Extreme Candidates as the Beneficent Spoiler? Range Effect in the Plurality Voting System

How does the entrance of radical candidates influence election results? Conventional wisdom suggests that extreme candidates merely split the votes. Based on the range effect theory in cognitive psychology, we hypothesize that the entrance of an extreme candidate reframes the endpoints of the ideological spectrum among available candidates, which makes the moderate one on the same side to be perceived by the voters as even more moderate. Through two survey experiments in the United States and Taiwan, we provide empirical support for range effect in the vote choice in the plurality system. The results imply that a mainstream party can, even without changing its own manifesto, benefit from the entrance of its radical counterpart; it explains why the mainstream party may choose cooperation strategically. Our findings also challenge the assumption in regression models that the perceived ideological positions of candidates are independent of each other

Towards an understanding of the means-ends relationship in citizenship education

While it is clear that all educational undertakings consist of ends and means, the relationship between the two is far from straightforward. This article proposes a framework for understanding the relationship in the context of citizenship education. Qualitative research was undertaken of three educational initiatives in Brazil: the schools of the Landless Movement, the Plural School framework in the city of Belo Horizonte, and the Voter of the Future programme, run by the Electoral Tribunals. Case studies were carried out of each, involving documentary analysis, interviews and observations. Analysis of the relationship between ends and means in each case gave rise to two key frames: the first, ‘proximity’, refers to the extent to which ends and means are separate or unified; the second, ‘rationale’, refers to the grounds on which means are chosen. Finally, the implications of this framework for understanding curriculum are drawn out

An Impossible Utopia: People’s Art and the Cultural Revolution

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution period of the People’s Republic of China (1966-1976) was crucial in the creation of modern-day China. The material culture of that period mirrors the turbulent political activity of students and the directives of the Communist Party’s central leadership during the height of the Mao Zedong personality cult. The commercial manufacture of posters, often the sole decoration available for the public and private spheres, offers strong examples of the design style of this time. The posters are not only indicative of the propagandistic fervor of production, but the aesthetic changes initiated in the visual and performing arts during the period as the state consciously manipulated style in an effort to create a “people’s” art and envision a Marxist utopia. This paper suggests that a comprehension of folk arts and popular culture is essential for understanding the visual language of this specific geographic and political space. A new perspective on the reconciliation of reality and ideology during the Cultural Revolution is gained through an analysis of popular form and content, and reveals not only the basis of a modern mass culture, but the unprecedented unification of high and low art forms

Aspects of Inner-Korean relations examined from a German viewpoint

This paper series takes a look at several aspects of inner-Korean relations, primarily in the area of international relations and economic cooperation, from a German viewpoint. In fact, the complexity of the respective subjects touched in this frame would require a deeper and more comprehensive analysis than developed here. The underlying idea is to stimulate further thought in several areas of pre- and post unification aspects by deriving inspiration from Germany's historical experience. The pre-unification phase and, specifically, the post-unification experience in Germany are of value to both Koreas. Further joint research is recommended on historical and contemporary aspects of German reunification that is relevant and suitable to Korea. --international relations,policy,economic development,Korea,Germany

Soft and Hard Strategies: The Role of Business in the Crafting of International Commercial Law

Part I returns to the classic definition of hard international law initially put forward by Kenneth Abbott and Duncan Snidal and related IR scholars and analyzes existing commercial law treaties in light of this definition. It concludes that virtually none of these commercial law treaties constitute “hard” international law because nearly all commercial law treaties rely on national courts for enforcement. But Abbott and Snidal’s focus on the extent to which international law is legalized—and especially the extent to which it is enforced by international actors—may matter less with commercial than other more public international lawmaking. This is because the mostly private law governing commercial transactions conceives of obligation and enforcement in ways distinct from its public law counterparts. Part II explains the distinction between private and public laws that govern purely domestic commerce. Many commercial transactions are not governed by regulatory legislation imposing “top down” obligations enforced by the state but rather contractual obligations that are self-regulating and mostly self-enforcing. In the absence of mandatory commercial regulation, businesses assert their interests domestically through privately organized contracts and litigation brought to enforce these contracts as well as through political pressure for reform of judicial administration. Where regulation does exist or has been proposed, businesses may also look to influence this regulation by lobbying legislators and executives. Part III considers the implications of commercial lawmaking for international settings and, in particular, state and non-state (that is, business) interests in the production of international versions of such laws. State sovereignty interests vary depending on the type of international commercial law reform proposed, whether regulatory or otherwise; business’ autonomy interests also vary along this axis. These interests may diverge, although the interests of states and businesses are also interconnected and subject to change based on assertions of influence. Soft law may aid in bridging these differences in various ways—through its gap-filling, advocacy, and socializing functions. Businesses are uniquely capable of fulfilling these functions through soft international law, capabilities that Part III explores both with reference to the detail of various international commercial laws and with regard to broader theoretical concerns

