"All politics is local": how local context explains radical right voting

People do not form their political preferences in a vacuum. They are deeply influenced by everyday experiences in the communities where they live and work—experiences that cannot neatly be categorised as ‘economic’ or ‘cultural’. These insights, this thesis argues, are crucial to understanding why people vote for radical right parties in Europe. The thesis examines these local contextual factors using panel regressions and multilevel analyses based on original and existing datasets of fine-grained census, electoral and survey data. It makes three main contributions. First, the thesis adds a spatial dimension to the study of radical right voting behaviour by showing how local sociotropic mechanisms— such as local labour market competition from immigrants with similar skill levels (paper 2) and the degradation of local socio-cultural spaces (paper 3)—affect people’s vote, alongside individual and national factors. Second, the thesis reconciles competing theories about the influence of economic and cultural factors on radical right support by pointing to the role of additional variables. Paper 1 shows how ‘subjective social status’ intermediates the relationship between economic distress and the rejection of cultural outgroups (a radical right catch-cry). Paper 3 explores how the decline of everyday opportunities for communal interaction—here, the closure of British pubs—fuels radical right support. Paper 2 looks at the economic effects of immigration at a more granular level, showing that it is neither immigration nor unemployment per se that boosts radical right support but rather localised competition between immigrants and natives with similar skillsets. This finding points to the third contribution of this thesis: it explains why middle-class voters are also drawn to the radical right. Overall, this investigation of local contextual factors adds a crucial new dimension to our understanding of what drives people to vote for radical right political parties

Restoring the Vote: Former Felons, International Law, and the Eighth Amendment

The right to vote is a right that many Americans cherish. But for over five million Americans the right to vote is something different. It is merely a dream because they are denied the right. Considered fundamental by the courts and the people, the United States contrarily stands alone in its refusal to allow many former felons the right to vote. The denial of the right to vote leaves a large swath of the population voiceless in matters ranging from the election of the president to who should sit on their child\u27s school board. This article begins by chronicling the history of felon disenfranchisement. It begins with its origins in ancient Greece and Rome and traces it to the modern day. The article then explores the negative impact felon disenfranchisement has on the American political process. After describing the history and impact of felon disenfranchisement the article explores the various legal challenges that have been brought to various states felon disenfranchisement laws. Challenges have been made under the Fourteenth Amendment\u27s Equal Protection Clause, the Voting Rights Act, and the Eighth Amendment. The article will explain why these attempts have been unsuccessful and advocate for a new approach. This article ultimately concludes that the best hope litigants have is to bring suit under the Eighth Amendment. Litigants must do more than merely rehashing the arguments made in the past. Instead litigants should rely on international case law, attitudes, and approaches to felon disenfranchisement in crafting their Eighth Amendment suit. Using international law presents the best hope litigants have for convincing the judiciary to become more proactive in challenging these laws, and thus litigants should rely upon it in lawsuits going forward

Mobilization and Partisan Identities: A Comparative Study of Partisanship under Compulsory and Voluntary Voting

