Candidate Selection Mechanisms Research Articles

FedISM: Enhancing Data Imbalance via Shared Model in Federated Learning

Considering the sensitivity of data in medical scenarios, federated learning (FL) is suitable for applications that require data privacy. Medical personnel can use the FL framework for machine learning to assist in analyzing large-scale data that are protected within the institution. However, not all clients have the same distribution of datasets, so data imbalance problems occur among clients. The main challenge is to overcome the performance degradation caused by low accuracy and the inability to converge the model. This paper proposes a FedISM method to enhance performance in the case of Non-Independent Identically Distribution (Non-IID). FedISM exploits a shared model trained on a candidate dataset before performing FL among clients. The Candidate Selection Mechanism (CSM) was proposed to effectively select the most suitable candidate among clients for training the shared model. Based on the proposed approaches, FedISM not only trains the shared model without sharing any raw data, but it also provides an optimal solution through the selection of the best shared model. To evaluate performance, the proposed FedISM was applied to classify coronavirus disease (COVID), pneumonia, normal, and viral pneumonia in the experiments. The Dirichlet process was also used to simulate a variety of imbalanced data distributions. Experimental results show that FedISM improves accuracy by up to 25% when privacy concerns regarding patient data are rising among medical institutions.

Let the voters decide: Incumbents, opposition, and contested primaries in Argentina

Citizens’ ability to influence public decisions is the hallmark of democracy, and central to this are candidate selection mechanisms. Despite the increasing popularity of primaries across the globe, scholars disagree on how incumbency status shapes primary election contests. To address this question, I exploit an electoral reform in Argentina that forces parties and coalitions to participate in primaries, but allows these to be contested or uncontested. Employing an original data set on federal legislative nominations between 2011 and 2017, I show that internal divisions encourage contested primaries within the opposition, to which district-level rivals strategically respond in kind by fielding multiple internal lists to counter any potential electoral “bonus” others may enjoy from contesting primaries. Combined with the influence of presidents and governors over selection procedures, these patterns mean that primary races are closely fought within the opposition but are trouble-free under incumbency status.

Parliamentary Primaries After Democratic Transitions: Explaining Reforms To Candidate Selection In Ghana

Abstract Candidate selection procedures play a crucial role in shaping parliaments and influencing the quality of democracy. Yet, our understanding of what motivates parties to reform candidate selection mechanisms at specific points in time is limited. To address this gap, we examine the experience of Ghana’s National Democratic Congress (NDC), which reformed its selection procedures in 2015 allowing all party members to vote in primary elections for parliamentary candidates. We ask what triggered these reforms and identify four motivations—the confluence of which explains why the reforms were adopted in 2015. These motivations were: making the party more democratic by expanding participation, reducing the cost of the primary process, building the party’s organizational capacity, and keeping up with the party’s main competitor. Together, these led NDC leaders to believe that reforms would benefit the party. However, a divergence between actual and intended effects meant some of these benefits were not realized, so the NDC reversed its reforms. This case suggests that the current shift towards more inclusive candidate selection mechanisms across parts of Africa will not be linear: party leaders will adopt such reforms when they believe it is in their party’s interest.

Changes in Candidate Selection and the Sociodemographic Profile of Greek MPs. Evidence From the 2019 General Elections

The July 2019 national elections in Greece marked the return in power of the conservative party of ND, one of the two pillars of the traditional Greek bipartisanism. Turnover in these elections nearly reached 40%; more than two thirds of the current Parliament MPs were first elected during the crisis, since old parliamentarians slowly give away their seats to newcomers. The aim of this paper is twofold: 1) explore candidate selection mechanisms of old and new parties in Greece inquiring what -if any- has changed in these mechanisms after the Great Recession and whether they adopt IPD in a wider extent; and 2) investigate the sociodemographic profile of newcomers vis-à-vis older Parliamentarians in order to check if the outcome of the elections has changed in terms of a more socially diverse profile. Given that the issue of candidate selection (and election) is mostly based on unwritten rules, our findings will rely on written party rules (such as party manifestos), on original sociodemographic data and on personal interviews. We tentatively suggest that not much has changed in the candidate selection mechanisms in Greece. ND made limited use of its open registry of candidates, whilst SYRIZA applied the same rules as in previous elections. We conclude that, the crisis in Greece offered the opportunity structures for the mass renewal of its parliamentary elite and for a somewhat more socially diverse pool of successful candidates, but its effect quickly disappeared since new MPs resemble more independent political entrepreneurs and have less social and political ties.

