Distribution Of Votes Research Articles

Czynnik religijny w wyborach US midterms 2018

<p>Celem niniejszego artykułu jest analiza wpływu czynnika religijnego na przebieg i wynik wyborów do Kongresu Stanów Zjednoczonych Ameryki, przeprowadzonych dnia 6 listopada 2018 roku. Próba uchwycenia specyfiki tego głosowania nastąpi na podstawie metod analitycznych, w tym szczegółowej analizy czynników politycznych, które przełożyły się na takie, a nie inne poparcie amerykańskich grup wyznaniowych dla Partii Demokratycznej i Partii Republikańskiej. W szczególności autor będzie starał się odpowiedzieć na pytanie, czy wybory potwierdziły pojawiające się od miesięcy doniesienia publicystyczne o spadającym poparciu dla GOP wśród grup religijnych stanowiących tradycyjnie republikański elektorat. Niniejsza praca nie tylko pozwoli jednoznacznie zweryfikować lub sfalsyfikować stawianą hipotezę badawczą, ale ponadto określi główne determinanty takiego stanu rzeczy. W szczególności artykuł skoncentruje się na roli politycznego wizerunku prezydenta Donalda Trumpa i jego popularności (jak również niepopularności) wśród religijnych zwolenników obydwu partii politycznych jako jednego z kluczowych czynników wyjaśniającego rozkład głosów środowisk religijnych w ostatnich wyborach do Kongresu.</p>

What are the effects of entry of new extremist parties on the policy platforms of mainstream parties?

We examine the consequences to policy-seeking, center-left and center-right parties under proportional representation following entry by extremist parties either at one or both ends of a unidimensional political spectrum. Assuming a symmetric, unimodal voter distribution, we show that the entry of a single extremist party on either the left or right drives both mainstream parties in the direction opposite to the extremist party. We argue that this three-party scenario is the most empirically relevant case in contemporary European politics. We also extend results of Casamatta and De Donder that project moderation of mainstream parties at equilibrium for PR elections with two extremist parties – one on each end – to a symmetric, unimodal voter distribution. In a setting not considered by these authors, we show that this moderating effect on the mainstream parties for a symmetric voter distribution is reversed if the voter distribution is sufficiently bimodal.

Ethnic alignment in divided regions: individual and contextual factors

ABSTRACT The literature on sub-state nationalisms in Western democracies usually understands ethnicity as a defining feature of regional parties advocating for group and/or territorial recognition. However, the role of ethnicity for state-wide parties competing in regional elections has not received the same attention. Using observational data at the census section level for the Basque election of 2016, this paper shows how state-wide parties can be even more affected by ethnic alignment than regional parties. A key element presented here is the role of contextual effects that generate intra-group variations, resulting in different patterns of electoral boundaries. State-wide parties have an uneven distribution of vote indicating the difficulty of reaching wide segments of the electorate, a pattern that is only broken to some extent by the emergence of new political parties. On the other hand, some regional parties can be more successful both in non-core areas and reaching non-core voters in nationalist strongholds.

Numerical investigation of the influence of heat emitters on the local thermal comfort in a room

In this paper a numerical analysis of the effect of heat emitter characteristics on the local indoor thermal comfort condition in a room is presented. A dynamic model, able to evaluate the 3D distribution of the mean radiant temperature in the whole volume of a thermal zone is developed. The model allows a fast evaluation, in terms of computational time, of the view factors associated to the inner points of a room thanks to the use of the MATLAB Contour Double Integral Formula (CDIF) routine. The new tool has been used in order to obtain, by means of a series of dynamic yearly simulations, a comparison among different heat emitters (i.e. in-slab radiant floor, in-slab radiant ceiling, lightweight radiant ceiling, radiator, radiant vertical wall and all-air systems) in terms of 3D distribution of the local operative temperature in a room. The knowledge of the 3D distribution of the operative temperature enables the local analysis of the indoor thermal comfort conditions established in the room during the year. The local Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) distribution within the room is calculated for each considered configuration. The results allow to quantify how the reduction of the maximum surface temperature of the emitters, which can be experienced when the envelope thermal insulation is increased, can create more uniform indoor thermal conditions by reducing the differences existing among the heat emitters.

Political instability, economic inequality and social conflict: The case in Italy

Rising economic inequality may produce a contraction of political stability and a spread of social conflict, as suggested by the theory of relative power. Following this approach, participation in the political arena depends on the distribution of incomes, because the relative rich use their power to ensure that the status quo do not change, while the relative poor are likely to abandon the public arena when they realize that their demands will not be discussed. Through the implementation of an index of political stability on the Italian general elections of 2008 and 2013, this study empirically tests whether political instability is linked with economic inequality. The results of the analysis, which examines the sub-regional level, show that the strengthening of economic inequality is a decisive factor affecting the weight of the elites in the determination of economic and political choices, and that it influences the distribution of votes between political blocks. This comes at the disadvantage of the poorest who, aware of their lesser chances to have influence, choose to change the character of their participation.

