Election consolidation handbook for local election officials : 1983 elections.

Cover title.

Handbook for local election officials for 1985 elections.

Cover title.

State of Illinois local election officials handbook for the ... consolidated elections.

Includes supplements.

Plus Ça Change: The 2014 Local Elections in Northern Ireland

The local government elections of 22 May 2014 in Northern Ireland were the first to be held under revised district boundaries, with 11 'super councils' replacing the 26-council model used since 1973. Despite the structural reform, little changed in terms of political party support. Although they suffered some losses, the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Féin remained firmly entrenched as the two dominant players at local government level in Northern Ireland. The Ulster Unionist Party enjoyed only a marginal increase in its vote share, while the Social Democratic and Labour Party recorded one of the worst electoral performances in its history. Elsewhere, the Traditional Unionist Voice enjoyed a 'breakthrough' election and the Alliance Party defied widely held predictions that it would suffer at the polls as a result of its role in the Union flag crisis. The campaign was overshadowed by both the concurrent European Parliament contest and several crises of power-sharing at Stormont. As a result, distinctly local government issues received scant and fleeting attention. The contest saw the lowest local election turnout in Northern Ireland's history, continuing a general trend of increasing voter apathy in the province.

Betting on winner: the effect of local elections on corporate political activity outcomes

How can managers successfully access political rents by way of corporate political strategies (CPA)? Existing research has suggested several endogenous factors that correlate with CPA outcomes. I offer a more robust solution to this problem. Drawing on insights from the perspective of CPA as exchanges between firms and political decision-makers, and from the special interest politics of political economy, I develop and test a causal mechanism that links local elections, legislative bargaining and access to political rents at the national level. I conducted a natural experiment using regression discontinuity design and propensity score matching in municipal elections in Brazil to show that firms enjoy superior access to subsidized financing from the state-owned national development bank (BNDES) when they decide to invest in municipalities whose winning mayoral candidate is coalition-aligned with the national ruler. This effect fades away fades away as the level of competition in the local election decreases. The evidence implies that when managers bet on national coalition-aligned winners in close local elections, they positively affect CPA outcomes. I extend the exchange-based typology of corporate political strategies by offering a novel possibility of targeting voters with financial inducements, which I call a private local development strategy. Finally, these results show that firms exchange their project-execution capabilities for superior access to subsidized financing.

Election officials' handbook for the consolidated elections /

At head of title: State of Illinois.

Natural disasters and clientelism: the case of floods and landslides in Colombia

What are the effects of natural disasters on electoral results? Some authors claim that catastrophes have a negative effect on the survival of leaders in a democracy because voters have a propensity to punish politicians for not preventing or poorly handling a crisis. In contrast, this paper finds that these events might be beneficial for leaders. Disasters are linked to leader survival through clientelism: they generate an in-flow of resources in the form of aid, which increase money for buying votes. Analyzing the rainy season of 2010-2011 in Colombia, considered its worst disaster in history, I use a difference-in-differences strategy to show that in the local election incumbent parties benefited from the disaster. The result is robust to different specifications and alternative explanations. Moreover, places receiving more aid and those with judicial evidence of vote-buying irregularities, are more likely to reelect the incumbent, supporting the mechanism proposed by this paper.

Structural Changes and Formation of Rusta-shahr in Post-Revolutionary Rural Society in Iran

The following paper is based on the author's two-year research and fieldwork in Iran and examines the process of political and social changes since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the subsequent impact of the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88. This paper focuses on the transition of traditional, small villages into rusta-shahr or small rural cities and the first and second nation-wide elections of shoura or councils which were the first steps toward self-government. The author is guardedly optimistic regarding this democratic process but warns of possible future social unrest if changes are not more "balanced" between cities and rural areas and if the employment needs of the burgeoning younger generation are not met, political and social consequences may be catastrophic.

