General Polling Research Articles

The lexicon of consensus candidate and the Nigerian democracy: How healthy is it?

This paper discusses the issue of misused and misapplication of the term consensus in the political arena which has over the years caused disaffection, carpet-crossing among party members and the formation of new pre-matured political parties because of harmonizing out members of the same party. This misconstrue language (consensus) has also made political parties field wrong choice candidates which has further resulted to bad governance. The word consensus which ordinarily means common agreement, understanding or mutual cooperation to accepting an issue or something especially in selecting candidate(s), in Nigeria has turned a situation where two or few party chieftains connived (in their own interest) to edge out or manipulate other people in selecting a single person who happens to be their cronies, without the consent of the entire group. The forceful imposition apart from resulting to bad leadership had also cause rancour, intra-party wrangling and disunity, and political malady, which has not been too healthy for our endured democracy. As a review article, this paper, considers the consensus theory, various authors’ views about the concepts of the term was lavishly x-rayed and in the end the paper seeks to suggest that party chieftains should apply the concept properly, by consulting widely before coming out with a choice candidate(s) who will represent the party very well, so that the dividends of democracy will be felt and not be sacrificed on the altar of “puppet-godson” who will be pledging unnecessary pretentious loyalty to his godfather(s) to the detriment of the electorates, if he emerges the general winner at the general poll.

JUDICIAL PROTECTION OF THE RIGHT OF THE POPULATION TO TERRITORIAL SELF-ORGANIZATION IN THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION: ASSESSMENT OF CURRENT PRACTICE

Purpose of the study. The article examines topical problems of judicial protection of the population's right to territorial self-organization. This research seems to be relevant in connection with the problems that have arisen in practice, which require a comprehensive substantiation of the constitutional content of the population's right to territorial self-organization and an assessment of the existing judicial practice of considering territorial disputes in the system of local self-government in the Russian Federation. Conclusions. As a result of the study, the authors come to the conclusion that the provisions of Federal Law No. 131-ФЗ as amended by Federal Law No. 87-ФЗ dated 05/01/2019 and the judicial practice of recognizing a decision of a representative body as a form of consent of the population to change the boundaries of municipalities contradicts the constitutional right of the population on territorial self-organization. Such forms of democracy as a local referendum, general municipal discussion by the population or a general municipal poll should have an advantage, which will maximize the involvement of residents in resolving issues of the territorial structure at the municipal level.

Public Perception on the Western Balkan States’ Accession to the EU. Social-Constructivist Interpretations

"The purpose of the article is to analyse, form a social constructivist perspective, public perception on the accession of Western Balkan States to the European Union. Public opinion is an important indicator of the current situation in the region, as well as of the level of preparedness, engagement, and availability of the society to the European project and to internalize European values. For a more comprehensive understanding of the evolution and dynamics of public opinion, and whether we can discuss enlargement or accession fatigue, we have made a comparative analysis of polls conducted in 2010 and 2020. Moreover, since general polls are sensitive barometers and cannot be properly understood without placing them in a wider context, we have extended our research to the factors that influence public perception and the exposure to disinformation. Keywords: Western Balkans, EU accession, public perception, social constructivism "

