The political participation is a fundamental aspect of democracy, reflecting the involvement of citizens in the political process. Women's participation in politics is particularly important for achieving gender equality, inclusive governance, and social justice. India, being the world's largest democracy, has witnessed gradual progress in women's political representation over the years. The social medias have created new spaces for political engagement, especially for women. The 2024 Lok Sabha Election highlighted both achievements and challenges regarding women's participation in electoral politics. 800 women candidates contested the 2024 Lok Sabha elections out of more than 8,300 total candidates. This represented around 9.6% of all contestants. Despite being a slight improvement in the number of women candidates compared to earlier decades, women remained significantly underrepresented among political nominees. The increasing participation of women voters demonstrates their influence in determining electoral outcomes and shaping public policy.

Context: Community health centers, a key part of the health safety net in the United States, have a long tradition of promoting political participation, but few studies have examined the political influence of this practice. This article examines how health centers influence election participation and outcomes. Methods: This article develops an innovative county-level dataset on health center coverage from 2006 to 2022 using ZIP code–level patient data and examines how health center coverage is associated with voter registration, voter turnout, and the Democratic presidential candidate's vote share. It also examines whether these associations are stronger in high-poverty counties, where voting is more challenging. Findings: In most election years, health center coverage is positively associated with voter registration rates (except in 2018 and 2020) and turnout rates (after the passage of the Affordable Care Act) in high-poverty counties, but not in other counties. There is no consistent evidence showing that higher health center coverage is associated with a higher Democratic vote share. Conclusions: Health centers appear to play a more consistent role in facilitating election participation than in shaping electoral outcomes, with stronger effects concentrated in high-poverty counties. Health centers’ influence may vary with the broader political environment, such as the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

Many physician civic engagement efforts have effectively and appropriately focused on improving physician voter registration and turnout. As we see improvement in these areas for physicians, it is critical not to lose sight of the importance of continued civic engagement, even between elections. Just as we would not discharge a patient without a follow-up plan for continued management, we must consider our vote an initial intervention that requires continued monitoring.

Structural racism, the interconnected policies, institutions, and norms that systematically disadvantage communities of color, remains a core determinant of health inequities in the United States. Despite growing recognition of its impact, public health lacks standardized, validated measurement tools across contexts, limiting intervention effectiveness and policy change. Following PRISMA guidelines, we systematically reviewed peer-reviewed studies published between January 2000 and March 2025 that quantified structural racism in relation to health outcomes in the U.S. We searched PubMed and Scopus databases and selected twenty-eight studies which met the inclusion criteria. Studies operationalized structural racism across seven domains: education, socioeconomic status, judicial treatment, residential segregation, political participation, healthcare access, and historical legacies. Metrics included disparities in degree attainment, incarceration, unemployment, poverty, voter turnout, and multidimensional indices. These measures are consistently associated with poor health outcomes, including infant mortality, cardiovascular disease, and delayed cancer treatment. Recent methodological trends show movement toward composite, spatial, and longitudinal approaches. Quantifying structural racism is vital to dismantling systemic inequities. While progress has been made, greater methodological consistency and cross-sectoral frameworks are needed. Standardized, multidimensional measures can enable practitioners and policymakers to identify inequities, allocate resources, and develop targeted strategies that promote racial health equity, thereby making the public's health a true national priority.

ABSTRACT The 2024 National and Provincial Elections in South Africa precipitated a structural shift from single-party dominance to coalition governance. This paper analyses electoral volatility within the Gauteng City-Region (GCR), with emphasis on Johannesburg and Tshwane. Using a convergent parallel mixed-methods approach, integrating Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) electoral data (2011–2024), longitudinal GCRO Quality of Life survey data (2009–2024), and practitioner-researcher participant observation, we triangulate macro-level electoral and trust trends with micro-level coalition governance dynamics. The analysis correlates declining voter turnout and political fragmentation with a profound erosion of public trust, revealing that a ‘politics of instability’, marked by leadership churn and administrative paralysis, has alienated the electorate. We juxtapose this domestic fragility with the global ambitions of Johannesburg and Tshwane as co-Chairs of the Urban 20 (U20) in 2025, arguing that participation in transnational city networks offers a ‘post-political’ refuge, access to external legitimacy and technocratic stability amidst internal political turbulence.

