The Top Two: Too Soon to Tell

Abstract. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the balance of economics and political science in Islamic political economy. The economic science here refers to economics value based on Islamic teaching, while political science refers to political value based on Islam. Whereas Islamic political science is a field that evaluates the interaction between the Islamic economy and politics as well as the implication of the influences of one field on the other.Beyond this assessment, between the economic and political value, which one is more influential in Islamic political economy? To date, most scholars are inclined towards the influence of their respective field. For those in economic field, the focus of Islamic political economy is mostly directed towards economic value rather than political value.Similarly, those who are in politics will be more inclined towards the political value rather than economic.Thus, which of the political or economic value should be made priority in Islamic political economy? Based on literature review and textual analysis, this paper will firstly, re-evaluate the issue where it is perceived that Islamic political economy does not necessarily need to focus on both political and economic value; secondly, analyse the extent to which the economic and political values are needed in Islamic political economy; and thirdly, summarise the option between the economic and political value in Islamic political economy in order to achieve a holistic field of study in overcoming problems and presenting solution for the political economy of the Ummah (Islamic nation). Keywords. Economic Value, Political Value, Islamic Political Economy. JEL. P47, P26, P16.

This paper identifies evidence of political marketing and, more specifically, consumer-oriented political marketing to analyse the theories of consumer behaviour and identify evidence of consumer behaviour in marketing in the behaviour of Ghanaian voters. The examination used quantitative research to analyse the relationship between three elements: (1) psychology, (2) personal and (3) social to understand the theory of the relationships between campaign messages and voters’ behaviour. Data were collected through a cross-sectional survey with semi-structured questionnaires administered to 7203 randomly selected respondents from participating political parties and voters in Accra, Ghana. Data received were analysed using descriptive statistics and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). Findings revealed a statistically significant relationship between the behaviour of voters in Ghana and the campaign messages of political parties. This paper concludes that there are opportunities for political marketing and change in voter behaviour. Still, sufficient attention should be given to the understanding of consumer behaviour theory that recognizes the behavioural dynamic of voters in the design of effective campaign messages that are responsive to voters’ needs.

Polarization and acculturation in US Election 2016 outcomes – Can twitter analytics predict changes in voting preferences

In the pursuit to enhance public electoral participation, lately the electoral body introduced the adoption of a twin-technology i.e. Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and INEC Election Result Viewing Portal (IReV), in subsequent elections. The efficacy of the twin-technology has raised a lot of apprehensions. Thus, it is against this backdrop this study assessed the public opinions and voting behaviours as regarding the worthiness and integrity of new Electoral Act with reference to INEC adoption of BVAS and IReV in Nigeria subsequent elections. The study adopted a survey research design, where data were primarily sourced from randomly sampled 400 Abuja municipal residents using questionnaires. Specifically, the study utilized descriptive analysis methods these include frequencies, percentages, charts and word-cloud in analyzing respondents views as regard awareness of the use of BVAS and IReV in Nigeria elections. It also employed the Fisher’s Exact Test to assess effects of the twin-technology awareness and its adoption on the public confidence in electoral process vis-à-vis their voting behaviour. The empirical findings from the descriptive analysis of the respondents revealed that there is great level of awareness among the public as regard the use of BVAS and IReV in subsequent elections in the country. Also, the study showed that respondents were full of praises for the innovation of the technology in Nigeria elections. Moreover, the Fisher’s Exact results showed that public awareness of use of BVAS and IReV positively influenced the public PVC collection rate. Howbeit, it revealed that public awareness of use of BVAS and IReV positively influenced voters’ turnout in subsequent General Election, if and only if electoral misconducts can be downcast. Thus, the study recommended that INEC could ensure full implementation and deployment of BVAS and IReV technology in coming (subsequent) elections. Also, INEC with NBA collaboration could ensure all electoral misconducts perpetrators are brought to justice as this would downcast electoral misconducts in the country and thereby enhancing voters’ turnout.

Modeling voter choice to predict the final outcome of two-stage elections

Voting as a Signal of Education

Unintended Consequences of Health Care Legislation

Political Cynicism: Measurement and Meaning

The Potential Effects of Policy Changes on Drug Markets in the UK and Australia: Estimates from a Survey of Drug Users

Health equity research often aims to promote policy, program, or system change; yet, findings are seldom translated or disseminated into lay and policy-relevant language for communities, practitioners, decision-makers, and policymakers. Policy briefs enable researchers to summarize and communicate their findings to policymakers and organizations, promoting policy, practice, and program change. To address the evidence-policy gap, which is the lack of translation from research findings to policy changes, the California Policy Lab and the UCLA Community Engagement and Research Program delivered a 2-hour interactive policy brief workshop to researchers, research staff, and community-based organizations. A community-government-academic-partnered research report was evaluated and reviewed as a case example, revising results and dissemination into a policy brief. A diverse community, government, and academic turnout (N=215 participants) and postworkshop survey results demonstrate a broad interest in the topic and the pressing need for more training on translating research into policy impact, particularly within multisector partnerships working toward health equity, where multimedia dissemination is critical for translating results for timely policy, program, or practice impact. A workshop curriculum, handout, and recording are provided to promote similar training in other settings. To promote more effective evidence-based policy and practice linkages, researchers and partners need more training on policy-relevant research design and related dissemination.

Practicing Democracy: Popular Politics in the United States from the Constitution to the Civil War. Edited by Daniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Pp. [viii], 296. $49.50, ISBN 978-0-8139-3770-0.) The ten (all male) authors in this volume met at conference at University College London in 2011 to reexamine well-worn questions of political engagement, development, and democratization in the first seventy-two years of U.S. history. Taken together, the essays they produced show early American political history to be vibrant field, capable of providing fresh insights. Editors Daniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith set an ambitious agenda for the volume, to chart the among citizens, parties, and governance in the period by building on insights from political science, from the political history of the 1960s and 1970s, and from the new, new political history of the 1990s and early 2000s (p. 11). The essays revise ideas about foundational issues: the relationship between Jeffersonian and Jacksonian politics; the push-pull relationship between political parties and voter turnout; and the interaction between parties, those in government power, and broader public. The essays in Part 1 focus on political development, even while sometimes resisting stable model of developing systems. Douglas Bradburn uses the concept of path dependence to examine the origins of two-party conflict in the early republic. Reeve Huston reexamines Ronald P. Formisano's The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s-1840s (New York, 1983) in light of more recent work that shows high activity in the 1790s to argue that the true origin of parties should be located in that decade, rather than in the Jacksonian period, even as state and local politics reveal an uneven pattern of democratization. Huston contends that Martin Van Buren may have invented discipline, but he did not innovate in most other functions. John L. Brooke's excellent essay follows up on his widely influential work on the public sphere by examining the early 1850s as a liminal, revolutionary rupture that hurried the onset of the Civil War as transformative event-clusters ... [reshaped] foundational myths and challenged social, political, and cultural structures (pp. 74, 75). He argues, in part, that the Civil War was hastened when party managers lost their power to control events because of cultural factors such as the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) (p. 77). The essays in Part 2 add nuance to the wearing-thin battle over whether voter turnout was high or low in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. …

Intergenerational transmission processes shape political behaviour. However, it is unclear if parental party affiliation during communism is associated with children’s voting behavior during the post-Soviet era. I use the case of post-Soviet elections in 2000, 2003, and 2004 in Russia to understand how family political party membership during the Soviet Union period is associated with children’s voting and political behaviour after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Leveraging insights from the national representative survey, I find that parental membership in the Communist Party before 1991 is associated with greater voter turnout among young Russian adults. I further show that these relationships persist only if a respondent’s family did not experience an economic shock (job loss or salary reduction) during economic instability in the 1990s. These results suggest the family’s pivotal role in the reproduction of political behaviours in the post-Soviet Russia, a context distinguished by wide political and economic transformations.

