A spatial model of legislative voting with perceptual error

This paper presents a unidimensional spatial model of voting in which members of Congress vote based on an imprecise perception of roll-call alternatives. The model is applied to the Senate roll-call votes of 1977 to estimate the ideal points of the senators, and to examine the role of a liberal-conservative dimension in describing votes on economic issues relative to social issues. In light of the spatial model, the paper argues that “standard” models of roll-call voting are not based on a theory of choice, and hence, that it is difficult to interpret their results. Alternatives to standard models, based on the spatial model, are developed and are used to analyze the role of ideology in deciding a specific economic issue: coal strip-mining.     

The arts of refusal: tragic unreconciliation,pariah humour,and haunting laughter

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates Hannah Arendt’s writings on tragic unreconciliation and pariah humour as offering creative strategies for confronting the deadening of emotion that enables people to become reconciled to what they should refuse or resist. She offers a distinctive contribution to debates on reconciliation and justice, I suggest, by articulating a tragic approach to unreconciliation. Yet Arendt recognised that tragic accounts of violence can reinforce denial and resignation. In writings on the ‘hidden tradition’ of the ‘Jew as pariah,’ Arendt suggests that humour can be an important response to tragic accounts of political violence and a strategy for awakening an emotional response in those who cannot perceive tragedies to which they have become reconciled. As arts of refusal, tragic unreconciliation and pariah humour invoke and subvert the tragic imagination to reveal possibilities for solidarity, responsibility, and transformation that challenge problematic forms of reconciliation – reconciliation to one’s role as a participant in, or bystander to abuse, reconciliation as self-abnegating assimilation, and reconciliation as compromise, scapegoating, or denial.     

二元论的逻辑错误

从使用人工语言表示一个一元论或二元论观点入手,首先,在一阶逻辑上定义"归元谓词",并使用集合的观点改写其表达式;其次,运用"归元谓词"定义一元论和二元论,并指出二元论的逻辑错误;然后将以上观点运用于对一个实例的分析,即对试图使用哥德尔定理反驳强人工智能观点的工作加以反驳;最后得出结论:讨论"世界本原"问题是无意义的,一个一元论仅仅是在承认空集存在的意义上被我们接受。     

The extension method to calculate the error of industrial structure

The industrial structure shows the service efficiency of economic resources and the rationality of its development. It has been one of the important works for governments to calculate the error of industrial structure and adjust it. The dependent function is the core of extension set, which shows the extent of objective property, and explains the easiness to be variated quantitatively or qualitatively. By using the dependent degree, the error of industrial structure shows not only the magnitude but also the easiness to correct it, then the decision-makers can discriminate the difficulty of industrial adjustment and select the emphasis, and the orientation of adjustment may be clearer and the operation may be more maneuverable. The paper analyzes the orientation to adjust the industrial structure and proposes some simple suggestions by using the calculation results.     

容错纠错机制的马克思主义哲学意蕴

容错纠错机制是党中央在马克思主义哲学的指导下,为激励新时代改革创新中担当有为的干部而提出来的,具有丰富的哲学内涵。容错纠错机制中蕴含着马克思主义哲学的世界观和方法论,同时又具有显著的时代特色、中国特色,是我们党运用马克思主义哲学在治国理政中的又一创新。     

走出预防和惩治腐败体系中的制度问题误区

惩治和预防腐败要“更加注重治本，更加注重预防，更加注重制度建设，做到惩治和预防两手抓、两手都要硬”，这是党在多年来反腐败斗争中不断探索得出的规律性结论，也是建立健全惩治和预防腐败体系的精要所在。学习贯彻党的十七届四中全会精神，深入实践落实科学发展观，全面、系统、完整、准确地把握制度的内涵，进而推动惩治和预防腐败体系中的制度建设协调、可持续发展，是深化反腐倡廉制度建设的基础和关键。     

论金朝迁都开封的战略失误

金朝迁都开封是由于军事失败和败军之将把持朝政,而金宣宗个人才能平庸作出的决策,它导致领土的丧失和财政、军事的困境,导致金朝一蹶不振。其合理对策应是固守中都或者退守上京。     

Proxy documents as a source of measurement error in the Comparative Manifestos Project

This paper considers the issue of document type diversity in the Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP). For many years the CMP has been collecting and coding a variety of documents, such as speeches, pamphlets, newspaper articles and leaflets, as manifesto proxies. By using previously unexplored archival material to perform controlled comparisons between different types of documents, this paper argues that the coding of such documents introduced considerable measurement error to party position estimates. Statistical analyses indicate that this measurement error is systematic rather than random as it is often manifested as centrist bias in parties' left–right position estimates. Consequently, the paper argues that random error correction methods cannot always correct for error attributed to the coding of proxy documents. The paper concludes with some recommendations for third-party users of the CMP data and documents and a plea to the CMP research team.     