National Referenda in Ukraine: Main Results and Consequences

The article contains scientific interpretation of the outcomes and identification of the defining characteristics of translation into practice of the main results of the referenda, which were held in Ukraine over the period from 1991 to 2000. During the period at hand, the total of three national referenda took place in Ukraine: on 17 March, 1 December, 1991, and 16 April, 2000. The author considers the key points regarding organizing and holding of such referenda as aforesaid based on the official data and those obtained by the author. The author specifically focuses on the fact that out of the seven questions put up for the referenda only one was carried into effect - the confirmation of the Declaration of Independence Act of Ukraine (12.01.1991). The rest of the results were ignored by the authorities. Based on the example of Ukraine, the nature of the influence of both external and internal factors on general poll organization is identified for the first time in a consolidated manner. The author also presents scientific data in order to prove the idea that in the contemporary environment it is essential to adhere to democratic principles in the course of public life management and especially when addressing fundamental issues of the government administration system. In this regard, the referendum (general poll), as a most important institution of democracy, is extremely important. The article also accentuates the imperative that human rights must be respected, including, inter alia, both the right to participate in referenda (general polls) and the right to demand translation of their outcomes into practice. Furthermore, the author for the first time systemically examines organization and procedure of referenda (general polls) in Ukraine and translation of their results into practice, using forms and methods of research object scientific analysis which are traditional for political sociology. In the present paper, the author primarily uses and refers to official documents and fundamental assessments by political leaders who were involved in the process of organizing and holding referenda in Ukraine.

Urinary incontinence frequency and affecting factors in women 18 years and over

Introduction: Urinary incontinence(UI) is a complicated condition that affects women of all ages, is common, affects life negatively, and occurs for many reasons. It does not only have a medical problem for women but also affects the quality of life defined as physical, psychological, economic and social well-being. In our study, it was aimed to evaluate the frequency of urinary incontinence and the affecting factors in women aged 18 and over.Methods: 212 female patients aged between 18-85 who applied to Cemil Tascioglu City Hospital Family Medicine Polyclinics were included in this study. Those patients were divided into two groups: urinary incontinent and continent. General poll form, ICIQ-SF were interrogated. In general poll form, medical story about demographic data, personal history, family history, additional diseases, UI risk factors was interrogated. Dates of study were evaluated in the sense of meaningfulness by Shapiro Wilk test, Mann Whitney U test, Pearson Ki-Kare test, Fisher’s Exact Ki-Kare test.Results: Number of incontinent and continent cases was 111 and 101, respectively. So, the frequency of UI was found to be 52.4%. Average age of incontinent and continent cases was 51.07±11.80 and 43.50±12.80 respectively. 37.7% of UI cases had urgent-type, 12.3% of UI cases had stress-type and 30.2% had mixed-type UI. Increase in body mass index (p<0.001), low level of education (p<0.001), curettage (p:0.014), menopause (p<0.001), giving birth to relatively big babies (p:0.048), hypertension (p:0.001), diabetes mellitus (p:0.038), constipation (p:0.042), genital prolapsus (p:0.008) were meaningfully higher in the incontinent group.Conclusion: In our study; it was found that urinary incontinence rate increased with increasing age. The vast majority of women see this as a result of being a woman and aging and they do not consult a doctor. In our study, we found that 86.8% of women with urinary incontinence did not consult a doctor. Most of the individuals with urinary incontinence can be recognized and treated effectively by their family physicians in primary care. Therefore, family physicians should identify the problem of urinary incontinence in patients who apply to outpatient clinics, identify risk factors, define and treat them.

Strategic Polling Limits the External Validity of Early Election Polling

Using responses from a series of general election polls conducted between February and March of 2020, we found that a non-negligible share of participants withheld information about their true voter intention by responding strategically to hypothetical questions about potential future vote choice, thus introducing a source of total survey error. Although we propose a combination of ex-ante considerations in survey design and ex-post statistical fixes that can be used to reduce total survey error and infer true voter intention, the lack of repeated outcomes limits our ability to precisely calibrate our models. Our findings call into question the external validity of conclusions based on conditional forecasts using hypothetical polling results and are especially pertinent to early US general election forecasting, where potentially meaningless differences of a few percentage points can be misinterpreted as proof of differences in relative electability of potential party nominees during the Primary election season. We suggest that results from hypothetical election polls should instead be viewed as sources of partial information on future behavior, and interpreted based on contextual variables such as the moment in time relative to the predicted event.

