9,478 research outputs found
Two-ballot versus plurality rule: an empirical investigation on the number of candidates
Duverger claimed more than 50 years ago that the number of candidates in elections should be a function of electoral rules. Both his âlawâ and âhypothesisâ suggest the number of candidates vying for seats in elections to be tightly linked to characteristics of the electoral process such as its degree of proportionality and the presence of runoffs. Here we test the validity of Duvergerâs claim using data from municipal elections in Brazil. Our study differs from others in the field in two important dimensions. First, by using municipal data we avoid the usual problems that plague statistical analysis using cross-country data. Secondly, we have a truly exogenous source of variation due to a change in electoral legislation introduced by the constitutional reform of 1988: simple plurality remained the rule only in municipalities with less than 200,000 voters, and a second-ballot became mandatory for the others above that threshold. This allows for a neat identification strategy using panel data. Our main finding is that elections with runoffs lure greater numbers of candidates in municipalities with sufficiently high levels of heterogeneity.Duverger's law, runoff, heterogeneity
Gluon saturation and the Froissart bound: a simple approach
At very high energies we expect that the hadronic cross sections satisfy the
Froissart bound, which is a well-established property of the strong
interactions. In this energy regime we also expect the formation of the Color
Glass Condensate, characterized by gluon saturation and a typical momentum
scale: the saturation scale . In this paper we show that if a saturation
window exists between the nonperturbative and perturbative regimes of Quantum
Chromodynamics (QCD), the total cross sections satisfy the Froissart bound.
Furthermore, we show that our approach allows us to describe the high energy
experimental data on total cross sections.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures. Includes additional figures, discussion and
reference
WebProt\'eg\'e: A Cloud-Based Ontology Editor
We present WebProt\'eg\'e, a tool to develop ontologies represented in the
Web Ontology Language (OWL). WebProt\'eg\'e is a cloud-based application that
allows users to collaboratively edit OWL ontologies, and it is available for
use at https://webprotege.stanford.edu. WebProt\'ege\'e currently hosts more
than 68,000 OWL ontology projects and has over 50,000 user accounts. In this
paper, we detail the main new features of the latest version of WebProt\'eg\'e
Strong curvature singularities in quasispherical asymptotically de Sitter dust collapse
We study the occurrence, visibility, and curvature strength of singularities
in dust-containing Szekeres spacetimes (which possess no Killing vectors) with
a positive cosmological constant. We find that such singularities can be
locally naked, Tipler strong, and develop from a non-zero-measure set of
regular initial data. When examined along timelike geodesics, the singularity's
curvature strength is found to be independent of the initial data.Comment: 16 pages, LaTeX, uses IOP package, 2 eps figures; accepted for
publication in Class. Quantum Gra
Ab-initio study of the relation between electric polarization and electric field gradients in ferroelectrics
The hyperfine interaction between the quadrupole moment of atomic nuclei and
the electric field gradient (EFG) provides information on the electronic charge
distribution close to a given atomic site. In ferroelectric materials, the loss
of inversion symmetry of the electronic charge distribution is necessary for
the appearance of the electric polarization. We present first-principles
density functional theory calculations of ferroelectrics such as BaTiO3, KNbO3,
PbTiO3 and other oxides with perovskite structures, by focusing on both EFG
tensors and polarization. We analyze the EFG tensor properties such as
orientation and correlation between components and their link with electric
polarization. This work supports previous studies of ferroelectric materials
where a relation between EFG tensors and polarization was observed, which may
be exploited to study ferroelectric order when standard techniques to measure
polarization are not easily applied.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, 5 tables, corrected typos, as published in Phys.
Rev.
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