A Relative Impact Ranking of Political Studies In Ireland

Against a background of the Irish government’s concerns with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and the British government’s wishes for a more quantitative Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), our study conducts a relative impact assessment of the study of politics, government, political science, and international relations in Ireland. Impact is measured as citations from the publications of permanent staff in eight Irish politics departments, based on data compiled in April 2008 from two leading academic indexes – ISI’s Web of Science and Scopus – as well as the now popular Google Scholar. We discuss some of the criticisms that naturally arise in a study of this nature. Then, following similar exercises in other disciplines (e.g. economics), we use the impact measures to compare and rank individual scholars as well as departments. We also explore the extent to which the choice of different indexes, and different measures, influences the results that we obtain. While there are differences, in particular between indexes based purely on articles and those that access books and other material, the results from the different indexes are strongly correlated.

A History of the Florida Philharmonic and an Original Composition: Symphony No. 2 . (Original Composition);

This dissertation is in two parts. The first part is a monograph which presents a history of the first fully professional orchestra in Miami. The Florida Philharmonic was founded in 1965 and ceased operations in 1982. Appendices provide lists of the programs which the orchestra performed. The second part is an original composition entitled Symphony No. 2. The symphony is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English Horn, two clarinets (in B-flat), two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns (in F), trumpet (in B-flat), three trombones, tuba, timpani, two vibraphones, gong, suspended cymbal, sizzle cymbal, marimba, wind chimes, orchestra bells, finger cymbals, triangle, snare drum, crash cymbals, xylophone, bass drum, celesta, piano, and strings. The symphony has four movements which combine contemporary compositional techniques with traditional forms. The first movement is in sonata form with an introduction. The second movement (a scherzo) is a rondo. The form of the third movement is A B A. The fourth movement is a two-part form. While the second part uses material from the first part in retrograde, it also contains a restatement of the introduction leading to a codetta

The most unkindest cuts: speaker selection and expressed government dissent during economic crisis

Economic crisis and the resulting need for austerity budgets have divided many governing parties and coalitions in Europe, despite strong party discipline in the legislative voting on these harsh budgets. We measure these divisions using automated text analysis methods to scale the positions that legislators express in budget debates, in an effort to avoid punishment by voters for supporting austerity measures, while still adhering to strict party discipline by voting along party lines. Our test case is Ireland, a country that has experienced both periods of rapid economic growth as well as one deep financial and economic crisis. Tracking dissent from 1987 to 2013, we show that austerity measures undermine government cohesion, as verbal opposition markedly increases in direct response to the economic pain felt in a legislator’s constituency. The economic vulnerability of a legislator’s constituency also directly explains position taking on austerity budgets among both government and opposition

More positive, assertive and forward-looking: how Leave won Twitter

How did people talk about the EU referendum on Twitter? Akitaka Matsuo and Kenneth Benoit (left) analysed 23m tweets about Brexit, and found salient differences between Leave and Remain supporters. People who backed Leave were more likely to use positive, assertive and forward-looking language. They also tended to follow politicians and campaigning accounts, while Remain supporters were more likely to follow journalists. Overall, Leave were in a better position on Twitter

Scaling hand-coded political texts to learn more about left-right policy content

Manual annotation of the policy content of political texts forms the basis for one of the most widely used empirical measures in comparative politics: left-right policy positions. Bridging automated “text as data” approaches and qualitative content analysis, we apply statistical scaling to this data to learn more about the association of specific policy dimensions to the left-right super-dimension, in a way that minimizes ex ante assumptions about the substantive content of left-right policy. We apply a Bayesian negative binomial variant of Slapin and Proksch’s (2008) “wordfish” model to category counts from party manifestos coded by the Manifesto Project, providing a data-driven approach that offers new insights into the policy content of left and right. We demonstrate how this method also works with content not originally designed for measuring positions. In addition, we show how the approach can be extended to measure the policy content of two latent dimensions, with some categories contributing to both

Estimating intra-party preferences: comparing speeches tovotes

Well-established methods exist for measuring party positions, but reliable means for estimating intra-party preferences remain underdeveloped. While most efforts focus on estimating the ideal points of individual legislators based on inductive scaling of roll call votes, this data suffers from two problems: selection bias due to unrecorded votes, and strong party discipline which tends to make voting a strategic rather than a sincere indication of preferences. By contrast, legislative speeches are relatively unconstrained, since party leaders are less likely to punish MPs for speaking freely as long as they vote with the party line. Yet the differences between roll call estimations and text scalings remain essentially unexplored, despite the growing application of statistical analysis of textual data to measure policy preferences. Our paper addresses this lacuna by exploiting a rich feature of the Swiss legislature: On most bills, legislators both vote and speak many times. Using this data, we compare text-based scaling of ideal points to vote-based scaling from a crucial piece of energy legislation. Our findings confirm that text scalings reveal larger intra-party differences than roll calls. Using regression models we further explain the differences between roll call and text scalings by attributing differences to constituency-level preferences for energy policy

On the unsuspected role of multivalent metal ions on the charge storage of a metal oxide electrode in mild aqueous electrolytes

International audienceInsertion mechanisms of multivalent ions in transition metal oxide cathodes are poorly understood and subject to controversy and debate, especially when performed in aqueous electrolytes. To address this issue, we have here investigated the reversible reduction of nanostructured amorphous TiO 2 electrodes by spectroelectrochemistry in mild aqueous electrolytes containing either a multivalent metal salt as AlCl 3 or a weak organic acid as acetic acid. Our results show that the reversible charge storage in TiO 2 is thermodynamically and kinetically indistinguishable when carried out in either an Al 3+-or acetic acid-based electrolyte, both leading under similar conditions of pH and concentrations to an almost identical maximal charge storage of $115 mA h g À1. These observations are in agreement with a mechanism where the inserting/deinserting cation is the proton and not the multivalent metal cation. Analysis of the data also demonstrates that the proton source is the Brønsted weak acid present in the aqueous electrolyte, i.e. either the acetic acid or the aquo metal ion complex generated from solvation of Al 3+ (i.e. [Al(H 2 O) 6 ] 3+). Such a proton-coupled charge storage mechanism is also found to occur with other multivalent metal ions such as Zn 2+ and Mn 2+ , albeit with a lower efficiency than Al 3+ , an effect we have attributed to the lower acidity of [Zn(H 2 O) 6 ] 2+ and [Mn(H 2 O) 6 ] 2+. These findings are of fundamental importance because they shed new light on previous studies assuming reversible Al 3+-insertion into metal oxides, and, more generally, they highlight the unsuspected proton donor role played by multivalent metal cations commonly involved in rechargeable aqueous batteries