Multi-party Settings Research Articles

Legislative Coalitions in Presidential Systems: The Case of Uruguay

The paper analyzes executive-legislative relations in Uruguay (1985-2005), and shows that even after controlling for ideological affinity, and accounting for the fact that ideology affects presence in the cabinet, legislators whose factions hold ministerial positions behave in a more pro-government way than what their ideology would predict. This result not only shows that coalitions “work,” but suggests that they work because the presidents use resources under their control to attract support from legislators. The paper presents a systematic analysis of executive-legislative relations in multiparty settings that makes use of the fact that non-ideologically contiguous coalitions often formed to separate the ideological from the strategic determinants of legislative behavior. It also contributes to the literature by presenting a new set of roll-call data, and, more generally, highlighting the risks of attempting to infer ideology directly from legislative behavior in presidential multiparty settings.

What is the Best Strategy to Obtain Legislative Support?: Survey Evidence from Brazilian State Assemblies

The legislative success of governments in Latin America has been explained by two main theories. For some authors, the main explanation involves the proactive and reactive powers of the chief executive. Other scholars argue that negotiations with deputies for portfolios and pork are the most important factors behind success in approving legislation. This paper proposes an innovative methodological strategy to test the mechanisms behind each of these theories. Original survey data of 12 Brazilian state-level assemblies is examined to assess elites' attitudes in regard to governors' strategies to obtain legislative support. Results suggest that there is not a unique equilibrium to the problem of coalition formation in multiparty settings. Deputies with concentrated constituencies, from more decentralized parties, and from conservative parties, tend to believe that the most efficient way a governor can obtain legislative support is to negotiate amendments with deputies. On the other hand, the more scattered a legislator's constituency and the more liberal or centralized his or her party, the more likely a deputy is to think that governors achieve better legislative success when they negotiate cabinet positions.

An introduction to entanglement measures

We review the theory of entanglement measures, concentrating mostly on the finite dimensional two-party case. Topics covered include: single-copy and asymptotic entanglement manipulation; the entanglement of formation; the entanglement cost; the distillable entanglement; the relative entropic measures; the squashed entanglement; log-negativity; the robustness monotones; the greatest cross-norm; uniqueness and extremality theorems. Infinite dimensional systems and multi-party settings will be discussed and an exteneive list of open research questione will be presented.

Assisted-care robot based on sociological interaction analysis

This paper presents our on-going work in developing service robots that provide assisted-care to the elderly in multi-party settings. In typical Japanese day-care facilities, multiple caregivers and visitors are co-present in the same room and any caregiver may provide assistance to any visitor. In order to effectively work in such settings, a robot should behave in a way that a person who needs assistance can easily initiate help from the robot. Based on findings from observations at several day-care facilities, we have developed a robot system that displays availability to multiple persons and then displays recipiency to an individual who initiates interaction with the robot. In this paper we detail this robot system and its experimental evaluation.

Inviting Participation in Organizational Change Through Ownership Talk

This article takes the practitioner’s view toward and focuses on participation through talk within multiparty settings of one process consulting case. From the perspective of discursive psychology, the authors ask what happens in interaction when the consultant is working to put into practice the ideal of active client participation in organizational change. They argue that participation is established when psychological ownership of the process is displayed through talk in interaction. This happens when what the authors call “ownership talk” is used: A person is sharing his or her views, interests, and experiences related to the change process.The authors provide detailed observations and interpretations about how local rules of displaying ownership talk are provided by the consultant and how they are negotiated, tested, and followed by the participants. The value of the ownership talk concept in developing theory and practices within the fields of organizational change, organizational development, and process consulting work is discussed.

Private multiparty sampling and approximation of vector combinations

We consider the problem of private efficient data mining of vertically-partitioned databases. Each of several parties holds a column of a data matrix (a vector) and the parties want to investigate the componentwise combination of their vectors. The parties want to minimize communication and local computation while guaranteeing privacy in the sense that no party learns more than necessary. Sublinear-communication private protocols have primarily been studied only in the two-party case. In contrast, this work focuses on multi-party settings. First, we give efficient private multiparty protocols for sampling a row of the data matrix and for computing arbitrary functions of a random row, where the row index is additively shared among two or more parties. These results can be used to obtain private approximation protocols for several useful combination functionalities. Moreover, these results have some interesting consequences for the general problem of reducing sublinear-communication secure multiparty computation to two-party private information retrieval (PIR). Second, we give protocols for computing approximations (summaries) of the componentwise sum, minimum, and maximum of the columns. Here, while providing a weaker privacy guarantee (where the approximation may leak up to the entire output vector), our protocols are extremely efficient. In particular, the required cryptographic overhead (compared to non-private solutions) is polylogarithmic in the number of rows.

Ballot design and split ticket voting in multiparty systems: Experimental evidence on information effects and vote choice

This article presents the results of a large-scale e-vote experiment, conducted during the 2005 Congressional Election in Argentina, measuring the effect of different e-vote designs on split ticket voting. The experiment demonstrates that ballot design and e-vote technology significantly affect split ticket voting and the overall outcome of elections in multiparty settings. We explain these differences by analyzing the information cues used by voters when searching for their preferred parties and candidates. We show that cues that reinforce party-centric information on the ballot, such as the party name or the party logo, significantly decrease split ticket voting. By contrast, priming on candidate-centric features in the ballot significantly increases split ticket voting. We test for biases that result from selectively disclosing information on candidates or parties among voters with different levels of information.

