large-N Analysis Research Articles

The Inter-institutional Division of Power and Time Allocation in the European Parliament

This paper examines whether the European Parliament strategically adapts to the inter-institutional balance of power by allocating its resources so that it spends more time in those areas of competence where it has the greatest power. Focusing on the legislative area, the authors examine whether differences in the inter-institutional division of power between different legislative procedures affect how long the EP spends on reaching its first reading position. They conduct a large-N analysis of over 3,000 legislative acts and a complementary analysis of treaty articles where the required decision procedure changed. In all analyses, the inter-institutional balance of power has the expected effect. The authors show that the EP spends more time reaching its first reading opinion in co-decision than it does in the consultation procedure where it has less power, even when they control for the characteristics of the files debated and the level of disagreement on the files.

US professional military education and democratization abroad

United States Professional Military Education (US PME) has commonly been blamed for training some of the worst abusers of human rights — Latin American dictators and thugs like Argentina’s Leopoldo Galtieri and Panama’s Manuel Noriega, Timorese counterinsurgents, and even some officers who would eventually serve the Taliban in Afghanistan. We test this conventional wisdom using both large-N analyses and case studies of Argentina, Greece, and Taiwan. Our large-N results suggest that US PME trained foreign officers prove to be an important stabilizing force during times of democratic transition. Our case studies uncover very few cases of US PME officers linked to human rights abuses; interestingly, in each of our cases, the US PME trained officers provided the initial infrastructure needed to begin domestic military education programs that encouraged civilian control of the military in emerging democracies.

Forum Section

We present an automatically updatable database of background information about Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) from 1979 until the present. Although this information is already directly accessible through the European Parliament’s web page, it is presented in a manner that makes it ideal only for those interested in finding information about individual MEPs, but difficult for anyone interested in doing large-N analysis. We provide an online ‘live’ source of background information about MEPs that is tailored towards the need of the latter group. Our web page allows researchers to specify the time period in which they are interested and to obtain data on committee, party group and delegation membership, as well as leadership positions within seconds. As the collection of the data is fully automated, we are able to keep the data updated as long as the European Parliament (EP) continues its current practice of making background information about members available online. Researchers will be able to combine this information with other data sources at a substantively lower cost than is currently the case. As such, we hope to encourage a new generation of research into the EP. The research note is organized as follows. The next section reviews the literature. It highlights how our database may be used to extend the already extensive quantitative literature on the EP. The second section gives the reader an overview of how the technology behind the database works and how to access the information. We leave the technical aspects of the principles behind the data collection scripts to the web appendix. The third section describes the database.

Integration in the Management of International Waters: Economic Perspectives on a Global Policy Discourse

In recent years an emergent global policy discourse has promoted the concept of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) as a strategy for the sustainable management of international waters. However, integration remains a considerable challenge in large international river basins. This article addresses the relevance of the global discourse on IWRM, asking how much integration can be expected and how much integration is desirable in international water management. The article presents a novel compilation of eighty-six international river basin organizations and examines their degree of integration in terms of three dimensions: membership, substantive scope, and form. More particularly, the article examines the integration problem from an economic perspective, asking whether integration serves the self-interest of the respective riparian states. The empirical evidence highlights the difficulties of integration, as the majority of international river basin organizations remain narrow in membership and scope. Economic considerations suggest that voluntary cooperation in river basins is institutionally demanding and that the degree of integration depends on the problem at hand. Hence, the challenge for international waters management is to search for the economically desirable degree of integration in each case. Keywords: international river basins, Integrated Water Resources Management, Coase theorem, integration. The Problem Some 263 river basins on earth cross international boundaries. (1) Whenever a water resource is international, competing claims over shared waters can generate conflict among riparian countries. In response, a global policy discourse has emerged that promotes Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) as a concept for sustainable resource use. IWRM calls for the integrated management of different water uses within the hydrological confines of a river basin. Proponents of IWRM often advocate the establishment of special river basin organizations. However, a number of social scientists have rejected IWRM as unrealistic with respect to international waters. For example, Frank Marty, basing his predictions on experiences with six bilateral agreements, expects that the majority of international water agreements will be bilateral and narrow in scope and that this is indeed how it should be. (2) John Waterbury warns that the quest for integrated development in international river basins will be elusive and excessively costly, although he concedes that bilateral agreements are not necessarily a solution for multiparty basins. (3) Empirical research suggests that existing arrangements are limited in membership and substantive scope, but large-N analyses are rare and generally limited to the analysis of membership. In terms of membership, Jesse Hamner and Aaron Wolf find that 86 percent of 145 international water treaties concluded since 1945 are bilateral; however, they do not distinguish between bilateral and multilateral basins. (4) According to Ken Conca, Fengshi Wu, and Ciqi Mei, thirty-three of forty-nine international river agreements established in multilateral basins between 1980 and 2000 are bilateral. (5) In terms of substantive scope, Ludwik Teclaff suggests that the majority of international water institutions are single-purpose, but the basis of his analysis is unclear. (6) In terms of form, it is an open question as to what extent riparian states not only conclude agreements but also set up specific river basin organizations. (7) Hence, only vague knowledge is available concerning integration of existing international river basin institutions in terms of substantive scope and form. How much integration can be expected in the management of international waters? How much integration is desirable in terms of membership, substantive scope, and form? In other words, how viable is the IWRM concept for the management of international rivers? To address these questions, I discuss in this article IWRM in the light of empirical evidence and economic considerations. …

