Regional elections in Portugal the Azores and Madeira: Persistence of non-alternation and absence of non-statewide parties

ABSTRACT

The ruling parties were elected into office again after the recent regional elections held in Madeira (29 March 2015) and in Azores (16 October 2016): the social-democrats (PSD – Partido Social Democrata) in Madeira and the socialists (PS – Partido Socialista) in Azores. Despite forty years of regional elections in Portugal a pattern of non-alternation in executive government (Madeira) and the same party being in office for a long time (Azores) still has not been broken. The most notable difference is that turnout registered the lowest scores since the first regional elections were held in the 1970s. Just a bit more than 50% of voters showed up at the ballot box.     

Social Bots in Election Campaigns: Theoretical,Empirical, and Methodological Implications

Social bots mimic and potentially manipulate humans and their behaviours in social networks. The public sphere might be especially vulnerable to their impacts, which is why we first discuss their potential influence on the public sphere from a theoretical perspective. From an empirical perspective, we analyzed Twitter followers of seven German parties before (N = 638,674) and during (N = 838,026) the 2017 electoral campaigns regarding bot prevalence and activities. The results revealed that the share of social bots increased from 7.1% before to 9.9% during the election campaigns. The percentage of active social bots remained roughly the same. An analysis of the content distributed by both the most popular and the most active bots showed that they disseminate few political hashtags, and that almost none referred to German politics. We discuss the results against the background of normative traditions of public sphere theories and address the methodological challenges bots pose in political communication.     

The importance of personal vote intentions for the responsiveness of legislators: A field experiment

Individual legislators can be important agents of political representation. However, this is contingent upon their responsiveness to constituency requests. To study this topic, an increasing number of studies use field experiments in which the researcher sends a standardized email to legislators on behalf of a constituent. In this paper, we report the results of an original field experiment of this genre with the members of the German Bundestag. Supplementing previous research, we explore whether constituency requests in which voters mention a personal vote intention (rather than a partisan vote intention) increase legislators’ responsiveness, and how this treatment relates to electoral system's incentives. We find that legislators treated with a personal vote intention were more likely to respond (67 per cent) and respond faster than those treated with a partisan vote intention (59 per cent). However, we also show that the treatment effect is moderated by electoral system incentives: it is larger for nominally-elected legislators than for those elected via a party list. Our results suggest that electoral system's incentives matter for legislators’ responsiveness only when constituents explicitly signals an intention to cast a personal vote.     

Partisanship & nationalization in American elections: Evidence from presidential,senatorial, & gubernatorial elections in the U.S. counties, 1872–2020

Scholars argue that contemporary American elections are pronounced in their degree of partisanship and nationalization. While much of this work largely uncovers a heightened degree of nationalization in contemporary elections, little is known about how far back these patterns generalize. Given the limited availability of American electoral data, this work also generally focuses on a single office or during a certain segment of the post-war period since 1946. Moreover, this work largely focuses on states as salient units of analysis, masking potential variation found in U.S. counties, the smallest geographical unit constituting panel observations over time and across elections. In this note, we leverage a novel dataset of county-level election returns for President, U.S. Senate, and Governor, to specify a model assessing whether American elections are more nationalized and partisan than during any other period since the Civil War. We find evidence that presidential and Senate elections are more partisan today than any period since the Civil War, while gubernatorial elections are as partisan today as they were during the late 1800s. Our findings have implications for contemporary-based theories explaining the rise of partisanship in American elections and demonstrates the utility of county-level data in assessing electoral changes in America.     

Scalable code clone search for malware analysis

Reverse engineering is the primary step to analyze a piece of malware. After having disassembled a malware binary, a reverse engineer needs to spend extensive effort analyzing the resulting assembly code, and then documenting it through comments in the assembly code for future references. In this paper, we have developed an assembly code clone search system called ScalClone based on our previous work on assembly code clone detection systems. The objective of the system is to identify the code clones of a target malware from a collection of previously analyzed malware binaries. Our new contributions are summarized as follows: First, we introduce two assembly code clone search methods for malware analysis with a high recall rate. Second, our methods allow malware analysts to discover both exact and inexact clones at different token normalization levels. Third, we present a scalable system with a database model to support large-scale assembly code search. Finally, experimental results on real-life malware binaries suggest that our proposed methods can effectively identify assembly code clones with the consideration of different scenarios of code mutations.     

