Incentives For Parties Research Articles

Party preferences for climate policy and the renewable energy transition in Spain’s multilevel democracy

The growing influence of regional governments in shaping climate policy and driving the renewable energy transition in multilevel democracies like Spain provides incentives for parties in favor of decentralization to emphasize these issues. Recent research has shown that such parties act as climate pioneers at the regional tier of government, driven by their desire to assert stronger subnational authority. To investigate these dynamics at the national level, this article examines the manifestos of the parties that won seats in the 2016, 2019, and 2023 Spanish national elections. The empirical findings suggest that parties are more likely to prioritize climate change and the renewable energy transition if they are pro-decentralization. By emphasizing how multilevel governance strengthens these priorities through party competition and the quest for regional autonomy, this article fills an important gap spanning decentralization and policy preferences related to climate and renewable energy.

Fomenting conflict

I study information disclosure as a means to create conflict. A sender aims to keep two parties engaged in a war of attrition and reveals information about their relative strength. In the unique Markov Perfect Equilibrium, the sender employs “shifting rhetoric”: she alternates pipetting good and bad news about each party, so that neither appears too strong. Information designed to induce one party to continue fighting weakens the other party's incentives. This spillover effect may lead to early resolution and leave the sender worse off. With commitment, the sender provides delayed noisy disclosures. A partisan sender, who favors one party, instead provides information which leads to immediate resolution.

Recognizing and Seizing Opportunities for Peace and Unification of Vietnam Following the Geneva Convention from 1954 To 1960

Purpose: The article provides an overview of the Vietnam War from 1954 to 1960, describing in detail the process of recognizing and seizing opportunities for peaceful reunification of the country after 1954 in Vietnam. Methods: The article clarifies the research problem using a combination of historical, logical, and analytical methods. Results and Conclusions: The article provides an overall, detailed picture of the basis for the Vietnam Labor Party and the Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to recognize and seize the opportunity to peacefully unify the country in the period 1954–1960; the plots, acts of repression, and sabotage by the US and the Saigon government (1954–1960); and the troubles and losses to the Southern Revolution when they fail to recognize and seize the chance for success. Research implication: The article provides truthful historical arguments and efforts of the Party, the Government, and the Vietnamese people to defeat the invasion and divide plots by the US and its henchmen to achieve the goal of unifying the country. Originality/value: The article gives valuable insights into the real situation in Vietnam after 1954 and the plans and intentions of relevant parties on the issue of the unification and division of Vietnam. Drawing on previous failure lessons, it emphasizes the importance of recognizing and seizing opportunities to win the revolution war.

The Myth of the Inevitable: How the Mistakes of the Powerful Facilitated the Rise of Nazi Germany

When examining the lead-up to World War II, Adolf Hitler's invasion of Poland is often seen as the catalyst for the war. However, this oversimplification neglects the circumstances that led Hitler to such a position. This essay challenges the prevailing notion that Hitler and the Nazis attained power solely through unwavering determination and exceptional political acumen. Instead, it argues that mistakes and misinterpretations by German and international leaders played a crucial role in facilitating the Nazi Party's rise to power and the establishment of the Third Reich. The Weimar leadership's political and economic miscalculations, combined with their misunderstandings of Hitler and his party's intentions, created an environment ripe for Hitler's seizure of power in 1933. Additionally, the miscalculations and misreadings of influential nations like Great Britain, France, and the United States enabled the Nazi regime to solidify its power and pursue expansionist goals while missing crucial opportunities to halt its progress.

Spatial Distance and Representation in Closed PR List: Revisiting the U-Curve Argument

Abstract The authors are testing the patterns of geographical representation in single nationwide district closed-list PR systems, in the framework of an earlier study made by Latner and McGann (2005), who suggested that MPs mostly reside in central metropolitan areas, as well as in distant regions, to the detriment of descriptive representation of areas adjacent to the capital. In this way, spatial distance serves as an incentive for parties to nominate lists comprised mostly of candidates from metropolitan urban centres who can easily reach the mid-distance municipalities for campaigning and constituency service, but also of those candidates residing in peripheral regions in which there is some sort of political or ethno-cultural saliency, prompting the voters to prefer their local candidates over capital city politicians. Authors are offering a novel approach of measuring and comparing spatial distance to the data on representation of local administrative units and regional subdivisions of four countries (Montenegro, Netherlands, Serbia and Slovakia). While the findings indeed indicate overrepresentation of capital cities and underrepresentation of neighbouring areas, the representation of peripheral areas is not significantly pronounced and seemingly depends more on a contextual case-to-case basis than on a general pattern related to spatial distance producing political or ethno-cultural saliency.

