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Political Office (political + office)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

Sir Robert Walpole after his Fall from Power, 1742,1745

HISTORY, Issue 302 2006
JONATHAN OATES
It is often assumed that Sir Robert Walpole's career in politics ended with his ceasing to be chief minister in 1742. During his remaining years, however, he continued to exert political influence by bolstering and advising the government, especially in 1743,4. Even without political office, he was still seen as the fount of patronage. He was also able to pursue his other interests in this time and enjoyed favour with both King George II and his former political colleagues. Yet his health, never good, deteriorated rapidly towards the end of 1744 and he died bravely in the spring of the following year. [source]

Implementing Affirmative Action: Global Trends

IDS BULLETIN, Issue 5 2010
Julie Ballington
This scoping article gives a global picture of dynamics, trends, policies and mechanisms for engaging with women's representation in political office. It discusses the kind of affirmative action introduced, and where it features vis-à-vis electoral cycles. It describes and compares candidate and reserved seats quotas and shows how electoral systems influence the possibilities of challenging power hierarchies in politics. The second part of the article reflects on the extent to which implementing quotas have been effective in engendering political representation and the conditions that allow or inhibit this. [source]

Why Are Fewer Women than Men Elected?

POLITICAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 2 2010
Gender, the Dynamics of Candidate Selection
Why are fewer women than men elected? Research suggests that this is the combined result of: (1) the supply of female aspirants, or the qualifications of women as a group to run for political office; and (2) the demand for female aspirants, or the preference of political elites for male over female candidates. The aim of this article is to reassess this explanation through the lens of recent case studies of female representation in four regions of the world: Africa, Latin America, North America and Western Europe. On their own, each contribution lends support to arguments about either supply or demand, leading their authors to offer distinct recommendations for change: an increase in the number of women who come forward, which is likely to be a slow and difficult process, or the adoption of gender quotas, which are quick but may produce mixed results. Yet juxtaposing these studies also exposes the limits of the traditional supply and demand model of candidate selection. On the one hand, the ,political market' does not operate efficiently towards an equilibrium solution of supply and demand. Rather, ideologies of gender introduce important distortions to the process: the fact that women are under-represented in all countries around the world suggests that both the supply of and demand for female candidates is artificially repressed, leading to low numbers of women in elective office. On the other hand, important variations exist in women's descriptive representation across countries and across political parties. These differences suggest that dynamics of supply and demand are shaped in crucial ways by features of the broader political context, which may include structural conditions but also the emergence of new and sometimes unanticipated opportunities. [source]

Getting Older, Getting Wiser?

POLITICS & POLICY, Issue 3 2003
The Impact of Aging on Candidate Evaluation
Domain-specific measures, such as political ideology and sophistication, have been used in models of how citizens evaluate candidates for political office. Non-domain-specific factors, such as age, may have additional explanatory power in models of evaluations and affect the type of information processing strategies employed by citizens. Specifically, the use of person- and issue-based information in evaluation strategies may be affected by the cognitive structure of aging, including the acquisition of person impression skills and resources. We test this hypothesis using the Pooled Senate Election Study (1988,92) and the 1974 American National Election Study. The analysis reveals that younger citizens base their evaluations mostly on issue-based criteria, but as citizens age they add person-based criteria to their evaluations. Implications for decision-making models are discussed. [source]