The effect of globalization on voter turnout

Despite significant efforts to understand the recent decline of voter turnout in democratic societies, the empirical explanations behind this development as well as regarding the overall cross-national variation in turnout rates remain rather limited. I contribute to this discourse by examining the effects of globalization on electoral turnout. More specifically, I seek to amend the argument raised by Hellwig who claims that economic globalization dissuades voters from voting on the matters related to economic policy and, at the same time, encourages them to put more weight on non-economic issue evaluations. I strive towards the modification of this argument by broadening the concept of globalization to include not only its economic aspects, such as trade and financial investments, but rather the overall spectrum of international effects on domestic policy provision, including the matters of politics, society and markets. Contrary to Hellwig, I posit a negative relationship between globalization and turnout in general and I test my hypothesis on an aggregate-level dataset covering parliamentary elections in 25 OECD democracies from 1970 to 2006. The empirical results show that only economic globalization exhibits a consistently significant effect on voter turnout while the influence of political and social types of international forces are found to be statistically inconsequential. While I find no empirical support for my argument, my analysis uncovers more comprehensively the mechanism of how economic globalization decreases turnout by looking at international pressures across a variety of issue areas, both economic and non-economic ones, thus comparing their individual effects.Governmen

Fiscal Federalism in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Ten Years after the Dayton Treatment and Still not in a Steady Condition

The following paper deals with the fiscal federalism in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Besides a detailed description of the development of the fiscal federalism in BiH since the Dayton peace process, the main focus of this paper is to illustrate how the public finance system in BiH is designed and what the main differences between the Republika Srpska and the BiH Federation are. We analyse the revenue disparities between the cantons and their respective municipalities, which are boosted by the origin or rather the derivation principle in tax collection, and present an equalisation system based on the VAT, which can minimise the fiscal gaps mainly in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH). Moreover, this paper highlights the successful process and the unsolved problems of the recently introduced Value Added Tax in BiH. Especially the VAT introduction, the common Governance Board, the Indirect Tax Administration (ITA) and the newly formed common army and police force could be interpreted as signs of stabilisation for this fragmented federation. Although these are milestones of a peaceful coexistence between Moslem Bosniacs, Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats, the Bosnian fiscal federalism has only been partly achieved.Fiscal Federalism, Grants, VAT introduction, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Piano Recital (60 minutes): Extended Program Notes

This Master’s Thesis Recital, recorded on the accompanying compact disc, contains music written by composers from five different stylistic epochs: Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Impressionist, and Modern (twentieth century). The diversity of pieces allowed me to present different compositional methods, structural forms, and individual composers’ styles. These program notes provide historical and biographical background, analyses, and musical examples for each piece

The Stoics on Identity.

A useful corrective to the increasingly ahistorical approach in much contemporary philosophy is an appreciation of the fact, often neglected these days, that many of the themes currently at the centre-stage of philosophical discussion were not merely raised by the Greeks but dealt with along lines that ring familiar to modern ears. A case in point is the issue of individuation in contemporary analytic metaphysics, in particular as it arises in connection with the problem of change. It will emerge that various moves in the recent literature have affinities with and indeed were anticipated by the Stoics in their treatment of puzzles of mereological change

Effect of bonding of a CO molecule on the conductance of atomic metal wires

We have measured the effect of bonding of a CO molecule on the conductance of Au, Cu, Pt, and Ni atomic contacts at 4.2 K. When CO gas is admitted to the metal nano contacts, a conductance feature appears in the conductance histogram near 0.5 of the quantum unit of conductance, for all metals. For Au, the intensity of this fractional conductance feature can be tuned with the bias voltage, and it disappears at high bias voltage (above $\sim$ 200 mV). The bonding of CO to Au appears to be weakest, and associated with monotomic Au wire formation.Comment: 6 figure

Improving adaptation and interpretability of a short-term traffic forecasting system

Traffic management is being more important than ever, especially in overcrowded big cities with over-pollution problems and with new unprecedented mobility changes. In this scenario, road-traffic prediction plays a key role within Intelligent Transportation Systems, allowing traffic managers to be able to anticipate and take the proper decisions. This paper aims to analyse the situation in a commercial real-time prediction system with its current problems and limitations. The analysis unveils the trade-off between simple parsimonious models and more complex models. Finally, we propose an enriched machine learning framework, Adarules, for the traffic prediction in real-time facing the problem as continuously incoming data streams with all the commonly occurring problems in such volatile scenario, namely changes in the network infrastructure and demand, new detection stations or failure ones, among others. The framework is also able to infer automatically the most relevant features to our end-task, including the relationships within the road network. Although the intention with the proposed framework is to evolve and grow with new incoming big data, however there is no limitation in starting to use it without any prior knowledge as it can starts learning the structure and parameters automatically from data. We test this predictive system in different real-work scenarios, and evaluate its performance integrating a multi-task learning paradigm for the sake of the traffic prediction task.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Absence of magnetically-induced fractional quantization in atomic contacts

Using the mechanically controlled break junction technique at low temperatures and under cryogenic vacuum conditions we have studied atomic contacts of several magnetic (Fe, Co and Ni) and non-magnetic (Pt) metals, which recently were claimed to show fractional conductance quantization. In the case of pure metals we see no quantization of the conductance nor half-quantization, even when high magnetic fields are applied. On the other hand, features in the conductance similar to (fractional) quantization are observed when the contact is exposed to gas molecules. Furthermore, the absence of fractional quantization when the contact is bridged by H_2 indicates the current is never fully polarized for the metals studied here. Our results are in agreement with recent model calculations.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure