Evolving network structure of academic institutions

Today’s colleges and universities consist of highly complex structures that dictate interactions between the administration, faculty, and student body. These structures can play a role in dictating the efficiency of policy enacted by the administration and determine the effect that curriculum changes in one department have on other departments. Despite the fact that the features of these complex structures have a strong impact on the institutions, they remain by-and-large unknown in many cases. In this paper we study the academic structure of our home institution of Trinity College in Hartford, CT using the major and minor patterns between graduating students to build a temporal multiplex network describing the interactions between different departments. Using recent network science techniques developed for such temporal networks we identify the evolving community structures that organize departments’ interactions, as well as quantify the interdisciplinary centrality of each department. We implement this framework for Trinity College, finding practical insights and applications, but also present it as a general framework for colleges and universities to better understand their own structural makeup in order to better inform academic and administrative policy

Electoral incumbency advantages and the introduction of fixed parliamentary terms in the United Kingdom

Can fixing the parliamentary term be expected to reduce electoral incumbency advantages? The UK’s 2011, Fixed-term Parliaments Act aims to prevent incumbents from scheduling early elections for political benefit. Yet, the view that flexible election timing gives incumbents an unfair advantage remains contested. The literature on opportunistic election calling – including the signalling effects of this strategy and the competence of governments that select it – lends support to both sides in the debate. This paper examines how far the divergent arguments apply in the UK. Using observed outcomes and a potential outcomes approach, we investigate to what effect incumbents have used election timing. Our results suggest that governments can improve their re-election chances when they have discretion to time elections to favourable circumstances instead of facing voters at set intervals when conditions may not be advantageous. Fixed parliamentary terms are likely to reduce that incumbency advantage significantly