La participación política de los residentes británicos y alemanes en España: el caso de San Miguel de Salinas, Alicante

Este estudio se fija en los ciudadanos noreuropeos asentados en la provincia mediterránea de Alicante que tienen un estatus más cercano al de un inmigrante que al de un turista. La importancia que ha cobrado esta corriente inmigratoria ha provocado cambios profundos en muchos municipios. El objetivo es estudiar el papel político de estos ciudadanos en aquellas regiones en las que su presencia es más significativa. El análisis se basa en datos demográficos y de participación en las elecciones municipales de 2011 y en un trabajo cualitativo que ahonda en la comprensión de los procesos informales de participación política. El hecho de que la influencia de los residentes noreuropeos en las instituciones políticas locales no haya crecido al mismo ritmo que su peso demográfico se debe tanto al desinterés de los extranjeros por participar en la vida pública como al interés de las élites políticas por desincentivar dicha participación.

Referendum Questions, Local Option, to be Voted upon at the State Election

Title Varies: Referendum Questions Submitted To Vote of the People; Referendum Questions and Proposed Constitutional Amendments

Citizen journalism and political participation : the youdecide project and the 2007 Australian Federal Election

The 2007 Australian Federal election not only saw the election of a Labor government after 11 years of John Howard’s conservative Coalition government. It also saw new levels of political engagement through the Internet, including the rise of citizen journalism as an alternative outlet and mode of reporting on the election. This paper reports on the You Decide 2007 project, an initiative undertaken by a QUT-based research team to facilitate online news reporting on the election on a ‘hyper-local’, electorate-based model. We evaluate the You Decide initiative on the basis of: promoting greater citizen participation in Australian politics; new ways of engaging citizens and key stakeholders in policy deliberation; establishing new links between mainstream media and independent online media; and broadening the base of political participation to include a wider range of citizen and groups.

Citizen journalism as social networking : reporting the 2007 Australian Federal Election

One of the perceived Achilles heels of online citizen journalism is its perceived inability to conduct investigative and first-hand reporting. A number of projects have recently addressed this problem, with varying success: the U.S.-based Assignment Zero was described as "a highly satisfying failure" (Howe 2007), while the German MyHeimat.de appears to have been thoroughly successful in attracting a strong community of contributors, even to the point of being able to generate print versions of its content, distributed free of charge to households in selected German cities. In Australia, citizen journalism played a prominent part in covering the federal elections held on 24 November 2007; news bloggers and public opinion Websites provided a strong counterpoint to the mainstream media coverage of the election campaign (Bruns et al., 2007). Youdecide2007.org, a collaboration between researchers at Queensland University of Technology and media practitioners at the public service broadcaster SBS, the public opinion site On Line Opinion, and technology company Cisco Systems, was developed as a dedicated space for a specifically hyperlocal coverage of the election campaign in each of Australia's 150 electorates from the urban sprawls of Sydney and Brisbane to the sparsely populated remote regions of outback Australia. YD07 provided training materials for would-be citizen journalists and encouraged them to contribute electorate profiles, interview candidates, and conduct vox-pops with citizens in their local area. The site developed a strong following especially in its home state of Queensland, and its interviewers influenced national public debate by uncovering the sometimes controversial personal views of mainstream and fringe candidates. At the same time, the success of YD07 was limited by external constraints determined by campaign timing and institutional frameworks. As part of a continuing action research cycle, lessons learnt from Youdecide2007.org are going to be translated into further iterations of the project, which will cover the local government elections in the Australian state of Queensland, to be held in March 2008, and developments subsequent to these elections. This paper will present research outcomes from the Youdecide2007.org project. In particular, it will examine the roles of staff contributors and citizen journalists in attracting members, providing information, promoting discussion, and fostering community on the site: early indications from a study of interaction data on the site indicate notably different contribution patterns and effects for staff and citizen participants, which may point towards the possibility of developing more explicit pro-am collaboration models in line with the Pro-Am phenomenon outlined by Leadbeater & Miller (2004). The paper will outline strengths and weaknesses of the Youdecide model and highlight requirements for the successful development of active citizen journalism communities. In doing so, it will also evaluate the feasibility of hyperlocal citizen journalism approaches, and their interrelationship with broader regional, state, and national journalism in both its citizen and industrial forms.

