scholarly journals Changing electoral districts in Slovenia: empirical challenges for geography.

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 35-46
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Population Size ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
The Other ◽  
Time Constraints ◽  
Electoral District ◽  
The One

Designing electoral districts is never a straightforward task, as many different, often conflicting, principles must be taken into account. In Slovenia, similar population size and geographical and cultural homogeneity are the two main principles on which electoral district/constituency plans must be based. However, as both principles are only vaguely defined, this brings opportunities for their endless politicisation, potentially enabling gerrymandering, on the one hand, and challenges to geographers involved in the electoral districts/constituency design on the other. The experience gained in such a project is briefly presented, highlighting empirical solutions applied to approach the abovementioned challenges. Geoinformatic support plays an essential role in the process of designing electoral districts/constituencies and their versioning. Due to time constraints, it was not possible to fully develop and apply automatic procedures that provide acceptable results. However, our initial attempts suggest that automatic procedures can provide usable results (also in the design of other administrative spatial units) if the rules (the empirical form of the principles) are clearer and less elastic. Another empirical problem, the practical involvement of political parties in the process of electoral districting, has been attempted through a geoinformatic application that allows political parties to create their own district plans, perhaps leading to more problems than solutions.

A semi-hybrid model for malaria with limited superinfection

1998 ◽  
Vol 30 (04) ◽  
pp. 1027-1057 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippe Picard
Keyword(s):  
Stochastic Model ◽  
Population Size ◽  
Hybrid Model ◽  
Human Population ◽  
Threshold Level ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The One

Modelling malaria with consistency necessitates the introduction of at least two families of interconnected processes. Even in a Markovian context the simplest fully stochastic model is intractable and is usually transformed into a hybrid model, by supposing that these two families are stochastically independent and linked only through two deterministic connections. A model closer to the fully stochastic model is presented here, where one of the two families is subordinated to the other and just a unique deterministic connection is required. For this model a threshold theorem can be proved but the threshold level is not the one obtained in a hybrid model. The difference disappears only when the human population size approaches infinity.

Hope

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Stratton-Lake
Keyword(s):  
Moral Theory ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
Central Place ◽  
The Other ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Ernst Bloch ◽  
Gabriel Marcel ◽  
Theological Virtues ◽  
The One

In Christian theology ‘hope’ has a central role as one of the three theological virtues. As theology has gradually become separated from moral theory, the inclusion of ‘hope’ within a theory of ethics has become rare. Hope can be either intentional or dispositional. The former is a specific hope for something, whereas the latter is a state of character. Kant gave a central place to intentional hopes in his moral theory with his doctrine of the postulates. Hope also played an essential role in the moral and political writings of Ernst Bloch and Gabriel Marcel. Bloch regarded hope as concerned with a longing for utopia, whereas Marcel regarded hope as a disposition to rise above situations which tempt one to despair. In each of these writers the Christian connection between hope, on the one hand, and faith and love, on the other, remained, although Kant and Bloch did not oppose these categories to reason, but sought to ‘subsume’ them under it.

Discover, Instrumentalize, Monopolize: Fidesz’s Three-Step Blueprint for a Populist Take-over of Referendums

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 705-732 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pepijn van Eeden
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Direct Democracy ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
The Other ◽  
Economic Disparities ◽  
The One ◽  
Political Apathy ◽  
Risky Option

