scholarly journals Local Candidates, Place-Based Identities, and Electoral Success

Author(s):  
Julia Schulte-Cloos ◽  
Paul C. Bauer

AbstractWhile a large body of literature empirically documents an electoral advantage for local candidates, the exact mechanisms accounting for this effect remain less clear. We integrate theories on the political geography of candidate-voter relations with socio-psychological accounts of citizens’ local attachment, arguing that citizens vote for candidates from their own local communities as an expression of their place-based identity. To test our argument, we exploit a unique feature of the German mixed-member electoral system. We identify the causal effect of candidates’ localness by relying on within-electoral-district variation coupled with a geo-matching strategy on the level of municipalities ($$\hbox {N}=11175$$ N = 11175 ). The results show that voters exhibit a strong bias in favor of local candidates even when they are not competitive. More than only expecting particularistic benefits from representatives, citizens appear to vote for candidates from their own local community to express their place-based social identity.

1977 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sidney M. Greenfield

The following pages examine the relationship between the transactions that constitute systems of patronage and clientage and politics as it operated in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais in the mid-1960s. The objective will be to show how the asymmetrical exchanges of patronage and the political-electoral system served to articulate local communities with the institutional systems of the larger society.The data and analysis will be presented through an examination of the activities of individuals in two small municίpio communities in the Zona da Mata of the State of Minas Gerais during the critical election campaign for governor in the year 1965. By examining some of the activities of a local doctor and a lawyer involved in politics, we shall be able to make explicit the transactional process by means of which segments of local communities in the region were articulated, through the political-electoral process, to the state and national level institutions of Brazilian society.


2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Bailey ◽  
Douglas Webber

Purpose As of 2011, the average US state had 37 health insurance benefit mandates, laws requiring health insurance plans to cover a specific treatment, condition, provider, or person. This number is a massive increase from less than one mandate per state in 1965, and the topic takes on a new significance now, when the federal government is considering many new mandates as part of the “essential health benefits” required by the Affordable Care Act. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach The authors use fixed effects estimation on 1996-2010 data to determine why some states pass more mandates than others. Findings The authors find that the political strength of health care providers is the strongest determinant of mandates. Originality/value A large body of literature has attempted to evaluate the effect of mandates on health, health insurance, and the labor market. However, previous papers did not consider the political processes behind the passage of mandates. In fact, when they estimate the laws’ effect, almost all papers on the subject assume that mandates are passed at random. The paper opens the way to estimating the causal effect of mandates on health insurance and the labor market using an instrumental variables strategy that incorporates political information about why mandates get passed.


2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 27-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paweł CIEŚLIŃSKI

The theme of the article is to check whether in democratic Poland, the institution of localreferendum an import role in the life of the local community. This form of political participation isa „tool” of the legal expression of political decisions by the local communities. Mainly explain, youmodel a local referendum in Poland is functional or dysfunctional – almost, in the bodies responsiblefor the referendum process from the moment of submission of the application until the end of votingand perhaps in the political apathy of local communities?


2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Haruo Nakagawa

Akin to the previous, 2014 event, with no data on voter ethnicity, no exit polls, and few post-election analyses, the 2018 Fiji election results remain something of a mystery despite the fact that there had been a significant swing in voting in favour of Opposition political parties. There have been several studies about the election results, but most of them have been done without much quantitative analyses. This study examines voting patterns of Fiji’s 2018 election by provinces, and rural-urban localities, as well as by candidates, and also compares the 2018 and 2014 elections by spending a substantial time classifying officially released data by polling stations and individual candidates. Some of the data are then further aggregated according to the political parties to which those candidates belonged. The current electoral system in Fiji is a version of a proportional system, but its use is rare and this study will provide an interesting case study of the Open List Proportional System. At the end of the analyses, this study considers possible reasons for the swing in favour of the Opposition.


2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Vivienne Dunstan

McIntyre, in his seminal work on Scottish franchise courts, argues that these courts were in decline in this period, and of little relevance to their local population. 1 But was that really the case? This paper explores that question, using a particularly rich set of local court records. By analysing the functions and significance of one particular court it assesses the role of this one court within its local area, and considers whether it really was in decline at this time, or if it continued to perform a vital role in its local community. The period studied is the mid to late seventeenth century, a period of considerable upheaval in Scottish life, that has attracted considerable attention from scholars, though often less on the experiences of local communities and people.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Jasko ◽  
Joanna Grzymala-Moszczynska ◽  
Marta Maj ◽  
Marta Szastok ◽  
Arie W. Kruglanski

Reactions of losers and winners of political elections have important consequences for the political system during the times of power transition. In four studies conducted immediately before and after the 2016 US presidential elections we investigated how personal significance induced by success or failure of one’s candidate is related to hostile vs. benevolent intentions toward political adversaries. We found that the less significant supporters of Hillary Clinton and supporters of Donald Trump felt after an imagined (Study 1A) or actual (Study 2) electoral failure the more they were willing to engage in peaceful actions against the elected president and the less they were willing to accept the results of the elections. However, while significance gain due to an imagined or actual electoral success was related to more benevolent intentions among Clinton supporters (Study 1B), it was related to more hostile intentions among Trump supporters (Studies 1B, 2, and 3).


