The Price of Collaboration: How Authoritarian States Retain Control

How does access to foreign or independent media affect the operation of a state security apparatus? This article answers this question concentrating on two characteristics of the informant network of the East German Stasi: the number of informants and their “price.” Exposure to West German TV (WGTV) had the potential to decrease the supply of informants and increase the demand for them, pushing up the value of the payments the informants received, but leaving their quantity theoretically ambiguous. I verify this reasoning using a rare original data set of Stasi informants. Results show that informants were given approximately 70 East German marks worth of rewards more per year in the areas that had access to WGTV, as compared with areas with no reception—ironically an amount roughly equivalent to the cost of an annual East German TV subscription. These findings demonstrate how an authoritarian state can counteract the potentially destabilizing effect of foreign media.

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Embedding Undersampling Rotation Forest for Imbalanced Problem

Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience ◽

10.1155/2018/6798042 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 2018 ◽

pp. 1-15 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Huaping Guo ◽

Xiaoyu Diao ◽

Hongbing Liu

Keyword(s):

Imbalanced Data ◽

Feature Space ◽

Original Data ◽

Training Set ◽

Data Set ◽

Minority Class ◽

Rotation Forest ◽

Novel Method ◽

Individual Classifier ◽

The Cost

Rotation Forest is an ensemble learning approach achieving better performance comparing to Bagging and Boosting through building accurate and diverse classifiers using rotated feature space. However, like other conventional classifiers, Rotation Forest does not work well on the imbalanced data which are characterized as having much less examples of one class (minority class) than the other (majority class), and the cost of misclassifying minority class examples is often much more expensive than the contrary cases. This paper proposes a novel method called Embedding Undersampling Rotation Forest (EURF) to handle this problem (1) sampling subsets from the majority class and learning a projection matrix from each subset and (2) obtaining training sets by projecting re-undersampling subsets of the original data set to new spaces defined by the matrices and constructing an individual classifier from each training set. For the first method, undersampling is to force the rotation matrix to better capture the features of the minority class without harming the diversity between individual classifiers. With respect to the second method, the undersampling technique aims to improve the performance of individual classifiers on the minority class. The experimental results show that EURF achieves significantly better performance comparing to other state-of-the-art methods.

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A Zero-Sum Game? Repression and Protest in China

Government and Opposition ◽

10.1017/gov.2017.24 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 54 (2) ◽

pp. 309-335 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Yao Li

Keyword(s):

Original Data ◽

Contentious Politics ◽

Authoritarian Regimes ◽

The State ◽

Data Set ◽

Systematic Analysis ◽

Quantitative Evidence ◽

Authoritarian State ◽

Zero Sum ◽

The Enemy Within: Personal Rule, Coups, and Civil War in Africa

World Politics ◽

10.1017/s0043887111000049 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 63 (2) ◽

pp. 300-346 ◽

Cited By ~ 152

Author(s):

Philip Roessler

Keyword(s):

Civil War ◽

Central Government ◽

Original Data ◽

Sub Saharan Africa ◽

Joint Control ◽

Political Survival ◽

Data Set ◽

Ethnic Exclusion ◽

Sub Saharan ◽

The Cost

Why do rulers employ ethnic exclusion at the risk of civil war? Focusing on the region of sub-Saharan Africa, the author attributes this costly strategy to the commitment problem that arises in personalist regimes between elites who hold joint control of the state's coercive apparatus. As no faction can be sure that others will not exploit their violent capabilities to usurp power, elites maneuver to protect their privileged position and safeguard against others' first-a rising internal threat, rulers move to eliminate their rivals to guarantee their personal and political survival. But the cost of such a strategy, especially when carried out along ethnic lines, is that it increases the risk of a future civil war. To test this argument, the author employs the Ethnic Power Relations data set combined with original data on the ethnicity of conspirators of coups and rebellions in Africa. He finds that in Africa ethnic exclusion substitutes civil war risk for coup risk. And rulers are significantly more likely to exclude their coconspirators—the very friends and allies who helped them come to power—than other included groups, but at the cost of increasing the risk of a future civil war with their former allies. In the first three years after being purged from the central government, coconspirators and their coethnics are sixteen times more likely to rebel than when they were represented at the apex of the regime.

