The , people of Worcester would form the core of the district that would elect five representatives. Reviewing the population numbers from adjacent towns shows that combining Leicester and West Boylston in this district reaches a population of ,, or a mere 0. Are we to pity these two towns for being swallowed up into the big Worcester monster just because their population numbers work out right, perhaps like some in Leicester already feel about their current inclusion in a "Worcester district"?
Just as every Worcester voter would have a fair chance to join with enough other voters to elect one representative, no matter where they live, so would the voters of these two towns.
One fifth of voters elect one representative, throughout the entire district. Under a PR system, the voters in these two towns would have a greater chance of electing a representative of their choice than if they were in a strictly suburban single member district.
It's all so much simpler. Besides, no one, within the city or outside, could accuse you of manipulating the lines towards some preconceived goal of representation. After you have completed the difficult process you are embarking on tonight, I urge you to create a Commission on Voting System Reform so that your successors ten years from now won't have to go through what you will certainly have to endure right now. Spotlight One: Testimony for Proportional Representation.
Spotlight Two: Cambridge and Proportional Representation. Spotlight Three: South Africa's Elections. Testimony to a Massachusetts Committee on Redistricting Howard Fain The task of the committee, as I understand it, is to redraw the boundary lines describing districts from which the Massachusetts House of Representatives shall be elected.
But the law leads you to some very tough questions: How shall different minority groups be treated? Are they competitors or allies? Additionally, the finding suggests that majority of the Ghanaian people are evaluative voters who make voting decisions upon careful assessment of the competence of contesting candidates and campaign promises.
Overall, this study draws attention to the importance of personality and pragmatic policies in winning elections. Accordingly, politicians need to be concerned about the public perception of their credibility and image, as well as the policies they bring to the campaign platform. Copyright , all rights reserved. International Relations Commons.
In the figure, we can see that poll errors decline over time. Some days before Election Day, the mean absolute error is about 4. Fifty days in advance, even before the official campaign has begun, the average error is below 3. On the eve of elections, it approaches 2. This is not surprising but it shows that polls become more reflective of the actual result, even though they remain imperfect even at the very end of the campaign.
Although the patterns in Figures 1 and 2 owe partly to the increasing number of polls and respondents as the election approaches, they also reflect change in preferences over time. Further consider that using a date from earlier points in the timeline, the mean absolute error reaches 4. The fundamentals of elections evidently are in place well before parties and leaders take center stage.
The early structuration of voter preferences is clear from analysis including important political and economic variables. The former is compiled from long-running Gallup and Ipsos MORI poll series, and the latter are a combination of the historic and current data series from the Office for National Statistics.
Given that improving economic conditions are expected to favour the government and, by extension, disadvantage the opposition, we invert the weekly earnings measure i. Finally, our fundamentals variables are standardized so that coefficients are more directly comparable with each other and with those for the polls.
Using a method pioneered for US presidential elections , we regress all the variables — polls, leader ratings and earnings growth — on the vote share for each party. Figure 3 presents regression coefficients relating the vote, the polls, and our two fundamental variables for each day of the timeline. The results indicate how much impact each variable has on the vote. In the figure we can see that polls are the dominant predictor on each day. Subsequently, this alienation has led to an increase in the amount of people who identify as independents in order to escape the constraints of a polarized party.
The loss of party identification affiliated with being an independent generates the greater issue voting. While issue voting has risen in recent years, many factors can complicate it. For instance, many stances can be taken on issues and voters must settle for the candidate whose views most closely match their own.
When the aforementioned situations take place, a voter may revert to party voting or may base their decision off of the individual personalities of the candidates. Similarly, issue salience is when people vote on the basis of how relevant an issue is to their lives. Most issues that are part of the national agenda can sometimes be a consequence of media agenda-setting and agenda-building.
In a commercialized media context, the media can often not afford to ignore an important issue which another television station, newspaper, or radio station is willing to pick up. The media may be able to create new issues by reporting and should that should be considered seriously.
Also, they can obscure issues by reporting through negligence and distraction. If persons are affected by high crime rates, or unemployment, for instance, the media can reduce the time they report on potential solutions, the nature of class-based society or other related issues. They can reduce the direct awareness of these problems in the lives of the public.
It is difficult to see, for instance, how an issue which is a major story to one television station could be ignored by other television stations. At the same time, the United States has witnessed increasing polarization between the Democratic and Republican Parties that has caused many voters to identify themselves as independents. This increasing lack of party identification combined with the difficulties that arise with issue voting has resulted in voting decisions based on the personality and demographic traits of candidates.
Candidates are most often evaluated on their party affiliation and stances on prominent issues. However, when the aforementioned problems with party identification and issue voting arise, the personal characteristics of candidates may enter into campaign strategies and voting decisions.
Many candidates utilize demographic factors to appeal to voters. For example, candidates may emphasize the importance of their families and their upbringing in humble middle-class households as a way to relate to a wide segment of American voters.
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