The Comparative Political Economy of Childcare: Japan, U.S., and Europe

Imperfections in the childcare market results in sub-optimal levels and quality of communal care for children. As a result, many women in industrialized democracies are opting out of motherhood. This project proposes to investigate the reasons behind those market deficiencies, as well as the political process for rectifying them. This project combines a large-n statistical analysis with in-depth process tracing in several countries: Japan, the U.S., Sweden, and Germany.

Winning the Bid: Analyzing the International Olympic Committee's Host City Selections

Previous scholarship has relied on case study analysis and anecdotal evidence to explain the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Olympic host city selection process. This has resulted in several provocative claims regarding why the IOC selects particular cities to host the Olympics. Large-n analysis can dispel some of these assertions by identifying the systematic tendencies in the IOC's host city choices. After reviewing the selection process and the different influences on the IOC's choice of a host city, rank-ordered conditional logit estimation is applied to data proxies of bid candidate characteristics from 1959 through 2005. The IOC shows a statistical tendency to base its decision on the economic vitality of a bid city's home country and on the need to maintain continental diversity.

Choosing Your Battles: American Civil–Military Relations and the Use of Force

Choosing Your Battles: American Civil–Military Relations and the Use of Force. By Peter D. Feaver and Christopher Gelpi. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 268p. $22.95.In their book, Peter Feaver and Christopher Gelpi have several agendas. They succeed at some better than others. Their first goal is to establish the fact of a civil–military opinion gap over the use of force. They find that civilian elites are more willing to expand U.S. foreign policy goals to include nontraditional missions related to human rights, whereas military elites are more supportive of a traditional Cold War foreign policy agenda (p. 42); and that nonveteran civilian elites are more willing to use force incrementally, whereas elite military officers support the decisive use of force enshrined in the Powell Doctrine. Both insights have been documented in the case study literature, but Feaver and Gelpi bring large-n analysis and original survey opinion data to bear on the topic.

Large-N analysis of the local quantum critical point and the spin-liquid phase

We analytically study a Kondo lattice model with an additional nearest-neighbor antiferromagnetic interaction in the framework of large-$\mathcal{N}$ theory. We find that there is a local quantum critical point between two phases, a normal Fermi liquid and a spin liquid in which the spins are decoupled from the conduction electrons. The local spin susceptibility displays a power-law divergence throughout the spin liquid phase. We check the reliability of the large-$\mathcal{N}$ results by solving with a quantum Monte Carlo simulation, the $\mathcal{N}=2$ spin-liquid problem with no conduction electrons, and we find qualitative agreement. We show that the spin-liquid phase is unstable at low temperatures, suggestive of a first-order transition to an ordered phase.

Geopolitics and the green revolution

Recent research and policies recognize the importance of environmental defenders for global sustainability and emphasize their need for protection against violence and repression. However, effective support may benefit from a more systematic understanding of the underlying environmental conflicts, as well as from better knowledge on the factors that enable environmental defenders to mobilize successfully. We have created the global Environmental Justice Atlas to address this knowledge gap. Here we present a large-n analysis of 2743 cases that sheds light on the characteristics of environmental conflicts and the environmental defenders involved, as well as on successful mobilization strategies. We find that bottom-up mobilizations for more sustainable and socially just uses of the environment occur worldwide across all income groups, testifying to the global existence of various forms of grassroots environmentalism as a promising force for sustainability. Environmental defenders are frequently members of vulnerable groups who employ largely non-violent protest forms. In 11% of cases globally, they contributed to halt environmentally destructive and socially conflictive projects, defending the environment and livelihoods. Combining strategies of preventive mobilization, protest diversification and litigation can increase this success rate significantly to up to 27%. However, defenders face globally also high rates of criminalization (20% of cases), physical violence (18%), and assassinations (13%), which significantly increase when Indigenous people are involved. Our results call for targeted actions to enhance the conditions enabling successful mobilizations, and for specific support for Indigenous environmental defenders.

Mediating International Conflicts: Is Image Change Necessary?

A basic assumption of much literature on international conflict, mediation, and social psychology is that the process of mediation can break down stereotypes or images which conflicting parties hold of each other; this breakdown is argued to facilitate settlement. The article proposes a method for the systematic testing of this assumption. This approach is then explored with a `plausibility probe' consisting of three case studies: the Israeli-Egyptian conflict from 1973 to 1979; the conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots from 1979 to 1983; and the Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to 1985. In all three cases, the predictions of hypothesized relationship were upheld. In the one case (Egypt-Israel) where resolution was reached, images did change, correlated with mediation efforts over time. In cases (Cyprus, Iran-Iraq) where no resolution was obtained, no image change occurred despite mediation efforts. These results suggest that the previously untested hypothesis of mediation theory regarding the importance of image change is a plausible one, and should be pursued with further research in the form of more case studies and large-N analyses.