“One Country, Two Systems,” Three Law Families, and Four Legal Regions: The Emerging Inter-Regional Conflicts of Law in China

With accumulation of sovereign debt in many large OECD countries it seems that attention is heightened on how to manage public resources more effectively. High levels of sovereign debt are partly related to the aftermath of the latest financial crisis, where resolution for many big economies was to intervene and use public resources to put an end to the expansion of the crisis. Public real estate is one of those resources, which’s efficient management has high importance on general public sector efficacy. It seems that governments around the world have a way to go toward efficiency in public real estate management. There seem to be rather wide differences in management practices and quality. This thesis is an attempt to quantify some choices Estonian government could take in terms of its public real estate management. Four different scenarios are compared and Monte Carlo Simulation tool is used for that purpose. Two of the scenarios are related to private sector involvement and two are not. Privatization of public assets does not only mean cashing out for the government. It has wider consequences by introducing market forces where they weren’t before. One of the most important points of interest in this thesis is what effect can market forces and change in incentives have on public real estate management. There can be both, positive and negative effects, but which ones would prevail? The model built during the process of the thesis tries to measure those effects with aggregate net present value and its volatility by looking at 30 years ahead. Simulation analyses is used to vary input variables in the range that seems to be supported by the observations made in the literature and in some cases, where data is not available, also according to more subjective view that of the author’s. As input and their characteristics are different for scenarios, it is of interest to document how do the main outputs, mean NPV and its volatility, vary along with inputs

String Phenomenology: Past, Present and Future Perspectives

The observation of a scalar resonance at the LHC, compatible with perturbative electroweak symmetry breaking, reinforces the Standard Model parameterisation of all subatomic data. The logarithmic evolution of the SM gauge and matter parameters suggests that this parameterisation remains viable up to the Planck scale, where gravitational effects are of comparable strength. String theory provides a perturbatively consistent scheme to explore how the parameters of the Standard Model may be determined from a theory of quantum gravity. The free fermionic heterotic string models provide concrete examples of exact string solutions that reproduce the spectrum of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model. Contemporary studies entail the development of methods to classify large classes of models. This led to the discovery of exophobic heterotic-string vacua and the observation of spinor-vector duality, which provides an insight to the global structure of the space of (2,0) heterotic-string vacua. Future directions entail the study of the role of the massive string states in these models and their incorporation in cosmological scenarios. A complementary direction is the formulation of quantum gravity from the principle of manifest phase space duality and the equivalence postulate of quantum mechanics, which suggest that space is compact. The compactness of space, which implies intrinsic regularisation, may be tightly related to the intrinsic finite length scale, implied by string phenomenology.Comment: 35 pages. No figures. To appear in the special volume edited by Gerald Cleaver on "Particle Physics and Quantum Gravity Implications for Cosmology". Based on talk presented at the 2012 CERN Summer Institute on String Phenomenolog

Teaching programming at a distance: the Internet software visualization laboratory

This paper describes recent developments in our approach to teaching computer programming in the context of a part-time Masters course taught at a distance. Within our course, students are sent a pack which contains integrated text, software and video course material, using a uniform graphical representation to tell a consistent story of how the programming language works. The students communicate with their tutors over the phone and through surface mail. Through our empirical studies and experience teaching the course we have identified four current problems: (i) students' difficulty mapping between the graphical representations used in the course and the programs to which they relate, (ii) the lack of a conversational context for tutor help provided over the telephone, (iii) helping students who due to their other commitments tend to study at 'unsociable' hours, and (iv) providing software for the constantly changing and expanding range of platforms and operating systems used by students. We hope to alleviate these problems through our Internet Software Visualization Laboratory (ISVL), which supports individual exploration, and both synchronous and asynchronous communication. As a single user, students are aided by the extra mappings provided between the graphical representations used in the course and their computer programs, overcoming the problems of the original notation. ISVL can also be used as a synchronous communication medium whereby one of the users (generally the tutor) can provide an annotated demonstration of a program and its execution, a far richer alternative to technical discussions over the telephone. Finally, ISVL can be used to support asynchronous communication, helping students who work at unsociable hours by allowing the tutor to prepare short educational movies for them to view when convenient. The ISVL environment runs on a conventional web browser and is therefore platform independent, has modest hardware and bandwidth requirements, and is easy to distribute and maintain. Our planned experiments with ISVL will allow us to investigate ways in which new technology can be most appropriately applied in the service of distance education