Resolute control: Forbidding candidates from winning an election is hard

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Role of political institutions and networks in agricultural policies: A quantitative assessment

The seminal papers of Persson and Tabellini have brought increasing interest in analyzing the effects of formal political institutions on economic policy choices. In contrast, the role of participatory policy processes in formulating efficient policies in developing countries has not been analyzed comprehensively yet. In both areas of research, systematic analyses are missing which aim at understanding the effect of formal and informal institutions on agricultural policy. Therefore, this thesis focuses on investigating the influence of formal and informal political institutions on agricultural policy choices. Electoral systems and forms of government are chosen as examples of formal institutions, political communication networks and legislative norms are considered as informal determinants of political decisions. In order to provide for a comprehensive analysis, theoretical hypotheses are derived from sound models of micro-political behavior and the empirical analyses use innovative econometric approaches. In summary, this cumulative thesis encompasses five contributions which show that formal and informal political institutions influence agricultural policy significantly. The first three contributions provide insights on the influence of constitutional rules on agricultural protection using time-series cross-section data on the national rate of assistance to agriculture, political institutions and standard polit-economic determinants of protectionism. The last two contributions focus on modeling participatory policy processes and determinants of political communication networks quantitatively. A network-based theoretical model of legislative decision-making and empirical data on agricultural policy positions and the communication network among influential actors in Malawi are used

Parameterized dichotomy of choosing committees based on approval votes in the presence of outliers

Approval voting provides an opportunity for the agents to make a comment about every candidate, without incurring the overhead of determining a full ranking on the entire set of candidates. This makes approval voting a natural choice for many practical applications. In this work, we focus on the use of approval voting for selecting a committee in scenarios where we can have few outrageous voters whom we call outliers. More specifically, we study the computational complexity of the committee selection problem for commonly used approval-based voting rules in the presence of outliers. Our first result shows that outliers render the committee selection problem intractable for approval, net approval, and minisum approval voting rules. We next study the parameterized complexity of this problem with five natural parameters, namely the target score, the size of the committee (and its dual parameter namely the number of candidates outside the committee); and the number of outliers (and its dual parameter namely the number of non-outliers). Our main contribution in this paper is dichotomous results, which establish the parameterized complexity of the problem of selecting a committee under approval, net approval, and minisum approval voting rules for all subsets of the above five parameters considered here (by showing either FPT or W[1] -hardness for all subsets of parameters).by Palash Dey, Neeldhara Misra and Y Narahar

Parameterized dichotomy of choosing committees based on approval votes in the presence of outliers

by Palash Dey, Neeldhara Misra and Y. Narahar

Why incumbents survive : authoritarian dominance and regime persistence in Russia

Defence date: 20 September 2018Examining Board: Hanspeter Kriesi, European University Institute (Supervisor); Vladimir Gelman, European University at Saint Petersburg; Anton Hemerijck, European University Institute; John Ora Reuter, University of Wisconsin, MilwaukeeWhy do incumbents in electoral authoritarian regimes retain power? This study seeks to answer this fundamental question by linking electoral fraud and sincere voting for the incumbent with incumbent’s distributive politics and, accordingly, by looking at the puzzle of authoritarian survival from two perspectives. An elite-oriented incumbent’s strategy suggests that, unlike democracies, where distributive politics is primarily targeted at voters, authoritarian incumbents inevitably have to deliver benefits to political elites in order to secure their loyalty, which is eventually converted into electoral fraud, repression of the opposition forces, persecution of the media, refraining from challenging the incumbent, and other authoritarian policy outcomes. A mass-oriented incumbent’s strategy implies that, if electoral competition is not meaningless, authoritarian incumbents also have to deliver benefits to the general public in order to secure genuine mass support, which eventually results in sincere voting for the incumbent. This argument is tested on cross-regional data from Russia as a prominent case of persistent electoral authoritarianism. The analysis begins with a poorly studied but an immanent element of any kind of authoritarianism – electoral fraud perpetrated by political elites and their local agents. Having developed a novel measure of electoral fraud forensics based on quintile regression, I demonstrate that electoral fraud in the Russian 2000–2012 presidential elections played a typical role for electoral authoritarianism: it was neither outcome-changing as it occurs in closed authoritarian regimes nor intrinsically sporadic as in electoral democracies, but it was widespread and hardly avoidable by the incumbent. The study then dwells on examination of the federal transfers to regional budgets as a type of public and formally legal yet politically motivated distribution. Not only were the central transfers allocated to the regions according to the principle of electoral allegiance to the federal incumbent presidents, but it also appears that, as authoritarian regime was consolidating over time, the larger amount of transfer funds was allocated to the bureaucracy (as part of the regime’s elite clientele) in order to secure its loyalty. The loyalty of regional elites, in its turn, was eventually converted into distinct authoritarian policy outcomes, including electoral fraud and persecution of the media. This resulted in a general bias of the electoral playing field and, thereby, contributed to sustaining the authoritarian equilibrium. By contrast, the analysis finds no evidence that the politicized transfers influenced sincere voting for the incumbent. These mixed findings indicate that popular support under electoral authoritarianism is still puzzling and calls for further examination, whereas securing loyalty of political elites via delivering them clientelist benefits is crucial for regime survival in personalist electoral dictatorships

Handbook of Mathematical Geosciences

This Open Access handbook published at the IAMG's 50th anniversary, presents a compilation of invited path-breaking research contributions by award-winning geoscientists who have been instrumental in shaping the IAMG. It contains 45 chapters that are categorized broadly into five parts (i) theory, (ii) general applications, (iii) exploration and resource estimation, (iv) reviews, and (v) reminiscences covering related topics like mathematical geosciences, mathematical morphology, geostatistics, fractals and multifractals, spatial statistics, multipoint geostatistics, compositional data analysis, informatics, geocomputation, numerical methods, and chaos theory in the geosciences