Candidate-driven ticket splitting in the 2000 Japanese elections

I offer a candidate-centered explanation for split-ticket voting patterns in the 2000 lower house elections in Japan. Drawing upon individual-level and aggregate data, I accurately estimate ticket splitting in Japan for the first time. I argue that ticket splitting in the mixed electoral system is frequently the result of unequal competition among the parties’ district candidates. Parties such as the LDP with more candidates fare much better in the SMD balloting than in the PR vote. This, and the disproportionality of the SMD vote–seat translation, contributes to the LDP's electoral victory. The analyses also demonstrate the difficulty of estimating ticket splitting in multiparty settings and validate the assumption that PR votes reflect sincere party preferences.

Turkish‐speaking First Graders in Norway Acquiring Second Language Vocabulary, Listening Comprehension and Literacy Skills

This study explored relationships between characteristics of classroom talk exposure and immigrant first graders' acquisition of second language oral skills (vocabulary and listening comprehension) and literacy skills. Twenty‐six children (mean age = 6.10 years) with Turkish as their first language and Norwegian as their second, attending various multilingual and ethnically diverse classrooms in Norway, were videotaped during classroom conversations. Classroom talk was coded for vocabulary richness, discursive complexity and emergent phonics talk and the children's oral language and literacy skills were assessed. Classroom vocabulary richness and discursive complexity predicted the children's second language vocabulary skills and listening comprehension after controlling for maternal education, but did not predict their literacy skills. The density of emergent phonics talk did not predict target children's code‐related skills in this sample. Applied perspectives related to second language learning in multiparty settings are discussed.

The nationalization of electoral change in the Americas

This paper examines the nationalization of electoral change in multiparty settings. We present a method to measure the relative magnitude of national and sub-national shifts in electoral support across parties and elections that is appropriate for the compositional structure of multiparty electoral data. We apply this new method to the analysis of legislative elections in six Latin American countries and the United States. Our findings indicate the widespread influence of local (i.e., state-specific) factors in electoral change, but highlight the drastic impact that intermittent nationalized shifts have on partisan support.

Regime Change and Ethnic Cleavages in Africa

This article explores a hitherto overlooked consequence of regime change in Africa. It shows how the shift from one-party to multiparty rule in the region altered the kinds of ethnic cleavages that structure political competition and conflict. The article demonstrates how the different strategic logics of political competition in one-party and multiparty settings create incentives for political actors to emphasize different kinds of ethnic identities: local-level identities (usually revolving around tribe or clan) in one-party elections and broader scale identities (usually revolving around region, language, or religion) in multiparty elections. The argument is illustrated with evidence from the 1991 and 1992 regime transitions in Zambia and Kenya.

An introduction to entanglement measures

We review the theory of entanglement measures, concentrating mostly on the finite dimensional two-party case. Topics covered include: single-copy and asymptotic entanglement manipulation; the entanglement of formation; the entanglement cost; the distillable entanglement; the relative entropic measures; the squashed entanglement; log-negativity; the robustness monotones; the greatest cross-norm; uniqueness and extremality theorems. Infinite dimensional systems and multi-party settings will be discussed briefly.

A dynamic discourse approach to classroom research

In this paper we propose a theoretical reassessment of the discourse-analytic tools that are used in classroom research and of the data that are addressed. To that end we present in-depth analyses of 1) an IRE structure in a first English (EFL) lesson in a Dutch secondary school; 2) episodes from Dutch as a second language classes in a school for refugee children; 3) two instructional units that were used as reflection data in a university teacher training course. All of these exhibit complex footing changes ( Goffman, 1981) and instances of co-speaking, muttering, whispering, overhearing etc. that are largely unexplored in classroom research. Yet these phenomena co-construct the interactional matrix that organizes participation and learning in multiparty settings. To shed light on what happens in the structural niches of turns and at the fuzzy edges of speaking-slots-in-progress we need a more dynamic and complex notion of context. Speaker/hearer roles may be embedded in or parasitic on each other along a continuum of official and informal or collusive stances. In our proposals to model emerging discourse complexity, subtle changes in register, bodily posture, tone of voice, rhythm and pitch are an integral part of what constitutes ‘the data’.

Narratives beget narratives

An ethnographic study of Turkish children's conversationally occasioned narratives indicates that one of the instigators of conversational narratives in children's talk is peer coparticipants' narratives. This paper examines Turkish preschool children's rounds of narratives in multi-party talk-in-interaction. The data come from 60 hours of naturalistically collected talk of preschool children aged 3-to-6 in two different preschools. The results show that rounds of narratives occur in certain types of multi-party settings, where the child participants conceived of the teacher as the mutual audience. The analyses of the data indicate that children often achieve thematic relevance with prior stories either through emulating the same content or introducing elaborations to the topics presented in prior narratives. The discussion focuses on the emergence of narratives as linguistic structures from certain participation configurations and sequential interactional positioning strategies in preschool group talk.

The general election in Japan, June 2000

I offer a candidate-centered explanation for split-ticket voting patterns in the 2000 lower house elections in Japan. Drawing upon individual-level and aggregate data, I accurately estimate ticket splitting in Japan for the first time. I argue that ticket splitting in the mixed electoral system is frequently the result of unequal competition among the parties’ district candidates. Parties such as the LDP with more candidates fare much better in the SMD balloting than in the PR vote. This, and the disproportionality of the SMD vote–seat translation, contributes to the LDP's electoral victory. The analyses also demonstrate the difficulty of estimating ticket splitting in multiparty settings and validate the assumption that PR votes reflect sincere party preferences.