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Repression, Redistribution and the Problem of Authoritarian Control

East European Politics and Societies and Cultures ◽

10.1177/0888325416670241 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 31 (1) ◽

pp. 68-92 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Henry Thomson

Keyword(s):

Comparative Advantage ◽

Original Data ◽

Policy Formulation ◽

Mass Mobilization ◽

Secret Police ◽

Data Set ◽

Redistributive Policies ◽

Comparative Advantages ◽

East German ◽

Authoritarian Politics

Theories of authoritarianism assert that autocratic governments follow repressive and redistributive policies which impede mass mobilization, mitigate economic grievances and prevent regime instability. However, policy formulation and implementation remain opaque and under-theorized elements of authoritarian politics. I argue that the mix of repressive and redistributive policies chosen by a regime is a function of intra-elite conflict between hard-liners and soft-liners. The power of the two factions and their influence on policy evolve as members of the elite learn to judge the comparative advantages of the regime in repression and redistribution. Hard-liners will be ascendant in regimes with a comparative advantage in repression, while soft-liners will be ascendant in regimes with a comparative advantage in redistribution. I illustrate these arguments with an account of the East German regime’s response to the 17 June uprising in 1953, including analysis of an original data set on secret police informants and food supplies after the unrest.

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The Cost of Doing Business: Congressional Requests, Cost, and Allocation of Presidential Resources

Political Research Quarterly ◽

10.1177/1065912918763748 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 71 (4) ◽

pp. 813-825

Author(s):

Brandon Rottinghaus ◽

Philip D. Waggoner

Keyword(s):

Cost Benefit ◽

Original Data ◽

Political Context ◽

The Political ◽

Data Set ◽

Scarce Resources ◽

Doing Business ◽

Trade Offs ◽

The Cost

Executive-legislative interactions operate with cost-benefit trade-offs. Presidents possess several material options in granting Congressional requests to leverage Congressional support but must also marshal these scarce resources. We argue presidents should strategically grant requests from members of Congress for a range of executive actions based upon the cost of the request and the political context. Using an original data set of nearly 4,000 internal Congressional requests made during the Eisenhower, Ford, and H. W. Bush administrations, we find that presidents are strategic in granting requests, where the cost of the request is an important consideration when deciding whether or not to approve a legislator request, especially on executive appointments but not on legislative matters. Ideological proximity to the president matters more than partisanship in granting requests. Presidents are sensitive to cost when ideology is concerned but less so when granting requests to committee chairs. We conclude by highlighting the implications for interbranch bargaining.

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Bring More Data!—A Good Advice? Removing Separation in Logistic Regression by Increasing Sample Size

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health ◽

10.3390/ijerph16234658 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 16 (23) ◽

pp. 4658 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Šinkovec ◽

Geroldinger ◽

Heinze

Keyword(s):

Logistic Regression ◽

Sample Size ◽

Original Data ◽

Parameter Estimates ◽

Small Data ◽

Data Sets ◽

Data Set ◽

Logistic Regression Models ◽

Good Advice ◽

The Cost

The parameters of logistic regression models are usually obtained by the method of maximum likelihood (ML). However, in analyses of small data sets or data sets with unbalanced outcomes or exposures, ML parameter estimates may not exist. This situation has been termed ‘separation’ as the two outcome groups are separated by the values of a covariate or a linear combination of covariates. To overcome the problem of non-existing ML parameter estimates, applying Firth’s correction (FC) was proposed. In practice, however, a principal investigator might be advised to ‘bring more data’ in order to solve a separation issue. We illustrate the problem by means of examples from colorectal cancer screening and ornithology. It is unclear if such an increasing sample size (ISS) strategy that keeps sampling new observations until separation is removed improves estimation compared to applying FC to the original data set. We performed an extensive simulation study where the main focus was to estimate the cost-adjusted relative efficiency of ML combined with ISS compared to FC. FC yielded reasonably small root mean squared errors and proved to be the more efficient estimator. Given our findings, we propose not to adapt the sample size when separation is encountered but to use FC as the default method of analysis whenever the number of observations or outcome events is critically low.

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"Bring More Data!" – A Good Advice? Removing Separation in Logistic Regression by Increasing Sample Size

10.20944/preprints201910.0321.v1 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Hana Šinkovec ◽

Angelika Geroldinger ◽

Georg Heinze

Keyword(s):

Logistic Regression ◽

Sample Size ◽

Original Data ◽

Parameter Estimates ◽

Small Data ◽

Data Sets ◽

Data Set ◽

Logistic Regression Models ◽

Good Advice ◽

The Cost

The parameters of logistic regression models are usually obtained by the method of maximum likelihood (ML). However, in analyses of small data sets or data sets with unbalanced outcomes or exposures, ML parameter estimates may not exist. This situation has been termed “separation” as the two outcome groups are separated by the values of a covariate or a linear combination of covariates. To overcome the problem of non-existing ML parameter estimates, applying Firth’s correction (FC) was proposed. In practice, however, a principal investigator might be advised to “bring more data” in order to solve a separation issue. We illustrate the problem by means of an examples from colorectal cancer screening and ornithology. It is unclear if such an increasing sample size (ISS) strategy that keeps sampling new observations until separation is removed improves estimation compared to applying FC to the original data set. We performed an extensive simulation study where the main focus was to estimate the cost-adjusted relative efficiency of ML combined with ISS compared to FC. FC yielded reasonably small root mean squared errors and proved to be the more efficient estimator. Given our findings, we propose not to adapt the sample size when separation is encountered but to use FC as the default method of analysis whenever the number of observations or outcome events is critically low.

