Selected video talks

Populist politics in the US, Europe and Latin America: Rage against the machine.  

Chair:
Kimberly J. Morgan, George Washington University

Presenters:
Justin Gest, George Mason University
David Art, Tufts University
Wendy M. Rahn, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Cynthia McClintock, George Washington University
Pippa Norris, Harvard University and University of Sydney
Ronald Franklin Inglehart, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Plenary Session at the American Political Science Association annual meeting, Philadelphia 2016. 

EIP seminars

Anaid Flesken (University of Bristol)

Ethnicity and perceptions of electoral integrity  
with Jakob Hartl (University of Bristol)

Attitudinal research consistently shows that electoral losers are less satisfied with the way democracy works than electoral winners. Recent work suggests that the pattern extends to perceptions of electoral integrity: losers are more likely to report electoral malpractice than winners, and the effect is stronger if respondents lost repeatedly.

This paper examines ethnic status group differences in the perception of electoral integrity, using the electoral integrity battery included in the latest World Values Survey wave as well as corresponding expert assessments from the Perceptions of Electoral Integrity Index.

Contrary to widespread expectations, ethnic differences are found to be insignificant or insubstantial; differences in perceptions of electoral integrity are explained mainly by political partisanship.

The results suggest, first, that substantive representation is more important than descriptive representation, even in ethnically divided societies. Second, they suggest that the winner–loser gap in political attitudes more generally is not due to a psychological “sore loser” effect after elections but to the extent to which respondents feel represented in between elections.

Merete Bech Seeberg (Aarhus University)

Candidate selection and intra-party violence
 

Electoral violence is a major concern in both autocracies, democratizing regimes, and sometimes even in established democracies. But not all violence occurs between parties. Rather, much election-related violence arises as a result of intra-party competition over candidate selection prior to the national election campaign. Intra-party violence, although often emphasized in case studies, has never been systematically investigated on a cross-national basis. 

This paper asks: What are the causes and triggers of intra-party violence during candidate selection processes?

The paper builds a framework for understanding intra-party violence during candidate selection processes. This is put to the test in several African cases.

This paper is co-authored by Dr Merete Bech Seeberg (Aarhus University) and Professor Svend-Erik Skaaning (Aarhus University)

John Keane (University of Sydney)

A Short History of the Future of Elections

Professor John Keane challenges our 'big picture' understanding of the contemporary history of elections by probing the connected trends of the universal adoption of electoral practices, the spread of various types of ‘electoral authoritarianism’ and new electoral practices 'non-Western' contexts. When elections are examined from a long-term and global perspective, can we say with any certainty that their significance and functions have changed during our generation or will change in the future?