The Economy, the War in Iraq and the 2004 Presidential Election

In this paper I apply the Bread and Peace model of voting in US presidential elections to analyze the sources of George W. Bush’s narrow re-election victory in 2004. The aggregate election outcome is readily explained by the model’s objectively measured political-economic fundamentals – no appeal need be made to arbitrary count, trend, dummy and switching variables. The results imply that the 2004 election turned mainly on weighted-average growth of per capita real disposable personal income over the term. The war in Iraq, which has escalated dramatically in political relevance since the 2004 contest, had a relatively small impact on the election result, most likely depressing Bush’s two-party vote share by less than a half percentage point.2004 US presidential election; voting and economy; Iraq and 2004 US election; bread and peace voting

The 2010 Midterm Election for the US House of Representatives

The number of House seats won by the president's party at midterm elections is well explained by three pre-determined or exogenous variables: (1) the number of House seats won by the in-party at the previous on-year election, (2) the vote margin of the in-party's candidate at the previous presidential election, and (3) the average growth rate of per capita real disposable personal income during the congressional term. Given the partisan division of House seats following the 2008 on-year election, President Obama's margin of victory in 2008, and the weak growth of per capita real income during the first 6 quarters of the 111th Congress, the Democrat's chances of holding on to a House majority by winning at least 218 seats at the 2010 midterm election will depend on real income growth in the 3rd quarter of 2010. The data available at this writing indicate the that Democrats will win 211 seats, a loss of 45 from the 2008 on-year result that will put them in the minority for the 112th Congress.US House of Representatives; 2010 election; economics and elections

The Politicization of Growth Theory

In this essay I review the main features of neoclassical growth theory, with an eye to seeing what it has to say about the causes of wealth and poverty among nations. I argue that outside the OECD and a comparatively small circle of other countries, neoclassical models contribute little to identifying the deeper sources of cross-national patterns in growth and productivity. I then discuss recent advances in the empirical analysis of economic performance that feature the influence of politics, policy and institutional arrangements on entrepreneurship, innovation, investment and the efficiency with which factor inputs are transformed to output.neoclasssical growth theory; institutions and economic development and growth; politics and economic development and growth

Integrating Evolutionary Computation with Neural Networks

There is a tremendous interest in the development of the evolutionary computation techniques as they are well suited to deal with optimization of functions containing a large number of variables. This paper presents a brief review of evolutionary computing techniques. It also discusses briefly the hybridization of evolutionary computation and neural networks and presents a solution of a classical problem using neural computing and evolutionary computing technique

LHC constraints on gauge boson couplings to dark matter

Collider searches for energetic particles recoiling against missing transverse energy allow to place strong bounds on the interactions between dark matter (DM) and standard model particles. In this article we update and extend LHC constraints on effective dimension-7 operators involving DM and electroweak gauge bosons. A concise comparison of the sensitivity of the mono-photon, mono-W, mono-Z, mono-W/Z, invisible Higgs-boson decays in the vector boson fusion mode and the mono-jet channel is presented. Depending on the parameter choices, either the mono-photon or the mono-jet data provide the most stringent bounds at the moment. We furthermore explore the potential of improving the current 8 TeV limits at 14 TeV. Future strategies capable of disentangling the effects of the different effective operators involving electroweak gauge bosons are discussed as well.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures; v2: reconstruction efficiencies for the different missing transverse energy signals included in the analysis; version to appear in PR

The Logical Problem of Evil and the Limited God Defense

Formulated theories on the Logical Problem of Evil, the Evidential Problem of Evil and the Limited God Defense