National Electoral Choices in Rural Mexico 1

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1 University Press Scholarship Online You are looking at 1-8 of 8 items for: keywords : secret ballot National Electoral Choices in Rural Mexico 1 Jonathan Fox in Accountability Politics: Power and Voice in Rural Mexico Published in print: 2007 Published Online: May 2008 ISBN: eisbn: acprof:oso/ This chapter analyzes persistent exclusionary electoral practices, using quantitative indicators of access to the secret ballot in Mexico's 1994 presidential election in rural areas. While the opposition expected a rerun of the repertoire of fraud and manipulation that characterized the 1988 race, instead the state effectively deployed a range of levers of intervention in rural economic and social life that, in combination with the systematic lack of access to the secret ballot, reduced the ruling party's need to resort to fraud by inducing a widespread fear vote. This study draws on two previously unstudied data sets to estimate the degree of rural voter access to the secret ballot in the 1994 presidential elections, including a focus on opposition party oversight in indigenous municipalities in the states of Oaxaca, Veracruz, and Chiapas. Accountability Politics: Power and Voice in Rural Mexico Jonathan A. Fox Published in print: 2007 Published Online: May 2008 ISBN: eisbn: Item type: book acprof:oso/ How can the seeds of accountability ever grow in authoritarian environments? Embedding accountability into the state is an inherently uneven, partial, and contested process. Campaigns for public accountability often win limited concessions at best, but they can leave cracks in the system that serve as handholds for subsequent efforts to open up the state to public scrutiny. This book explores how civil society thickens by comparing two decades of rural citizens' struggles to hold the Mexican state accountable, exploring both change and continuity before, during, and after national electoral turning points. Page 1 of 5

2 The book addresses how much power-sharing really happens in policy innovations that include participatory social and environmental councils, citizen oversight of elections and the secret ballot, decentralized social investment funds, participation reforms in World Bank projects, community-managed food programs, as well as new social oversight and public information access reforms. Meanwhile, efforts to exercise voice unfold at the same time as rural citizens consider their exit options, as millions migrate to the US, where many have since come together in a new migrant civil society. This book concludes that new analytical frameworks are needed to understand transitions to accountability. This involves unpacking the interaction between participation, transparency, and accountability. Fighting Elections I: Interests, Parties, and Political Organization MATTHEW CRAGOE in An Anglican Aristocracy: The Moral Economy of the Landed Estate in Carmarthenshire Published in print: 1996 Published Online: October 2011 ISBN: eisbn: acprof:oso/ In the period covered by this book, the basis of politics in Carmarthenshire underwent a fundamental shift. Until the 1860s, at least, the dominant feature was the prevalence of the interest, bound together by ties of patronage, dependence, and marriage, and thus having essentially local reference points. After 1868, however, and particularly after 1880, national political parties increasingly dominated local thinking about politics. Votes were sought, and given, with an explicit appeal to national issues and personalities. The crucial factors in this change were the enlarged electorate brought about by the 1867 and 1884 Reform Acts, and the introduction of the secret ballot, factors which undermined the old rules governing the conduct of county politics. This chapter traces the change from interest to party-based politics by considering the ideological and practical aspects of electioneering. It examines the interest and party, as well as the way in which the essential ground rules of one political culture were replaced by the other. It also examines specific organizational changes, including voter registration and canvassing practice, together with how politics was actually financed. Page 2 of 5

