Abstract: While the party decides theory explains the outcomes of past nomination battles for president, this year in the Republican presidential contest party insiders failed to anoint a standard bearer. Who decides when the party elites don’t? In 2016, it was America’s authoritarian voters. And their candidate of choice, Donald Trump, is anathema to party leaders. I argue that Trump’s rise is in part the result of authoritarian voters’ response to his unvarnished, us-versus-them rhetoric. The failure of Republican Party insiders to coalesce behind one candidate opened the door for Trump. Authoritarian-driven partisan polarization (Hetherington and Weiler 2009), increasing fear of real and imagined threats, and terrorist incidents abroad and at home provided the fuel for Trump’s campaign. And Trump’s message and manner ignited that fuel, propelling him to the Republican nomination for president.

Abstract: Scholarship on primary election outcomes has largely ignored the ability of political parties to shape outcomes and influence the decisions of candidates to compete for the party’s nomination. Only recently have theories of parties as networks of policy demanders suggested that parties influence the candidate nomination process. Previous attempts to document party control of primaries, however, have only tested these theories on small or unrepresentative samples of primary races or have looked at general election results after the party’s nominee has already been selected. Using a simple and easily understood measure of party support, I show that candidates who are less connected to the party are less likely to win and also less likely to remain a candidate in the primary. I find that parties not only are effective in helping candidates win but also are influential in excluding certain electoral options from being presented to primary voters.

Abstract: This article explores the negative campaign messages made by presidential nomination candidates on their opponents. Using a compilation of national and state media accounts of candidate attack activity from the 1992 Democratic nomination race, we seek to answer the questions -- are the intermediated attacks made by presidential nomination candidates random events or are they predictable consequences of measurable variables? Moreover, when candidates attack, who is their likely target? We find that intermediated candidate attacks can be predicted based on a number of conditions. Among these conditions are competitive positioning, reward factors and media-related conditions. Moreover, the general foci of attacks appear to be limited to attacking those who are competitively in the top tier. Attacks vary both in their frequency and in their nature depending on the competitive stage of the campaign. The systematic evaluation of these opponent-focused negative messages and their role in candidate strategy and voter evaluation is important for understanding presidential nomination politics and strategic communication

Abstract: One of the themes of 2016 so far has been the challenges faced by political institutions. From Brexit to Bernie Sanders’ potent critique of the Democratic Party, we’ve heard a lot about how voters ...

Abstract: What’s the best predictor of which candidate will win the presidential nomination? The winner of the Iowa caucus? The winner of the New Hampshire primary? Actually neither is as good an indicator as the winner of what political scientists call “the invisible primary” — the period before a single primary or caucus vote is cast. A fast start in Iowa or New Hampshire is important. A candidate with a poor showing in both states is in trouble. Voters aren’t interested, donors aren’t interested, and reporters aren’t interested in a candidate who finishes at the back of the pack. Yet, more often than not, the winner in Iowa has lost in New Hampshire. Since 1980, of the twelve open nominating races — those without an incumbent president seeking reelection — only Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004 won both contests. In 1992, the eventual Democratic nominee, Bill Clinton, lost both, though he ran well enough in the two states to be seen as a viable candidate.

Abstract: This article advances a party-centric analysis of gender quotas in Brazil. We examine how parties mediate electoral rules, finding that neither the implementation of the Lei de Cotas (Quota Law) in 1995 nor its 2009 mini-reform was sufficient to induce significant change in party strategies for the nomination and election of women. Moreover, we find that while the open-list proportional representation electoral system is an important part of the explanation for the quota's failure to enhance women's representation, an analysis of how those electoral rules interact with decentralized party politics and women's absence from subnational party leadership structures yields superior explanatory power for understanding quota (non)compliance. We marshal extensive evidence on interparty variation in candidacies to Brazil's Chamber of Deputies and state legislative assemblies and interviews with candidates, party leaders, bureaucrats, and activists throughout Brazil to show how electoral rules and party dynamics interact to undermine the gender quota, resulting in a limited increase in the number of female candidates and stagnation in the number of women elected. We conclude that reform efforts must target not only electoral rules but also the subnational party structures that mediate these rules if they are to enhance women's political representation.

