scholarly journals Why do voters vote? Theoretical concepts and experimental results

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 204-226
Author(s):  
A.P. Zaostrovtsev ◽  
◽  
V.V. Matveev ◽  

The article examines the evolution of the analysis of voters’ behavior when searching for an answer to the question: Why does the a voter vote? It is shown how the approach to the voter as a rational egoistic investor gave rise to what is commonly called the “voter’s paradox” in political and economic theory. Further search was aimed at explaining this paradox. On the one hand, the concept of an expressive voter appears, who expresses himself through participation in elections, on the other hand, we are talking about an altruistic voter who overcomes egoism. The latest theoretical finding was the explanation of participation in voting by attracting “relational goods” that differ in their qualities from both public and private goods. With this approach, the “voter’s paradox” finds the most consistent solution. And it is in this approach the shift from methodological individualism to institutional individualism is most clearly manifested. The authors of the article highlight this shift as a new trend in explaining the reasons for voting. At the same time, it is argued that the considered conceptual diversity is a reflection of the multidimensional features of human nature, and it is this fact that gives rise to the ambiguity and contradiction of experimental results.

1948 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 853-859
Author(s):  
R. F. A. Altman

Abstract As numerous investigators have shown, some of the nonrubber components of Hevea latex have a decided accelerating action on the process of vulcanization. A survey of the literature on this subject points to the validity of certain general facts. 1. Among the nonrubber components of latex which have been investigated, certain nitrogenous bases appear to be most important for accelerating the rate of vulcanization. 2. These nitrogen bases apparently occur partly naturally in fresh latex, and partly as the result of putrefaction, heating, and other decomposition processes. 3. The nitrogen bases naturally present in fresh latex at later stages have been identified by Altman to be trigonelline, stachhydrine, betonicine, choline, methylamine, trimethylamine, and ammonia. These bases are markedly active in vulcanization, as will be seen in the section on experimental results. 4. The nitrogenous substances formed by the decomposition processes have only partly been identified, on the one hand as tetra- and pentamethylene diamine and some amino acids, on the other hand as alkaloids, proline, diamino acids, etc. 5. It has been generally accepted that these nitrogenous substances are derived from the proteins of the latex. 6. Decomposition appears to be connected with the formation of a considerable amount of acids. 7. The production of volatile nitrogen bases as a rule accompanies the decomposition processes. These volatile products have not been identified. 8. The active nitrogen bases, either already formed or derived from complex nitrogenous substances, seem to be soluble in water but only slightly soluble in acetone.


2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-234
Author(s):  
Caroline Cordeiro Viana e Silva ◽  
Alexsandro Eugenio Pereira

Abstract The expansion of the security agenda was at the basis of the emergence of new theoretical concepts in the field of studies on international security. One example is the concept of securitisation, developed by the Copenhagen School, which makes it possible to examine, on the one hand, new threats to the security of countries and, on the other hand, the policies through which they seek to address them. Based on this concept, the article argues that drug trafficking was securitised by the Brazilian government in the period of 2011-2016. From 2016, with the issue of Decree nº 8903, the matter returned to the stage of ‘politicisation’ as understood by the Copenhagen School. The decree marked, therefore, a process of desecuritisation of the issue in Brazil, since it revoked the Strategic Border Plan, resulting in the loss of the temporary and emergency nature of the ‘Ágata’ operations. This article analyses the development of Brazilian legislation since 1976 on this matter and carries out, for the period 2011 to 2016, content analysis of the narrative on securitisation. In addition, this work examines the guidelines and nature of the Brazilian government’s public policies aimed at combating drug trafficking.


wisdom ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (5) ◽  
pp. 47
Author(s):  
Ana Bazac