Rebels in Parliament: The Effects of Candidate Selection Methods on Legislative Behaviours

AbstractIn this article, we concentrate on the question whether candidate selection mechanisms affect the propensity of members of parliament (MPs) to defect from party line. Literature suggests that MPs selected by more inclusive procedures (i.e. party primaries) are more likely to be rebels than legislators nominated directly by party leaders. Despite the increasing attention that scholars devote to candidate selection methods, empirical evidences are still limited and they are inconsistent, especially for as to concern the Italian case. Empirically, we focus our attention on the Democratic Party (Partito Democratico—PD) during the XVII legislature in Italy. The PD is an ideal laboratory to test whether candidate selection affects MPs’ propensity to vote against party line because PD’s legislators are both selected by party primaries and appointed by party leader. Our results suggest, in contrast to previous findings, that candidate selection is a strong predictor in explaining voting defection.

ELIS++: a shapelet learning approach for accurate and efficient time series classification

In recent years, time series classification with shapelets, due to the high accuracy and good interpretability, has attracted considerable interests. These approaches extract or learn shapelets from the training time series. Although they can achieve higher accuracy than other approaches, there still confront some challenges. First, they may suffer from low accuracy in the case of small training dataset. Second, they must manually set some parameters, like the number of shapelets and the length of each shapelet beforehand, and some hyper-parameters, like learning rate and regulation weight, which are difficult to set without prior knowledge. Third, extracting or learning shapelets incurs a huge computation cost, due to the huge search space. In this paper, we extend our previous shapelet learning approach ELIS to ELIS++. To improve the accuracy on the small training dataset, we propose a data augmentation approach. To learn the higher quality shapelets, based on the PAA shapelet candidates search technique proposed in ELIS, ELIS++ first propose a novel entropy-based approach shapelet candidate selection mechanism to discover shapelet candidates, and then applies the logistic regression model to adjust shapelets.To avoid setting other parameters manually, we propose a Bayesian Optimization based approach. Moreover, two techniques are proposed to improve the efficiency, coarse-grained shapelet adjustment and SIMD-based parallel computation. We conduct extensive experiments on 35 UCR datasets, and results verify the effectiveness and efficiency of ELIS++.

A Dynamic Model of Primaries

Primary elections are increasingly popular around the world, but historically political parties have typically chosen their candidate selection mechanisms in a decentralized manner. We develop a th...

A Novel Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm With Levy Flight

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a widely applied meta-heuristic algorithm. Little researches focused on the candidate selection mechanism, which was developed based on the simple uniform distribution. This paper employs the Levy flight mechanism based on Levy distribution to the candidate selection process and takes advantage of Levy flight that not only guarantees the search speed but also extends the searching space to improve the performance of ACO. Levy ACO incorporating with Levy flight developed on the top of Max-min ACO. According to the computational experiments, the performance of Levy ACO is significantly better than the original Max-min ACO and some latest Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) solvers.

PRIMARIES AS A NEW COMMUNICATION FORMAT FOR INTERACTION BETWEEN THE RUSSIAN VOTER AND THE PARTY CANDIDATE

The transformation of electoral processes, as well as the introduction of new elements, as a rule, are due to the dynamic development and at the same time the increasing complexity of social relations. One of such manifestations is the active testing party of the mechanism of preliminary intraparty voting to determine the most effective candidates by the United Russia and their subsequent nomination to elected authorities of power. The use of a truly innovative candidate selection mechanism for the Russian Federation, for the first time in which all citizens with active electoral rights could join, was a demonstration of the party’s preparation for participation in the competition for single-mandate constituencies within the framework of the newly returned mixed electoral system in the elections of deputies of the State Duma. In the given conditions, the party declared its readiness to induce its regional organizations to reorient - the main political resource for it should be voter support. The key indirect effect of the use of this tool for the Russian voter was manifested in the expansion of the traditional boundaries of the application of active suffrage. Taking into consideration attention to the emerging practice of both its supporters and critics, as well as attempts to institutionalize, the author analyzed the background of the issue and formulated the advantages and threats brought by the primaries into the Russian electoral process. The basis of the study for the formulation of the problem and the formulation of possible arguments in favor of this procedure were the data of sociological and expert surveys, as well as the existing scientific works of authors who are few in this area of work.