3 Burson v. Freeman in The Constitution of Electoral Speech Law: The Supreme Court and Freedom of Expression in Campaigns and Elections Published in print: 2008 Published Online: June 2013 ISBN: eisbn: Publisher: Stanford University Press DOI: / stanford/ This chapter examines Burson v. Freeman, a case involving Tennessee's prohibition on electioneering (the solicitation of votes and the display/ distribution of campaign literature) within one hundred feet of the entrance to the polling place on election day. Desiring both to advocate for a candidate down the ballot and to take advantage of the opportunity for last-minute campaigning, generally, Rebecca Freeman challenged this provision of the state's electoral code, alleging that the law violated her First Amendment right to communicate with voters in this quintessentially political environment. But for the state, while the grounds of the polling place may avail themselves to such activities 364 days a year, on election day they took on a different character, acting as a kind of embodiment of the premise of a secret ballot meaning that, as the Court agreed, campaign free zones of this sort were necessary to protect voters and the process itself, in light of the increased potential for fraud, harassment, and intimidation where electioneering was allowed. Australia s Electoral Idiosyncrasies William O. Coleman in Only in Australia: The History, Politics, and Economics of Australian Exceptionalism Published in print: 2016 Published Online: August 2016 ISBN: eisbn: acprof:oso/ The chapter brings out five features of the Australian electoral system: the original use of the secret ballot, preferential voting, compulsory voting, an independent Australian Electoral Commission, and a rural and regional party of national significance. These peculiar institutions are a settled and unquestioned part of the Australian political framework. Most provide the occasion for national self-congratulation. This chapter surveys the origins of these particularities, and weighs what they actually indicate about the nature of Australian society, arguing that, contrary to the common Australian presumption, none of these constitute a proof of Page 3 of 5

4 the strength of democracy. Australian democracy is, in fact, weak, and that the poverty of its parliamentarism is its key weakness. Disaggregating the secret ballot: electioneering and the politics of self-knowledge Alexander Thomas T. Smith in Devolution and the Scottish Conservatives: Banal Activism, Electioneering and the Politics of Irrelevance Published in print: 2011 Published Online: July 2012 ISBN: eisbn: Publisher: Manchester University Press DOI: / manchester/ This chapter examines one important challenge for the Conservative Party's senior strategists as they sought to address their apparent crisis of irrelevance: how to establish the voting intentions of potential supporters in what is otherwise an election by secret ballot. Working within various legal constraints, Conservative activists in Scotland developed a variety of strategies to render the Electoral Roll transparent so that the political allegiances of thousands of local voters could be discerned (imagined). The chapter analyses two particular discursive artefacts the survey and the canvass sheet as performing a politics of self-knowledge for local Tories, and also considers the target letter, through which senior Conservatives hoped to achieve a positive outcome for local Party candidates in the forthcoming elections. Almost inevitably, however, Tory activists became preoccupied with the banal concerns of designing, producing and distributing these various discursive instruments, in addition to the most efficient bureaucratic means of managing the canvass and other data they generated. Responsible Government in an Imperial Context Angela Woollacott in Settler Society in the Australian Colonies: Self-Government and Imperial Culture Published in print: 2015 Published Online: May 2015 ISBN: eisbn: acprof:oso/ In the Australian colonies as in Canada, South Africa, and New Zealand the status of fully independent manhood with political rights was linked to the quest for colonial self-government. While they looked to Canada for the model of self-government, Australian settlers and residents Page 4 of 5

5 reconceived themselves as new actors on the imperial and global stage, forging democratic modernity through constitutional innovation. Responsible government constitutions for New South Wales, Tasmania, and Victoria were enacted in 1855, for South Australia in 1856, and for Queensland in 1859 when it separated from New South Wales. Other electoral reforms followed, especially male suffrage and the secret ballot. To explore the ways in which political reformers in the Australian colonies embodied imperial connections and experience, and were aware of questions of indigenous dispossession, this chapter considers Henry Samuel Chapman, one of the leading advocates of responsible government in the white settler colonies. Introduction Politics as Unusual Elaine Hadley in Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain Published in print: 2010 Published Online: February 2013 ISBN: eisbn: Publisher: University of Chicago Press DOI: / chicago/ This chapter presents an introduction to political liberalism in mid- Victorian Britain between the mid-1850s and the early 1880s. It describes Victorian society that mid-century political liberalism ambivalently inhabits and its distinctive response to it. It discusses the form liberal individualism took and examines mid-century political liberalism's attempted revision of the public sphere. It explores the politics of liberal citizenship and the version of abstract embodiment in the political public sphere, the liberal citizen of the ballot box, a formation that emerges in the debates concerning secret balloting, which was made into law in It describes the mid-century political liberalism's deeply fraught relation to Ireland and in this way placing mid-century liberalism in its appropriate imperial context but also to a consideration of how midcentury liberal politics sought grounding authority in a precarious world of opinion. Page 5 of 5