Using Election Forecasts to Understand the Potential Influence of Campaigns, Media, and the Law in U.S. Presidential Elections

How do campaigns, media, and voting laws influence the outcome of U.S. Presidential elections? Political scientists often argue that these factors influence outcomes much less than commonly thought. To illustrate this argument, we show that we can predict the presidential vote in each state with a high degree of accuracy. Specifically, between 2004 and 2016, we correctly predict 94% of all state presidential vote outcomes. Our predictions are based on a forecasting model of the Electoral College, based primarily on each state’s approval rating of the incumbent president (using almost 90,000 survey responses from June and July of election years), current economic conditions in each state, and state votes in the previous election. We use these forecasts to help establish the upper bounds of campaign and media effects. We argue that identifying the limits of these effects is a critical step when trying to estimate their impact. We also show how our forecasts can be used to test the aggregate effects of election-related laws, such as Florida’s Amendment 4—which enfranchised hundreds of thousands of Floridians who previously could not vote due to felony convictions—and voter ID laws, whose effects are notoriously difficult to study. We have made our data publicly available to facilitate further research on these topics

Finding Harmony Amidst Disagreement Over Extradition, Jurisdiction, the Role of Human Rights, and Issues of Extraterritoriality Under International Criminal Law

This Article examines extradition and jurisdiction over extraterritorial crime, focusing on the relationship between jurisdiction and extradition in the broader context of human rights law. The authors challenge what they argue are chimerical, although strongly held beliefs in the incompatibility of European and United States criminal justice systems and extradition practices. They argue that cooperation in matters of international criminal law may be enhanced, while protection of human rights is promoted. The authors establish this possibility by breaking down the barriers to understanding that stem from the divergent European versus Anglo-American modes of analysis

Essays on the Political Participation and Views of Immigrant-origin Citizens in Germany

229 pagesResidents with a migration history make up around 14 percent of all residents in OECD countries, with numbers increasing quickly. While these numbers seem numerically small, these residents potentially represent an important component of the electorate in these countries - large enough to swing elections. Despite their electoral potential, their political participation is not well understood and is far from equal. As a subset of residents with a migration background, non-citizens (residents that do not have the citizenship of the country in which they reside) make up approximately 10 percent of residents in European countries. 1 In most countries this means that these non-citizen residents do not have voting rights on the national level and are politically disenfranchised. While excluding more than 10 percent of permanent residents from formal political participation already raises normative questions about the quality and legitimacy of German democracy, I argue in this dissertation that these increasing shares of disenfranchised noncitizen residents who are not eligible to vote in national elections have massive implications and spill-overs for formal political participation for other citizens as well - in particular for immigrant-origin citizens. The overarching question in this thesis is as follows: is the political participation of immigrant-origin citizens in a conventional Western democratic setting truly democratic and equal? How does the (politically) conscious legal exclusion of large shares of immigrants without citizenship (as in non-citizens without the right to vote) from the electorate relate to political participation, representation, and political views for all eligible voters in general - regardless of their migration background? And how does this formal exclusion relate to immigrant-origin citizens who, by definition, are a subset of immigrant-origin residents but are eligible to vote? How do citizens contextualized in a local and social setting where legal exclusion from voting is the norm participate politicall themselves? I attempt to shed light on these questions by looking at administrative, voting, and public opinion data in Germany from 1950 to 2020. First, I test if local contextualization matters for political participation. Second, I test if social contextualization matters using contemporary data. Third, I test if a more favorable, historical policy environment in Germany led to different results – and I find that it did. In the second chapter, the main question is, how does local contextualization matter for political participation? I use high spatial resolution German public opinion and administrative election data to show that there is a strong negative relationship between neighborhoods/municipalities with a large share of non-citizens and a reduction of voter turn-out in national elections. This relationship is negative and strong for both immigrant-origin citizens and autochthonous citizens.2 In the third chapter, I attempt to zoom in on the social contextualization of voting. I use German panel data to show that citizens that have non-citizen peers in their peer group tend to report voting less in national elections than citizens without these direct non-citizen links. In chapter four, I test whether a more favorable policy environment could have led to different outcomes in Germany. I use a historical case of expellees who were forced migrants from former East German territories who fled to Germany after World War II. They received full citizenship and voting rights shortly after their arrival in Germany between 1945 and 1953. Despite substantial exposure to social and political discrimination, they did not show the same patterns as discovered in chapter 2 and 3. After 10 years or so, their political participation was almost indistinguishable from other German citizens. This implies that social and political acceptance in combination with a favorable policy environment (direct access to citizenship and voting rights) matters a lot for the political participation of migrants