The Election Observer Group Reports are the observations, conclusions and recommendations of Commonwealth Observer Groups. The Secretary-General constitutes these observer missions at the request of governments and with the agreement of all significant political parties.

Four laws of party seats and votes are constructed by logic and tested, using physics-like approaches which are rare in social sciences.

Passions matter to politics. Yet, much of the work on passions in politics focuses on such spectacular events as social movements, civil wars and revolutionary upheavals, but ignores electoral politics as banal. The contributors to this book trace the importance of passions to electoral politics with a focus on India’s landmark 2019 General Elections which saw the decisive re-election of Narendra Modi as the country’s Prime Minister. This book illustrates the economic, social and cultural processes that shaped political passions in India during the summer of 2019. The contributors compel us to take seriously the ‘structures of feeling’ in politics. Such an approach requires interdisciplinarity. Which is why the book brings together a stellar team of economists, political scientists, sociologists, historians and geographers to explain Modi’s resounding win.

The right to free elections is one of the most difficult rights to define: while it is an objective and essential principle in any democratic society, it is also a fundamental personal right on which every citizen can rely. It is an individual right, but it is meaningful only as part of a collective process. That same right, in conjunction with the right to vote and the right to stand for election, needs to be practised in a democratic way which also brings into play many other rights and freedoms, before, during and after the election itself. It is also one of the most highly valued rights at the Council of Europe because it helps to promote the “true democracy” which underpins the Organisation, alongside the rule of law and the honouring of fundamental freedoms. This book examines the main Council of Europe legal texts and sources on this topic: conventions, resolutions, recommendations and guidelines, without forgetting the abundant case law of the European Court of Human Rights. It is a work for legal practitioners, students and, more generally, anyone interested in how Europe and democracy go hand in hand.

This collection offers an in-depth look at municipal voting behaviour during local elections in eight of Canada's largest cities.

This book is the first collection on Indo-Caribbean women's writing and the first work to offer a sustained analysis of the literature from a range of theoretical and critical perspectives, such as ecocriticism, feminist, queer, post-colonial and Caribbean cultural theories. The essays not only lay the framework of an emerging and growing field, but also critically situate internationally acclaimed writers such as Shani Mootoo, Lakshmi Persaud and Ramabai Espinet within this emerging tradition. Indo-Caribbean women writers provide a fresh new perspective in Caribbean literature, be it in their unique representations of plantation history, anti-colonial movements, diasporic identities, feminisms, ethnicity and race, or contemporary Caribbean societies and culture. The book offers a theoretical reading of the poetics, politics and cultural traditions that inform Indo-Caribbean women's writing, arguing that while women writers work with and through postcolonial and Caribbean cultural theories, they also respond to a distinctive set of influences and realities specific to their positioning within the Indo-Caribbean community and the wider national, regional and global imaginary. Contributors visit the overlap between national and transnational engagements in Indo-Caribbean women's literature, considering the writers' response to local or nationally specific contexts, and the writers' response to the diasporic and transnational modalities of Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean communities.