Single-Peakedness and Disconnected Coalitions

Ordinally single-peaked preferences are distinguished from cardinally singlepeaked preferences, in which all players have a similar perception of distances in some one-dimensional ordering. While ordinal single-peakedness can lead to disconnected coalitions that have a "hole" in the ordering, cardinal single-peakedness precludes this possibility, based on two models of coalition formation: ¥ Fallback (FB): Players seek coalition partners by descending lower and lower in their preference rankings until a majority coalition forms. ¥ Build-Up (BU): Similar to FB, except that when nonmajority subcoalitions form, they fuse into composite players, whose positions are defined cardinally and who are treated as single players in the convergence process. FB better reflects the unconstrained, or nonmyopic, possibilities of coalition formation, whereas BU-because all subcoalition members must be included in any majority coalition that forms-restricts combinatorial possibilities and tends to produce less compact majority coalitions. The "strange bedfellows" frequently observed in legislative coalitions and military alliances suggest that even when players agree on, say, a left-right ordering, their perceptions of exactly where players stand in this ordering may differ substantially. If so, a player may be acceptable to a coalition but may not find every member in it acceptable, causing that player not to join and possibly creating a disconnected coalition.COALITION FORMATION; SINGLE-PEAKEDNESS; LEGISLATURES; ALLIANCES

[Introduction] Resistance in intellectual history and political thought

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Common-Law Constitutionalism and the Limits of Reason

In recent years, the central claim of common-law constitutionalism has been that precedent and tradition embody some form of latent wisdom. Judges will generally do best by deferring to the wisdom embodied in precedent and tradition, rather than trusting to their unaided reason. In what follows, I offer a critical analysis of this family of claims. Drawing throughout on Jeremy Bentham's critique of the subconstitutional common law, I conclude that the constitutional common law is not plausibly seen as a repository of latent wisdom, at least not to any greater extent than statutes and other nonjudicial sources of law. The mechanisms advanced by common-law constitutionalists suffer from infirmities of internal logic and from a failure to make the necessary institutional comparisons between and among precedent and tradition, on the one hand, and the outputs of legislatures, executive officials, and constitutional framers on the other

Against State Censorship of Thought and Speech: The “Mandate of Philosophy” contra Islamist Ideology

Contemporary Islam presents Europe in particular with a political and moral challenge: Moderate-progressive Muslims and radical fundamentalist Muslims present differing visions of the relation of politics and religion and, consequently, differing interpretations of freedom of expression. There is evident public concern about Western “political correctness,” when law or policy accommodates censorship of speech allegedly violating religious sensibilities. Referring to the thought of philosopher Baruch Spinoza, and accounting for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights, and various empirical studies on the religious convictions of Muslims, it is argued here that: (1) sovereign European state powers should be especially cautious of legal censorship of speech allegedly violating Muslim religious sensibilities; and (2) instead of legal moves to censorship, European states should defer to the principle of separation of religion and state (political authority). Further, a reasonable interpretation of Islamic jurisprudence allows that matters of religious difference may be engaged and resolved by appeal to private conscience and ethical judgment, rather than by appeal to public law per se. In so far as they are 1 representative of contemporary scholarship, the interpretative positions of Ziad Elmarsafy, Jacques Derrida, and Nasr Abū Zayd are presented in illustration of this latter point

The “law” of uneven and combined development: Part 1

Since the 1990s there has been an upsurge of academic interest in Trotsky’s concept of uneven and combined development, but relatively little attention has been paid to its intellectual antecedents. This first of two articles will reconstruct the sources and components of uneven and combined development, in particular the strategy of permanent revolution, the conditions for which it was intended as an explanation, and the theory of uneven development, which Trotsky had to extend in order to provide that explanation. The article moves between the concepts of permanent revolution and uneven development, tracing their historical development from emergence in the eighteenth century until the era of the first Russian Revolution. By this point a relationship between the two had begun to be established by Marxists on the centre and left of the Second International, and in turn made possible the formulation of the “law” of uneven and combined development, which will be discussed in the second article

A páros összehasonlításokon alapuló rangsorolás módszertani és alkalmazási kérdései = Methodological and applicational issues of paired comparison based ranking

A páros összehasonlításokkal történő rangsorolás egyaránt felmerül a döntéselmélet, a preferenciák modellezése, a társadalmi választások elmélete, a tudománymetria, a statisztika, a pszichológia, vagy a sport területén. Ilyen esetekben gyakran nincs lehetőség az alternatívák egyetlen, objektív skálán történő értékelésére, csak azok egymással való összevetésére. Ez három, részben összefüggő kérdést vet fel. Az első a vizsgált gyakorlati probléma matematikai reprezentációja, a második az így keletkező feladat megoldása, a harmadik a kapott eredmény értelmezése. Értekezésünk az első kettőre fókuszál, bár a 7. fejezetben szereplő alkalmazásban az utóbbira is kitérünk. ____ Paired comparison based ranking problems are given by a tournament matrix representing the performance of some objects against each other. They arise in many different fields like social choice theory (Chebotarev and Shamis, 1998), sports (Landau, 1895, 1914; Zermelo, 1929) or psychology (Thurstone, 1927). The usual goal is to determine a winner (possibly a set of winners) or a complete ranking for the objects. There were some attempts to link the two areas (i.e. Bouyssou (2004)), however, they achieved a limited success. We will deal only with the latter issue, allowing for different preference intensities (including ties), incomplete and multiple comparisons among the objects. The ranking includes three areas: representation of the practical problem as a mathematical model, its solution, and interpretation of the results. The third issue strongly depends on the actual application, therefore it is not addressed in the thesis, however, it will appear in Chapter 7