Measuring error for adjacent policy position estimates: Dealing with uncertainty using CMP data

Careful users of CMP party position data should take the uncertainty of position estimates into account. We compare and evaluate two current approaches that provide error estimates for party positions. Researchers of the CMP group identify measurement error in quantitative content analysis as the cause of uncertainty about position estimates, whereas a second approach by Benoit et al. (2009) attributes the uncertainty of position estimates to a stochastic generation of election programs. We illustrate the commonalities and differences of these approaches and provide two empirical applications, the identification of the left–right order of parties and of policy shifts by parties, using CMP data for 25 countries. Despite conceptual differences, results in these applications are surprisingly similar.     

Education,human error,and road crash risk: An empirical investigation in the Indian states

This study examines the road accident rates from 29 Indian states and 6 Union Territories during 2006–2015. In this paper, we have employed several empirical techniques such as regression, generalized method of moments (GMM), and threshold regression models to examine how education and attitude of the drivers impact the road accident rates. In our empirical analysis, we demonstrate that lawless driving is found to be positive and statistically significant while incorporating both state and year effects. We also find some interesting result in the context of education and road accidents. We notice positive relationship between higher education and road accident rates across Indian states, which tells us highly educated people are more prone to road accidents as compared with less educated people. In the threshold analysis, the study discovers the positive relationship between road injury and accidents caused by people with higher education, in cases of considering road injury rate from drunken driving as the threshold variable. There appears to be a large number of behavioral issues emanating from higher education, which contributes significantly to the road accident rates in the Indian states. Hence, there is a need for policy intervention.     

The deep error of political libertarianism: self-ownership,choice, and what’s really valuable in life

ABSTRACT

Contemporary versions of natural rights libertarianism trace their locus classicus to Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. But although there have been many criticisms of the version of political libertarianism put forward by Nozick, many of these objections fail to meet basic methodological desiderata. Thus, Nozick’s libertarianism deserves to be re-examined. In this paper I develop a new argument which meets these desiderata. Specifically, I argue that the libertarian conception of self-ownership, the view’s foundation, implies what I call the Asymmetrical Value Claim: a dubious claim about the importance of choice relative to other valuable capacities. I argue that this misunderstands what is really valuable in life, and show how it causes libertarianism to generate counterintuitive public policy recommendations.     

Affirmative action,duality of error,and the consequences of mispredicting the academic performance of african american college applicants

The implications of different potential affirmative action policies depend on three factors: selection rate from the applicant pool, base rate of qualified applicants, and accuracy of performance predictions. A series of analyses was conducted under various assumptions concerning affirmative action plans, causes of racial differences in average college admissions test scores, and racial differences in accuracy of performance predictions. Evidence suggesting a lower level of predictive accuracy for African Americans implies that, under a program of affirmative action, both proportionately more false positives (matriculated students who do not succeed) and proportionately more false negatives (rejected applicants who could have succeeded) will be found among African American applicants. Unless equivalent levels of predictive accuracy are achieved for both groups, no admission policy can be fair simultaneously to majority group applicants and African American applicants. © 2002 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

The relationship between corruption and income inequality in U.S. states: evidence from a panel cointegration and error correction model

We investigate the causality between corruption and income inequality within a multivariate framework using a panel data set of all 50 U.S. states over the period 1980 to 2004. The heterogeneous panel cointegration test by Pedroni (Oxf. Bull. Econ. Stat. 61:653–670, 1999; Econom. Theory 20:597–627, 2004) indicates that in the long run corruption and the unemployment rate have a positive and statistically significant impact on income inequality while a negative impact is found for real personal income per capita, education, and unionization rate. The Granger-causality results associated with a panel vector error correction model indicate both short-run and long-run bidirectional causality between corruption and income inequality.