我国《职业教育法》的立法分析与建议

我国现行《职业教育法》自1996年颁布至今,未有过任何修改完善,存在诸多不符合时代发展要求的问题,甚至出现了有些环节无法可依的窘迫局面。对于现行《职业教育法》存在的问题,需要对其立法目的加以重新审视,并且从立法内容和立法技术两个角度进行分析。在强调明确主体责任的同时,关注各方法律主体的权利诉求。适当借鉴国外的有益经验,结合我国具体国情,尽快修订完善现行《职业教育法》。     

Politics in 140 Characters or Less: Campaign Communication,Network Interaction,and Political Participation on Twitter

The methods by which politicians and policy makers communicate with the public are constantly adapting to the ever-changing media environment. As part of this changing landscape, this study considers the case of Twitter. Specifically, the authors conduct a survey of political Twitter users, in order to understand their use of the medium and their political behaviors within it. Results indicate that political Twitter users are more interested in and engaged in politics in general and less trusting of the mainstream media. Moreover, the study investigates the extent to which followers of a campaign may affect its overall influence in the Twitterverse.     

Time and technique: the legal lives of the 26-week qualifying period

This paper aims to bring an appreciation of legal form, technicalities, and legislative drafting to growing interdisciplinary literatures on time and governance. Scholarship across politics, geography, science studies and anthropology continues to trace the productive force and specific qualities of diverse temporal horizons. At the same time socio-legal scholars increasingly focus on the work of making and negotiating law, engaging with the dogged, everyday work of legal experts and bureaucrats. Yet little attention has been paid, to date, to the work of legislative drafters. This paper follows the ‘legal lives’ of qualifying periods on family-friendly employment rights. As examples of legal technicalities that work with time, qualifying periods form an important part of the regulatory structure that separates precarious workers from ‘regular’ employees in UK law. Drawing on documentary research and interviews with policy experts, union activists and legislative drafters, this paper focuses on the formal qualities of qualifying periods, arguing that these legal technicalities conjure time and legal form as inextricable. Whenever law becomes relevant to conversations about time and governance, we could usefully pay attention to the idiosyncrasies and controversies occupying legal form and legislative drafting.     

Negative voting and party polarization: A classic tragedy

Elections around the globe attest to the persistence of polarization in democratic politics. Popular support for antagonistic elite strategies defies standard predictions of ideological convergence. This paper develops a new solution to the theoretical puzzle: The centrifugal drive in representative democracy is a byproduct of voters’ disposition to evaluate policy platforms on the basis of issue positions that they dislike—to wit, negative voting. While reasonable individually, this behavior backfires collectively as elections dominated by negativity produce more polarized legislatures. Quite tragically, party polarization ultimately reflects an uncoordinated struggle of the electorate to avoid the worst rather than to pursue the best. Support for these claims comes from a theoretical model and a large comparative analysis of vote choice and party platforms. The evidence also favors the negativity model over earlier spatial models of elections. In light of negativity, normative concerns about polarization and democratic representation stand to be reconsidered.     

Post-legislative scrutiny in the UK Parliament: adding value

ABSTRACT

Legislatures appoint committees for different purposes. Both Houses of the UK Parliament separate legislative committees from non-legislative, or select, committees. Each is unusual in that it utilises select committees to engage in post-legislative scrutiny. We examine why each engages in this type of scrutiny, given competing demands for limited resources. Distributive and informational theories are utilised to explain the difference between the two chambers, identifying why the form of asymmetrical bicameralism to be found in the United Kingdom facilitates scrutiny that would otherwise not be undertaken. The genesis and impact of post-legislative scrutiny committees are considered, with a focus on the House of Lords and why the use of such committees plays to the strengths of the House.