Voting and Not Voting in Early 18th-Century English Parliamentary Elections

This article uses data from 28 poll books to explore voter behaviour over time in early 18th-century English parliamentary elections (from 1710 to 1735). Voters in this period exhibited a high degree of partisan loyalty from one election to the next. But voters were also quite likely to drop out of the electorate between elections. As a case study of Sussex elections in 1734 shows, even among voters who made a definite promise to vote for a given candidate or set of candidates, there was a significant proportion who did not vote. While some non-voting can be explained as an attempt to avoid disobliging powerful patrons, this article argues that voters needed to be motivated to appear at the polls. The electoral culture of the early 18th century – treats, balls, public appearances by the candidates, etc. – should be understood as attempts to mobilise rather than to persuade potential voters.     

The Voting Rights of Incarcerated Australian Citizens

Drawing on and combining political science and legal frameworks, this article explores the validity of disenfranchising Australian prisoners. The authors examine and critically assess the various arguments used in Australia by both legislators and High Court Justices to defend the practice of disenfranchisement. Such arguments are assessed against liberal democratic principles as well as jurisprudence arising from cases in settings that provide protection for electoral rights in formal charters of rights. The authors show that in settings that entrench voting rights in the Constitution, any infringement attracts strict scrutiny from the courts. Courts insist that any abridgement of voting rights should serve a legitimate government purpose and be proportionate to that purpose. The arguments made for prisoner disenfranchisement by legislators in the Australian context invariably fail both parts of this test.     

Electoral Pluralism,Social Division and the 2016 Parliamentary Elections in Jordan

Representing one of the most stable regimes in the Middle East, Jordan has been undergoing a process of political liberalization since 1989. Due to the so‐called East Bank‐West Bank cleavage that followed by the influx of Palestinian migrants to Jordan, the country has also come to epitomize a divided society. Within this context, this paper aims to analyze the ongoing prospects for democratization in Jordan through an examination of four persistent debates shaping its electoral pluralism: those over social/identity division, electoral law as a regime‐survival mechanism, the role of the Ikhwan and the IAF's electoral boycotts, and electoral apathy. Finally, the impact of the Arab upheavals/revolts on restructuring the process of political reform — as well as opposition in the kingdom in the post‐2011 era — will be explored with reference to the changing dynamics of Islamist opposition.     

Information Provision and Individual Behavior: A Case Study of Voting at an English General Election

A basic premise of much work in behavioral geography is that spatial variations in decision making reflect the geography of information availability. Within this context, more attention has been paid to the behavior than to the provision of information. In this paper, both the supply of relevant information and its impact are modeled and analyzed, using the 1983 general election in England as a case study. Variations in campaign spending on information are identified, related to the party's standing in a constituency, and these variations are shown to have been related to the electoral outcome.     

Urban-Rural Voting Differences in Russian Elections, 1995-1996: A Rayon-Level Analysis

Two specialists on the electoral geography of post-Soviet Russia examine the results of the second national 1995 parliamentary election and the June and July 1996 presidential elections in the Russian Federation. The scale of analysis is the rayon level, based on a data set of roughly 300 rayons drawn from nine representative oblasts across the country. The data permit urban-rural and regional patterns in electoral behavior to be elucidated with greater precision. Although urban and rural effects are pronounced, the analysis reveals the importance of many other local contextual factors less amenable to quantification. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers H10, O10, R1O. 1 figure, 7 tables, 24 references.     