On the performance of phonetic algorithms in microtext normalization

User–generated content published on microblogging social networks constitutes a priceless source of information. However, microtexts usually deviate from the standard lexical and grammatical rules of the language, thus making its processing by traditional intelligent systems very difficult. As an answer, microtext normalization consists in transforming those non–standard microtexts into standard well–written texts as a preprocessing step, allowing traditional approaches to continue with their usual processing. Given the importance of phonetic phenomena in non–standard text formation, an essential element of the knowledge base of a normalizer would be the phonetic rules that encode these phenomena, which can be found in the so–called phonetic algorithms.In this work we experiment with a wide range of phonetic algorithms for the English language. The aim of this study is to determine the best phonetic algorithms within the context of candidate generation for microtext normalization. In other words, we intend to find those algorithms that taking as input non–standard terms to be normalized allow us to obtain as output the smallest possible sets of normalization candidates which still contain the corresponding target standard words. As it will be stated, the choice of the phonetic algorithm will depend heavily on the capabilities of the candidate selection mechanism which we usually find at the end of a microtext normalization pipeline. The faster it can make the right choices among big enough sets of candidates, the more we can sacrifice on the precision of the phonetic algorithms in favour of coverage in order to increase the overall performance of the normalization system.

Carreras legislativas discretas en contextos de débil institucionalización partidista: Propuesta teórica y evidencia empírica aplicada a la legislatura de Ecuador, 1979-2007

Este articulo analiza las carreras politicas de aquellos actores que, tras cumplir un solo periodo en la legislatura, no vuelven a ocupar otros espacios de eleccion popular o de influencia publica. Para el efecto, se recurre a un modelo de investigacion mixto en el que se vincula una base de datos inedita sobre la trayectoria de los legisladores del Ecuador entre 1979 y 2007 con entrevistas, revision de medios de comunicacion escrita y fuentes secundarias. De forma contra intuitiva, los hallazgos empiricos sena­lan que casi la mitad de los diputados ecuatorianos reproducen este tipo de compor­tamiento politico, al que Schlesinger (1966) denomino carreras legislativas discretas. Adicionalmente, el articulo argumenta que la debil institucionalizacion de los parti­dos, entendida como la monopolizacion de los mecanismos de seleccion de candida­tos alrededor de las cupulas, explica la presencia de este comportamiento politico. Bajo este argumento, y contrariamente a lo que plantean las teorias de la conexion electoral y de la ambicion politica, las carreras legislativas discretas constituirian un patron de conducta sistematico en algunas legislaturas de America Latina.

Measuring candidate selection mechanisms in European elections: Comparing formal party rules to candidate survey responses

Students of party organization often rely on politicians’ perceptions when measuring internal party institutions and organizational characteristics. We compare a commonly used survey measure of political parties’ European Parliament candidate selection mechanisms to measures that the authors coded directly from parties’ selection rules. We find substantial disconnect between formal institutions and survey respondent perceptions of selection mechanisms, raising questions about measure accuracy and equivalency. While this divergence may be driven either by distinctions between de jure and de facto selection procedures or by respondent error, we find the differences between the two measures are unsystematic. Our findings suggest that authors studying party characteristics must decide whether their research question calls for survey or formal institutional measures.

