Information, Candidate Selection, and the Quality of Representation: Evidence from Nepal

How do we improve the quality of representation in new democracies? This paper studies candidate selection by party leaders and asks whether poor information about public preferences can lead elite choices to diverge from mass opinion. Working with a political party in Nepal, we show that while elites value voter preferences, these preferences only explain one third of elite candidate selection. Next, we embed an experiment in actual candidate selection deliberations for this party and find that party leaders not only select different candidates when polling data are presented to them, but that their updated decisions also improve the party’s vote share. By opening the black-box of candidate selection, this paper demonstrates that closing the information gap between elites and voters has the power to improve the quality of representation

Resurrecting Minimal Yukawa Sector of SUSY SO(10)

Supersymmetric $SO(10)$ models with Yukawa coupling matrices involving only a $10_H$ and a $\overline{126}_H$ of Higgs fields can lead to a predictive and consistent scenario for fermion masses and mixings, including the neutrino sector. However, when coupled minimally to a symmetry breaking sector that includes a $210_H$ and a $126_H$, these models lead either to an unacceptably small neutrino mass scale, or to non-perturbative values of the gauge couplings. Here we show that with the addition of a $54_H$ to the symmetry breaking sector, the successful predictions of these models for fermion masses and mixings can be maintained. The $54_H$ enables a reduction of the $B-L$ symmetry breaking scale to an intermediate value of order $10^{12}$ GeV, consistent with the observed neutrino mass spectrum, while preserving perturbative gauge coupling unification. We obtain an excellent fit to all fermion masses and mixings in this framework. We analyze carefully the prediction of the model for CP violation in neutrino oscillations. Consistency with proton lifetime, however, requires a mini-split SUSY spectrum with the squarks and sleptons having masses of order 100 TeV, accompanied by TeV scale gauginos and Higgsinos. Such a spectrum may arise from pure gravity mediation, which would predict the partial lifetime for the decay $p \rightarrow \overline{\nu} K^+$ to be an order of magnitude above the current experimental limit.Comment: 29 pages, 3 figures, replacement to match the published versio

Exploring the democratic potential of online social networking: The scope and limitations of e-participation

Copyright © 2012 by the Association for Information Systems.The availability and promise of social networking technologies with their perceived open philosophy has increasingly inspired citizens around the world to participate in political activity on the Web. Recent examples range from opposing public policies, such as government funding cuts, to organizing revolutionary social movements, such as those in the Middle East and North Africa. Although online spaces create remarkable opportunities for various forms of political action, there are concerns over the power of existing institutions to control and even censor such interaction spaces. The objective of this article is to draw together different insights on the online engagement phenomenon, highlighting both its potential and limitations as a mechanism for fostering democratic debate and influencing policy making. We examine recent examples from Europe, the Middle East and Latin America. Finally, we summarize the implications of our work and outline directions for further research