Race and Competitiveness in Brazilian Elections: Evaluating the Chances of Black and Brown Candidates through Quantile Regression Analysis of Brazil's 2014 Congressional Elections

Although the proportion of black, brown and indigenous electoral candidates in Brazil is close to the proportion of blacks, browns and indigenous in the general population, the proportion elected to the country’s Federal Congress is significantly lower. Statistical techniques such as linear or logistic regression are typically used to estimate the effect of a particular variable such as color/race or gender on a candidate’s electoral performance. However, in Brazilian elections, characterized by substantive, asymmetrical differences such as extreme variations in campaign finance distribution, the efficacy of these types of regression models is limited. Such being the case in Brazil's open list proportional representation system, we propose quantile regression as the most suitable means for estimating the relationship between voting and other variables such as race/color, because it enables us to estimate relationships between the variables of interest across several distribution quantiles. Quantile regression models show that black and brown candidates get as many as 40% fewer votes than white candidates in higher vote distribution quantiles. Furthermore, analysis of access to campaign financing finds that black and brown candidates on average garner only 75% of the funds available to white candidates at quantile 80 of campaign finance distribution. This drops to 65% at quantile 90.

Dinamika Perempuan Berpolitik: Strategi Pengembangan Partai Keadilan Sejahtera di Era Reformasi

Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (PKS) is a unique and phenomenal party, it was born from the womb of a social-religious movement named Jama'ah Tarbiyah which later morphed into an Islamic political party. The PKS social base is a middle-class, educated and young Muslim community. This research explores the strategy of developing PKS in Kebumen District from 1999 to 2014 in the dynamics of Indonesian Islamic politics. This research reveals the unique pheno­menon of PKS Kebumen's role in an electoral manner in the distribution of votes and seats in the Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat Daerah (DPRD). The method of approach uses pheno­menological studies. The results of this study are that PKS was born of an ideology or Islamic religious thought. His birth was acceptable to the community because PKS approached the community through collective actions such as; <em>majlis ta'līm</em>, social services, natural disaster assistance, channeling financial loan funds, establishing school buildings, and places of worship.

Las cadena de televisión españolas frente al debate del 13J: estrategias de programación y audiencia social

The television debate represents a decisive factor in political communication campaigns, and even more so if we consider that the television channels arbitrate social audience strategies that cause the message to be transmedia. The candidate, a television political leader, is able to impact on an audience that is larger than the one exposed to the propagandistic tools, and they can obtain an advantageous position in the distribution of votes. The political debate, understood as informative and live content, is potentially attractive to the traditional and social audiences and hence, the television channels structure programming strategies and social media to compete for the largest number of viewers. This research analyzes the transmedia proposal of La 1 of TVE, Antena 3, Telecinco and La Sexta before the pre-electoral debate of June 13th, 2016. All television channels benefit from the social impact of debate to a greater or lesser extent, achieving an accumulate audience of 47% and 1.8 million of tweets. Conversations were channeled through hashtags, and there was participation from official broadcasters, including political leaders, and screen integration.

RzeczPiSpolita POlska. Geografia wyborcza Platformy Obywatelskiej oraz Prawa i Sprawiedliwości w latach 2005-2010

The competition between Civic Platform (PO) and Law and Justice (PiS) in recent 5 years has led to the reflection about the territorial aspect of these divisions. Particulary interesting is the distribution of votes. A few tendentions like presence of historical divisions can be observed. The aim of this paper is to analyse these divisions and the main factors of their occurance.

SpArcFiRe: Enhancing Spiral Galaxy Recognition Using Arm Analysis and Random Forests

Automated quantification of galaxy morphology is necessary because the size of upcoming sky surveys will overwhelm human volunteers. Existing classification schemes are inadequate because (a) their uncertainty increases near the boundary of classes and astronomers need more control over these uncertainties; (b) galaxy morphology is continuous rather than discrete; and (c) sometimes we need to know not only the type of an object, but whether a particular image of the object exhibits visible structure. We propose that regression is better suited to these tasks than classification, and focus specifically on determining the extent to which an image of a spiral galaxy exhibits visible spiral structure. We use the human vote distributions from Galaxy Zoo 1 (GZ1) to train a random forest of decision trees to reproduce the fraction of GZ1 humans who vote for the “Spiral” class. We prefer the random forest model over other black box models like neural networks because it allows us to trace post hoc the precise reasoning behind the regression of each image. Finally, we demonstrate that using features from SpArcFiRe—a code designed to isolate and quantify arm structure in spiral galaxies—improves regression results over and above using traditional features alone, across a sample of 470,000 galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Анализ влияния электоральной активности на конкурентность выборов в России