Social media in selected Australian federal and state election campaigns, 2010-15

Campaigning in Australian election campaigns at local, state, and federal levels is fundamentally affected by the fact that voting is compulsory in Australia, with citizens who are found to have failed to cast their vote subject to fines. This means that - contrary to the situation in most other nations – elections are decided not by which candidate or party has managed to encourage the largest number of nominal supporters to make the effort to cast their vote, but by some 10-20% of genuine ‘swinging voters’ who change their party preferences from one election to the next. Political campaigning is thus aimed less at existing party supporters (so-called ‘rusted on’ voters whose continued support for the party is essentially taken for granted) than at this genuinely undecided middle of the electorate. Over the past decades, this has resulted in a comparatively timid, vague campaigning style from both major party blocs (the progressive Australian Labor Party [ALP] and the conservative Coalition of the Liberal and National Parties [L/NP]). Election commitments that run the risk of being seen as too partisan and ideological are avoided as they could scare away swinging voters, and recent elections have been fought as much (or more) on the basis of party leaders’ perceived personas as they have on stated policies, even though Australia uses a parliamentary system in which the Prime Minister and state Premiers are elected by their party room rather than directly by voters. At the same time, this perceived lack of distinctiveness in policies between the major parties has also enabled the emergence of new, smaller parties which (under Australia’s Westminster-derived political system) have no hope of gaining a parliamentary majority but could, in a close election, come to hold the balance of power and thus exert disproportionate influence on a government which relies on their support.

Political competition and environmental reporting: evidence from New Zealand local governments

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between "political competition" and "environmental reporting" by New Zealand local governments. Design/methodology/approach - The research method includes a longitudinal analysis of environmental reporting by New Zealand local governments in their annual reports for the financial years 2005-2006 to 2009-2010. "Content analysis" was used to attach scores to the extent of environmental reporting. The "number of candidates divided by the number of available positions at the previous election" was used as the proxy for "political competition". Findings - The study reports a positive relationship between "political competition" and "environmental reporting" in 2007-2008. The number of local governments reporting voluntary environmental information increased in 2006-2007 and 2007-2008 compared to 2005-2006, followed by a reduction in such numbers following the 2007-2008 financial year. This trend in disclosure can be attributed to the local government elections in October 2007. This finding is consistent with the expectation of "agency theory" and provides insight into the pattern of perceived agency costs. The study also finds a dearth in reporting "monetary" and "bad" news. Originality/value - The study contributes towards the previous literature on environmental reporting by concentrating on the public sector and New Zealand, together with investigating the relationship of such reporting with "political competition" through a longitudinal analysis. The theoretical contribution of this study is the adoption of "agency theory" in the context of public sector voluntary reporting and investigating the significance attached by agents to environmental reporting to minimise agency cost. The practical contribution of the study is in the area of future development of reporting standards in regards to environmental reporting.

Gender stereotypes in politics: what changes when a woman becomes the local political leader?

This study documents how the presence of a woman in an executive political role affects the gender stereotype of women in politics. We use Brazilian electoral data and restrict our focus to close mayoral races (using an RDD design) in which the top two candidates are of opposite sexes. Our most important result was a reduction in the number of candidates and votes for female mayoral candidates after a woman is elected, regardless of her eligibility status for reelection. This negative result is linked only to the position of mayor and not to other political positions (councilor, state or federal deputy). In addition, our results may be interpreted as evidence that voters do not use their update on women as local leaders to change their beliefs on women’s ability to run for other political positions. Finally, female mayors do not appear to have a role model effect on younger cohorts of women. We also note that our results are not influenced by differences in mayoral policies (generally and specifically for women), which could influence voters’ gender stereotypes.