Abstract: The 2014 European Parliament (EP) elections took place in a very particular environment. Economic crisis, bailout packages, and austerity measures were central on the agenda in many Southern countries while open borders and intra-EU migration gained high salience elsewhere in the Union. A strong decline of political trust in European and national institutions was alarming. At the same time, the nomination and campaigning of “ Spitzenkandidaten ”, lead candidates of EP political groups for European Commission (EC) presidency, was meant to establish a new linkage between European Parliament elections and the (s)election of the president of the Commission. All of this might have changed the very nature of EP elections as second-order national elections. In this paper, we try to shed light on this by analysing aggregate election results, both at the country-level and at the party-level and compare them with the results of the preceding first-order national election in each EU member country. Our results suggest that the ongoing politicisation of EU politics had little impact on the second-order nature of European Parliament elections.

Abstract: Quotas for women and ethnic minorities are implemented to increase diversity in political institutions, but, as they usually target only one group at a time, they may end up increasing the inclusion of one under-represented group at the cost of another. Recent work has emphasized the institutional underpinnings of the variation in such outcomes. In this article I show how the intersectional effects of quotas may also vary within the same institutional context, as changes in the pressure to include excluded groups interact with the informal opportunity structures within political parties. Looking at the nomination of female candidates across India over time, I show that, as the efforts to include more women in politics intensified, much of the increase in female candidates occurred in constituencies reserved for ethnic minorities. This pattern may in part be the result of parties resisting changes to existing power hierarchies by nominating women at the cost of the least powerful male politicians, but can also be seen as evidence that minority quotas have created a political space that is more accessible to women.

Abstract: This paper analyzes the role of competition between political parties for the promotion and turnover of social minorities in party organizations. We collect extensive and reliable panel data for the career trajectories of all Swedish politicians in 290 municipal councils over 20 years (N=35,000). We argue that political competition pushes local parties to promote the best individual, which in turn improves gender equality at the top. This finds strong support in the empirical analysis. Heightened competition is associated with smaller gender gaps in re-election, retention on the electoral ballot, and promotions to top positions. An extended analysis shows that variation in the qualifications and family structures of male and female politicians cannot account for these results. As a more plausible mechanism, the analysis suggests that parties have nomination processes that are less centralized and more focused on competence as a selection criteria when competition is fierce.

Abstract: In this article we assess the electoral effects of the nomination of ethnic minority candidates. We argue that descriptive representation is an important factor in how parties in SMD systems establ...

Abstract: The continuous underrepresentation of women and of various minorities in elected political assemblies challenges classic democratic theory, which focuses on procedures, on the how, while neglecting the who of representation, be it in the ancient city-state of Athens or in modern deliberative governance structures. Political representation is embedded in the power structure of the political system. In most political systems the political parties are the gatekeepers to elected positions. When the voters enter the polling station, the nomination and rank order of candidates for election have already been decided on by the political parties. Historically, representation predates democracy, as in the representation of noblemen, priests, and the bourgeoisie in the old estates. The present discussion of equal representation of all citizens in relation to their share of the population is linked to modern democracy. Yet, increasingly, even senior non-democratic countries select their political assemblies through direct public elections, which has made the question of who the representatives are a global issue. This entry distinguishes between descriptive, substantive, and symbolic representation. Keywords: gender equality; intersectionality; political representation; women's rights; women's/feminist organizations

Abstract: Previous studies showed that cultural dimensions (individualism and collectivism) are related to audience behavior in responding to political speeches. However, this study suggests that speech context is an important issue to be considered in understanding speaker-audience interaction in political speeches. Forms of response, audience behavior, and response rates were analyzed in three speech contexts: acceptance speeches to nomination as political parties’ candidates for presidential election, presidential election campaign speeches, and presidential inauguration speeches in the Korean presidential election of 2012. We found that audience response forms and behavior were distinctive according to the three speech contexts: in-group partisan leadership, competitive, and formal contexts. However, there was no relationship between the affiliative response rate and electoral success in the election. The function of the audience response is popularity and support of a speaker in acceptance and election campaign speeches, while it is conformity to social norms in inauguration speeches.

