Aggregation and Representation in the European Parliament Party Groups

While members of the European Parliament are elected in national constituencies, their votes are determined by the aggregation of MEPs in multinational party groups. The uncoordinated aggregation of national party programmes in multinational EP party groups challenges theories of representation based on national parties and parliaments. This article provides a theoretical means of understanding representation by linking the aggregation of dozens of national party programmes in different EP party groups to the aggregation of groups to produce the parliamentary majority needed to enact policies. Drawing on an original data source of national party programmes, the EU Profiler, the article shows that the EP majorities created by aggregating MEP votes in party groups are best explained by cartel theories. These give priority to strengthening the EP’s collective capacity to enact policies rather than voting in accord with the programmes they were nationally elected to represent

Models of Party Democracy : Patterns of Party Regulation in Post-War European Constitutions

This article investigates the ways in which political parties are codified in modern democratic constitutions, providing a unique cross-sectional and longitudinal overview of the patterns of party constitutionalization in post-war Europe. Although the constitutions of western liberal democracies traditionally have paid little attention to the role of parties, evidence suggests that in contemporary democracies, both old and new, they are increasingly accorded a formal constitutional status. Little is known, however, about the substantive content of their constitutional position or about the normative connotations of their constitutional codification. In this article, we demonstrate that there is a clear correlation between the nature and the intensity of party constitutionalization and the newness and historical experience of democracy and that, with time, the constitutional regulation of the extra-parliamentary organization and the parties’ rights and duties has gained in importance at the expense of their parliamentary and electoral roles. The analysis furthermore suggests that three distinct models of party constitutionalization can be identified – Defending Democracy, Parties in Public Office, and Parties as Public Utilities – each of which is related to a particular conception of party democracy

Trgi kot orodje za napovedovanje

Trgi kot orodje za napovedovanje: primer slovenske volilne borz

America’s Favorite Bicycle Ride

Review of: "RAGBRAI: America’s Favorite Bicycle Ride," by Greg Borz

Some equations relating multiwavelets and multiscaling functions

The local trace function introduced in \cite{Dut} is used to derive equations that relate multiwavelets and multiscaling functions in the context of a generalized multiresolution analysis, without appealing to filters. A construction of normalized tight frame wavelets is given. Particular instances of the construction include normalized tight frame and orthonormal wavelet sets

Block Locally Optimal Preconditioned Eigenvalue Xolvers (BLOPEX) in hypre and PETSc

We describe our software package Block Locally Optimal Preconditioned Eigenvalue Xolvers (BLOPEX) publicly released recently. BLOPEX is available as a stand-alone serial library, as an external package to PETSc (``Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation'', a general purpose suite of tools for the scalable solution of partial differential equations and related problems developed by Argonne National Laboratory), and is also built into {\it hypre} (``High Performance Preconditioners'', scalable linear solvers package developed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory). The present BLOPEX release includes only one solver--the Locally Optimal Block Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient (LOBPCG) method for symmetric eigenvalue problems. {\it hypre} provides users with advanced high-quality parallel preconditioners for linear systems, in particular, with domain decomposition and multigrid preconditioners. With BLOPEX, the same preconditioners can now be efficiently used for symmetric eigenvalue problems. PETSc facilitates the integration of independently developed application modules with strict attention to component interoperability, and makes BLOPEX extremely easy to compile and use with preconditioners that are available via PETSc. We present the LOBPCG algorithm in BLOPEX for {\it hypre} and PETSc. We demonstrate numerically the scalability of BLOPEX by testing it on a number of distributed and shared memory parallel systems, including a Beowulf system, SUN Fire 880, an AMD dual-core Opteron workstation, and IBM BlueGene/L supercomputer, using PETSc domain decomposition and {\it hypre} multigrid preconditioning. We test BLOPEX on a model problem, the standard 7-point finite-difference approximation of the 3-D Laplacian, with the problem size in the range $10^5-10^8$.Comment: Submitted to SIAM Journal on Scientific Computin