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This article examines the memorialisation of the Battle of Dumlupınar (30 August 1922) in K€utahya, Turkey. Through an investigation of landmarks, literature and oral history, we explore the post-war imaginings and settings of this battle. We observe three major practices of war memorialisation in the battlegrounds of Dumlupınar: state, public and local. State and public practices are largely intertwined and embody themselves in the form of highly visible landmarks and regulated acts of commemoration. The local practices are subtler and represent counter narratives of war entangled with the conflict landscape, myths, and local politics. By looking into this dichotomy, this article scrutinises the present role of battlegrounds in the memorialisation of the Battle of Dumlupınar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to bring together the factors of resilience, regime stability, and foreign penetration into one research project based on the example of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which marked the one-hundredth anniversary of its statehood in 2021. Even though it exists in a neighborhood that is in turmoil, the Jordanian monarchy has managed to survive all the spillover effects from such regional conflicts. This study argues that external influences have played an increasingly significant role in political developments in Jordan since the beginning of the New World Order in 1989. Scholars of international relations often argue that foreign penetration may cause state vacuums like those that have arisen in Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Iraq. Yet, this has not been the case with other states in the Middle East. One important factor behind this resilience and regime stability is related to the behavior of foreign actors. With respect to the Hashemite Kingdom, the United States has historically been the main provider of state security. Nonetheless, at the same time the European Union (EU) has adopted a pragmatic view toward Jordan and its new resilience-building approach also helps to maintain the status quo. Moreover, the regional hegemons and swing states of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region do not have an interest in altering the existing order save for a few radical groups. The author argues that the convergence of the national interests of the major regional stakeholders also contributes to regime stability and that outside support has increased the resilience of its political system despite the growing frustrations of many of the country's citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, voter fraud has emerged as a salient issue in American politics and elections. Despite minimal evidence of fraud cases and non-existent effects on election outcomes, Americans continue to believe in the existence and impact of voter fraud on elections. In this paper, we examine a potentially key source of this disconnect – the U.S. news media. How the media cover voter fraud likely affects citizens' beliefs and opinions on the subject. However, little research exists exploring voter fraud coverage. In this paper, we examine the patterns and themes of voter fraud coverage in local newspapers for each of the 50 states during the 2012 elections. Amongst the results, we show that voter identification and registration were dominant topics in coverage. Further, battleground states and states that recently passed restrictive voting laws affected which topics related to voter fraud received the most attention. Finally, we find that the number of fraud cases in each state was unrelated to voter fraud news coverage. From an agenda setting and framing standpoint, our results suggest Republicans may have been successful in making voter identification and fraud a salient issue in the news during the 2012 elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In December 2020, Texas filed a motion to the U.S. Supreme Court claiming that the four battleground states: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin did not conduct their 2020 presidential elections in compliance with the Constitution. Texas supported its motion with a statistical analysis purportedly demonstrating that it was highly improbable that Biden had more votes than Trump in the four battleground states. This article points out that Texas's claim is logically flawed and the analysis submitted violated several fundamental principles of statistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In any federation where intergovernmental transfers form a major chunk of revenues for sub-national governments; determinants of allocation shares have always been a salient issue. This paper makes an empirical attempt to investigate whether there are any political motives behind the distribution of central funds among sub-national governments in case of India. We find that in aggregate terms relatively higher per capita transfers are channelled towards states inhabited by large swing voters to gain/maintain control over such states. The significance of the coefficients of interaction terms between swing; alignment and election year dummies reveals that in case of discretionary transfers; during election years; swing states are receiving disproportionately larger shares while during non-election years core states are favoured disproportionately. It gives an empirical insight into the manner whereby central political party targets both core and swing states for political returns in terms of higher votes. Normative considerations were also found relevant as states with higher rural population were found to receive higher per capita transfers. Representation and alignment were found to be insignificant determinants of allocation shares. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among registered Asian America voters, Asian American voting gaps narrow considerably.[10] The time between elections, year-round, is a valuable period to engage and register voters. The model minority stereotype, which touts Asian Americans' special value for education, encourages outreach to Asian Americans with messages about education issues. And Asian Americans are less likely to be contacted to take part in politics compared to other groups.[4] This is in part because candidates and parties adopt the stereotypes above and conclude that Asian Americans don't really want to vote. [Extracted from the article]

We develop a new conceptualization of political advertising effects by looking at the effect of the marginal advertising dollar during the heat of presidential campaigns. We argue that in contrast to other studies investigating effects of political ads, our approach is more apt to capture the natural environment in which political ads are encountered during a presidential campaign. We focus on the intense inundation of political ads voters are confronted with in swing states in the weeks leading up to the presidential election, and argue that it is unclear a priori whether we should expect advertising to affect vote intention in that critical circumstance. We empirically validate this hypothesis using a trove of data from the 2012 campaign: daily polling in media markets around the country, detailed data on all registered voters in the country, all TV advertisements by market and exact airtime, and the entire Twitter corpus. We find that neither overall increases in advertising spending nor partisan imbalances in spending expanded the candidates' electorate. In fact, total Designated Market Area (DMA)-level spending significantly moderates a negative relationship between spending advantages and advantages in vote intention, suggesting a boomerang effect of additional spending late in the campaign. In closing, we discuss the ramifications of our findings for future research, and stress the importance of research tracking advertising effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The winner-take-all method of allocating Electoral College votes (in 48 of the 50 states) in US presidential elections has promoted interesting behaviours by politicians and states that are evident throughout US (economic) history. This analysis explores the impact that being a ‘battleground state’ in presidential elections has on future voter participation rates. After quantifying the degree to which each state is a battleground state, the empirical analysis proffers what it refers to as the ‘battleground voting hypothesis’, which argues that the greater the degree to which a given state is a battleground state, the greater the expected benefits from voting in that state and hence the greater the voter turnout in that state. The empirical results suggest that the top-to-bottom ‘battleground state effect’ generated an average of 7.8 additional percentage points in voter participation in presidential elections over the period 1964–2008 for those states at the top of the scale. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]