The paper aims at emphasising the significances of the concept of dignity through the lens of the relational character of this concept. Even though it appeared in modernity as substantive/essence, as an autonomous state that might be attached to man – and it was developed in the frame of methodological individualism –, dignity is a construct depending on the historical and social relations, thus the culture and values dominant in a certain time. And, because the consideration of the others is assumed by the individual who internalises the intertwining and force of values in the way he seems to not detach his own being from dignity, the paper demonstrates that, although there is an ontological basis of dignity – the human conatus – the concept of dignity is incomprehensible without connect it to, or more, without integrating it within the social complex.First of all, the individual translation of the human conatus in the concept of dignity supposes the social character of man. The instruments of the individual, necessary for his survival, are social. The language through which he expresses his self-consciousness as his own dignity is social. The nuances his self-consciousness transposes as feelings and their expressions are borrowed from the culture known by the individual.But leaving this alone, and considering as a beginning of the analysis only the individual’s feeling of dignity as transposition of his/her will to live, this feeling is vague, ineffable and evanescent if it would not have the positive or negative reactions of society towards it. Indeed, society is the ultimate criterion of the individual consciousness of dignity, because it accredits this individual feeling. If, by absurd, there was no society – or the individual would live in an individual niche and would not know anything about society (but, for the sake of our philosophical experiment, he could express through meaningful words his feelings) – the individual would not be sure that he has a constitutive dignity and he deserves dignity. Only the others authorise this feeling, whether they endorse it or not, having the function of a thermometer measuring the individual belief.Methodological individualism is contradictory concerning the concept of dignity: on the one hand, it lauds to sky this concept (in its essentialist variant) as related to the individual, and on the other hand, it neglects the consequences of social relations over the real state of dignity of all the human beings.Finally, the paper links this relational standpoint to both the surpassing of the abstract individual and the clash of universalistic and particularistic values.


1970 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 102-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank L. Chan ◽  
W. Barclay Jones

AbstractAn x-ray spectrometer with experimental results is herewith described using a radiosotope source Fe55 having a halflife of 2.6 years. As a result of the disintegration, the managanese x-rays are capable of exciting fluorescent x-rays of such elements as sulfur, chlorine, potassium, calcium, scandium and titanium in aqueous solutions. These elements with the Ka wavelengths ranging from 5.3729 Å to 2.7496 Å may be designated as between the very soft x-rays on the one hand and the hard x-rays on the other. The x-ray spectrometer presently described has achieved a resolution of 136 ev, FWHM.Simultaneously, these elements have also been quantitatively determined by conventional x-ray fluorescent spectrometers. Since one of the spectrometers is designed to operate in vacuum as well as in helium or air, determination of sulfur, potassium and calcium were carried out in vacuum. Determination of chlorine was carried out in a helium atmosphere, Calcium, scandium and titanium were determined in air with an air-path spectrometer.In the present study aqueous solutions containing these elements were used. The use of aqueous solutions has the inherent advantages of being homogeneous and free from effect of particle size.


Algorithms ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 14
Author(s):  
Jianjian Ji ◽  
Gang Yang

Existing image completion methods are mostly based on missing regions that are small or located in the middle of the images. When regions to be completed are large or near the edge of the images, due to the lack of context information, the completion results tend to be blurred or distorted, and there will be a large blank area in the final results. In addition, the unstable training of the generative adversarial network is also prone to cause pseudo-color in the completion results. Aiming at the two above-mentioned problems, a method of image completion with large or edge-missing areas is proposed; also, the network structures have been improved. On the one hand, it overcomes the problem of lacking context information, which thereby ensures the reality of generated texture details; on the other hand, it suppresses the generation of pseudo-color, which guarantees the consistency of the whole image both in vision and content. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better completion results in completing large or edge-missing areas.


2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Olaf Hoffjann ◽  
Karina Hoffstedde ◽  
Franziska Jaworek