Treasury Crisis as Illustrated by 17th Century Poland

The article describes a crisis of the State Treasury of Poland that occurred in the 1660s and 1670s. The State’s revenues and expenditures are discussed, as well as institutional problems of the Polish Republic, such as: decentralization of the fiscal apparatus and the State’s fiscal planning. The study presents the background of the introduction of: general poll and excise taxes. Also, an attempt is made to point out the causes of the economic crisis in the Treasury.

Environmental Attitudes Across Race and Ethnicity

ObjectivesThis article examines the degree to which environmental concerns are influenced by race and ethnicity, and particularly whether significant differences exist among people of color and whites. Our objective is to clarify this uncertainty since previous studies have been limited by the timeframe and geographic scope of their data.MethodsWe analyze 15 years of nationally representative data from Gallup's General Poll Social Survey. Using a multitude of dependent variables that capture a range of environmental issues, we employ ordinal logistic regression models to understand environmental attitudes across race and ethnicity.ResultsWe find that people of color are more concerned than whites about matters pertaining to environmental justice, and just as concerned about problems related to traditional environmentalism.ConclusionsThe results of this study contribute to our understanding of the individual‐level determinants of environmental attitudes, and provide insights into the attitudinal foundations of the modern‐day environmental justice movement.

Response to Grand Challenges: The Dimension of Social Sciences and the Humanities

This article discusses the choice of priority areas, including in the social sciences and humanities, based on the needs of society and the so-called grand challenges, rather than in the traditional logic of development of basic science, which can evolve at its own pace, not always in accordance with the actual needs or effective demand. This approach fits into the new conceptual logic presented in the Strategy for the Scientific and Technological Development of the Russian Federation. Sociological surveys of two types—general public poll and expert assessment—are used to facilitate the choice of priorities.

Kaip Lietuvoje atsirado pirmasis konstitucinis įstatymas

The Constitutional Law “On the State of Lithuania” that was adopted on 11 February, 1991 is the first constitutional law in the history of Lithuania’s law. The author describes the circumstances in which this constitutional law was adopted and discloses the relation of this law to the general poll (plebiscite) held on 9 February, 1991. The article shows how this constitutional law is different from the institute of constitutional laws established in the Constitution that is in force at present. The Constitutional Law “On the State of Lithuania” has been included into the Constitution of 1992 as its constituent part (Article 150 of the Constitution), therefore, its legal power is the same as that of the entire Constitution, i.e., the constitutional law in question has the supreme legal power as the rest provisions of the Constitution do. The Constitution also consolidates constitutional laws of a different type, i.e., the constitutional laws that must be included into the list of constitutional laws (Paragraph 3 of Article 69 of the Constitution), as well as the laws that are referred to as the constitutional ones in separate articles of the Constitution (Paragraph 3 of Article 47 of the Constitution). One is not allowed to identify the constitutional laws included into the list of constitutional laws and the constitutional law specified in Paragraph 3 of Article 47 of the Constitution, on the one hand, with the constitutional laws (constitutional acts) specified in Article 150 of the Constitution, on the other hand, since the legal power of the constitutional laws included into the list of constitutional laws and the constitutional law specified in Paragraph 3 of Article 47 of the Constitution is lower than the legal power of the Constitution. The arguments of the article are critical of the opinion found in the scientific legal literature that the general poll (plebiscite) was held “in order to grant the constitutional status to the provision regarding the sovereignty and form of the State of Lithuania”.

WAIT-AND-SEE STRATEGIES IN POLLING MODELS

We consider a general polling model with N stations. The stations are served exhaustively and in cyclic order. Once a station queue falls empty, the server does not immediately switch to the next station. Rather, it waits at the station for the possible arrival of new work (“wait-and-see”) and, in the case of this happening, it restarts service in an exhaustive fashion. The total time the server waits idly is set to be a fixed, deterministic parameter for each station. Switchover times and service times are allowed to follow some general distribution, respectively. In some cases, which can be characterized, this strategy yields a strictly lower average queuing delay than for the exhaustive strategy, which corresponds to setting the “wait-and-see credit” equal to zero for all stations. This extends the results of Peköz [12] and of Boxma et al. [4]. Furthermore, we give a lower bound for the delay for all strategies that allow the server to wait at the stations even though no work is present.

