The Voting Rights Act (VRA) (79 Stat. 667) is widely regarded as the most effective piece of civil rights legislation enacted in the United States. Adopted initially in 1965 to protect the voting ...rights of African Americans, it was expanded in 1975 to protect the voting rights of specified language minorities: Hispanice, Native Americans, Native Alaskans, and Asian Americans. A number of important changes in American politics can be traced directly to the VRA. The first is the dramatic increase in the number of minority voters. The major barriers to minority group members registering to vote and casting ballots have been removed as a result of the Act; consequently, minority disfranchisement is only rarely an issue today. The expansion of the minority electorate was critical to another important change, the increase in the number of minority elected officials. Minority voter support has usually been essential to the electoral success of minority candidates. Growth in the minority electorate in the United States was followed by an increase in minority officeholders. The magnitude of this increase, however, has been dependent on additional VRA provisions.
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Although we often plead with our colleagues and students to be more “systematic,” we may not always be clear about what we mean. In biology, systematics is the “scientific study of the kinds and ...diversity of organisms and of any and all relationships among them” (Simpson 1961), the most important aspect of which is taxonomy, “the theory and practice of classifying organisms into groups on the basis of their relationships” (Mayr 1969). In political science, our organisms are political institutions. This article is a call for research in political systematics with suggestions for how the taxonomy of electoral systems might be developed. Institutional taxonomy can play many roles in comparative politics. It can provide an appreciation of the existing and theoretical diversity of political institutions, provide the information necessary to construct a theory of institutional development, systematize the variables that affect and constrain political interactions, and provide the starting point for informed discussions of institutional reform. Current attempts to develop large standardized data sets in comparative politics (Rosenstone 1994), for instance, require institutional taxonomy if the effort is to be effective. Of course, this discussion would be moot if institutional taxonomy were already well established (with or without the term).
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The term gerrymandering always evokes spirited partisan debate and political controversy. Yet, when we begin to scratch at the surface, we see that there is more to gerrymandering than debates about ...cartographical aesthetics. The issue goes directly to the heart of theories of democracy and representation and is replete with controversy, irony, and inconsistency. My key point is that resolving the gerrymandering issue is distinct from, and therefore may not result in, improving representation. This point is due to the fact that neither jurists nor scholars have been able to set forth a clear and consistent definition of representation. Terminology: The term gerrymander must be distinguished from redistricting. The latter is the process by which congressional and legislative district lines are redrawn in order to balance their populations in the wake of the decennial census. The former uses redistricting for partisan ends by dividing concentrations of voters to prevent their coalescing into a majority in a district, or by concentrating so many group members into a district that their electoral strength is diluted because the extra votes could have been used to help elect a sympathetic candidate elsewhere. It is this notion—the dilution of voting power as a result of partisan cartography—that has made the term gerrymander so controversial.
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President Alberto Fujimori created the Peruvian social Fund (FONCODES) in 1991 with the stated objectives of generating employment, helping to alleviate poverty, and improving access to social ...services. The author uses province-level data on monthly expenditures, socio-economic indicators, and electoral outcomes to analyze political influences on the timing and geographic distribution of FONCODES expenditures between 1991 and 1995. He finds that: 1) FONCODES expenditures increased significantly before elections. 2) FONCODES projects were directed at poor provinces, as well as provinces in which the marginal political impact of expenditures was likely to be greatest. The results are robust to many specifications and controls. The Peruvian data thus support predictions made in the literature on political business cycle as well the literature on political influences on the allocation of discretionary funds.
Defining vigilance as retrospective voting - where voters evaluate incumbents on their performance during their entire term in office - the author compares voter behavior in local and national ...elections to make inferences about whether voters are more vigilant in monitoring government at the local level. Using data from 14 major states in India over the period 1960-92, she contrasts voters'behavior in state legislative assembly elections with their behavior in national legislative elections. In state assembly elections voter reward incumbents for local income growth, and punish them for a rise in inequality, over their entire term in office. But in national elections voters behave myopically, rewarding growth in national income and a fall in inflation and inequality only in the year preceding the election. The evidence is consistent with greater voter vigilance and government accountability in local than in national elections.
The author studies the effect of state legislative assembly elections, on the policies of state governments in 14 major states of India, from 1960 to 1996. She identifies the effect of the timing of ...elections using an instrument for the electoral cycle that distinguishes between constitutionally scheduled elections, and midterm polls. She contrasts two levers of policy manipulation - fiscal policy and public service delivery - to distinguish between alternative models of political cycles. The predictions of three models are tested: 1) Populist cycles to woo uninformed and myopic voters. 2) Signaling models with asymmetric information. 3) A moral hazard model with high discounting by political agents. The empirical results for fiscal policy show that election years have a negative effect on some commodity taxes, a positive effect on investment spending, but no effect on deficits, primarily because consumption spending is reduced. With regard to public service delivery, elections have a positive and large effect on road construction by state public works departments. Strikingly, the fiscal effects are much smaller than the effect on roads. The author argues that the pattern of evidence is inconsistent with the predictions of models of voter myopia, and asymmetric information. She explores an alternative moral hazard model in which the cycle is generated by high political discounting, and career concerns persuade politicians to exert greater effort in election years on the management of public works.
The authors demonstrate that sharply different policy choices across democracies can be explained as a consequence of differences in the ability of political competitors to make credible ...pre-electoral commitments to voters. Politicians can overcome their credibility deficit in two ways. First, they can build reputations. This requires that they fulfill preconditions that in practice are costly: informing voters of their promises; tracking those promises; ensuring that voters turn out on election day. Alternatively, they can rely on intermediaries patrons - who are already able to make credible commitments to their clients. Endogenizing credibility in this way, the authors find that targeted transfers and corruption are higher and public good provision lower than in democracies in which political competitors can make credible pre-electoral promises. The authors also argue that in the absence of political credibility, political reliance on patrons enhances welfare in the short-run, in contrast to the traditional view that clientelism in politics is a source of significant policy distortion. However, in the long run reliance on patrons may undermine the emergence of credible political parties. The model helps to explain several puzzles. For example, public investment and corruption are higher in young democracies than old; and democratizing reforms succeeded remarkably in Victorian England, in contrast to the more difficult experiences of many democratizing countries, such as the Dominican Republic.
Residents in suburban Cook County could be the first voters to use new election equipment next year.The Cook County Board of Commissioners on Wednesday awarded a 10-year contract for nearly $31 ...million to Dominion Voting Systems, Inc., ...
Approval voting is concerned with the decision behavior of organizations & societal systems. As with other voting procedures, it elicits & converts input from voters into a social decision. Under ...approval voting, each voter in a multicandidate election can vote for as many candidates as he wishes. The candidate with the most votes is elected. Approval voting is analyzed here from the viewpoint of expected utility maximizing voters. Approximately optimal voting strategies are developed. The relative abilities of votes for different numbers of candidates to affect the outcome are assessed, & the issue of equity among voters is addressed. It is argued that approval voting is more equitable than the common plurality voting system. AA.
