14,106 research outputs found
"Voto por voto, casilla por casilla?" : Democratic consolidation, political intermediation, and the Mexican election of 2006
After he had only tightly lost the election in July 2006, Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his Coalición claimed fraud and asserted that unfair conditions during the campaign had diminished his chances to win the presidency. The paper investigates this latter allegation centering on a perceived campaign of hate, unequal access to campaign resources and malicious treatment by the mass media. It further analyzes the mass media’s performance during the conflictual post electoral period until the final decision of the Federal Electoral Tribunal on September 5th, 2006. While the media’s performance during the campaign tells us about their compliance with fair media coverage mechanisms that have been implemented by electoral reforms in the 1990s, the mass media is uncontained by such measures after the election. Thus, their mode of coverage of the postelectoral conflicts allows us to “test” the mass media’s transformation to a more unbiased, social responsible “fourth estate”. Finally the paper scrutinizes whether the claims of fraud and the protests by the leftist movement resulted in lower levels of institutional trust and democratic support. The analysis of the media performance is based on data provided by the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE). Its Media Monitor encompassed more than 150 TV stations, 240 radio stations and 200 press publications. However, there is no comparable data available for the postelectoral period. Interviews with Mexican media experts, which the author has conducted during the postelectoral period, serve as empirical basis for the second part. Data on the public opinions and attitudes of Mexican citizens are taken from the 2007 Latinobarometro, the 2006 Encuesta Nacional and several polls conducted by Grupo Reforma. The results do not support López Obradors notions. Even though a strong party bias is characteristic of the Mexican media system, all findings hint at a continuity of balanced campaign coverage and fair access to mass media publicity. Coverage during the postelectoral period was more polarized, yet both sides remained at least partially open for oppositional views. The claims of fraud, mass protest mobilization and anti-institutional discourse by Lopez Obrador’s leftist movement seem not to have caused significant loss in institutional trust, support of and satisfaction with democracy, even though these levels remain quite low
A New Class of Asymptotically Non-Chaotic Vacuum Singularities
The BKL conjecture, stated in the 60s and early 70s by Belinski, Khalatnikov
and Lifshitz, proposes a detailed description of the generic asymptotic
dynamics of spacetimes as they approach a spacelike singularity. It predicts
complicated chaotic behaviour in the generic case, but simpler non-chaotic one
in cases with symmetry assumptions or certain kinds of matter fields.
Here we construct a new class of four-dimensional vacuum spacetimes
containing spacelike singularities which show non-chaotic behaviour. In
contrast with previous constructions, no symmetry assumptions are made. Rather,
the metric is decomposed in Iwasawa variables and conditions on the asymptotic
evolution of some of them are imposed. The constructed solutions contain five
free functions of all space coordinates, two of which are constrained by
inequalities. We investigate continuous and discrete isometries and compare the
solutions to previous constructions. Finally, we give the asymptotic behaviour
of the metric components and curvature.Comment: MSc Thesis, 42 pages; v2: appendix on cosmological constant added,
typos corrected; v3: typos correcte
Mississippian Communities in the St. Francis Basin: A Central Place Model
The development of Mississippian settlement models for northeast Arkansas is reviewed. It is argued that a five-tier central place hierarchy best accounts for the variability currently known to exist among Mississippian communities in the St. Francis basin
Problem of Site Definition in Cultural Resource Management
The strategies employed by the Cache River Archeological Project, the Little Black Watershed Project, and the 1976 Village Creek Archeological Project with regard to site definition are compared and assessed. It is argued that both the Cache and Little Black Projects used unnecessarily restrictive definitions of cultural resources. The more liberal approach of the Village Creek Project enables both the archeological community and governmental agencies to interpret and assess better the significance and general extent of the archeological context of the cultural resource base
An Empirical Analysis of the Role of Amplifiers, Downtoners, and Negations in Emotion Classification in Microblogs
The effect of amplifiers, downtoners, and negations has been studied in
general and particularly in the context of sentiment analysis. However, there
is only limited work which aims at transferring the results and methods to
discrete classes of emotions, e. g., joy, anger, fear, sadness, surprise, and
disgust. For instance, it is not straight-forward to interpret which emotion
the phrase "not happy" expresses. With this paper, we aim at obtaining a better
understanding of such modifiers in the context of emotion-bearing words and
their impact on document-level emotion classification, namely, microposts on
Twitter. We select an appropriate scope detection method for modifiers of
emotion words, incorporate it in a document-level emotion classification model
as additional bag of words and show that this approach improves the performance
of emotion classification. In addition, we build a term weighting approach
based on the different modifiers into a lexical model for the analysis of the
semantics of modifiers and their impact on emotion meaning. We show that
amplifiers separate emotions expressed with an emotion- bearing word more
clearly from other secondary connotations. Downtoners have the opposite effect.
In addition, we discuss the meaning of negations of emotion-bearing words. For
instance we show empirically that "not happy" is closer to sadness than to
anger and that fear-expressing words in the scope of downtoners often express
surprise.Comment: Accepted for publication at The 5th IEEE International Conference on
Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA), https://dsaa2018.isi.it
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