Reassessing the Link between Voter Heterogeneity and Political Accountability: A Latent Class Regression Model of Economic Voting

While recent research has underscored the conditioning effect of individual characteristics on economic voting behavior, most empirical studies have failed to explicitly incorporate observed heterogeneity into statistical analyses linking citizens' economic evaluations to electoral choices. In order to overcome these drawbacks, we propose a latent class regression model to jointly analyze the determinants and influence of economic voting in Presidential and Congressional elections. Our modeling approach allows us to better describe the effects of individual covariates on economic voting and to test hypotheses on the existence of heterogeneous types of voters, providing an empirical basis for assessing the relative validity of alternative explanations proposed in the literature. Using survey data from the 2004 U.S. Presidential, Senate and House elections, we and that voters with college education and those more interested in political campaigns based their vote on factors other than their economic perceptions. In contrast, less educated and interested respondents assigned considerable weight to economic assessments, with sociotropic jugdgments strongly in uencing their vote in the Presidential election and personal financial considerations affecting their vote in House elections. We conclude that the main distinction in the 2004 election was not between `sociotropic' and `pocketbook' voters, but rather between `economic' and `non-economic' voters

Electron Population Aging Models for Wide-Angle Tails

Color-color diagrams have been useful in studying the spectral shapes in radio galaxies. At the workshop we presented color-color diagrams for two wide-angle tails, 1231+674 and 1433+553, and found that the standard aging models do not adequately represent the observed data. Although the JP and KP models can explain some of the observed points in the color-color diagram, they do not account for those found near the power-law line. This difficulty may be attributable to several causes. Spectral tomography has been previously used to discern two separate electron populations in these sources. The combination spectra from two such overlying components can easily resemble a range of power-laws. In addition, any non-uniformity in the magnetic field strength can also create a power-law-like spectrum. We will also discuss the effects that angular resolution has on the shape of the spectrum.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, proceedings from 1999 'Life Cycles of Radio Galaxies' workshop at STScI in Baltimore, M

When is .999... less than 1?

We examine alternative interpretations of the symbol described as nought, point, nine recurring. Is "an infinite number of 9s" merely a figure of speech? How are such alternative interpretations related to infinite cardinalities? How are they expressed in Lightstone's "semicolon" notation? Is it possible to choose a canonical alternative interpretation? Should unital evaluation of the symbol .999 . . . be inculcated in a pre-limit teaching environment? The problem of the unital evaluation is hereby examined from the pre-R, pre-lim viewpoint of the student.Comment: 28 page

Bolza quaternion order and asymptotics of systoles along congruence subgroups

We give a detailed description of the arithmetic Fuchsian group of the Bolza surface and the associated quaternion order. This description enables us to show that the corresponding principal congruence covers satisfy the bound sys(X) > 4/3 log g(X) on the systole, where g is the genus. We also exhibit the Bolza group as a congruence subgroup, and calculate out a few examples of "Bolza twins" (using magma). Like the Hurwitz triplets, these correspond to the factoring of certain rational primes in the ring of integers of the invariant trace field of the surface. We exploit random sampling combined with the Reidemeister-Schreier algorithm as implemented in magma to generate these surfaces.Comment: 35 pages, to appear in Experimental Mathematic