the 2011 Iowa Code Supplement. The Supplement will contain all enactments from 2011 and earlier years that are made effective in 2011 or on January 1, 2012. Changes in Code language to be included in the 2011 Iowa Code Supplement are marked by highlighting in yellow. Code sections with changes are also highlighted in yellow in the Table of Contents. In previous editions of this publication some Code sections were not printed in their entirety, with only the portion relating to election law printed. This year all Code sections relating to election law are printed in their entirety, including the Code section’s complete history and footnotes. DISCLAIMER This document is not an official legal publication of the state of Iowa. For the official publication of the Iowa Acts and the Iowa Code, see those publications. (2011 Iowa Code §2B.17)

Understanding Political Knowledge and Its Influence on Voting Preferences in the 2007 Federal Election

In this article we propose a model to explain how voters' perceptions of their ideological proximity to a party affect their propensity to vote for that party. We argue that political knowledge plays a crucial moderating role in the relationship between party proximity and voting propensity. It is necessary, however, to distinguish between institutional knowledge (information about the political system) and party knowledge (information about the parties' left-right positions). An analysis of survey data from the 2007 Swiss federal elections supports our main hypothesis that party knowledge enhances the link between party proximity and voting propensity. Institutional knowledge may have additional influence, but clear evidence for this effect was obtained only for propensities to vote for the Swiss People's Party (SVP). Overall, the impact of political knowledge was found to be substantial, even after controlling for the outstanding influence of party identification and other predictors of voting propensities

E-tools for civic education : experiences from the election campaign in Switzerland 2007

Political participation is often very low in Switzerland especially among students and young citizens. In the run-up to the Swiss parliamentary election in October 2007 several online tools and campaigns were developed with the aim to increase not only the level of information about the political programs of parties and candidates, but also the electoral participation of younger citizens. From a practical point of view this paper will describe the development, marketing efforts and the distribution as well as the use of two of these tools : the so-called "Parteienkompass" (party compass) and the "myVote"-tool - an online voting assistance tool based on an issue-matching system comparing policy preferences between voters and candidates on an individual level. We also havea look at similar tools stemming from Voting Advice Applications (VAA) in other countries in Western Europe. The paper closes with the results of an evaluation and an outlook to further developments and on-going projects in the near future in Switzerland.

The Half-Life of Election Pledges : What makes MPs change their positions?

"Thou shalt not bear false witness," as we all know. Yet changing one's mind in case of respectable reasons seems to be allowed. Which is good news for politicians, but reduces the effectiveness of prospective voting, i.e. the focus on "the commitments of candidates to take actions that citizens desire to be taken" (Powell 2000: 9). This may be bad news for voters. By comparing pre-election commitments of Swiss members of parliament (MPs) with actual voting behaviour in the lower house of parliament, the following article explores the question how much confidence voters can have in prospective voting and what factors explain (non-)fulfilment of election pledges.

Undercoverage and Nonresponse in a List-sampled Telephone Election Survey

For landline telephone surveys in particular, undercoverage has been a growing problem. However, research regarding the relative contributions of socio-demographic bias and other composition effects is scarce. We propose to address this issue by analyzing an election survey which used a sample from a register-based sampling frame containing basic socio-demographic information and to which telephone numbers were subsequently matched. With respect to socio-demographic representation of the final sample, we find that difficult to match groups are also difficult to contact, while those who cooperate tend to have different characteristics. We find bias due to undercoverage to be of greater magnitude than noncontact bias, while noncooperation falls between the two. As for substantive variables, both additional efforts to match missing telephone numbers and the construction of better weights are successful in closing the gap between survey estimates of voting behavior and true values from the election results.

More than Words? An Analysis on the Language and Structure of General Election Manifestos of the British Labour Party 1983-2005

The topic of this study is the language of the educational policies of the British Labour party in the General Election manifestos between the years 1983-2005. The twenty-year period studied has been a period of significant changes in world politics, and in British politics, especially for the Labour party. The emergence educational policy as a vote-winner of the manifestos of the nineties has been noteworthy. The aim of the thesis is two-fold: to look at the structure of the political manifesto as an example of genre writing and to analyze the content utilizing the approach of critical discourse analysis. Furthermore, the aim of this study is not to pinpoint policy positions but to look at what is the image that the Labour Party creates of itself through these manifestos. The analysis of the content is done by a method of close-reading. Based on the findings, the methodology for the analysis of the content was created. This study utilized methodological triangulation which means that the material is analyzed from several methodological aspects. The aspects used in this study are ones of lexical features (collocation, coordination, euphemisms, metaphors and naming), grammatical features (thematic roles, tense, aspect, voice and modal auxiliaries) and rhetoric (Burke, Toulmin and Perelman). From the analysis of the content a generic description is built. By looking at the lexical, grammatical and rhetorical features a clear change in language of the Labour Party can be detected. This change is foreshadowed already in the 1992 manifesto but culminates in the 1997 manifesto which would lead Labour to a landslide victory in the General Election. During this twenty-year period Labour has moved away from the old commitments and into the new sphere of “something for everybody”. The pervasiveness of promotional language and market inspired vocabulary into the sphere of manifesto writing is clear. The use of the metaphors seemed to be the tool for the creation of the image of the party represented through the manifestos. A limited generic description can be constructed from the findings based on the content and structure of the manifestos: especially more generic findings such as the use of the exclusive we, the lack of certain anatomical parts of argument structure, the use of the future tense and the present progressive aspect can shed light to the description of the genre of manifesto writing. While this study is only the beginning, it proves that the combination of looking at the lexical, grammatical and rhetorical features in the study of manifestos is a promising one.

Compositional data analysis of vote shares in the 2001 Australian Federal election

First application of compositional data analysis techniques to Australian election data

Procès-verbal de saisie faite par les commis aux aydes [des Fermes Royales-Unies de France] sur le sieur Louis de Londre, marchand épicier à Paris, de six caisses remplies de bouteilles d'eau-de-senteur ou d'esprit-de-vin, prétendu être foiblement chargé d'odeur aromatique... et Sentence contradictoire rendue en l'Election de Paris, qui fait main-levée de ladite saisie, du 13 août 1750

[Acte. 1750-03-02. Paris]