An Effective Polling Scheme for IEEE 802.11e

In medium access control (MAC) protocols for wireless local area networks (WLANs), the Round-Robin scheme is the general polling scheme. A major drawback of this scheme is that it is inefficient when only a small number of stations have packets to transmit. This inefficiency is caused by polling stations that have no packets to transmit. This paper proposes an effective and simple polling scheme to reduce the number of polling times for a station with no packets to transmit. For example, the simulation result shows that the throughput increases by 35.8% when fifteen stations out of thirty stations in the polling list have packets to transmit at IEEE 802.1 la 54 Mbps rate.

Real-time network monitoring scheme based on SNMP for dynamic information

An efficient and automated network management is required in large and complex networks since it is very difficult to manage them only with human effort. In response to this need, the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) has been developed and adopted as the de facto standard. Some management information changes with time and the management station needs to monitor its value in real time. In such a case, polling is generally used in the SNMP because the management station can query agents periodically. However, the polling scheme needs both request and response messages for management information every time, which results in network traffic increase. In this paper, we suggest a real-time network monitoring method for dynamic information to reduce the network traffic in SNMP-based network management. In the proposed strategy, each agent first decides its own monitoring period. Then, the manager collects them and approves each agent's period without modification or adjusts it based on the total traffic generated by monitoring messages. After receiving a response message containing the monitoring period from the management station, each agent sends management information periodically without the request of management station. To evaluate the performance of the proposed real-time monitoring method, we implemented it and compared the network traffic and monitoring quality of the proposed scheme with the general polling method.

Under Siege: The Global Fate of Euthanasia and Assisted-Suicide Legislation

Over the last 40 years public views concerning voluntary life-ending behaviours have changed. The notion of medical doctors being involved in the death of patients who explicitly request it was widely rejected until the 1960s, but now, at least in general opinion polls, it is quite widely accepted. For instance, in Australia, in 1962, only 42% agreed to the sanctioning, in principle, of physicians ending the life of a terminally ill patient further to the patientʼs request. This percentage rose to 78% in the 1990s. Similarly, in Canada, the percentage favouring, in principle, a certain level of legalisation of physician-assisted suicide went up from 45% in 1968 to 78% in 1990. In the Netherlands, in 1966, only 40% of the population agreed to the premise that euthanasia could, in certain situations, be acceptable; this rose to over 50% by 1970, and has been consistently over 70% since 1990.

GM food and crops: what went wrong in the UK? Many of the public's concerns have little to do with science.

Genetically modified (GM) crops are now being grown extensively in North and South America and China, although not in Europe. Food produced from these crops has become a part of the normal diet in North and South America and in China, but not in Europe, where contention continues despite the fact that millions of US citizens eat GM soya without any ill effects in a very litigious society, and many Europeans have eaten GM soya while in the US without any adverse consequences. > Why has the British public, who normally so pragmatically welcome scientific advances, resisted the introduction of genetically modified crops? European consumers' continuous and ardent opposition to GM crops and foods has had serious repercussions for plant research, for the commercial development of new crops and, most importantly, for developing countries that could benefit most from GM crops. Several countries in Africa and elsewhere have resisted growing such crops, mainly for fear of being unable to export them to the European market ( The Economist , 2002). It is therefore worthwhile to investigate what actually went wrong in the debate about GM food and crops in Europe and how these foods have earned such a bad name. Such an analysis could not only help to overcome public fears of this technology, but also help scientists and policy makers to address similar concerns in the future, such as the growing debate over nanotechnology. The concerns of European consumers about the potential health and environmental threats of GM crops have resulted in an unprecedented effort to investigate those anxieties and communicate with the wider public, particularly in the UK, where the use of public consultation has been extensively developed. The first of these initiatives was the extensive Farm Scale Evaluations of three GM crops (herbicide‐resistant beet, oil seed rape and maize), whose …