Patterns of (party competition in) democracy: Voter certainty and party strategy in different institutional settings

AbstractObjectivesWhile some argue that parties reduce voter uncertainty to attract more votes, others claim that parties increase vote shares when beclouding their policy positions. To address the puzzle, I argue that as the degree of consensual characteristics increases, strategic uncertainty is electorally more helpful because parties in consensus models should consider the governing coalition and facilitate cooperation with other parties due to multiparty systems.MethodsUsing the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, I employ multilevel modeling to analyze 335 parties in 32 countries including both advanced and postcommunist democracies.ResultsI find empirical evidence that as the political institutions have more consensus models, it is more beneficial (or less costly at least) for parties to pursue voter uncertainty with broad appealing strategies primarily in advanced democracies.ConclusionThe findings suggest that democratic institutional settings shape the incentives for parties to adopt either broad or narrow appeals in the context of party competition.

Sex peptide regulates female receptivity through serotoninergic neurons in Drosophila

The courtship ritual is a dynamic interplay between males and females. Courtship successfully leading to copulation is determined by the intention of both parties which is conveyed by complex action sequences. In Drosophila, the neural mechanisms controlling the female's willingness to mate, or sexual receptivity, have only recently become the focus of investigations. Here, we report that pre-mating sexual receptivity in females requires activity within a subset of serotonergic projection neurons (SPNs), which positively regulate courtship success. Of interest, a male-derived sex peptide, SP, which was transferred to females during copulation acted to inhibit the activity of SPN and suppressed receptivity. Downstream of 5-HT, subsets of 5-HT7 receptor neurons played critical roles in SP-induced suppression of sexual receptivity. Together, our study reveals a complex serotonin signaling system in the central brain of Drosophila which manages the female's desire to mate.

Toward a Super-COP? Timing, Temporality, and Rethinking World Climate Governance

Toward a Super-COP? Timing, Temporality, and Rethinking World Climate Governance

Contract Law’s Red Herring: Exposing “Intention” as a Guise for Consideration

This paper describes and evaluates the contested fourth requirement for contract formation: the intention of both parties that their agreement be legally enforceable (“legal intention”). I begin with an overview of the jurisprudence on legal intention, ending with the Supreme Court of Canada’s most recent pronouncement in Ethiopian Orthodox Church of Canada St. Mary Cathedral v Aga. While the Court in this case affirmed that legal intention is to be treated as a fourth requirement, its analysis reveals precisely the reason why it should not be: when courts purport to analyze legal intention, an inherently difficult value to assess, they often lapse into a veiled assessment of consideration instead. I draw on Peter Benson's conception of "robust consideration" to argue that we should dispense with the legal intention requirement. In its place, a clear test for robust consideration would allow courts to conduct self-aware analyses free from contorted intention assessments. I conclude by offering an interpretation of Balfour v Balfour, the seminar case supporting a legal intention requirement, that is consistent with my proposed approach to contract formation.

Faktori teritorijalne reprezentativnosti u zatvorenom proporcionalnom izbornom sistemu - slučaj Republike Srbije

The author maps the patterns of geographical representation in the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia over the last nine electoral cycles, since the year 2000. During that period, a closed-list PR system is implemented in Serbian elections, within a single nationwide constituency. According to the theoretical expectations, such a system is unsuitable for equal geographical representation, because voters choose national lists as a whole, without affecting the order of the candidates, so the system does not provide incentives for parties to offer regionally balanced lists. However, even within that framework, a significant number of elected representatives come from different local subdivisions. Within districts as this paper's level of analysis, the author is determining underrepresentation and overrepresentation patterns, as well as potential demographic, economic, or geographical factors affecting the representation ratio, i.e. the share of elected representatives in relation to the share of the district's population.

Herd Behavior and Cascading in Capital Markets: A Review and Synthesis

We review theory and evidence relating to herd behaviour, payoff and reputational interactions, social learning, and informational cascades in capital markets. We offer a simple taxonomy of effects, and evaluate how alternative theories may help explain evidence on the behavior of investors, firms, and analysts. We consider both incentives for parties to engage in herding or cascading, and the incentives for parties to protect against or take advantage of herding or cascading by others.

