10,066 research outputs found
Political Ambition and Legislative Behavior in the European Parliament
Members of the European Parliament (MEP) typically follow one of two career paths, either advancing within the European Parliament itself or returning to higher office in their home states. We argue that these different ambitions condition legislative behavior. Specifically, MEPs seeking domestic careers defect from group-leadership votes more frequently and oppose legislation that expands the purview of supranational institutions. We show how individual, domestic-party, and national level variables shape the careers available to MEPs and, in turn, their voting choices. To test the argument, we analyze MEPs' roll-call voting behavior in the 5th session of the EP (1999-2004) using a random effects model that captures idiosyncrasies in voting behavior across both individual MEPs and specific roll-call votes.published or submitted for publicationnot peer reviewe
Protect This House? Transnational Party Group Influence on Candidate Selection to the European Parliament
Introduction: The benefits of legislator seniority are
well established in the scholarly literature on legislative politics. Developed initially within the American congressional context (eg., Davis 1990; Holcombe 1989; Weingast and Marshall 1988), the worth of long- serving legislators—viz., their ability to function
productively and provide tangible policy and office benefits to their political parties and constituents—has
also been explored by scholars of comparative politics
(Jones et al. 2002; McKelvey and Riezman 1992; Shomer 2009). Much of this literature has also been concerned
with the increasing ‘personalization’ that comes with
legislator seniority: legislators feel more independent,
having developed an individual brand during their tenure,
and begin to behave in ways that appear less beholden
to their respective political parties and more directly
linked to voters. While such scenarios typically model
legislators as the agents of either political party or
constituent principals, what happens when the agents are
unable to identify who the most important principals are
Unitary equivalence to a truncated Toeplitz operator: analytic symbols
Unlike Toeplitz operators on , truncated Toeplitz operators do not have
a natural matricial characterization. Consequently, these operators are
difficult to study numerically. In this note we provide criteria for a matrix
with distinct eigenvalues to be unitarily equivalent to a truncated Toeplitz
operator having an analytic symbol. This test is constructive and we illustrate
it with several examples. As a byproduct, we also prove that every complex
symmetric operator on a Hilbert space of dimension is unitarily
equivalent to a direct sum of truncated Toeplitz operators.Comment: 15 page
Rational Parties, Radical Voters? Fringe Party Recruitment Strategies at the National & European Levels
Introduction: Scholars and practitioners alike have long noted the relative lack of interest in
European Parliament (EP) elections, both on the part of the voting public and from
mainstream national politicians (Hix and Marsh 2007; Hobolt, Spoon, and Tilley 2009;
Reif and Schmitt 1980; Reif 1984; Schmitt 2005). Within the academic literature, this has
led to a characterization of EP elections as being ‘second order’ in interest to both
European voters and political parties, as compared with national political contests. It
also contributes to portrayals of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) as a
klatch of political amateurs, retirees, or fringe extremists—even as the real legislative
powers of the EP have greatly expanded since the initiation of direct European elections
in 1979 (Kreppel 2002)
Assessing the relationship between spectral solar irradiance and stratospheric ozone using Bayesian inference
We investigate the relationship between spectral solar irradiance (SSI) and
ozone in the tropical upper stratosphere. We find that solar cycle (SC) changes
in ozone can be well approximated by considering the ozone response to SSI
changes in a small number individual wavelength bands between 176 and 310 nm,
operating independently of each other. Additionally, we find that the ozone
varies approximately linearly with changes in the SSI. Using these facts, we
present a Bayesian formalism for inferring SC SSI changes and uncertainties
from measured SC ozone profiles. Bayesian inference is a powerful,
mathematically self-consistent method of considering both the uncertainties of
the data and additional external information to provide the best estimate of
parameters being estimated. Using this method, we show that, given measurement
uncertainties in both ozone and SSI datasets, it is not currently possible to
distinguish between observed or modelled SSI datasets using available estimates
of ozone change profiles, although this might be possible by the inclusion of
other external constraints. Our methodology has the potential, using wider
