Party policy change: exploring the limits of ideological flexibility in Belgium

Parties need to adapt their policy platforms in order to win elections, yet this is not without risk. Policy shifts can reduce credibility and foster intra-party conflicts. As a result, parties tend to proceed with caution when programmatic changes are made. In this article two risk reduction methods are formulated as hypotheses and investigated. First, we claim that parties will prefer making changes to the amount of attention, issues get in a manifesto than to the positions they defend. Second, we argue that the amount of change is related to the ideological and electoral importance of the issue. In other words, we assume that parties are less likely to make positional changes on issues they own because this can possibly bring about loss in credibility and contradicts with the fact that politicians and party members are policy driven. These hypotheses are examined with new data gathered through the content analysis of the party manifestos of the Belgian Liberal party and the social democratic party for elections held between 1961 and 2010. The article concludes that parties make smaller positional changes as opposed to changes in the issues they emphasize. Only weak evidence was found for the fact that the positional flexibility toward an issue correlates with the ideological and electoral importance of an issue

A Constraint-Solving Approach for Achieving Minimal-Reset Transition Coverage of Smartcard Behaviour

Smartcards are security critical devices requiring a high assurance verification approach. Although formal techniques can be used at design or even at development stages, such systems have to undergo a traditional hardware-in-the-loop testing phase. This phase is subject to two key requirements: achieving exhaustive transition coverage of the behavior of the system under test, and minimizing the testing time. In this context, testing time is highly bound to a specific hardware reset operation. Model-based testing is the adequate approach given the availability of a precise model of the system behavior and its ability to produce high quality coverage while optimizing some cost criterion. %l'argument n'est pas convainquant.This paper presents an original algorithm addressing this problem by reformulating it as an integer programming problem to make a graph Eulerian. The associated cost criterion captures both the number of resets and the total length of the test suite, as an auxiliary objective. The algorithm ensures transition coverage. An implementation of the algorithm was developed, benchmarked, and integrated into an industrial smartcard testing framework. A validation case study from this domain is also presented. The approach can of course be applied to any other domains with similar reset-related testing constraints

Effect of Corrosion on the Low-cycle Fatigue Strength of Steels used in Frequent Start-up Power Generation Steam Turbine

AbstractThe practical importance of fatigue failure in steam turbine materials has directed many experimental research towards assessing the physical reason for material sensitivity to corrosion fatigue and providing design rules for engineers. Metallic materials used in steam turbine are exposed to cyclic loading at high temperature and steam environment, during their service life. In this study, an original fatigue testing setup was developed to investigate the effect of aqueous solutions and temperature on the fatigue strength on the martensitic stainless steel X19CrMoVNbN11-1 used for rotating blades and (ii) a cast G17CrMoV5-10 steel used for casing. Fatigue tests were carried out in two environments: (i) in air at 90°C and (ii) in distilled water at 90°C (pH = 7.2 and 02 = 3 ppm) at a loading frequency of 1Hz. Internal and surface crack initiation are observed in air at 90°C, whereas in purified water at 90°C, the crack initiated in the surface at corrosion defects. The decrease observed in the corrosion fatigue strength of specimens was more important at high plastic strain level of that on similar specimens tested in air. Based on fractography analysis, fatigue crack initiation mechanisms in air and in distilled water were identified. Two different scenarios for fatigue damage depending on the microstructure are proposed and will be discussed in this paper