FEMINIST INSTITUTIONALISM REVISITED: THE GENDERED FEATURES OF THE NORMS, RULES, AND ROUTINES OPERATING WITHIN INSTITUTIONS

1.IntroductionThe material gathered in this study provides a rich and diverse context for understanding the disproportionate balance of power that permit men to establish the requirements of women's admission to the political system, the gendered and institutional underlying forces of the candidate selection mechanism, and the function of gender norms in evaluations of potential candidates. This research makes conceptual and methodological contributions to the in- stitutional ascendancy of certain kinds of masculinity, the gendered character of political parties, and the critical significance of arrangements of gendered institutions.2.The Link between Gender, Institutions and Candidate SelectionInstitutions are thoroughly permeated with gender. The performance of gendered regulations, norms, and routines impacts institutional design options and mechanisms, and it influences institutional results. Gender bias develops from a series of social norms (Anderson and Kantarelis, 2016; Flegar, 2016) instituted on established notions regarding femininity and masculinity. Such norms are typically associated with a certain sex: the former are ascribed to women, the latter to men. Both masculinity and femininity appear in plural forms, dealing with various aspects involving the specific institutional framework, and converging with other aspects, e.g. race, class, and sexuality. There are diverse types of femininity and masculinity operating, with some kinds of the latter functioning hegemonically. As social construals, gender norms do not dictate that women perform in a feminine manner or men conversely. (Chappell and Waylen, 2013)Institutions have definitely gendered cultures and are encompassed in dynamic and constant mechanisms of creating and recreating gender. Decentralized candidate selection mechanisms may have adverse consequences for women. Candidate selection is an intricate and temporally particular mechanism that occurs in numerous phases (Lindberg, 2016; Machan, 2016; Popescu Ljungholm, 2016), and formal rules on where choices regarding candidates are taken may not coincide to informal routines and effective choices taken at various levels. Formal regulations, e.g. electoral systems and electoral gender quotas, may essentially influence and change party selection routines in gendered manners. Electoral systems supply political parties with determinants that have an influence on who parties identify to be an appropriate candidate. Parties are demanded to put gender aside and conceive their selection mechanisms in such a manner that they can recognize appropriate female candidates. (Bjarnegard and Kenny, 2016)Formal characteristics of political systems incorporate the laws and institutions that officially organize political activity, possibly being an alliance of systemic entities. Proportional representation systems endorse women to the degree that their structural aspects coalesce with interests to essentially opt for more women, i.e. routines and norms that back and require the acceptance of female candidates. While chances to harmonize proposals are unfeasible (Bauder, 2016; Lazaroiu, 2015; Greve, 2015), parties that decide to nominate more women may set up innovative routines to carry out this objective, resembling all-women short inventories to ensure that the candidate selected in a certain district is female. Formal and informal routines of select few, in the situation of political recruitment, comprise the operations and standards that parties use to decide on their candidates, possibly being practical institutions that influence views as to who is an eligible or required candidate, a series of convictions that may be gendered to fluctuating degrees. (Krook, 2010)3.The Gendered Features of Institutional DynamicsCooperation is a critical component of the policy-making mechanism and democratic representation. Female legislators are calculated public servants and team up in an endeavor to be more successful representatives: they confront structural obstacles that confine their capacity to wield impact on the policy-making mechanism (when women become part of a maledominated institution, they confront formal and informal structural obstacles that hinder them from exerting guidance in the legislative mechanism). …

SELECCIÓN DE CANDIDATOS Y RELACIONES DE PODER EN LA ESTRUCTURA DE PARTIDO: ELECCIONES PARA CONCEJO DE MEDELLÍN Y ASAMBLEA DE ANTIOQUIA, 2015

Este texto se encarga de analizar los diferentes mecanismos de selección de candidatos usados por los partidos políticos para enfrentar las contiendas subnacionales, destacando de allí los diversos métodos usados, la calidad del selectorado y los requisitos de los postulantes, situaciones cambiantes de acuerdo con dónde se sitúan los centros de poder (quién realmente toma la decisión), así como la forma en que se tramitan las luchas internas por ostentar este privilegio (las tensiones que nacen entre los líderes locales y nacionales). Para cumplir con este objetivo se usan las experiencias de selección de candidatos de los partidos que participaron en las elecciones de autoridades locales de 2015 en Colombia, específicamente en las de Concejo de Medellín y de Asamblea de Antioquia.

Gender, Partisanship, and Candidate-Selection Mechanisms

AbstractHow candidates are selected, such as through nomination by party elites or election by primary voters, potentially influences the underrepresentation of women in political office. Partisan differences suggest that primary voters in right-leaning parties might select fewer female nominees than would their left-leaning counterparts even if both parties' elites are equally likely to select female nominees. This hypothesis is confirmed by an analysis of lieutenant governors in the United States, a position that varies in whether candidates are appointed by party elites or elected by primary voters. In cases where lieutenant-governor candidates are appointed, Democratic and Republican gubernatorial nominees are equally likely to choose female running mates; where primary voters select the lieutenant governor, Republicans are less likely to nominate women.