Partisan identification is intimately related to many central aspects of political behavior. It influences vote choice, voters’ policy positions, and the manner in which voters process new political information. Partisanship has the power to undermine politicians’ accountability and it can even trump voters’ democratic values in polarized societies. Yet large gaps remain in our understanding of the relationship between partisanship and another key subject of political behavior: voter participation. We know that partisans are more likely to turn out to vote than their non-partisan counterparts; but why are partisans more likely to turn out? Are partisans simply people who are more interested in politics (and, therefore, more likely to participate)? Or is there a direct, causal relationship between partisanship and turnout? In this dissertation, I examine competing theories of why partisans participate more than non-partisans. With a series of novel empirical tests aimed at causal identification, I clarify the mechanisms underlying the relationship between partisanship and turnout. Partisanship mobilizes voters by introducing additional incentives to vote, separate from the intensity of their policy preferences. Partisanship generates expressive incentives to vote and engenders a sense of partisan duty — an obligation to do one’s part to contribute to the party’s success. When voters adopt partisan identities, they conceive of themselves as part of a larger group. These group identities fundamentally alter the calculus of voting, facilitating a cooperative logic of turnout. In contrast to oft-made claims in the political behavior literature, I find that the causal chain does not run in both directions: voting does not foster partisan identities. Prior work posited that the act of voting makes people more likely to adopt partisan identities, either through a process of political learning or a desire to resolve cognitive dissonance. The hypothesis that voting fosters partisanship underlies the dominant theory of how compulsory voting laws shape partisanship. Thus, my finding that voting does not foster partisanship calls for a new approach to understanding partisan dynamics under compulsory voting. In the second part of this dissertation, I present a new theory of party-voter linkages under compulsory voting. In both compulsory and voluntary voting systems, parties face a breadth-versus-depth tradeoff in their outreach to voters. When voting is voluntary, parties prioritize depth: they work to build stronger partisan identification among a smaller subset of the population. These stronger partisan identities are necessary to ensure that a party’s supporters are motivated to show up on Election Day. In compulsory voting systems, where parties need not concern themselves with extensive mobilization efforts, breadth becomes more important than depth. Parties competing in compulsory voting systems must win over a larger share of the population, since would-be abstainers are compelled by law to participate. But they don’t face the same burden of mobilizing their supporters, so they don’t need to invest in building ties as strong as those in voluntary systems. The result is that more voters identify with parties in compulsory voting systems, but the strength of their identification is, on average, weaker

When is an alternative possibility robust?

According to some, free will requires alternative possibilities. But not any old alternative possibility will do. Sometimes, being able to bring about an alternative does not bestow any control on an agent. In order to bestow control, and so be directly relevant qua alternative to grounding the agent's moral responsibility, alternatives need to be robust. Here, I investigate the nature of robust alternatives. I argue that Derk Pereboom's latest robustness criterion is too strong, and I suggest a different criterion based on the idea that what agents need to be able to do is keep open the possibility of securing their blamelessness, rather than needing to directly ensure their own blamelessness at the time of decision

Lost in Translation: Social Choice Theory is Misapplied Against Legislative Intent

Several prominent scholars use results from social choice theory to conclude that legislative intent is meaningless. We disagree. We support our argument by showing that the conclusions in question are based on misapplications of the theory. Some of the conclusions in question are based on Arrow\u27s famous General Possibility Theorem. We identify a substantial chasm between what Arrow proves and what others claim in his name. Other conclusions come from a failure to realize that applying social choice theory to questions of legislative intent entails accepting assumptions such as legislators are omniscient and legislators have infinite resources for changing law and policy. We demonstrate that adding more realistic assumptions to models of social choice theory yields very different theoretical results-including ones that allow for meaningful inferences about legislative intent. In all of the cases we describe, important aspects of social choice theory were lost in the translation from abstract formalisms to real political and legal domains. When properly understood, social choice theory is insufficient to negate legislative intent

Ramshackle Federalism: America’s Archaic and Dysfunctional Presidential Election System

Accordingly, this Article proposes five sensible and achievable reforms to modernize the presidential election system. Each requires Congress and the federal government to play a much more proactive role in the presidential election system. The Constitution may be founded on federalist principles, but excessive decentralization is not serving us well in presidential election administration. In an age of tumultuous and accelerating change, the presidential election system must be modernized to meet the needs of twenty-first century America

Bonding, Structure and the Stability of Political Parties: Party Government in the House

The public policy benefits that parties-deliver are allocated by democratic procedures that devolve ultimately to majority rule. Majority-rule decision making, however, does not lead to consistent policy choices; it is unstable. In this paper, we argue that institutions - and thereby policy coalitions -- can be stabilized by extra-legislative organization. The rules of the Democratic Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives dictate that a requirement for continued membership is support on the floor of Caucus decisions for a variety of key structural matters. Because membership in the majority party’s caucus is valuable, it constitutes a bond, the posting of which stabilizes the structure of the House, and hence the policy decisions made in the House. We examine the rules of the House Democratic Caucus and find that they do in fact contain the essential elements of an effective, extralegislative bonding mechanism