Models and Methods Commons^™

Political Violence And Conflict Resolution: The Struggle For Peace In Northern Ireland, Lisa G. Fox

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

Political violence, especially in ethnoreligious conflicts, continues to threaten the stability and security of the international environment. Motivations for using violence are complex and can evolve over time. As long as one or more of the motivations continue to exist, parties to a conflict will feel that violence is a legitimate course of action and, thus, the conflict will persist.

Theories about the causes of conflict and the approaches that should be taken to terminate it mostly propose a single approach. A single approach, however, will address certain issues while leaving others unresolved, allowing some motivations to continue stimulating conflict. …

The Fight For Political Representation In A Southern Suburb: The Use Of The Voting Rights Act And The Federal Court System By Black Plaintiffs In Henrico County, Virginia, Thomas J. Shields

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

There has been an abundance of written work on the historic fight for black political equality in southern urban areas. However, almost no scholarly work exists on the fight for black political equality in the rapidly expanding southern suburbs. This article analyzes the rise of the black population and its fight for political representation on the local governing board in Henrico County, a large suburb of Richmond, Virginia. The article details the increase in the black population in Henrico County from 1950 to 2000 and provides a descriptive analysis how black plaintiffs used the Voting Rights Act in a redistricting …

Satellite Televisions In Lebanon: Agents Of Change Or Reinforcing The Status Quo?, Yara Youssef

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There has been a noted interest in the new technologies of the nineties, those that have expanded the realm of traditional mass media and the traditional means of communication that people were previously used to. With the start of globalization and the world becoming what some have called “global village,” the act of distributing information to the four comers of the world has become less complicated than it used to be, and boundaries are seen as constantly being eroded by the new pressures of modernization and liberalization. The internet and satellite televisions increased in importance in this realm, and so …

Mapping The Small Arms Trade: Insights From Social Network Analysis, David Todd Kinsella

Political Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

In recent years, researchers have increasingly turned their attention to the proliferation of small arms, a transnational trade amounting to over $7 billion in value during 2002. Small arms are difficult to track and are not the stuff of military parades, but they are immensely destructive. The trade in small arms should be understood not as a market but as a network, one that shares some important properties with networked forms of organization studied by sociologists. I make this argument and then employ quantitative methods developed for the study of social networks in an effort to show the basic structure …

The Effects Of Ballot Position On Election Outcomes, Jonathan G.S. Koppell, Jennifer A. Steen

Publications from President Jonathan G.S. Koppell

This article presents evidence of name-order effects in balloting from a study of the 1998 Democratic primary in New York City, in which the order of candidates' names was rotated by precinct. In 71 of 79 individual nominating contests, candidates received a greater proportion of the vote when listed first than when listed in any other position. In seven of those 71 contests, the advantage to first position exceeded the winner's margin of victory, suggesting that ballot position would have determined the election outcomes if one candidate had held the top spot in all precincts.

Multiparty Split-Ticket Voting Estimation As An Ecological Inference Problem, Kenneth Benoit, Michael Laver, Daniela Giannetti

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The estimation of vote splitting in mixed-member electoral systems is a common problem in electoral studies, where the goal of researchers is to estimate individual voter transitions between parties on two different ballots cast simultaneously. Because the ballots are cast separately and secretly, however, voter choice on the two ballots must be recreated from separately tabulated aggregate data. The problem is therefore of one of making ecological inferences. Because of the multiparty contexts normally found where mixed-member electoral rules are used, furthermore, the problem involves large-table (R × C) ecological inference. In this chapter we show how vote-splitting problems in …