Polling systems with periodic server routeing in heavy traffic: distribution of the delay

We consider polling systems with mixtures of exhaustive and gated service in which the server visits the queues periodically according to a general polling table. We derive exact expressions for the steady-state delay incurred at each of the queues under standard heavy-traffic scalings. The expressions require the solution of a set of onlyM—Nlinear equations, whereMis the length of the polling table andNis the number of queues, but are otherwise explicit. The equations can even be expressed in closed form for several routeing schemes commonly used in practice, such as the star and elevator visit order, in a general parameter setting. The results reveal a number of asymptotic properties of the behavior of polling systems. In addition, the results lead to simple and fast approximations for the distributions and the moments of the delay in stable polling systems with periodic server routeing. Numerical results demonstrate that the approximations are highly accurate for medium and heavily loaded systems.

Polling systems with periodic server routeing in heavy traffic: distribution of the delay

We consider polling systems with mixtures of exhaustive and gated service in which the server visits the queues periodically according to a general polling table. We derive exact expressions for the steady-state delay incurred at each of the queues under standard heavy-traffic scalings. The expressions require the solution of a set of only M—N linear equations, where M is the length of the polling table and N is the number of queues, but are otherwise explicit. The equations can even be expressed in closed form for several routeing schemes commonly used in practice, such as the star and elevator visit order, in a general parameter setting. The results reveal a number of asymptotic properties of the behavior of polling systems. In addition, the results lead to simple and fast approximations for the distributions and the moments of the delay in stable polling systems with periodic server routeing. Numerical results demonstrate that the approximations are highly accurate for medium and heavily loaded systems.

A general polling algorithm using a wireless AMR system for restoration confirmation

Restoration of distribution systems is a complicated process, especially after storms, when a large number of outages can occur. Many utilities are implementing automated meter reading (AMR) systems that can aid in the restoration process. This paper presents work done to utilize the capabilities and information provided by a wireless AMR system, including the on-demand read feature, to develop a polling procedure to identify system conditions. It takes advantage of the connection information provided by a utility and the performance of the wireless meter communication systems.

Decomposition results for general polling systems and their applications

In this paper we derive decomposition results for the number of customers in polling systems under arbitrary (dynamic) polling order and service policies. Furthermore, we obtain sharper decomposition results for both the number of customers in the system and the waiting times under static polling policies. Our analysis, which is based on distributional laws, relaxes the Poisson assumption that characterizes the polling systems literature. In particular, we obtain exact decomposition results for systems with either Mixed Generalized Erlang (MGE) arrival processes, or asymptotically exact decomposition results for systems with general renewal arrival processes under heavy traffic conditions. The derived decomposition results can be used to obtain the performance analysis of specific systems. As an example, we evaluate the performance of gated Markovian polling systems operating under heavy traffic conditions. We also provide numerical evidence that our heavy traffic analysis is very accurate even for moderate traffic.

Polling systems with periodic server routing in heavy traffic

We consider polling systems with mixtures of exhaustive and gated service, and in which the server visits the queues according to a general polling table, in heavy traffic. We derive exact expressions for the expected delay at each of the queues (under heavy-traffic scalings), requiring the solution of a set of M — N linear equations, where M is the length of the polling table and N is the number of queues. The results lead to closed-form expressions for the scaled expected delay under the commonly used star and elevator routing schemes, in a general parameter setting. In addition, the results reveal several insensitivity properties of the scaled expected delay with respect to the system parameters, providing new insights into the behavior of periodic polling systems in heavy traffic. The results also suggest simple and fast-to-evaluate approximations for the expected delay at each of the queues in stable polling systems. Numerical examples show that the approximations are very accurate in practical heavy-traffic scenarios