Volume 13, Issue 2

The U.S. Electoral College’s winner-take-all method of awarding electoral votes creates a high susceptibility to disputes and errors, but past reform attempts have glossed over their likely disruptions to power balances among states and between the two political parties. This gap is filled by connecting pragmatic models of power shifts and election disputability to a historically informed probabilistic model of future elections. This methodology is then applied to a continuum of reform proposals between the current system and the Lodge-Gossett version of a national popular vote. The results show that a modest smoothing of winner-take-all near the toss-up point delivers a good tradeoff between reducing dispute frequency and distorting power balances, enabling meaningful reform in an era of high polarization. This conclusion holds for extrapolation of the current national landscape into near-future elections, as well as for more arbitrary distributions of partisans among states to represent far-future landscapes. However, as electoral award smoothing diminishes the frequency of disputed elections, it inevitably broadens their scope.

The question of whether people voting for Eurosceptic parties in almost every European country is simply a democratic way of expressing a political opinion, or if it presents a threat to democracy by giving a voice to Eurosceptic parties that challenge the EU in a populist manner, has not lost its currency since the 2008 European sovereign dept crisis. In fact, at the first glance, the situation of anti-Corona protestors in Canada or Germany seems comparable. But contrary to some scholars, I argue that it was the economic crisis that first visualized the interdependency of the EU members to the citizens, and was, therefore, the ideal setting for populists to create an atmosphere of mistrust, with the help of the media in some countries. This Research Note addresses the undertheorized link between populism and crisis, by developing a theoretical model focussing on the aggregate level, which shows that EU-membership duration is a crucial factor in explaining voting for Eurosceptic parties. I use data from the European Social Survey and compare a period from 2002 to 2016, conducting trend analysis and difference-in-difference-estimation. My analysis reveals that Eurosceptic parties are more successful in those countries, where anti-EU protest has already been established before. In addition, I find a delayed crisis effect. This could be important for our understanding of the current Covid-19-crisis, which is a health crisis in first place, but a threat to democratic values and instrumentalized by populists as well.

The purpose of this article is to examine the extent to which an approach that takes into account the historical and spatial context of an election can contribute to a better understanding of electoral dynamics in general. It applies this approach to the analysis of the results of the populist radical right party “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) at the 2017 federal election in Germany. Making use of a newly compiled dataset at the municipality level in Germany, local context will first be included in a direct way, measured by distances from the municipalities to relevant geographical markers that can be associated with a long-term or a short-term historical legacy. These spatial points include former Nazi concentration camps (main camps as well as relevant sub-camps) in order to test for the long-term legacy, first reception facilities for refugees during the so-called “refugee crisis” (2015–16) as markers of one of the most incisive developments of the recent past in Germany. Additionally, the distance to the Eastern border is tested, as this variable has proven to be relevant in the context of earlier studies on the AfD. Second, actively modeling spatial non-stationarity using Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) in an exploratory manner shows that most effects on the strength of the AfD at the municipality level (from modernization loser theory to the contact hypothesis) vary significantly and considerably in terms of strength throughout Germany.

Income inequality is viewed as one of the greatest challenges facing democracies today. Democracy is predicated on the ideal of equality, but political inequality occurs when the preferences of some are systematically afforded more weight in the political process than others. This research paper investigates the causal chain that allows for political inequality to arise through preference formation, articulation, and aggregation, by outlining the effects that income inequality can have on preferences for redistribution, political participation, and policy responsiveness. It finds that the policy choices presented to the electorate substantially matter for democracy, especially so in this age of increasing income inequality. There appears to be a lack of policy choice provided by political parties resulting in unequal policy responsiveness to the preferences of lower-income earners.

Carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) traps heat from the sun, and thereby prevents oceans from becoming frozen solid to keep the earth habitable. CO 2 emission also stimulates global warming and increases the pace of climate change. For such contradictory influences, researchers across the globe have shown interest in examining the relationship among energy, emission, trade and commerce, focusing on different regions, including the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Investigation from a developed country perspective is understudied. Hence, this research aims at analysing how trade and commerce, urbanisation, energy consumption, and economy affect the volume of CO 2 emission in Japan. The World Bank database was used to collect data for 1960–2010. The findings suggest that the inverted U-shaped relationship between economic progress and carbon emissions follows the Environmental Kuznets Curve theorem. However, per capita energy consumption has no significant impact on emission in the long run; the trade volume does not directly affect the emission of CO 2 in Japan. Besides, the ratio of the urban population shows a negative impact on carbon emission in the long run.

The goal of this research was to use Bayesian switching volatility models to model the stock returns of the GCB, bank in Ghana. Monthly stock prices of GCB bank for the period of 138 months were used for the study. The two-state Markov-Switching GARCH models were used in the study to determine the best model for modelling and forecasting the stock returns. The Deviance Information Criteria was considered when selecting the best model. Based on the Deviance Information Criteria, E-GARCH variance specification with skewed student- t innovation was shown to be appropriate for modelling the stock returns. The estimates of the best model showed the first regime to exhibit the features of “turbulent market conditions” while the second regime exhibits “tranquil market conditions”. The risk analysis finds the best model to generally perform better in estimating both Value-at-Risk and Expected Shortfall at 1% rather than 5%. The study advises investors to invest in GCB bank because of the high returns connected with the stock and the fact that when “turbulent market conditions” arise, the recovery rate for these stocks is faster.