The paper presents the results of a study on the election turnout of citizens in the Russian regions. The main objective of the study is to analyze how electoral behavior affects the distribution of votes among candidates who implement passive suffrage. It is necessary to determine whether there is a rela-tionship between the competitiveness of election and election turnout. Besides, it is important to ex-plain the reasons for the possible dependence, i.e. to show how this relationship affects the distribu-tion of forces in the pre-election race. The study focuses on the Russian presidential election of 2018. Election turnout is expressed through the percent-age of voter turnout, and the voter percentage in favor of candidates nominated for the highest state office is regarded as a result of the election cam-paign. The study revealed the peculiarities of elec-toral behavior during the voting period and outlined the relevant aspects of the electoral branch func-tioning in Russia. The trend in the high percentage of votes for the incumbent president at polling sta-tions and, at the same time, the high percentage of voter turnout prove that the fewer people vote, the more the competition of election is, and vice versa. The low competition and the lack of the alternative to the incumbent government demonstrate that, nowadays, Russia is in need of new political leaders who could prove themselves and, at least, get vot-ers’ attention that implies full involvement in politics during the election period.

The price of a vote: Diseconomy in proportional elections.

The increasing cost of electoral campaigns raises the need for effective campaign planning and a precise understanding of the return of such investment. Interestingly, despite the strong impact of elections on our daily lives, how this investment is translated into votes is still unknown. By performing data analysis and modeling, we show that top candidates spend more money per vote than the less successful and poorer candidates, a relation that discloses a diseconomy of scale. We demonstrate that such electoral diseconomy arises from the competition between candidates due to inefficient campaign expenditure. Our approach succeeds in two important tests. First, it reveals that the statistical pattern in the vote distribution of candidates can be explained in terms of the independently conceived, but similarly skewed distribution of money campaign. Second, using a heuristic argument, we are able to explain the observed turnout percentage for a given election of approximately 63% in average. This result is in good agreement with the average turnout rate obtained from real data. Due to its generality, we expect that our approach can be applied to a wide range of problems concerning the adoption process in marketing campaigns.

Preparing the Terrain: Conditioning Factors for the Regionalization of the Vote for Federal Deputy in São Paulo

This article proposes a new interpretation of the regional distribution of votes in the dispute for legislative offices in Brazil. The literature has traditionally understood regionalization to be evidence that politicians deliberately create zones of influences in certain areas. We argue, however, that other dimensions of the Brazilian electoral system, notably the large size and magnitude of electoral districts, reinforce the information that reaches voters and adds value to geographic aspects, such as the home city of the candidates, accounting for the spatial concentration of votes. Using new, previously unpublished, data on the hierarchy of cities, the results for Sao Paulo between 1998 and 2014 confirm this interpretation. This result suggests a new theoretical understanding about how the Brazilian political system works by introducing another explanation for how certain areas become influential, thereby revealing new research agendas.

Extreme idealism and equilibrium in the Hotelling\u2013Downs model of political competition

In the classic Hotelling–Downs model of political competition, no pure strategy equilibrium with three or more strategic candidates exists when the distribution of voters’ preferred policies is unimodal. I study the effect of introducing two idealist candidates to the model who are non-strategic (i.e., fixed to their policy platforms), while allowing for an unlimited number of strategic candidates. Doing so, I show that equilibrium is restored for a non-degenerate set of unimodal distributions. In addition, the equilibria have the following features: (1) the left-most and right-most candidates (i.e., extremists) are idealists; (2) strategic candidates never share their policy platforms, which instead are spread out across the policy space; and (3) if more than one strategic candidate enters, the distribution of voter preferences must be asymmetric. I also show that equilibria can accommodate idealist fringes of candidates toward the extremes of the political spectrum.

The BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement: A Subversive Power Against the IMF’s Conditionality?

Abstract In 2014, the BRICS countries established the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) purportedly to compensate for the BRICS’ frustration over the non-materialization of reforms in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that had long been promised but blocked by the United States until late 2015. A contractual analysis of the CRA reveals that though all BRICS countries enjoy equality for strategic decisions, the CRA strongly resembles the IMF’s quota-based voting distribution where operational decisions are taken. It nevertheless provides a more balanced voting system, as it does not provide one single party with a veto position. The CRA further lacks legal personality and other fundamental features such as its own staff or macroeconomic research facilities. Financing approvals are thus linked to IMF on-track arrangements, which undermines the CRA’s significance. The CRA nonetheless holds the potential to be developed into a viable BRICS alternative to the IMF in the long term.

