Electoral reform in local government: alternative systems and key issues

The Government plans a full modernisation of local government, including annual elections and a stronger scrutiny role for elected representatives. Such a programme must also consider reform options which improve the match between votes and seats, revitalise local electoral dynamics and strengthen links between councillors and constituents. This research, by Patrick Dunleavy and Helen Margetts, investigates a key possibility for such an agenda: changing the local electoral system. The researchers simulated local elections under five alternative electoral systems to first-past-the-post

Reconsidering Chinese modesty: Hong Kong and mainland Chinese evaluative judgements of compliment responses

Compliments are usually intended to have a positive effect on interpersonal relations, yet for the outcome actually to be positive, both the compliment and the compliment response need to be handled appropriately. This paper focuses on different types of compliment responses, and explores Chinese people’s evaluative judgements of these different types. Gao and Ting-Toomey (1998) argue that modesty is an important component of Chinese politeness, and that to blatantly accept a compliment is considered impolite. Several studies (e.g. Chen 1993, Yuan 1996 and Loh 1993) have indeed found that compliments are rejected more frequently in Chinese than in English, yet other evidence suggests that acceptance responses are also relatively common in Chinese. This paper explores a number of hypotheses associated with these issues. It reports a study carried out in Mainland China and Hong Kong, and discusses the notion of Chinese modesty in relation to the findings

Life events and acute cardiovascular reactions to mental stress: a cohort study

Objective: This study addressed the issue of whether frequent exposure to life events is associated with aggravation or blunting of cardiovascular reactions to acute mental stress. Methods: In a substantial cohort of 585 healthy young adults, systolic and diastolic blood pressure and pulse rate were recorded at rest and in response to a mental arithmetic stress task. Participants indicated, from a list of 50 events, those they had experienced in the last year. Results: There was an overall association between life events and blunted cardiovascular reactivity that was driven by variations in the frequency of exposure to desirable events. The total number of events and the number of personal events were negatively associated with systolic blood pressure and pulse rate reactions to acute stress, whereas the number of work-related events was negatively associated with diastolic blood pressure and pulse rate reactivity. The negative association between total events and systolic blood pressure reactivity was stronger for women than men, whereas men exposed to frequent undesirable events showed enhanced diastolic blood pressure reactivity. The blunting of pulse rate reactivity associated with frequent personal life events was evident particularly for those who had a relatively large number of close friends. Conclusions: The nature and extent of the association between life events exposure and stress reactivity in young adults depends on the valence of the events together with the sex of the individual and their social network size

Data science, artificial intelligence and the third wave of digital era governance

This article examines the model of digital era governance (DEG) in the light of the latest-wave of data-driven technologies, such as data science methodologies and artificial intelligence (labelled here DSAI). It identifies four key top-level macro-themes through which digital changes in response to these developments may be investigated. First, the capability to store and analyse large quantities of digital data obviates the need for data ‘compression’ that characterises Weberian-model bureaucracies, and facilitates data de-compression in data-intensive information regimes, where the capabilities of public agencies and civil society are both enhanced. Second, the increasing capability of robotic devices have expanded the range of tasks that machines extending or substituting workers’ capabilities can perform, with implications for a reshaping of state organisation. Third, DSAI technologies allow new options for partitioning state functions in ways that can maximise organisational productivity, in an ‘intelligent centre, devolved delivery’ model within vertical policy sectors. Fourth, within each tier of government, DSAI technologies offer new possibilities for ‘administrative holism’ - the horizontal allocation of power and functions between organisations, through state integration, common capacity and needs-based joining-up of services. Together, these four themes comprise a third wave of DEG changes, suggesting important administrative choices to be made regarding information regimes, state organisation, functional allocation and outsourcing arrangements, as well as a long-term research agenda for public administration, requiring extensive and detailed analysis

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Subsystem constraints in variational second order density matrix optimization: curing the dissociative behavior

A previous study of diatomic molecules revealed that variational second-order density matrix theory has serious problems in the dissociation limit when the N-representability is imposed at the level of the usual two-index (P, Q, G) or even three-index (T1, T2) conditions [H. van Aggelen et al., Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. 11, 5558 (2009)]. Heteronuclear molecules tend to dissociate into fractionally charged atoms. In this paper we introduce a general class of N-representability conditions, called subsystem constraints, and show that they cure the dissociation problem at little additional computational cost. As a numerical example the singlet potential energy surface of BeB+ is studied. The extension to polyatomic molecules, where more subsystem choices can be identified, is also discussed.Comment: published version;added reference