The general election in the UK, May 2005

At the 2005 general election in the UK, held on 5 May, the Labour Party won an historically unprecedented third victory in a row, and, correspondingly, the Conservative Party suffered its third defeat in a row. In total, 62 seats changed hands, and, as all three major parties experienced both some success and some failure, the election results were curiously ambivalent

The epistemology of Schelling's philosophy of nature

The philosophy of nature operates as one complete and systematic aspect of Schelling’s philosophy in the years 1797-1801 and as complement to Schelling’s transcendental philosophy at this time. The philosophy of nature comes with its own, naturalistic epistemology, according to which human natural productivity provides the basis for human access to nature’s own productive laws. On the basis of one’s natural productivity, one can consciously formulate principles which match nature’s own lawful principles. One refines these principles through a process of experimentation, which relies on the human being’s naturalness in productivity. By making natural activity central to knowledge, Schelling takes seriously the naturalness of humans, without denying the dramatic shift that occurs when consciousness and rationality factor into experience. This epistemology can thus be fruitfully put in conversation with current philosophical discussions of mind and nature, in that it offers a naturalized account of mind which does not suffer from the typical weaknesses of a contemporary Kantian or Hegelian account. The paper thus concludes with a discussion of John McDowell’s Mind and World, and shows how Schelling’s philosophy can resolve some tensions in that work

On families of 9-congruent elliptic curves

We compute equations for the families of elliptic curves 9-congruent to a given elliptic curve. We use these to find infinitely many non-trivial pairs of 9-congruent elliptic curves over Q, i.e. pairs of non-isogenous elliptic curves over Q whose 9-torsion subgroups are isomorphic as Galois modules.Comment: 18 pages. This article supersedes parts of arXiv:1105.170

The electoral effectiveness of constituency campaigning in the 2010 British General Election: The ‘triumph’ of Labour?

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Electoral Studies. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2011 Elsevier B.V.This article establishes a model of likely campaign effectiveness, before examining the intensity of constituency campaigning at the 2010 general election in Britain and its subsequent impact on electoral outcomes, using both aggregate and individual level data. It shows that constituency campaigning yielded benefits in varying degrees for all three main parties and that Labour’s constituency campaign efforts were effective despite the electoral context, and ultimately affected the overall outcome of the election. These findings have significant implications for our understanding of the circumstances under which campaigns are likely to be more or less effective, and provide further evidence that a carefully managed campaign stands the most chance of delivering tangible electoral payoffs