The voting systems in the Council of the EU and the Bundesrat – What do they tell us about European Federalism?

Abstract The Treaty of Lisbon introduced a new system of weighted votes in the Council, which radically departs from the principles on which the distribution of votes between the Member States of the EU was based for more than half a century. At the same time, the system of double majority is fundamentally different from the assumptions on which voting systems in federal states are based, including in the Bundesrat. Systems used in federal states are usually based on a compromise between the equality of states, and the equality of citizens. Consequently, in the Nice system, smaller Member States in the EU had relatively greater power compared to their populations than smaller federal units in the German Bundesrat. The results presented in this paper indicate that the Lisbon system of voting in the Council differs significantly from voting systems in federal states.

An ordered probability model for predicting outdoor thermal comfort

Outdoor thermal comfort in urban spaces is gaining increasing research attention because it is associated with the quality of life in cities. This paper presents an ordered probability model for predicting the probability distribution of thermal sensation votes (TSVs) based on 1549 observations obtained from a large-scale field survey conducted at a park in Tianjin, China. With a given set of inputs, the developed model can predict the probability that people will feel cold, cool, slightly cool, neutral, slightly warm, warm, or hot. The predictive capability of the ordered probability model was systematically assessed by comparing it with the survey data and a traditional multivariate linear model. Both models had a similar accuracy in predicting single-value TSVs. However, the ordered probability model performed much better than the multivariate linear model in predicting the probability distribution of TSVs. A sensitivity analysis of the ordered probability model revealed that outdoor air temperature was the most important influencing factor. The impacts of global radiation, relative humidity, and activity level on predicted thermal sensation depended on the outdoor air temperature. The developed ordered probability model was used to predict suitable time periods for holding outdoor activities in Tianjin across a whole year. This new model is a more informative tool for predicting outdoor thermal comfort.

Quantifying Gerrymandering Using the Vote Distribution

Abstract One way to assess the presence of gerrymandering is to analyze the distribution of votes. The efficiency gap, which does this, plays a central role in a 2016 federal court case on the constitutionality of Wisconsin's state legislative district plan. Unfortunately, however, the efficiency gap reduces to proportional representation, an expectation that is not a constitutional right. We present a new measure of partisan asymmetry that does not rely on the shapes of districts, is simple to compute, is provably related to the “packing and cracking” integral to gerrymandering, and that avoids the constitutionality issue presented by the efficiency gap. In addition, we introduce a generalization of the efficiency gap that also avoids the equivalency to proportional representation. We apply the first function to U.S. congressional and state legislative plans from recent decades to identify candidate gerrymanders.

Technological Change, Campaign Spending and Polarization

We focus on changes in technology and campaign management to study the documented simultaneous increase in campaign spending and polarization. In our model, some voters are ideological while others are impressionable. If the distribution of voters between types is endogenous and depends on parties' platform choices, our results show that a) an increase in the effectiveness of electoral advertising or a decrease in the electorate's political awareness, surely increases polarization and may also increase campaign spending, while b) a decrease in the cost of advertising does not affect neither polarization nor spending.

STATE OF KOSOVO AND ITS RELATIONS WITH INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY

No organization represents community of states more than the United Nations (UN). The UN provides balance, neutrality, security and stability for the international community. States invest more legitimacy in that than any other organization and through its universal membership, it serves as a road and guide to international norms. In other hand the United Nations doesn’t have the competence to recognize states, but states recognize states. If you’re not a UN member, it doesn’t mean that you’re not a state. The four criteria for being a state are determination of a territory, the populations, the government and ability to reach agreement with others. In this contest Republic of Kosovo is facing difficulties in joining United Nation, and his specialized agencies, also facing the difficulties, to join international organizations as a way to secure recognition and complete statehood in international arena. Showing the will and the determination to respect international obligation regulated by each specialized agency and organization, the process of application in UNESCO is the case which shows how the states are divided in international arena, and one of the major failure of Kosovo foreign policy and diplomacy after rejection of Kosovo bid to join UNESCO in 2015. The application process and steps followed by Kosovo institutions, decisions and recommendation of the UNESCO executive board, discussed on the General Conference, part of the general conference discussion related to the Kosovo application and voting process on the General Conference distribution of votes from the states who voted in favor, against, abstention and absence during General Conference and rejection of Kosovo bid. And the conclusions while what are the benefits on joining the UNESCO and the consequences for Kosovo in the rejection of bid to obtain a seat at the organization UNESCO, what are the next steps and the chances of Kosovo Institution and recommendations for future, and selection of approaches on the second bid to join UNESCO in the near future.