ON 9 MARCH 2003, during the New South Wales state election campaign, Premier Bob Carr announced that a re-elected Labor government would convene a state summit on alcohol. The 1999 NSW Drug Summit and the 2002 Obesity Summit were obvious models. The 1999 Drug Summit, also conceived during a state election campaign, was generally considered to have been successful. It developed a realistic polic...

The Portuguese presidential election of 2006 represented a major upset for the incumbent Socialist Party (PS). In the March 2005 legislative elections, the PS had obtained 46.4 percent of the valid votes allowing it to form, for the first time in the history of this center-left party, a single-party cabinet supported by an absolute majority in parliament. However, less than one year later, the ...

F ollowing decades of civil conflict and antiapartheid struggle, Namibia held the first one-person, one-vote election in 1989. The country achieved electoral democracy in 1990 and committed itself to a process of national reconciliation. The early 1990s also saw the reconstitution of civil society organizations and an expansion of international organizations. It was a moment ripe for progressiv...

Previous comparative research into the determinants of voting using aggregate data has suffered from two limitations: it relied predominantly on country-level data; and it seldom ventured beyond a consideration of one or two types of elections. In order to overcome these shortcomings, we use an original dataset in which data are aggregated to sub-national units; and include examples of national...

Effective communication between voters and members of parliament is a key success factor democracy. Fortunately, modern information technology is giving a lot of new channels to take care of this communication. Traditionally, Members of Parliament have maintained static www-sites, but nowadays more dynamic and interactive forms of communication, such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter are almost a ...

Parliamentary threshold or parliamentary is a requirement for the acquisition of votes by political parties participating in general election which aims to be able send representatives parliament. The existence expected provide change accommodate all groups, but that have not been meet requirements related threshold, matters their legislative candidates will eliminated. So this gives impression...

Are men and women legislators equally loyal to their parties? We theorize that parties select candidates based on gendered criteria, leading the (s)election of more disciplined women. Moreover, we argue expectations about proper behavior limit legislators’ ability act independently from parties. Using surveys over 800 parliamentarians across 17 African legislatures, find report significantly hi...

Internet has found an increasing role in the politics, during the last decade. Today, terms like digital democracy, Internet elections, Internet advertisements (propaganda, social- political Web logging in the internet has become common terms.  Internet is getting replaced for the traditional media in politics. The interactive characteristic of this media has changed it to an unrivaled instrume...

We analyze in detail a leader election protocol that we call the Swedish leader election protocol. The goal is to select one among n > 0 players, by proceeding through a number of rounds. If there is only one player remaining, the protocol stops and the player is declared the leader. Otherwise, all remaining players flip a biased coin; with probability q the player survives to the next round, w...