Abstract: Political parties have long been identified as critical players in Canadian democracy. In this address I focus on the activities of parties at the constituency level arguing that this is crucial to fully understanding many important questions in Canadian political science. By way of example, using data relating to the 2015 federal election, I argue that examining the relative vitality of local party associations in the period between election campaigns assists in a fuller understanding of election outcomes and that examining local party nomination dynamics is key to understanding the underrepresentation of women in the candidate pool and ultimately in the House of Commons.

Abstract: There is persistent debate about who most influences the federal appointment process, especially whether the executive branch staffs the federal bureaucracy with individuals loyal to the White House or relies on the process as an accommodation to important political players, especially members of Congress. Yet, people still know little about the role members of Congress play in the process of shaping the prenomination environment. In this article, the authors address this debate by using unique archival data from the Dwight Eisenhower and Gerald Ford Presidential Libraries to identify which legislators contacted the president about a specific nomination or appointment request and under what conditions these requests were successful. The authors find that legislator resources, Senate membership, and those closer ideologically to the president are related both to the number of requests made and to the number of successful appointment or nomination requests granted. The results suggest that the president relies on members of Congress for credible information about staffing administrative positions, but they appoint or nominate individuals that are in their own interest, not necessarily to accommodate Congress.

Abstract: This study analyzes the important role state political culture played in the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Donald Trump appealed to demographically distinct types of voters in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries and caucuses that varied considerably from previous Republican presidential nominees. Relative to the demographics of the primary electorates, however, this study finds that state political culture played an outsized role in determining Donald Trump’s relative level of support in a particular state. When state demographics are utilized in ordinary least squares regression models as independent variables with state partisanship and Daniel Elazar’s state political culture typology, political culture proves to be a significant determinant of the level of support given to Trump in a state. States that are characterized by a more moralistic political culture are considerably more likely to have given Trump a lower share of the vote while voters in states that are characterized by a more traditionalistic or individualistic culture were more likely to support Trump.

Abstract: Presidents often see a Supreme Court nomination as an opportunity to leave a lasting mark on policy. Recent studies speculate that focusing on Supreme Court nominees affects presidential success beyond the confirmation process, but this has not been established systematically. We develop and test a hypothesis stating that presidents who get into a battle to promote a controversial Supreme Court nominee will see delays and failures in their efforts to promote their legislative agenda in the Senate and fill lower level judicial vacancies. We test our theory using data on presidential policy agenda items from 1967 to 2010 and lower level judicial nominations from 1977 to 2010. We find that increased efforts in promoting confirmation reduce the likelihood of timely Senate approval of important policy proposals and nominees to federal district courts.

Abstract: “You're going to have a deportation force, and you're going to do it humanely.”—Donald Trump, candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, discussing the deportation of the eleven million undocumented immigrants currently residing in the United States (BBC [2015][1]). The 2016

Abstract: In this article, the author will argue that development of the Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa nomination dossier involved collaborations between multiple actors, involved the recognition of indigenous knowledge systems, and resulted in the co-creation of hybrid mapping representations. This empirical research examines data sources like World Heritage dossiers and state/UNESCO correspondence letters held at the UNESCO World Heritage Centre archives in Paris, France and cultural site dossiers archived at the International Council on Memorials and Sites (ICOMOS) in Charenton-le-Pont, France. Actor-network theory informs this research and will act as a heuristic tool for collection, organizing, and analyzing the archival documents. A framework called postcolonial centers of calculation will be introduced to untangle technoscientific processes associated with World Heritage nomination documents. A case study of the Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa nomination dossier reveals historical cycles of accumulation geographic information around Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa, a strong network of indigenous and state collaborations, and the creation of hybrid geographic representations. The discussion and conclusion section relate this research to sustainability science and indigenous geographies, and suggest future research directions.

Abstract: Scholars exploring the female representation gap in the U.S. Congress have pointed to district-level differences to explain why some districts regularly field women candidates and elect congresswomen while others almost never do. Specifically, demographic, economic, and political characteristics strongly influence a district's female candidacy, nomination, and election rates. This article asks whether also knowing about a district's religious environment helps us better predict the presence and success of women candidates. My central finding is that religiosity, in general, and the strength of some denominations within a district are strong predictors of where women will run and how well they will compete.