Electronics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (9) ◽  
pp. 1438
Author(s):  
Patricia Conde-Cespedes

Complex networks analysis (CNA) has attracted so much attention in the last few years. An interesting task in CNA complex network analysis is community detection. In this paper, we focus on Local Community Detection, which is the problem of detecting the community of a given node of interest in the whole network. Moreover, we study the problem of finding local communities of high density, known as α-quasi-cliques in graph theory (for high values of α in the interval ]0,1[). Unfortunately, the higher α is, the smaller the communities become. This led to the maximal α-quasi-clique community of a given node problem, which is, the problem of finding local communities that are α-quasi-cliques of maximal size. This problem is NP-hard, then, to approach the optimal solution, some heuristics exist. When α is high (>0.5) the diameter of a maximal α-quasi-clique is at most 2. Based on this property, we propose an algorithm to calculate an upper bound to approach the optimal solution. We evaluate our method in real networks and conclude that, in most cases, the bound is very accurate. Furthermore, for a real small network, the optimal value is exactly achieved in more than 80% of cases.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Omer Solodoch

Abstract In response to the political turmoil surrounding the recent refugee crisis, destination countries swiftly implemented new immigration and asylum policies. Are such countercrisis policies effective in mitigating political instability by reducing anti-immigrant backlash and support for radical-right parties? The present study exploits two surveys that were coincidentally fielded during significant policy changes, sampling respondents right before and immediately after the change. I employ a regression discontinuity design to identify the short-term causal effect of the policy change on public opinion within a narrow window of the sampling period. The findings show that both Swedish border controls and the EU–Turkey agreement significantly reduced public opposition to immigration in Sweden and Germany, respectively. In Germany, support for the AfD party also decreased following the new policy. Public opinion time trends suggest that the policy effects were short lived in Sweden but durable in Germany. These effects are similar across different levels of proximity to the border and are accompanied by increasing political trust and a sense of government control over the situation. The findings have implications for understanding the impact of border controls on international public opinion, as well as for assessing the electoral effect of policy responses to global refugee crises.


Agronomy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 130
Author(s):  
Nausheen Nazir ◽  
Abdur Rahman ◽  
Faheem Uddin ◽  
Atif Ali Khan Khalil ◽  
Muhammad Zahoor ◽  
...  

Berberis lyceum Royle has such pronounced medicinal values that it is used as cure of many diseases and has exhibited great therapeutic effects among the local communities throughout the world. The present research was carried out to evaluate the quantitative ethnobotanical status and phytochemical analysis of B. lyceum. Regular field trips were arranged to the study area (Shangla District) in August 2017 to October 2019 and interviews with 100 residents (age range: 30 to 50 years) were conducted. The approach adopted for ethnobotanical data was semi-scientific as the inhabitants were not aware about the modern names of some diseases and therefore physician prescriptions were also consulted. Ethnobotanical data were examined using relative frequency of citation and % use value. The % use value of B. lyceum indicates that the people of District Shangla mostly used it for curing of different diseases. In spite of tremendous uses the plant still survived in this area mainly due to the non-accessibility for humans of the mountain tops; otherwise, increase in anthropogenic activities even in these hilly areas poses a threat of the eradication of this plant. To correlate the folkloric uses with its phytochemical composition, HPLC (high performance liquid chromatography) analysis was performed and a total of six phenolic compounds (quercetin, chlorogenic acid, berberine, rutin, mandellic acid, and hydroxy benzoic acid) were identified in its root. As most of the health complications are correlated to oxidative stress therefore in vitro antioxidant activity were also performed using DPPH (2, 2- diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl) and ABTS (2, 2′-azinobis-3-ethyl benzo thiazoline -6- sulfonic acid) assays. The observed antioxidant potential may most probably be due to berberine and chlorogenic acid that were present in highest concentration in the analyzed extract. The effectiveness of the selected plant as remedy for a number of diseases (that were pointed out by the local community) may be due to its phytochemical composition especially berberine and chlorogenic acid as oxidative stress is the root cause of many diseases. The plant extract exhibited high antioxidant potential (DPPH IC50 = 165µg/mL; ABTSIC50 = 110µg/mL) in relation to the detected concentration of berberine and chlorogenic acid. It can be inferred from experimental results that the ethnopharmacological efficacy of this endangered species may be due to its phytochemical composition and antioxidant activities. This case study helps to revive the importance of B. lyceum in local communities and emphasizes the need for its conservation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 675-684
Author(s):  
Johannes Krause

Despite the 2020 reform of Germany’s national parliament voting law, the debate about a robust voting system has not ended . Träger and Jacobs have convincingly shown that Naun­dorf’s suggestion to introduce a parallel voting system creates more problems than it solves, and thus more far-reaching approaches have to be considered . One way to stop the Bunde­stag from growing is to reject the two vote-system . Comparable to the system of Thuringia’s local elections, with open lists and three votes per voter, both the standard size of the Bun­destag can be safely adhered to and at the same time a personalized proportional represen­tation can be maintained . Among other advantages, the voters would have greater influence on the personalized composition of the Bundestag . In particular, reservations on the part of the political parties could stand in the way of such a sustainable solution to the ongoing problems with the German electoral system .


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