Previous research indicates that women candidates may more easily gain elected office by aligning themselves with issues that the public associates favorably with women, such as health care, education, and children's and women's rights. But this strategy may be more or less successful depending...

Momentum is an important determinant of voting in presidential primaries. One of the principal reasons is that the media tends to treat candidate success with positive coverage. Throughout nominating campaigns, the media consistently reports delegate counts for each competing candidate. Media...

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded in October 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, two African-American students at Merritt College in Oakland, California. Subsequently, local Panther chapters sprung up in cities across the United States, including in Portland, Oregon in...

This paper examines the challenges that Indigenous peoples face when they use cultural rights arguments to influence the decision making of international organizations such as the United Nations, the WTO and NAFTA regulatory boards. The paper responds to the concerns that identity politics has...

In this study, a group of Swedish social media users – politically active as well as “unpolitical” users – are interviewed in focus groups as well as individually about their attitudes towards online political participation, providing a deeper, more informed view of how social media...

In this paper we seek to study whether the initiative process has a different influence on political participation and engagement among men and women. This question is motivated by previous work in which we find that the 24 American states with some form of the initiative process consistently...

When our interpretations of Emersonﾒs political thought includeﾗrather than dodge or defuseﾗhis religion, our accounts of his work are enhanced. Among other things, we stand to learn much about his contributions to the democracy theory of his day and of our own, and new and bright light is...

The impact of legislative term limits on women's representation has developed through several stages. After term limits reforms passed but before they took affect, research suggested that women's representation would increase due to the forced retirement of - mostly-male incumbents. After term...

Many scholars have discussed the consequences of the personal vote on the behavior of legislators, yet little scholarship has been devoted to the effect of the personal vote on the success of women candidates. My paper engages this important issue, employing a comparative lens to examine how...

In this paper, I examine how citizen characteristics in a city impact the use of municipal initiatives. My primary research question is: Under what conditions are citizens most likely to raise local initiative contests? Further I ask: Can the initiative be used as an end-run around voting rights...