Living up to expectations? EU politicization and party Europeanization in Flanders and the Netherlands

At the turn of the century, both academics and practitioners anticipated the Europeanization of national politics and political parties. One major expectation was that parties would adapt their organisation and behaviour to the existence of the EU and the functioning of its institutions. However, the early 2000s poured cold water on those expectations: the slacking politicization of EU affairs, it was concluded, created few incentives for parties to adapt, and so there was no meaningful Europeanization to speak of. EU politicization became the necessary pre-condition for party Europeanization. Today, however, that pre-condition seems (partly) fulfilled, as scholars are observing increasing EU politicization. Hence, we ask whether parties live up to expectations and, facing a politicised context, are today showing signs of party organizational Europeanization (POE). Based on a comparative case study of Dutch and Flemish parties, who function in differently politicized environments, we find that Europeanization remains limited. We conclude that it is likely not EU politicization holding parties back, but instead point towards the broader institutional misfit between national and European politics. We call on future research to further elaborate on this misfit, which might be the Achilles heel for EU democracy.

Identification of Shortwave Radio Communication Behavior Based on Autocorrelation Spectrogram Features

Cognitive communication behavior is becoming a research hotspot in the field of communication confrontation. In theory, the behavioral intention of noncooperating parties can be obtained by analyzing communication signals. Considering the complexity of the actual electromagnetic environment, even when the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is low, a certain accuracy still needs to be guaranteed. In this paper, according to five types of physical burst waveforms defined by the shortwave radio interoperability standard, a signal feature extraction method based on autocorrelation spectrogram features is proposed, and a two-input convolutional neural network (CNN) for classification is designed to improve the identification ability of shortwave communication behavior. The experimental results illustrate that the five kinds of shortwave radio communication behaviors can be accurately identified even when the noise is large. The research in this paper can directly analyze the communication behavior through physical layer signal without demodulation, which has the ability to grasp the communication behavior of the shortwave radio station in real time.

Factors Affecting Borrowers’ Intention in Peer-To-Peer Lending Platform in Mongolia

The current paper aims to examine factors that influence borrowers’ intention to borrow from Peer-to-Peer lending platform in Mongolia. This topic has been attracting researchers’ interest especially since 2008 when the 3rd round of fintech development starts over the developed countries. The most of those studies focus on investigating the factors that explain borrowers’ intention to borrow, and a few of them research this perspective from the investors’ side. It is hardly to find the study that explain intentions of parties to participate in a P2P lending platform in Mongolia. Our research tries to fill this gap by studying factors influencing borrowers’ intention in Mongolian fintech market. We have used the TAM model as a theoretical framework and have collected survey questionnaires from investors and borrowers from all fintech companies in Mongolia. The result shows that borrowers’ intention is mostly driven by initial trust and perceived risk. Other variables, perceived ease of use and perceived security, have no impact on borrowers’ decisions to participate in P2P platform.

Factors Affecting Borrowers’ Intention in Peer-To-Peer Lending Platform in Mongolia

The current paper aims to examine factors that influence borrowers’ intention to borrow from Peer-to-Peer lending platform in Mongolia. This topic has been attracting researchers’ interest especially since 2008 when the 3rd round of fintech development starts over the developed countries. The most of those studies focus on investigating the factors that explain borrowers’ intention to borrow, and a few of them research this perspective from the investors’ side. It is hardly to find the study that explain intentions of parties to participate in a P2P lending platform in Mongolia. Our research tries to fill this gap by studying factors influencing borrowers’ intention in Mongolian fintech market. We have used the TAM model as a theoretical framework and have collected survey questionnaires from investors and borrowers from all fintech companies in Mongolia. The result shows that borrowers’ intention is mostly driven by initial trust and perceived risk. Other variables, perceived ease of use and perceived security, have no impact on borrowers’ decisions to participate in P2P platform.

Modern Issues and Challenges in Contract Frustration

There is no doubt that the corona virus (COVID-19) pandemic has impacted almost every sphere of human endeavours, including the performance of a contract. The significance of the concepts of frustration and force majeure as principles of contract in the current context of the COVID-19 pandemic cannot be overemphasized. While frustration, a common law doctrine is implied by law to release parties from their obligations, force majeure clauses look at the express intention of parties in dealing with supervening occurrences. This article intends to simplify the understanding of the overlapping nature of frustration, force majeure and COVID-19 in modern contracts.

