1,578 research outputs found
Electoral Malapportionment: Partisanship, Rhetoric and Reform in the Shadow of the Agrarian Strongman
This article revisits the zonal malapportionment and âJohrymanderâ endemic in Queenslandâs electoral system before the Fitzgerald Inquiry and examines how reform was won. Fitzgerald spent little time justifying his intuition that an unfair electoral system eroded accountability, and devolved to the Electoral and Administrative Review Commission (EARC) the task of rewriting Queensland electoral law. It did so by adopting precepts well established in other Australian jurisdictions; the process was one of liberalising, but not groundbreaking, catch-up. The Queensland example is intriguing for the paradoxes it presented. Bjelke-Petersenâs electoral manipulations merged pretence with openness. The concept of zonal weighting was given historical and policy justifications and cloaked behind the work of putatively independent commissions, yet its inherent partisanship was a notorious fact. More curious still, the manipulations were unnecessary either as a means of maintaining the conservatives in office or as a legal subterfuge evading constitutional constraints. Rather, Bjelke-Petersenâs pointed rejection of democratic pluralism married with the projection of an image of leadership by right. Viewing Queenslandâs zonal system in the larger perspective of manipulation of electoral maps, this article compares populist strongmen in South Australia (Playford) and QuĂ©bec (Duplessis), who employed similar rhetoric to entrench themselves in power. Ultimately, as others had, Queenslandâs government constructed a long-running but brittle form of agrarian chauvinism, in which the signalling of anti-democratic values inherent in the zonal system was an important rhetorical component. Bjelke-Petersen was proud to govern over, rather than through, democracy
Deliberative or Performative? Constitutional Reform and the Politics of Public Engagement in New Zealand
A key assumption that shapes debates over deliberative constitutionalism is the idea that âdeliberationâ versus the wielding political power based upon partisan influence somehow represent different poles of the constitutional-deliberative coin. This dualism is problematic. While the term âdeliberationâ means careful consideration and purposeful and dispassionate decision-making, its adjectival form âdeliberateâ may also imply âcalculatedâ, âpremeditatedâ and âcontrolledâ. How democracies deliberate is arguably an empirical and political question rather than a theoretical or normative one. This paper sets out to explore these themes in the context of New Zealand, a country that has had three major constitutional deliberations since 2005. Framed by government as ânational conversationsâ on âthe future of New Zealandâ, these include two initiatives aimed at engaging the publicâs views on constitutional reform and a recent consultation over proposals to change the national flag. What is striking about these popular constitutional initiatives, however, is the lack of public engagement or serious government interest. We argue that these ânon-eventâ deliberations highlight one of the key challenges for deliberative constitutionalism: how to prevent instrumentalism and performativity from overshadowing the substantive.
In developing our argument we draw on anthropological fieldwork on the role of the Crown in New Zealand and the Commonwealth. As we aim to show, the New Zealand case study highlights yet another problem for deliberative constitutionalism in practice: the difficulties of creating a meaningful public consultation when the main terms of reference (âCrownâ and âConstitutionâ) are so ambiguous, amorphous and poorly understood
Unveiling the nature of interaction between semantics and phonology in lexical access based on multilayer networks
An essential aspect of human communication is the ability to access and retrieve information from onesâ âmental lexiconâ. This lexical access activates phonological and semantic components of concepts, yet the question whether and how these two components relate to each other remains widely debated. We harness tools from network science to construct a large-scale linguistic multilayer network comprising of phonological and semantic layers. We find that the links in the two layers are highly similar to each other and that adding information from one layer to the other increases efficiency by decreasing the network overall distances, but specifically affecting shorter distances. Finally, we show how a multilayer architecture demonstrates the highest efficiency, and how this efficiency relates to weak semantic relations between cue words in the network. Thus, investigating the interaction between the layers and the unique benefit of a linguistic multilayer architecture allows us to quantify theoretical cognitive models of lexical access
Civic Health Report 2013
This report is an initial attempt to assess the Civic Health of The College at Brockport. By âCivic Healthâ we mean the civic, social and political strength of a community. Civic strength is characterized by the level of community involvement and the capacity of a community to work together to resolve collective problems. Social strength captures the social ties, networks, level of trust, and shared understanding in a community. Political strength gauges the extent of citizensâ engagement with government. In this first Civic Health Report we present data addressing most, but not all, aspects of Civic Health. We focus on the College at Brockport student body. In future years we plan to expand the range of indicators we assess and extend the project to include faculty and staff â clearly two important constituencies in the college community
Continuous extension of a densely parameterized semigroup
Let S be a dense sub-semigroup of the positive real numbers, and let X be a
separable, reflexive Banach space. This note contains a proof that every weakly
continuous contractive semigroup of operators on X over S can be extended to a
weakly continuous semigroup over the positive real numbers. We obtain similar
results for non-linear, non-expansive semigroups as well. As a corollary we
characterize all densely parametrized semigroups which are extendable to
semigroups over the positive real numbers.Comment: 8 pages, minor modification
Mitigation of cascading failures in complex networks
Cascading failures in many systems such as infrastructures or financial networks can lead to catastrophic system collapse. We develop here an intuitive, powerful and simple-to-implement approach for mitigation of cascading failures on complex networks based on local network structure. We offer an algorithm to select critical nodes, the protection of which ensures better survival of the network. We demonstrate the strength of our approach compared to various standard mitigation techniques. We show the efficacy of our method on various network structures and failure mechanisms, and finally demonstrate its merit on an example of a real network of financial holdings.Published versio
Transplanckian Collisions at the LHC and Beyond
Elastic collisions in the transplanckian region, where the center-of-mass
energy is much larger than the fundamental gravity mass scale, can be described
by linearized general relativity and known quantum-mechanical effects as long
as the momentum transfer of the process is sufficiently small. For larger
momentum transfer, non-linear gravitational effects become important and,
although a computation is lacking, black-hole formation is expected to dominate
the dynamics. We discuss how elastic transplanckian collisions can be used at
high-energy colliders to study, in a quantitative and model-independent way,
theories in which gravity propagates in flat extra dimensions. At LHC energies,
however, incalculable quantum-gravity contributions may significantly affect
the experimental signal.Comment: 45 pages, 9 figures. v2: added refs and expanded discussion of
fixed-angle string scatterin
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