datasets, to provide better understanding of both variations in SSI and the
atmospheric response.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figures, Journal of Space Weather and Space Climate
(accepted), pdf version is in draft mode of Space Weather and Space Climat
Tying knots in light fields
We construct a new family of null solutions to Maxwell's equations in free
space whose field lines encode all torus knots and links. The evolution of
these null fields, analogous to a compressible flow along the Poynting vector
that is both geodesic and shear-free, preserves the topology of the knots and
links. Our approach combines the Bateman and spinor formalisms for the
construction of null fields with complex polynomials on . We
examine and illustrate the geometry and evolution of the solutions, making
manifest the structure of nested knotted tori filled by the field lines.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure
Cosmological Acceleration Through Transition to Constant Scalar Curvature
As shown by Parker and Raval, quantum field theory in curved spacetime gives
a possible mechanism for explaining the observed recent acceleration of the
universe. This mechanism, which differs in its dynamics from quintessence
models, causes the universe to make a transition to an accelerating expansion
in which the scalar curvature, R, of spacetime remains constant. This
transition occurs despite the fact that we set the renormalized cosmological
constant to zero. We show that this model agrees very well with the current
observed type-Ia supernova (SNe-Ia) data. There are no free parameters in this
fit, as the relevant observables are determined independently by means of the
current cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) data. We also give the
predicted curves for number count tests and for the ratio, w(z), of the dark
energy pressure to its density, as well as for dw(z)/dz versus w(z). These
curves differ significantly from those obtained from a cosmological constant,
and will be tested by planned future observations.Comment: 31 pages, 7 figures; to appear in ApJ. Corrected numerical results;
described quantum basis of theory; 18 references added; 2 figures adde
Crystal and molecular structure of bis(8-phenylmenthyl) 2-(2-methyl-5-oxo-3-cyclohexen-1-yl)propandioate, C\u3csub\u3e42\u3c/sub\u3eH\u3csub\u3e54\u3c/sub\u3eO\u3csub\u3e5\u3c/sub\u3e• CH\u3csub\u3e3\u3c/sub\u3eCN
The X-ray crystal structure of the title compound, as crystallized from acetonitrile-water was determined. The relative stereochemistry of the cyclohexenone ring with respect to the 8-phenylmenthyl esters was determined. The title compound crystallizes in the noncentrosymmetric space group P21, with a=8.9850(10) Å, b=15.575(3) Å, c=14.478(2) Å, β=94.61(2)°, and D calc=1.118 g cm−3 for Z=2
An online electoral connection? How electoral systems condition representatives’ social media use
This article analyses the impact of electoral institutions on the re-election campaigning and outreach strategies of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) on the Twitter social media platform. Social media offers politicians a means to contact voters remotely and at low cost. We test the effect of diverse national proportional representation electoral institutions in European elections on a possible online electoral connection. We draw upon an original dataset of MEP Twitter activity before, during, and after the 2014 European elections. Our results confirm that variation in electoral institutions leads to meaningful differentiation in MEP social media campaigning, which is further affected by national party, voter and MEP characteristics. MEPs make constructive use of Twitter, but there is no sustained online electoral connection
Unsupervised Training for 3D Morphable Model Regression
We present a method for training a regression network from image pixels to 3D
morphable model coordinates using only unlabeled photographs. The training loss
is based on features from a facial recognition network, computed on-the-fly by
rendering the predicted faces with a differentiable renderer. To make training
from features feasible and avoid network fooling effects, we introduce three
objectives: a batch distribution loss that encourages the output distribution
to match the distribution of the morphable model, a loopback loss that ensures
the network can correctly reinterpret its own output, and a multi-view identity
loss that compares the features of the predicted 3D face and the input
photograph from multiple viewing angles. We train a regression network using
these objectives, a set of unlabeled photographs, and the morphable model
itself, and demonstrate state-of-the-art results.Comment: CVPR 2018 version with supplemental material
(http://openaccess.thecvf.com/content_cvpr_2018/html/Genova_Unsupervised_Training_for_CVPR_2018_paper.html
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