The law of international treaties in the scientific works of Hersch Lauterpacht

The article examines the doctrinal contribution of Professor Hersch Lauterpacht to the development of International Treaty Law. Based on the analysis of Hersch Lauterpacht's scientific work in the field of international treaty law, his contribution to the development of concepts of codification and progressive development of international law, principles of interpretation, and the relationship between the principle of effective interpretation and intentions of the parties to treaty.
 It is emphasized that, according to Lauterpacht, the codification of international law is necessary for the international community as a whole, so it should be carried out within the UN and aimed at its general acceptance by states. Therefore, all states should be given equal opportunities to participate in and join the work on codification.
 It is pointed up that among the principles of interpretation of international treaties, the main of them, H. Lauterpacht singles out the principle of good faith. The scholar considers this norm as one of the general principles of law recognized by civilized states in the matter of interpretation.
 Particular attention is paid to the doctrinal views of H. Lauterpacht on the relationship between the principle of effective interpretation and the intentions of the parties to the agreement. The researcher has noted that the intention of the parties should be a primary factor in the interpretation of agreements. According to H. Lauterpacht, in the interpretation of treaties, any considerations - effectiveness or inefficiency - which tend to turn certain intentions of the parties into a factor of secondary importance, are incompatible with the true purpose of interpretation. In fact, applying the principle of efficiency, the court does not replace the intentions of the parties and does not replace it with a third factor. Professor H. Lauterpacht, exploring the relationship between the principle of efficiency and the common intention of the treaty parties raises one of the most controversial and elusive issues of jurisprudence - the nature and limits of the judicial function. In his view, this function is largely to interpret the rule of law, regardless of the source in which it is set out. In the international sphere, the problem is complicated by the existence of a number of factors, such as the lack of common intention of the parties directly related to the subject matter of the dispute; international treaties or individual provisions are often a political substitute rather than a legal expression of the agreement of the parties.

Secure and Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning via Co-Utility

The decentralized nature of federated learning, that often leverages the power of edge devices, makes it vulnerable to attacks against privacy and security. The privacy risk for a peer is that the model update she computes on her private data may, when sent to the model manager, leak information on those private data. Even more obvious are security attacks, whereby one or several malicious peers return wrong model updates in order to disrupt the learning process and lead to a wrong model being learned. In this article, we build a federated learning framework that offers privacy to the participating peers as well as security against the Byzantine and poisoning attacks. Our framework consists of several protocols that provide strong privacy to the participating peers via unlinkable anonymity and that are rationally sustainable based on the co-utility property. In other words, no rational party is interested in deviating from the proposed protocols. We leverage the notion of co-utility to build a decentralized co-utile reputation management system that provides incentives for parties to adhere to the protocols. Unlike privacy protection via differential privacy, our approach preserves the values of model updates and, hence, the accuracy of plain federated learning; unlike privacy protection via update aggregation, our approach preserves the ability to detect bad model updates while substantially reducing the computational overhead compared to methods based on homomorphic encryption.

The Semiotics of the Peace Rituals (Pomaas Atag to Kosunayan) of Obo Manobo People

This study looked into the meanings of objects used in peace ritual, how these objects communicate the intention of parties involved, and how the ritual constitutes ideology on peace among the Obo Manobo people. Particularly, it is a semiotic reading of the Obo Manobo’s ritual for peace which employed Halliday’s social and functional approach to language and Lemke’s semiotic thinking. The peace ritual is found to be a semiotic system that embodies the values, symbols, and ideas of the Obo Manobos as a group. It is a multimodal communicative event that comprises various integrating elements to language, thoughts, feelings and aspirations, dramatizes collective representations, encodes the culture of the Obo Manobos and, therefore, conveys ideologies on peace. As embedded in the ritual, the Obo Manobos believe that peace is consequential effect of how they observe customary laws of the tribe, and disregarding this will result to punishment and chaos.

Hydropower Pricing Options for Cross-Border Electricity Trading in China Based on Bi-Level Optimization

Regional cross-border electricity trading is popular in price and cooperation. It is a reliable path to alleviate the shortage of power supply during rapid economic growth. As an important export commodity, the pricing options for hydropower directly relate to the cooperation intention of business parties. This study demonstrates the price formation methods and internal relationships of cascade hydropower stations in CBET. To simulate the decision-making of a bilateral forward contract, a bi-level optimization model was constructed, and the objectives of each layer represent the interests of both parties. The BOM was linearized with Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions and strong duality, and finally solved using mixed-integer linear programming. The prices of CHSs in southwestern China were calculated under different pricing options and the results were absorbed in an actual transaction case. Consequently, the complementarity between different exporting countries was verified. The most suitable pricing option for CBET was determined, that is the unified electricity price based on the marginal cost, to be 481 CNY/MW∙h, which is 20% to 60% higher than the thermal and photovoltaic from other countries. Furthermore, national policy support and economic subsidies are key guarantees for the sustainable development of CBET, which can reduce the discount electricity price to below that of thermal generation by 30%.