The voter participation rate in the 2024 Sukabumi City Regional Election has not reached the 80% target set by the General Election Commission (KPU), with an average achievement of only 69.78%. This low number shows that there are obstacles in people's political involvement, one of which is related to voter behavior. This study aims to analyze the influence of voter behavior on the level of participation in the Regional Elections. Voter behavior is studied through sociological, psychological, and rational approaches. In Sukabumi City, voter behavior tends to be rational-pragmatic, namely voting based on considerations of direct benefits and concrete personal interests. This research uses a mixed method, with data collection through surveys, interviews, and documentation. The results of the regression analysis showed that voter behavior had a significant effect on participation, both individually and collectively. The conclusion of this study states that voter behavior, especially those that are rational-pragmatic, contribute positively to increasing participation in the Sukabumi City Regional Elections

The 15th State General Election (PRN) in Negeri Sembilan has already drawn its curtain on 12 August 2023. As expected, the Unity Government with the collaboration of Pakatan Harapan (PH) and Barisan Nasional (BN) has won with a 2/3 majority, namely 31 State Legislative Assembly (DUN) seats out of the 36 DUN seats contested. However, the performance of the Perikatan Nasional (PN) candidate was quite surprising because the opposition party managed to win 5 DUN seats, namely 3 from PAS and 2 from BERSATU. More surprisingly, PH lost in areas considered to be their strongholds, namely in the Paroi and Labu DUN constituencies, while BN lost in Gemas and Bagan Pinang, which are considered UMNO strongholds and safe areas because of the presence of 'fixed deposit' votes in those areas, namely postal votes from the military. In the Serting DUN constituency, UMNO narrowly lost to the PAS candidate, namely with a majority of 843 votes. Therefore, this article focuses on the 5 DUN constituencies won by PN as the study area. This article tries to focus on the following 3 things. First, to delve into the behavior of voters in 5 DUN constituencies before the 15th PRN. Second, to identify the performance of political parties contesting in those constituencies in the 15th PRN. Third, to assess the issues and factors that led to the change in behavior of voters in those 5 constituencies who switched support to PN. This study uses secondary sources from EC reports, books, journals, papers, websites and online newspapers as study data. This data is then analyzed qualitatively. The results of the study show that rural Malay voters have rejected the cooperation that occurred in the Unity Government between PH and BN. More than that, BN voters, especially UMNO, are still skeptical and confused about the cooperation that occurred, especially involving DAP. Therefore, it is hoped that the impact of writing this article can provide a new picture of the political behavior of Malays in rural areas and add more information related to the political journey in Negeri Sembilan.

The participation of EU citizens in the European Parliament elections is much lower than in the national elections and differs significantly across the EU member states. The article is aimed at finding out the factors that influence the participation of EU citizens in the elections to the European Parliament. The study outlines the theoretical approaches to understanding the phenomenon of the European Parliament elections and the assumptions of researchers about the factors that may influence the electoral activity of citizens. According to second-order elections theory by Karlheinz Reif and Hermann Schmitt citizens perceive European Parliament elections as less important than national elections that results in lower participation. However, the behavior of voters may also be affected by a number of factors which may be regarded as individual-level motivations (trust in national and European authorities, attitudes towards EU institutions etc.). With use of binary logistic regression method, it was defined which factors influenced the participation of citizens in the European Parliament election 2014 and explained the differences in the electoral activity of citizens of different EU countries. The nature of the identified factors that influence the participation of citizens in the elections to the European Parliament suggests that the second-order elections theory is still valid. The paper shows that feeling of political efficacy makes voting a sensible act for a per­son. Feeling close to certain political party motivates a person to support his or her party in all types of elections. The importance of factors related to the second-order elections paradigm is partly confirmed by the voter turnout in 2019 EP elections. More mobilization efforts by the parties and more visible election campaign made the topic of the EP elections more public and motivated the voter to turn out.