Abstract: This article examines an alternative logic for candidate renomination to the European Parliament (EP), based upon the size and ideological nature of a Member of the European Parliament’s (MEP’s) home party, as well as timing of EP elections. I derive expectations from the second-order election hypothesis to show that parties from outside of the national mainstream should expect to benefit disproportionately from EP elections and therefore renominate experienced incumbents at higher rates. Using original data on the career behaviour of MEPs during the 2009 and 2014 elections, I find that such parties are more likely to treat EP contests as ‘first order’ in their importance, particularly when European elections are held during the midterm period of the national election cycle. My findings have new implications for the differentiated volatility of the EP, specifically, as well as for internal party dynamics in multi-level systems, more generally.

Abstract: This study assesses the link between nomination committees' presence and size as well as male directors on nomination committee and gender diversity in Ghanaian boardrooms. We use a dataset of 25 listed and 20 unlisted Ghanaian firms for January 2006 to December 2012; nine years after the Ghana Government endorsed an Affirmative Action Plan to achieve 40% representation of women on all boards by the year 2000. We employ probit and logit regressions to test our hypotheses. Listed firms and financial institutions are more likely to have more gender diverse boards. By contrast, we have no evidence to support the link between board gender diversity and board size, firm age, firm size, firm ownership, board composition and nomination committees' presence and size as well as male directors on nomination committee. Overall, our results raise questions on the appropriateness of the continual use of both the agency and resource dependency theories in explaining board gender diversity in developing economies' perspective. This study is the first of its kind, particularly within developing economies.

Abstract: This article examines how three potential effects of television news affect the public's perceptions of candidates. Data are used from the networks' nightly news coverage of each candidate during the 1984 Democratic primary campaign and from the National Election Study's 1984 Continuous Monitoring Survey. The analysis provides support for the existence of candidate-specific attention, horse race, and tone effects on (1) the mass public's assessment of a candidate's attractiveness, (2) people's willingness to vote for a candidate, and (3) judgments about a candidate's likelihood of garnering the nomination. Television coverage of candidates matters but in different ways and to different degrees across candidates. Finally, there is evidence for the power of strong indirect media effects, a testimony to the rapid diffusion of media messages into the wider political culture.

Abstract: Previous studies of presidential appointments have consistently found that presidents place their most competent appointees into agencies responsible for policy issues high on their agendas. Using a survey with an embedded experimental manipulation, we examine whether members of the public, when given the backgrounds of fictional presidential appointees, are able to infer the president's policy priorities based on the perceived competence of the appointees. Results suggest that perceived policy importance is positively associated with perceptions of competence, and negatively associated with perceptions of favoritism or patronage - characterized here as the nomination of campaign fundraisers. Moreover, these same factors are associated with increased levels of support for the President's policy positions in the policy areas for which the nominees are responsible. Notably, perceived nominee ideology has no perceptible effect on policy support or perceived policy importance.

Abstract: The past twenty years have seen a tremendous rise in international dispute settlement mechanisms. As international adjudication has become more prominent and pervasive some of its most fundamental tenants have also come under deep scrutiny. Recently, a new debate has emerged regarding party-appointments — a widespread feature in international arbitration. While international arbitrators, like national judges, are supposed to be neutral and impartial and to exercise independent judgment, practitioners and scholars concur that arbitrators often lean in favor of the nominating party. As a result of concerns over lack of impartiality, “blind appointments” — wherein nominees do not know which party appointed them — have been suggested as a corrective intervention in the arbitration field.This Article explores the causes, implementation challenges, and possible limitations of blind appointments in arbitration. It makes three contributions: First, it proposes a theoretical framework to understand the different biases introduced with the nomination of judges in international adjudication: compensation, affiliation, selection and epistemic effects. Second, considering new data from investment arbitration proceedings and experimental surveys on arbitrators, it shows that blinding is a promising intervention to target affiliation effects while maintaining potential benefits resulting from party participation in the tribunal’s formation. Third, it explains how blind appointments may have important limits as to their corrective properties and explores the conditions that are more favorable for the success of this proposal in other fields of international adjudication.