Enrichment Training Program and Successful Marriage in Kuwait: a Field Study on Kuwaiti Couples

The main purpose of the current study was to determine whether a marriage enrichment program could effectively increase and improve marital satisfaction and marital communication of Kuwaiti couples. In addition, most of the previous studies which focused on marriage enrichment programs have been conducted with predominantly white, North American married couples (Yelsma, 1988). The study of the impact of the marriage enrichment will provide insight into the ways couples from other cultural backgrounds interact with each other in achieving marital satisfaction, especially, couples from Muslim countries. Participants were 62 married couples (16 couples in the experimental group; 16 couples in the control group) — their marital duration ranging from one year to thirty‐one years. The study examined whether a marital enhancement program could make any change in the marital satisfaction of Kuwaiti couples. The study focused on the following research questions: 1) Do socio‐demo‐graphic factors (age, income, education, duration of marriage, children) play a role on the marital satisfaction level of Kuwaiti couples? 2) Is there a difference in the marital satisfaction scale between male and female in the pre‐test, post‐test marital satisfaction scale? 3) Does the marriage enhancement training program in the Social Development Office (SDO) influence the post‐test level of the marital satisfaction of the participants? The study concluded that the marriage enrichment program in the SDO of Kuwait has had a significant positive effect on marital communication and marital adjustment immediately following the enrichment experience.     

Community of Practice in the Kuwaiti Medical Sector: An Exploratory Study

Community of Practice (CoP) is a relatively new concept in the Middle East and North Africa. The concept has been used for a number of years in the business sector; however, the use of CoPs in the health sector has not been as widespread. The aim of this study is to provide insights into the status of CoPs in the health sector and the knowledge sharing practices that take place among members of such CoPs in Kuwait. Ninety‐eight questionnaires were distributed among medical practitioners. Results showed that the majority of members perceived the CoP as a source of increasing professional knowledge. Respondents focused mainly on the COPs fostering social interactions at the workplace or during task‐oriented activities. They mostly discussed specific problems and immediate concerns. The desire to learn and the desire to help others were the main motivators for doctors to share their knowledge. Lack of time and lack of technology and knowledge transfer mechanisms were reported as the primary obstacles to sharing knowledge. Nearly 65 percent of the CoP members responding to the survey stated that they did not receive any financial support from their management. In recent years the role of communities in learning and knowledge sharing has attracted much attention among those interested in knowledge as a situated practice. The concept of Communities of Practice (CoP) was originally developed by Lave and Wenger (1991 ), who suggested that learning took place in social relationships rather than the simple acquisition of knowledge. Lave and Wenger's observations have formed the basis of the “situated learning theory,” which describes that learning takes place in a setting functionally identical to a space where the knowledge is applied ( Lave & Wenger, 1991 ). The CoP concept has been used in the business sector for over 20 years, but the use of CoPs in the health sector has been recent ( Li et al., 2009 ). In addition, results of two studies, conducted by Traboulsi (2002 ) and Johnson and Kalidi (2005 ), revealed that the CoP is a relatively new phenomenon in the Middle East and North Africa. This article aims to provide insights into the status of CoPs in the health sector and their knowledge‐sharing practices in Kuwait.     

Ecological Inference and Spatial Variation of Individual Behavior: National Divide and Elections in Catalonia

When in geography one reconstructs individual behavior starting from aggregated data through ecological inference, a crucial aspect is the spatial variation of individual behavior. Basic ecological inference methods treat areas as if they were all exchangeable, which in geographical applications is questionable due to the existence of contextual effects that relate to area location and induce spatial dependence. Here that assumption is avoided by basing ecological inference on a model that simultaneously does a cluster analysis, grouping together areas with similar individual behavior, and an ecological inference analysis in each cluster, estimating the individual behavior in the areas of each group. That allows one to capture most of the spatial dependence and summarize the individual behavior at a local level through the behavior estimated for each cluster. This approach is used to investigate vote switching in Catalonia, where voters split across a national allegiance divide on top of the ideological divide. That leads to Catalans having a lot of options to choose from, and to them voting differently depending on whether the election is for the Catalan parliament or for the Spanish parliament. To investigate that, the results in the two most recent pairs of such elections are analyzed by simultaneously clustering areas based on the similarity of their vote and vote switch patterns, and estimating one vote switch pattern for each cluster. As a result, Catalonia is partitioned into four clusters that have a strong spatial structure, with all the areas in the same cluster having similar demographic composition. The estimated vote switch patterns are quite different across clusters but very similar across pairs of elections, and they help assess how the differential voter turnout and the strategic dual vote effects vary in space.