ABSTRACT Voter turnout patterns are influenced by both individual values and systematic factors including election laws. For many years, US state legislatures engaged in bipartisan efforts to enact election laws designed to increase voter turnout by making voting easier. Beginning about 50 years ago, however, many US legislatures have enacted a series of new voting laws that make voting more difficult and restrict voter turnout. These include laws requiring voters to produce more rigorous identification documents to register and vote, and laws eliminating or significantly restricting voting by mail (VBM). Research indicates that partisanship and self-interest variables have powerful effects on attitudes toward voting laws. In this study we seek to understand how civic values that extend beyond the self variously reinforce or moderate public attitudes toward voting laws. We propose that civic duty and trust (both interpersonal and institutional) condition partisan and self-interest based attitudes toward voting laws (e.g. voter ID, vote by mail). Findings indicate that institutional trust is significantly associated with less support for voter ID and greater support for mail-in voting. Civic duty and interpersonal trust were not significantly associated with the dependent variables in the fully specified model.

ABSTRACT How does aid impact social cohesion and political attitudes in ethnically fragmented recipient countries? Utilizing geospatial data on Chinese aid projects combined with Afrobarometer survey responses, the study uses a spatial-temporal approach to create difference-in-differences (DID) and difference-in-difference-in-differences (DDD) liked models. By comparing individuals near ongoing aid projects to those near future projects, the research shows the following effects: Chinese aid significantly enhances local freedom to speak yet simultaneously reduces voting participation and increases ethnic group unfair treatment. Heterogeneous effects are also evident across ethnic and religious groups. Furthermore, the result for the president’s co-ethnic group shows exactly opposite trends with respondents from the president’s ethnic group. More voting behaviour, less perceptions of ethnic group unfair treatment and more satisfaction with democracy. While in co-religion test, only voting is significant. The findings highlight the complex mechanisms through which foreign aid interacts with local clientelist politics, underscoring the need to consider ethnic inequality and political favouritism when evaluating the broader social consequences of aid in fragmented emerging economies.

ABSTRACT This article examines how local governments influence voter turnout in the absence of national-level interventions, focusing on ballot convenience. Using a novel, comprehensive nationwide dataset integrating financial, electoral, and municipal-level data from all Czech municipalities (2010–2022), the study proposes new performance indicators for assessing election efficiency and voting accessibility. The Czech Republic serves as a distinctive case for testing the limits of physical convenience due to its exclusively in-person voting model and high number of polling stations. Results show that while a denser polling station network may improve voting convenience, it does not necessarily increase turnout, suggesting a “ceiling effect” where marginal improvements yield diminishing returns. Moreover, such local improvements are associated with higher administrative expenditures, reducing cost-efficiency in the provision of electoral services. These findings highlight the trade-offs involved in election administration between accessibility and resource efficiency.

ABSTRACT This study examines the relationship between sleep patterns and various forms of political participation. Building on prior work, which mostly focused on the association between sleep duration and voter turnout, this study investigates a broader spectrum of political actions, such as attending political conventions, contacting public officials, and expressing political opinions on social media. Drawing on data from a longitudinal survey of 800 respondents in Israel, our findings suggest that shorter sleep duration positively correlates with higher levels of political engagement and interest. These findings challenge the conventional notion that inadequate sleep reduces civic participation. Furthermore, the study uncovers a potential connection between longer sleep duration on free days and more liberal political views. This research contributes to our understanding of the complex interplay between sleep habits and political engagement, highlighting the need for further investigations of this emerging field.

ABSTRACT In general, older individuals have higher voter turnout. In many countries, however, the youngest citizens are not the least likely to vote. Nonetheless, it is difficult to estimate the causal effect of first-time voting on turnout because many factors change with age. This study exploits a natural experiment in Japan. The proportion of first-time voters in a municipality can be estimated by the time from the latest local election to the current national election. In Japan, the timing of the latest local election can be regarded as randomly decided. Thus, scholars only have to regress the turnout of the youngest generation on the estimated share of the first-time voters to estimate the first-time voter boost. The results show that the first-time voter boost is 10.9 percentage points.

