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This paper examines attitudes toward policies intended to enhance the political rights and representation of indigenous populations. The analysis is based on a parallel set of questions about the under-representation and the expansion of rights for minority groups that were asked of populations in three countries. Election studies administered in Australia, Canada and New Zealand asked respondents a series of questions regarding support for government assistance for aborigines, self-government, and guaranteed representation. We examine several explanations for variations in the support of majority populations for these policies. Specifically, we examine how perceptions of threat, values such as post-materialism and personal identity structure preferences for the expansion of rights. The paper ends with a discussion of the implications of the results for building support for expansion of political rights for indigenes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

News media called the two women competing for the post of Prime Minister in the 1999 New Zealand election "Xena warrior princesses" and described one of them as a "beautifully tempered samurai sword". These metaphors placed the female leaders firmly in the electoral "battleground" while clearly marking them as female. Are female leaders feminsed or masculinised by media coverage of their electoral performances? Our paper analyses newspaper reportage of three national elections that featured competitive women leaders, two elections in New Zealand and one in Canada. We examine the gendered nature of descriptions and framing of the male and female leaders. Given the masculine nature of the state and international relations we anticipated the application of masculine descriptors and antagonistic tactics to male and female leaders alike. This expectation was borne out by our findings, and we argue that the norm of aggressively masterful and adversarial political leadership circulated through media coverage of these three elections, reinforcing the idea of political competition as a battle between heroic warriors. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of polls on perceptions of the race, preferences, and vote choice under three different electoral systems: pure plurality (Canada), pure PR (the Netherlands), and a mixed member proportional system with a threshold (New Zealand). We test the hypothesis that poll effects are greatest in Canada, where the incentives for strategic voting are strongest, and smallest in the Netherlands, where the incentives are weakest. The data come from the 1997 Canadian Election Study (CES), the 1998 Dutch Election Study (DES), and the 1999 New Zealand Election Study (NZES). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]