Does illegal immigration empower rightist parties?

The main goal of this paper is to analyze the political outcome in countries where the relevant issue in elections is the control of immigration. In particular we explore the consequences on the political outcome of the fact that parties are either ideological or opportunistic with respect to this issue. In order to do that we use a simple two-party political competition model in which the issues over which parties take positions are the level of border enforcement and the way it has to be financed. We show that an ideological rather than a pure opportunistic behavior gives parties an advantage to win the election. In particular, in most of the cases we consider we find that rightist parties have an advantage to win in countries where the relevant issue in election is illegal immigration. This result may help us to understand the recent success of anti-immigrant and rightist parties in several countries.illegal immigration, skilled, unskilled, ideology

Ensemble model output statistics for wind vectors

A bivariate ensemble model output statistics (EMOS) technique for the postprocessing of ensemble forecasts of two-dimensional wind vectors is proposed, where the postprocessed probabilistic forecast takes the form of a bivariate normal probability density function. The postprocessed means and variances of the wind vector components are linearly bias-corrected versions of the ensemble means and ensemble variances, respectively, and the conditional correlation between the wind components is represented by a trigonometric function of the ensemble mean wind direction. In a case study on 48-hour forecasts of wind vectors over the North American Pacific Northwest with the University of Washington Mesoscale Ensemble, the bivariate EMOS density forecasts were calibrated and sharp, and showed considerable improvement over the raw ensemble and reference forecasts, including ensemble copula coupling

Blockchain: A Graph Primer

Bitcoin and its underlying technology Blockchain have become popular in recent years. Designed to facilitate a secure distributed platform without central authorities, Blockchain is heralded as a paradigm that will be as powerful as Big Data, Cloud Computing and Machine learning. Blockchain incorporates novel ideas from various fields such as public key encryption and distributed systems. As such, a reader often comes across resources that explain the Blockchain technology from a certain perspective only, leaving the reader with more questions than before. We will offer a holistic view on Blockchain. Starting with a brief history, we will give the building blocks of Blockchain, and explain their interactions. As graph mining has become a major part its analysis, we will elaborate on graph theoretical aspects of the Blockchain technology. We also devote a section to the future of Blockchain and explain how extensions like Smart Contracts and De-centralized Autonomous Organizations will function. Without assuming any reader expertise, our aim is to provide a concise but complete description of the Blockchain technology.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figure

Politics, Governance, and Zigzags of the “Power Vertical”: Toward a Framework for Analysis of Russia\u27s Local Regimes

In the wake of multiple political and economic transformations in the 1990s and the 2000s, new patterns of subnational politics and governance emerged across Russia’s regions and large cities in the form of local regimes. These patterns could be analyzed through the theoretical and comparative lenses of international research on the subject. I argue that the major changes of local regimes in Russia’s regions and large cities – unlike those analyzed in the literature on American and European sub-national politics and governance – are heavily affected by structural factors such as trends of local as well as national economic development. Also, major political and institutional changes in Russia and, especially, the process of cooptation of previously semi-autonomous local regimes into the hierarchy of the power vertical during the wave of re-centralization of politics and governance in the 2000s led to the emergence of the dual model of sub-national governance, which combines some featured characteristics of subnational authoritarianism and crony capitalism that partly resembles developmental trends in some Third World countries as well as late-Soviet practices of territorial politics and governance