This article assesses the referendums in Hungary in 2004, 2008, and 2016 diachronically. The review is framed by two competing liberal parliamentary approaches to direct democracy: A useful democratic corrective to the distortions of particracy, or a risky option leading to tyranny of the majority? Rather than choosing sides, this article shows how the conundrum conceals another, more interesting question: Which are the constraints under which the liberal parliamentary viewpoint shifts from the one to the other? Theorizing on post-democracy and populism provides a provisional answer: A consensualized, “post-political” parliament is key, as this, in combination with widening social-economic disparities, incentivizes illiberal populist parties to harness referendums, which prompts liberal parliamentarianists to change their minds. The referendums in 2004, 2008, and 2016 in Hungary substantiate this suspicion. Taken together, they offer a step-by-step blueprint for how, in a thoroughly postpolitical situation, a referendum evolves into a perfect catalyst for populists on their road to power, enabling them with (a) agenda-setting; (b) an explosive emphasis on popular legitimacy; (c) arousing voluntarism, while luring opponents into campaigning for boycott and political apathy; (d) combining social equalitarianism with identarian protectionism, and most importantly; (e) bypassing parliament itself. This article is part of the special cluster titled Political Parties and Direct Democracy in Eastern Europe, guest-edited by Sergiu Gherghina.

scholarly journals Parties’ Issue Emphasis Strategies on Facebook

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wojciech Rafałowski
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Party System ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Issue Ownership ◽  
The One ◽  
Issue Emphasis

In recent years, a significant amount of research has been devoted to theorising and explaining parties’ vote-seeking behaviours with regard to emphasising certain policy domains and ignoring others. These strategies are largely determined by the parties’ issue ownership and the context of the competition. In this article, I explore the interaction between these two groups of factors, that is, how a given party type and its role within the party system moderate the political actor’s responsiveness to various unfolding events. The study uses a collection of Facebook posts published by the official profiles of some of the Polish political parties. I demonstrate that the competitors develop distinct strategies of issue emphasis in accordance with the incentives coming from the events that occur on the one hand and their strengths and weaknesses related to certain issue domains on the other.

scholarly journals The Memory of Communist Poland in the Third Polish Republic. A Tentative Systematisation

2016 ◽  
pp. 37-53
Author(s):  
Jerzy Łazor ◽  
Wojciech Morawski
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
The Other ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Third ◽  
Communist System ◽  
Veteran Status ◽  
The One

The political discourse in Poland in the final years before the fall of communism in 1989, was based on a strong opposition between the authorities and the rest of society. Even then, however, support for the opposition was not unanimous, and it was even less so in previous years. Most Poles considered the communist system forced, exogenous, oppressive, unacceptable, and supported by the Soviet threat. Still, individual reactions were varied: there were different paths to be taken through communism. The authors of the paper discuss how these paths contributed to differing recollections of the period. They focus on the collective memory of political parties and politicians, particularly on the controversial question of collaborating with the communist regime and the rights to veteran status among the former opposition members. It is a story of two types of memory: the one stressing reconciliation and the other pushing the distinction between former regime representatives and democratic opposition members

scholarly journals Li Shangyin and the Art of Poetic Ambiguity

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-177
Author(s):  
Maja Lavrač
Keyword(s):  
Personal Experience ◽  
Tang Dynasty ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
The Other ◽  
High Price ◽  
Secret Message ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Li Shangyin ◽  
The One ◽  
Unique Style

Li Shangyin (813–858), one of the most respected, mysterious, ambiguous and provocative of Chinese poets, lived during the late Tang period, when the glorious Tang dynasty was beginning to decline. It was a time of social riots, political division and painful general insecurity. Li Shangyin is famous as a highly original and committed poet who developed a unique style full of vague allusions and unusual images derived from the literary past (the traditional canon, myths and legends) as well as from nature and personal experience. The second important feature of his poetry is a mysteriousness which finally leads to ambiguity. Ambiguity plays an essential role in most of his renowned poems, and he uses it to superbly connect present and past, reality and fantasy, and history and mythology. Thus, ambiguity and obscurity, respectively, often engender different interpretations among Chinese critics. These interpretations reflect the poems’ imaginative qualities, hypotheses and contradictions. Since each interpretive direction emphasizes but a single aspect of the poet’s character, it is more fitting to understand his ambiguous poems in symbolic terms. Such understanding entails that the meaning of the poem is not limited to one interpretation; rather, the poem’s poetic landscape opens itself up to various interpretations.Li Shangyin is actually most popular for his melancholic love poetry that reveals his ambiguous attitude to love. In this poetry, love is shrouded in a secret message. On the one hand, we can sense his moral disapproval of a secret but hopeless love; on the other, we can sense his passion. This leads to a paradox: the pleasing temptations of an illicit romance also exact a high price. In these love poems Li investigates various aspects of the worlds of passion which stoke in him feelings of rapture, satisfaction, joy and hope as well as feelings of doubt, frustration, despair and even thoughts of death.

scholarly journals iscaliteit en politiek : het lokaal niveau : Een analyse in de 308 Vlaamse gemeenten

Res Publica ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-129
Author(s):  
Johan Ackaert
Keyword(s):  
Financial Crisis ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Small Variation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Central Administration ◽  
Municipal Council ◽  
Income Sources ◽  
Financial Difficulties ◽  
The One ◽  
Flemish Municipalities

Due to the financial crisis of the Belgian central administration and the financial difficulties of local government, municipal taxes are gradually taking a higher place in the rank of municipal income sources. One could expect a differentiation between the presence of some political parties in the board ofmayor and aldermen (the local majority) on the one hand and the burden of taxation (and its amount of increase) on the other hand. Concerning this amount of increase, the data showed no evidence to prove that differentiation in the Flemish municipalities.  Still we noticed a small variation in the burden of taxation according as to theweight of the socialist group within the local majority. Nevertheless factors as population and the level of mean income in the municipalities were more important to explain the burden of taxation. The results of the municipal-council elections of 1988 are not affected by the increase of the local burden of taxation.

scholarly journals The failure of mainstream parties and the impact of new challenger parties in France, Italy and Spain

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Piero Ignazi
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Party ◽  
The Other ◽  
European Countries ◽  
The Political ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Post War ◽  
The One ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Collective Engagement

Abstract Political parties share a very bad reputation in most European countries. This paper provides an interpretation of this sentiment, reconstructing the downfall of the esteem in which parties were held and their fall since the post-war years up to present. In particular, the paper focuses on the abandonment of the parties' founding ‘logic of appropriateness’ based, on the one hand, on the ethics for collective engagement in collective environments for collective aims and, on the other hand, on the full commitment of party officials. The abandonment of these two aspects has led to a crisis of legitimacy that mainstream parties have tried to counteract in ways that have proven ineffective, as membership still declines and confidence still languishes. Finally, the paper investigates whether the new challenger parties in France, Italy and Spain have introduced organizational and behavioural changes that could eventually reverse disaffection with the political party per se.

A semi-hybrid model for malaria with limited superinfection

1998 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 1027-1057 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippe Picard
Keyword(s):  
Stochastic Model ◽  
Population Size ◽  
Hybrid Model ◽  
Human Population ◽  
Threshold Level ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The One

Modelling malaria with consistency necessitates the introduction of at least two families of interconnected processes. Even in a Markovian context the simplest fully stochastic model is intractable and is usually transformed into a hybrid model, by supposing that these two families are stochastically independent and linked only through two deterministic connections. A model closer to the fully stochastic model is presented here, where one of the two families is subordinated to the other and just a unique deterministic connection is required. For this model a threshold theorem can be proved but the threshold level is not the one obtained in a hybrid model. The difference disappears only when the human population size approaches infinity.

String Generation by Cellular Automata

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-132
Author(s):  
Martin Kutrib ◽  
◽  
Andreas Malcher ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cellular Automata ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Structural Properties ◽  
The Other ◽  
Time Constraints ◽  
Closure Properties ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One

In contrast to many investigations of cellular automata with regard to their ability to accept inputs under certain time constraints, in this paper we are studying cellular automata with regard to their ability to generate strings in real time. Structural properties such as speedup results and closure properties are investigated. On the one hand, constructions for the closure under intersection, reversal and length-preserving homomorphism are presented, whereas on the other hand the nonclosure under union, complementation and arbitrary homomorphism are obtained. Finally, decidability questions such as emptiness, finiteness, equivalence, inclusion, regularity and context-freeness are addressed.

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