PurposeAlthough the market for communication consultancies has been booming worldwide for many years now, there are still only a handful of theoretical concepts and empirical findings pertaining to communication consulting. This is the fundamental starting point for this paper, which sets out to answer the following research questions: What is the function of communication consulting? What are the differences between consultants' expectations of consulting and those of clients? How do consultants and clients deal with the contradiction between proximity and distance? What are the potential threats to the autonomy of consulting?Design/methodology/approachThe paper combines a theoretical framework of communication consulting with a survey of German communication consultants and clients.FindingsFirst, a theoretical framework is developed in which communication consulting is defined as follows: First, it opens up decision-related contingency and thus produces additional options for managing communicative relationships with internal and external target groups, before helping to close decision-related contingency. The results of the survey show that the expectations of clients and consultants for communication consulting are largely similar. In the closing dimension especially, most clients share the active role of self-conception of most consultants. On the other hand, in some opening activities, clients wish for more critical, independent and courageous consulting.Research limitations/implicationsThe scope of the empirical material is limited to communication consultants and clients in Germany and may therefore not be valid in other cultural contexts.Originality/valueThe paper closes a gap in both theory building and empirical research in communication consulting. The theory presented conceives of communication consulting as a hybrid of management consulting and process consulting and, in addition to the opening dimension, also takes the closing dimension of consulting into consideration for the first time. The study reveals a certain schizophrenia in clients: on the one hand, clients demand more critical consultants and thus call for more distance; on the other hand, clients prefer to be close to their consultants, particularly if they wish to work with them for the long-term.


Author(s):  
Shizhu He ◽  
Kang Liu ◽  
Weiting An

Customers ask questions, and customer service staffs answer those questions. It is the basic service manner of customer service (CS). The progress of CS is a typical multi-round conversation. However, there are no explicit corresponding relations among conversational utterances. This paper focuses on obtaining explicit alignments of question and answer utterances in CS. It not only is an important task of dialogue analysis, but also able to obtain lots of valuable train data for learning dialogue systems. In this work, we propose end-to-end models for aligning question (Q) and answer (A) utterances in CS conversation with recurrent pointer networks (RPN). On the one hand, RPN-based alignment models are able to model the conversational contexts and the mutual influence of different Q-A alignments. On the other hand, they are able to address the issue of empty and multiple alignments for some utterances in a unified manner. We construct a dataset from an in-house online CS. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed models are effective to learn the alignments of question and answer utterances.


Author(s):  
Constantin Buta ◽  
Ichinur Omer ◽  
Andreea Andronic

This paper is one detailed research of the major river basins of the Romanian North Dobrogea, Taita River Catchment. The Taita River has a catchment size of about 591 km 2 and is flowing into the Black Sea through Topraichioi Lake after 57 km. Upstream it has an elevation about 240 m height and 0 m at downstream (the reference is the Black Sea). The complexity of this research study is given, on the one hand, by the descriptive side of the natural aspects (geological, morphological, climatic aspects, hydrology and the soil) and, on the other hand, by the practical side, boosted by the information system processing of data. This study presents the theoretical concepts concerning the hazards and the risk, which, for a better interpretation of the impact of these phenomena, are supplemented by the maps, graphs and photographs.


Author(s):  
Walter Wahl

The investigation of the crystalline properties of the simpler organic bodies, gaseous or liquid at Ordinary temperature, has been described in Parts I and II.* In this paper the experimental results will be discussed with regard to their bearing upon the problem of the relationship between molecular constitution and crystal symmetry. In order to facilitate a comparison the experimental results are summarised in the table on p. 2. As seen from the table, more than 50 per cent, of the substances investigated are polymorphic, and to this class nearly all the substances which contain only one carbon atom belong. The question therefore arises which one of the crystalline modifications of a substance is to be compared with the one or the other form of another substance, or with the crystals of a substance of which only one modification is known. In most of the cases investigated very little is known with regard to the modification stable at low temperature, and thus for practical reasons only the form crystallising directly out of the liquid state can be taken into account.


1973 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 426-436
Author(s):  
George M. Von Furstenberg

Samuelson (1955) and Bator (1957) have provided geometric techniques for deriving or illustrating the conditions for Pareto-optimality in exchange and production. Bator's approach merely serves to illustrate what the distribution of private consumption and of consumer welfare must be if it is to make any arbitrarily chosen output combination Pareto-efficient. Samuelson. on the other hand, derives the Pareto-efficient output configuration, given a constraint on the welfare of one of two individuals. Even though Samuelson's approach makes the better use of the geometry, Bator's demonstration was the first to be extended from private to public goods (by McLure, 1968). The reverse extension of Samuelson's model, from public to private goods, is attempted in this note.


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