Proximity, candidates, and presidential power: how directly elected presidents shape the legislative party system

The impact of presidential coattails on the legislative party system is a highly intuitive idea. The coattails effect is believed to depend on the number of presidential candidates and the size of the presidential prize. This article proposes a different way of understanding this relationship. We argue that the strategic behavior of political parties and the way in which the number of presidential contenders shapes the legislative party system can only be predicted for an intermediate range of presidential power. Outside this range the effect is indeterminate. We test our proposition on democracies with direct presidential elections from 1945-2011. Our results confirm that the number of presidential candidates is an important determinant of the legislative party system and show that whether or not legislative elections are held close to presidential elections has little influence on party-system fragmentation in countries with directly elected presidents

Between distance and proximity

My practice is a means of dealing with distance and desire— desire for intimacy and understanding, for clarity in communication, longing to get closer, to see further, to be near the ocean, to touch the horizon, desire for something certain, longing to let it go. The objects and videos I make are metaphors for a relationship between landscape and longing— gestures of reaching, stretching and trying to span a distance, trying to embody the intangible. Longing is often still present even at close proximity. I want the objects and videos I make to instill an urge to touch, to transgress or press against the boundary between beings. Through these gestures I’m thinking of ways to communicate touch across distance— how to feel presence through absence.Studio Ar

Influence of PWM on the proximity loss in permanent magnet brushless AC machines

The winding copper loss can be significantly increased due to skin and proximity eddy current effects. The skin and proximity losses due to fundamental frequency current has been investigated in literature, but the influence of PWM on the skin and proximity losses has not been reported. In this paper, 2-D finite element method is employed to analyze the skin and proximity losses in a permanent magnet brushless AC machine, in which significant proximity loss exists due to high frequency current ripples induced by the PWM, as confirmed by both theoretical calculation and experiment. The analyses should be generally applicable to other machines