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Rotational Characteristics of the Green Solar Corona: 1947-1991

International Astronomical Union Colloquium ◽

10.1017/s0252921100025197 ◽

1994 ◽

Vol 144 ◽

pp. 139-141 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

J. Rybák ◽

V. Rušin ◽

M. Rybanský

Keyword(s):

Solar Corona ◽

World Wide ◽

Rotation Period ◽

Original Data ◽

Coronal Emission ◽

Time Intervals ◽

Data Set ◽

The World ◽

Coronal Emission Line ◽

Homogeneous Data

AbstractFe XIV 530.3 nm coronal emission line observations have been used for the estimation of the green solar corona rotation. A homogeneous data set, created from measurements of the world-wide coronagraphic network, has been examined with a help of correlation analysis to reveal the averaged synodic rotation period as a function of latitude and time over the epoch from 1947 to 1991.The values of the synodic rotation period obtained for this epoch for the whole range of latitudes and a latitude band ±30° are 27.52±0.12 days and 26.95±0.21 days, resp. A differential rotation of green solar corona, with local period maxima around ±60° and minimum of the rotation period at the equator, was confirmed. No clear cyclic variation of the rotation has been found for examinated epoch but some monotonic trends for some time intervals are presented.A detailed investigation of the original data and their correlation functions has shown that an existence of sufficiently reliable tracers is not evident for the whole set of examinated data. This should be taken into account in future more precise estimations of the green corona rotation period.

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Electing the Senate

10.23943/princeton/9780691163161.001.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Wendy J. Schiller ◽

Charles Stewart III

Keyword(s):

Original Data ◽

State Legislators ◽

Internal Conflict ◽

Data Set ◽

Senate Elections ◽

Political Actors ◽

The Public ◽

Seventeenth Amendment ◽

The People ◽

Election Process

From 1789 to 1913, U.S. senators were not directly elected by the people—instead the Constitution mandated that they be chosen by state legislators. This radically changed in 1913, when the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, giving the public a direct vote. This book investigates the electoral connections among constituents, state legislators, political parties, and U.S. senators during the age of indirect elections. The book finds that even though parties controlled the partisan affiliation of the winning candidate for Senate, they had much less control over the universe of candidates who competed for votes in Senate elections and the parties did not always succeed in resolving internal conflict among their rank and file. Party politics, money, and personal ambition dominated the election process, in a system originally designed to insulate the Senate from public pressure. The book uses an original data set of all the roll call votes cast by state legislators for U.S. senators from 1871 to 1913 and all state legislators who served during this time. Newspaper and biographical accounts uncover vivid stories of the political maneuvering, corruption, and partisanship—played out by elite political actors, from elected officials, to party machine bosses, to wealthy business owners—that dominated the indirect Senate elections process. The book raises important questions about the effectiveness of Constitutional reforms, such as the Seventeenth Amendment, that promised to produce a more responsive and accountable government.

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Styles of Representation in Constituencies in the Homeland and Abroad: The Case of Italy

Parliamentary Affairs ◽

10.1093/pa/gsaa063 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Eva Østergaard-Nielsen ◽

Stefano Camatarri

Keyword(s):

Original Data ◽

Role Orientation ◽

International Mobility ◽

Data Set ◽

Democratic Representation ◽

Public Debates ◽

At Home

Abstract The role orientation of political representatives and candidates is a longstanding concern in studies of democratic representation. The growing trend in countries to allow citizens abroad to candidate in homeland elections from afar provides an interesting opportunity for understanding how international mobility and context influences ideas of representation among these emigrant candidates. In public debates, emigrant candidates are often portrayed as delegates of the emigrant constituencies. However, drawing on the paradigmatic case of Italy and an original data set comprising emigrant candidates, we show that the perceptions of styles of representation abroad are more complex. Systemic differences between electoral districts at home and abroad are relevant for explaining why and how candidates develop a trustee or delegate orientation.

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