ABSTRACT (Submission for special issue on Interference and information manipulation in elections and governance) Canada, the US, and other countries are moving to ban TikTok, citing concerns about Chinese ownership of the platform and privacy threats related to access to personal information (Karadeglija 2024, Shepardson 2024). Underlying these concerns is the idea that personal information might be leveraged by the Chinese government to influence the opinions, attitudes, and even behaviours of TikTok users in ways that undermine democracy (e.g., by promulgating messaging that suppress voting behaviour in certain demographics – [Murray, Peter. 2022. TikTok 2022 Election Interference: Evidence of TikTok Suppression of Nonpartisan Voter Turnout Videos. Accelerate Change]). A variety of labels is currently used to describe this kind of influence and the sorts of protections that might be put in place to prevent it, including ‘cognitive security’ and ‘epistemic security’. These labels encompass a vague, multifaceted, and loosely defined cluster of manipulative threats, and invite incomplete or even inappropriate conceptions of security from malign influence that in turn motivate ill-conceived or incomplete policy responses. This paper identifies the perceived threats articulated as motivations for the TikTok ban and analyses them using Bacchi's ‘What's the Problem Represented to Be?’ (WPR) framework. We show that while TikTok is problematised in terms of foreign ownership, data collection, and cognitive effects, these representations are often underdeveloped, competing, and at times contradictory. As a result, they obscure rather than clarify the specific mechanisms of influence at stake, hampering the development of coherent and effective policy responses.

Abstract The Voting Rights Act (1965) protects minority voters’ ability to elect candidates of their choice, namely co-ethnic candidates. Historically, these protections were enforced through preclearance, which required federal approval of voting changes to prevent retrogression. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Shelby v. Holder (2013) eliminated preclearance, raising concerns about its impact. Existing research largely focuses on minority voter registration and turnout, often concluding that the ruling’s effects are less severe than expected. But is this too narrow a lens to view the implications of this Supreme Court ruling? This study shifts attention to minority descriptive representation, analyzing how Shelby v. Holder affected the number of Latinos elected to local offices. Using a Synthetic Difference-in-Differences approach and data from the National Association of Latino Elected Officials directory, I find that the ruling is associated with a decline in Latino descriptive representation. These findings highlight the need to consider representation beyond turnout and registration when evaluating policy impacts on minority voting rights.

This article reviews the evolution of research in Comparative Political Economy of Inequality (CPEI) over the past 25 years, highlighting key developments in the field. Early research in CPEI emphasised the political and institutional determinants of inequality, particularly the role of power resources, labour market institutions, and welfare state policies. Over time, scholarship has expanded to examine the consequences of inequality, focusing on political participation, preference formation, and biases in policy responsiveness. This article identifies a persistent dynamic of self-reinforcing inequality, where rising socio-economic disparities shape political behaviour, depress voter turnout, and limit redistributive policies. Additionally, it outlines a future research agenda, emphasising the role of political parties in mitigating or exacerbating inequalities and the issue of trade-offs in responsiveness to short- and long-term challenges.

ABSTRACT Although youth often constitute a significant portion of a country’s population, they remain underrepresented in national parliaments around the world. While previous research has highlighted some of the causes and effects of youth underrepresentation, we aim to examine the unexplored relationship between compulsory voting and youth representation. We hypothesize that because youth electoral turnout should equalize with older adult’s electoral turnout under compulsory voting, parties will have an incentive to nominate more young candidates, which should also lead to more youth representatives. We test this stipulation using a unique dataset with nearly 500 elections in democracies from 1945 to 2024. Empirically, we find a null relationship between compulsory voting and higher youth representation. For the larger literature on youth representation, this implies that compulsory voting is not the panacea that can render parliaments more representative with society in terms of their age representation.

ABSTRACT Overestimating voter turnout in surveys is a persistent issue that leads to misreporting and obscures important demographic differences. A split-sample experiment in the Danish National Election Study 2022 tested the effect of probing for non-voting, reducing overreporting by two percentage points. However, a substantial 10-percentage-point gap remains compared to actual turnout, largely attributable to self-selection bias. This bias further diminishes clear distinctions in turnout across gender, age, education, country of origin and marital status when comparing survey-reported data to population-validated and sampling frame-validated turnout data. These findings underscore the importance of using actual validated turnout data whenever possible and highlight the limited effectiveness of probing for non-voting in mitigating turnout overestimation.