Large-N analysis of the (2+1)-dimensional Thirring model.

We analyze the (2 + 1)-dimensional vector-vector type four-Fermi interaction (Thirring) model in the framework of the $\frac{1}{N}$ expansion. By solving the Dyson-Schwinger equation in the large-$N$ limit, we show that in the two-component formalism the fermions acquire parity-violating mass dynamically in the range of the dimensionless coupling $\ensuremath{\alpha}$, $0\ensuremath{\le}\ensuremath{\alpha}\ensuremath{\le}{\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{c}\ensuremath{\equiv}\frac{1}{16}\mathrm{exp}(\frac{\ensuremath{-}N{\ensuremath{\pi}}^{2}}{16})$. The symmetry breaking pattern is, however, in a way to conserve the overall parity of the theory such that the Chern-Simons term is not induced at any orders in $\frac{1}{N}$. ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{c}$ turns out to be a nonperturbative UV-fixed point in $\frac{1}{N}$. The $\ensuremath{\beta}$ function is calculated to be $\ensuremath{\beta}(\ensuremath{\alpha})=\ensuremath{-}2(\ensuremath{\alpha}\ensuremath{-}{\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{c})$ near the fixed point, and the UV-fixed point and the $\ensuremath{\beta}$ function are shown to be exact in the $\frac{1}{N}$ expansion.

Ising model in a time-dependent magnetic field.

We report the results of Monte Carlo simulations on a two-dimensional Ising model in a sinusoidally oscillating external magnetic field. We find evidence for a dynamical phase transition, supporting the results of recent mean-field and large-N analyses of this model. We also analyze the hysteresis loops as a function of the amplitude and frequency of the applied field, fitting our data to a proposed areal scaling law.

Partially ordered states in Ginzburg-Landau-Wilson models with cubic-type anisotropy.

We study the Ginzburg-Landau-Wilson M N-vector model with cubic-type anisotropy and obtain exact results in the large-N limit. We focus on the region of the parameter space in which cubic anisotropy favors, at low temperatures, long-range magnetic order of one of M N-component fields. This region is known to be, for sufficiently large MN, a runaway region of perturbative renormalization-group (RG) analysis, for the spatial dimensionality d less than four, what is usually interpreted to correspond to a fluctuation-induced first-order transition. The large-N analysis presented in this paper enables us to check the validity of this conjecture and to establish the structure of the phase diagram in any d and for all values of quartic couplings of the model. The most interesting outcome of this analysis is that, in a range of values of quartic couplings, the direct transition from paramagnetic to ferromagnetic phase splits into two consecutive phase transitions with a partially ordered phase occurring in the temperature range between these transitions. Discrete permutational symmetry of the M N-vector model (being restored in the paramagnetic phase) is spontaneously broken in the partially ordered phase; one of M N-vector fields becomes soft in this phase (as if there is a quadratic anisotropy, breaking permutational symmetry, present in the system). However, this partially ordered fluctuation induced phase has no long-range magnetic order.We find that such a phase is present in the phase diagram in any d if quartic couplings of the model are sufficiently strong. In the weak-coupling regime (which is usually believed to be tractable by RG analysis when d\ensuremath{\approxeq}4), we find (in agreement with RG) that, for 4\ensuremath{\ge}d\ensuremath{\ge}${d}_{c}$(M), the system exhibits a direct fluctuation-induced first-order transition and the partially ordered state is absent. However, for ${d}_{c}$(M)>d>2, the partially ordered state is universally present even in parts of the phase diagram having arbitrarily small quartic couplings. Possible situations occurring for finite N are discussed qualitatively. Systems favoring incommensurate modulated order on one of M equivalent pairs of wave vectors in q space can be modeled by M two-vector models. For these systems the partially ordered phase is a nematiclike orientationally ordered phase. We discuss the feasibility of observing such a phase in these systems.

Phase structure of theO(N)vector model

In a large-N analysis of the O(N) lambdaPhi/sup 4/ theory in four dimensions, we find that the O(N)-symmetric lowest-lying state is a metastable state. The decay rate of this false vacuum into a broken-symmetry state is, however, suppressed (approx.exp(-N)). Nevertheless, at finite temperature, we find that above a critical temperature T/sub c/ the only existing phase is a broken-symmetry phase with N-1 Goldstone bosons. This phase reflects the intrinsic instability of this theory, and the large-phi/sub c/ structure indicates that the renormalized lambdaPhi/sup 4/ theory is inconsistent. The only acceptable version of this theory is its regularized form which becomes a free-field theory as the regularization is removed.