Why are Women Underrepresented in Czech Politics? An Analysis of Candidate Lists and Voting Behavior in the Olomouc Region

The article explores several reasons why women in Czech politics are underrepresented not only relative to their overall share in the society but also relative to their presence at lower levels of politics. The article tests two principal hypotheses using data from both a unique post-electoral public opinion survey carried out in the Olomouc region in 2010, and from official electoral statistics. First, it concentrates on the structural barriers of female underrepresentation presented by the candidate nomination and selection processes of the political parties. Second, it explores the possibility that more flexible candidate lists are beneficial for female representation. We compare the proportions of preference votes received by women both prior to and after electoral reforms in 2010, which for the first time gave voters the possibility to cast four preference votes and thus made the list structures more flexible. The research design includes both OLS and logistic regression models, which specify the empirical relationships derived from previous theoretical debates. The results suggest that Czech women are heavily disadvantaged by the Czech parties’ candidate selection mechanisms, and also that we do not have enough evidence to conclude that flexible lists are more conducive to higher female representation. The article concludes by considering various institutional means of reducing female political underrepresentation, including the introduction of electoral gender quotas.

Factors influencing intra-party democracy and membership rights

Political parties are considered to be vital elements of political life in modern democracies, and whether in democratic regimes they maintain democratic mechanisms within their own organizations and structures has been an intriguing topic. The most important issue is which factors influence the internal democracy in parties. This article examines the relationship between functioning of democracy in parties and party leadership, candidate selection mechanisms, membership systems, policy formulation systems and communication channels. In addition to the commonly used indicators of intra-party democracy in three areas – the leader’s power and control, nomination process and determining policy preferences – this article deals with the process of membership recruitment and membership rights. It analyses the factors that influence intra-party democracy in Turkey focusing on the multiparty period after 1946 by giving examples from the political parties and previous research results.

How things fall apart

The politics of African democracies is marked by a curious disjuncture: in spite of severe social diversity and proportional electoral arrangements, dominant parties abound. This peculiarity frustrates the design of constitutional experts, who expect proportional electoral arrangements to translate social cleavages into discrete political parties. In such cases, it follows that the dominant political party – rather than parliament – becomes the primary site of accommodation between competing social formations. Little, however, is known of how groups vie for power within Africa’s dominant political parties; electoral law is largely silent on the subject of intraparty democracy. Under what conditions do dominant parties – understood as coalitions of social formations – remain cohesive? We address this question by looking at the process of candidate selection, often considered ‘one of the best points at which to observe the distribution of power within the party’ (Schattschneider, 1970 [1942]: 64). We conduct a comparative case study of two dominant parties in South Africa and Namibia, using evidence drawn from primary party documentation and interviews with party leaders, officials, candidates and members. We find that inclusive candidate selection mechanisms can stabilize factional competition, while exclusive mechanisms, conversely, can presage elite rupture within the dominant party.

Dynamic Multipoint Relay Candidate Selection for Broadcast Data Aggregation in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

In OLSR, only selected multipoint relays (MPRs) are allowed to forward broadcast data during the flooding process, which reduces the message propagation overhead compared to the classical flooding mechanism. Since every node in a network selects its own MPRs independently, many nodes may be MPRs of other nodes, which results in many collisions in the medium access control (MAC) layer under heavy traffic conditions. In this paper, we propose an MPR candidate selection mechanism for broadcast data aggregation in mobile ad-hoc networks. The proposed MPR candidate selection scheme can reduce the number of MPR candidates and appropriately spread MPR candidates over the whole network area. The performance of the proposed MPR candidate selection mechanism is investigated via mathematical analysis and simulations. We also propose a broadcast data aggregation mechanism to achive efficient resource utilization. Performance evaluation indicates that the proposed MPR candidate selection and broadcast data aggregation mechanism is efficient under heavy broadcast traffic load conditions.