Objectives: Government surveillance of American Muslims has grown following 9/11, yet little scholarship has analyzed how this activity impacts political participation. We examine racial and ethnic variation in American Muslims’ experiences of state surveillance, as well as the connection between those experiences and voter turnout. Methods: Using a survey of 1000 American Muslims, we identify racial and ethnic patterns in being singled out in airports and by the police. We then analyze how being stopped in these venues shaped turnout behavior in the 2016 presidential election. Results: Black Muslims are more likely to encounter surveillance from the police, while Muslims who identify as Asian report the highest degree of monitoring in airports. We find that police encounters are linked to decreased electoral participation, but being singled out by airport security is not tied to a change in turnout. Conclusions: These findings provide a more detailed and comprehensive understanding of who is impacted by surveillance in the US and how that surveillance shapes American democracy.

The election of regional heads is a form of democratic implementation that requires the active participation of the community as voters. However, in its implementation, various obstacles are still found such as low voter participation, limited access to information, and lack of efficiency in the conventional voting process. This research aims to develop an online-based regional head election information system as a solution to increase voter participation through the use of digital technology. The research method used is Research and Development (R&D) with a Waterfall system development model which includes the stages of needs analysis, system design, implementation, testing, and evaluation. The developed system provides features of voter registration, candidate information, online voting process, and real-time recapitulation of vote results. The system test is carried out using the Black Box Testing method and shows that all system functions are running according to the user's needs. The results of this study show that the implementation of an online-based election information system can provide easy access, increase transparency, and encourage community involvement, especially young voters, in the process of electing regional heads. Thus, this system has the potential to become a digital innovation that supports improving the quality of local democracy.

This study examines the internal operations of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in Nigeria and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) in Ghana from 2011 to 2025, assessing their impact on democratic norms in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Grounded in democratic consolidation theory, the research explores how party structures shape political culture and institutional legitimacy. Using a qualitative research approach, data were drawn from semi-structured interviews and electoral commission reports, and analyzed thematically. Findings show that internal party governance significantly affects national democratic health and regional influence. The PDP demonstrates persistent centralization, elite dominance in candidate selection, over 600 pre-election litigations in 2023, low female representation (below 10%), and declining voter turnout (69% in 1999 to 27% in 2023). In contrast, the NDC has institutionalized participatory mechanisms, codified dispute resolution processes, and increased female candidacy (above 15% by 2020). These differences shape regional standing: Nigeria’s internal party instability has weakened its ECOWAS mediation credibility, while Ghana’s stable party system has strengthened its diplomatic reputation. The study recommends transparent candidate selection rules, periodic constitutional reforms, and regional guidelines on internal party democracy, peer review mechanisms, and linking party support to measurable democratic reforms.

This study examines the relationship between electoral integrity and democratic legitimacy in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic (1999–2023), situating the analysis within the broader West African democratic landscape. Employing qualitative methodology and comparative review of seven electoral cycles, this paper investigates whether electoral integrity genuinely influences democratic legitimacy or remains a theoretical ideal disconnected from political reality. Findings reveal a paradoxical pattern where, despite periodic elections, persistent irregularities including vote buying, result falsification, and violence have undermined both electoral credibility and citizen trust. Notably, voter turnout declined precipitously from 52.3% in 1999 to a historic low of 26.7% in 2023, signaling a profound legitimacy crisis. The study concludes that while electoral integrity significantly impacts democratic legitimacy, institutional constraints and political interference have transformed this relationship into a contested myth, necessitating urgent institutional reforms to restore public confidence.

This study examines youth political participation and electoral expectations in the 2024 Local Election of Lubuklinggau City, with a particular focus on university students as strategic voters in local democracy. Despite their growing demographic dominance, youth participation is often characterized by high electoral turnout but limited deliberative engagement. This research aims to analyze voting intention, attitudes toward money politics, sources of political information, priority issues, and factors influencing candidate preferences among young voters. The study employs a quantitative approach using a survey method involving 442 student respondents aged 18–35 years. Data were collected through structured questionnaires and analyzed using descriptive statistics and simple inferential techniques. The findings indicate that youth voting intention is relatively high; however, political participation remains largely procedural rather than discursive. Most respondents demonstrate a strong normative rejection of money politics and rely heavily on social media as their primary source of political information. Education costs, employment opportunities, and living expenses emerge as the most influential policy issues shaping electoral preferences. This study contributes to the literature on local democratic participation by highlighting the gap between electoral participation and substantive political engagement among young voters. The findings underscore the importance of strengthening political education, media literacy, and program-based digital campaign strategies to enhance the quality of youth participation in local elections.