(Re‐)join the party! The effects of direct democracy on party membership in Europe

It has been argued that political parties are in decline. While they used to be responsible for connecting citizens to the state by translating their preferences into policies, they have increasingly become part of the state, acting as governors instead. While this perspective emphasises parties’ representative function, it is less clear what their role is in a more direct democratic context. Parties may gain support due to such context, but they may also be seen increasingly redundant in a situation where citizens can co‐decide directly. Focusing on party membership, this study tests these rival expectations on a panel of 16 West European democracies over the period 1980–2008 and finds that parties tend to have higher levels of party membership in a direct democratic context. The usage of referendums, however, does not contribute to this effect.     

Content-Based Image Retrieval： Near Tolerance Rough Set Approach

The problem considered in this paper is how to detect the degree of similarity in the content of digital images useful in image retrieval, i.e., to what extent is the content of a query image similar to content of other images. The solution to this problem results from the detection of subsets that are rough sets contained in covers of digital images determined by perceptual tolerance relations （PTRs）. Such relations are defined within the context of perceptual representative spaces that hearken back to work by J.I-I. Poincar6 on representative spaces as models of physical continua. Classes determined by a PTR provide content useful in content-based image retrieval （CBIR）. In addition, tolerance classes provide a means of determining when subsets of image covers are tolerance rough sets （TRSs）. It is the nearness of TRSs present in image tolerance spaces that provide a promising approach to CBIR, especially in cases such as satellite images or aircraft identification where there are subtle differences between pairs of digital images, making it difficult to quantify the similarities between such images. The contribution of this article is the introduction of the nearness of tolerance rough sets as an effective means of measuring digital image similarities and, as a significant consequence, successfully carrying out CBIR.     

Erosion and Variety in Pay for High Public Office

Two elements have characterized the rewards for public officials in the past two decades. One is the erosion of pay and perquisites in many democratic countries. The other is a continuing variety of rewards, especially when compared to those in the private sector. Using data from a variety of OECD countries and the European Union, this article investigates alternative explanations for these two elements. The data is adjusted for purchasing power of the different currencies and then related to the relative wealth of the countries. We find that ideas, interests and institutions all have some explanatory power, but that none is sufficient by itself to explain either variety or erosion in pay across the range of countries. The policy implications of these findings, in terms of both “how” and “how much” public officials should be paid, are also examined.