What explains electoral responses to the 'Great Recession in Europe?

The ?Great Recession? in Europe started in early 2008 and was the greatest economic crisis facing the continent since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It produced a largescale loss of support for many incumbent parties. The purpose of this paper is to explain responses to the crisis among European electorates with the assistance of three rival models of electoral choice. The first is the cleavages model associated with Rokkan and Lipset which highlights the importance of social groups as the sources of electoral support. The second is the spatial model of party competition which focuses on the ideological distance between voters and parties in relation to divisive issues in society. The third is the valence model which argues that voters will support parties that deliver policies over which there is widespread agreement about what should be done. The paper models electoral support for incumbent parties using data from the European Social Surveys of 2006, conducted prior to the recession, and again in 2012 some four years into the crisis. The results show that all three models are relevant for understanding mass political responses to the crisis. It is also apparent that an ideological shift to the right occurred in electoral support between the two periods and this happened among both the voters and also the incumbent parties in Europe

Energy balance of fusing silver wires surrounded by air

During the fusing process of a metallic COnductor of small cross-section by a fairly strong electric current, the following phenom~na can be distinguished

Avoiding voltage collapse by fast active power rescheduling

Basic ideas for a method where the active power production is rescheduled in an automatic (fast) way to increase the loadability of the power system during a voltage instability are presented. Active power production is a parameter that is controllable during this instability phase and it may have a positive influence on the system vulnerability to collapse, especially when current limitations of the generators are involved. Depending on the strength of the system, two major objectives can be distinguished: to strengthen a local area from collapsing or to avoid an increase of the voltage depressed area. © 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.link_to_subscribed_fulltex