Abstract: This article examines how political context affects the strategic choice of nomination rules, using data from federal and state-level legislative elections. Our analysis indicates that competition affects the selection rules parties adopt. Overall, parties are most likely to use open selection rules when they think they will win, largely due to the effects of activist competition over coveted nominations. However, state-level party leaders have not been consistently empowered by decentralization. Although state-level party leaders do have nonnegligible influence when it comes to the selection of local legislative nominees, they have more influence in those states that are the most dependent on the federal government for resources. Competitive context continues to be a stronger predictor of selection rule choice than decentralization.

Abstract: On July 16, 1841, President John Tyler nominated Edward Everett to be the United States' minister to Great Britain. The Senate debated Everett's nomination in executive sessions; this dragged on intermittently until Everett's appointment was confirmed by a 23-19 vote on September 13, the last day of this special session of Congress. (1) The Senate's executive sessions were secret, but as the delay grew protracted word leaked out that southern senators opposed Everett's appointment because they considered him a dangerous abolitionist. Those in the press who seconded that opposition based it on public letters Everett had written while governor of Massachusetts in the late 1830s. The resulting press furor in the North produced talk of retaliation and ultimately disunion. The storm dissipated when Everett won confirmation, but its lightning had illuminated how interconnected local, national, and international questions could be in American politics when slavery was at issue. Most historians of American foreign relations have underrated the links between sectional domestic politics and international questions. Those who call for study of these connections continue to take the posture of voices in the wilderness, insisting quite rightly that both political and diplomatic historians could benefit from increased interchange. (2) In recent years, scholars of the sectional politics of slavery in the Civil War era have turned their attention increasingly to the international arena. (3) But the Everett episode adds to this emerging picture by demonstrating that what a politician said with an eye to reelection to his state capital could reverberate in deliberations in the nation's capital concerning who should represent the nation in a great foreign capital. The Everett confirmation imbroglio thus highlighted how vulnerable national party coalitions were to sectional disruptions by epitomizing the multiple angles from which such disruptions could appear. At a time in which the Whig Party already faced serious sectional and ideological cleavages, the confirmation combat placed even greater pressure on party unity. Northern Whigs, previously among the staunchest of unionists, shocked many observers by indulging in bitter sectional rhetorical responses to the threat to Everett. And while Democrats were happy, from a partisan point of view, to inflict travail on a Whig nominee and potentially divide their opponents, only southern Democrats found opposition to Everett on grounds related to slavery a straightforward proposition. The course of the debate and the Senate's eventual endorsement of Everett, however, demonstrated how loyalty to party and the Union could triumph over sectional politics. Within the framework of southern politics, the Democrats and southern rights men in this debate employed a classic version of what scholar William Cooper has called "the politics of slavery," in which antebellum southern politicians accused the other party of unsoundness on slavery. In this cycle of "sectional one-upmanship practiced by the two parties," the standard charge was that one's own northern allies were reliable on slavery, while the other party's northern men were rank abolitionists. Although pushing the slavery issue into state and sectional politics in this way proved counterproductive to keeping it out of national politics, Cooper argues, neither party could seem to help itself. (4) But while national party managers were caught off guard by the controversy, they neither found themselves paralyzed by it nor blundered through it, proving creative and resourceful in managing the final vote. Furthermore, the months-long war of words demonstrated the passionate devotion to the Union among southern Whigs. Strongly committed moderates may seem oxymoronic to us, but southern Whigs, as leading unionists, deserve more attention than most modern scholars have paid them. (5) They were certainly much in evidence in key roles during the Everett confirmation dispute. …

Abstract: A number of scholars successfully modeled and predicted presidential nomination outcomes from 1996–2008. However, dramatic changes occurred in subsequent years that would seem to make replicating these results challenging at best. Building on those earlier studies, we utilize a series of OLS models that included measures of preprimary resources and early campaign successes or failures to forecast that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would win the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations in 2016. This outcome suggests that some fundamental factors governing nomination outcomes have not changed despite the conventional wisdom.