Consensus Decisions and Similarity Measures in International Organizations

Voting behavior in international organizations, most notably in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), is often used to infer the similarity of foreign policy preferences of member states. Most of these measures ignore, however, that particular covoting patterns may appear simply by chance (Häge 2011) and that these patterns of agreement (or the absence thereof) are only observable if decisions are reached through roll-call votes. As the relative frequency of roll-call votes changes considerably over time in most international organizations, currently used similarity and affinity measures offer a misleading picture. Based on a complete data set of UNGA resolution decisions, we demonstrate how taking different forms of chance agreement and the relative prevalence of consensus decisions into account affects conclusions about the effect of the similarity of member states’ foreign policy positions on foreign aid allocation.     

Legislative Oversight under the Nigerian Presidential System

Oversight function is a major component of the activities of modern legislatures irrespective of the form of government in practice. This study examines the extent to which the Nigerian legislature, characterised by infrequent appearances on the political scene and operating in an environment largely dominated by the executive arm, has performed its oversight role. The study, which is basically empirical, argues that the Nigerian legislature has been incapable of effectively performing its oversight role because, in addition to constraints like executive interference, crippling internal conflict, inexperience and high rate of members turnover hampering legislative efficiency, the legislature has compromised its role. However, occasional flashes of a measure of assertiveness by the legislature suggest that with effective mitigation of its internal problems its performance will improve as legislative culture deepens.     

List of Contributors

The emergence of regional parliamentary assemblies (RPAs) in Africa has been on the ascendancy since the mid-twentieth century. The essence of these parliaments is to contribute to regional economic and political integration through oversight, legislation and representation. However, the ability of Africa's RPAs to perform these functions has been challenged by institutional and legal factors. Using five regional parliaments (the East African Legislative Assembly, the Economic Community of West African States Parliament, the Inter-Parliamentary Union of Intergovernmental Authority on Development, the Pan-African Parliament and the South African Development Community Parliamentary Forum) as case studies, this paper examines the impact of these challenges on the functionality and viability of Africa's RPAs. It finds that given that these parliaments lack legitimacy of authority and enabling status of operation, they exist merely as deliberative, consultative and advisory bodies rather than independent organs of regional economic communities with full legislative and oversight powers. Consequently, the paper recommends, among other things, the amendment of their constitutive acts to grant them full legislative and oversight functions, and the election of their members by universal adult suffrage in order to give them legitimacy of authority.     

The 2014 Parliamentary Elections in India: A Study of the Voting Preferences of Muslims in Uttar Pradesh

This paper analyses the manner in which over the past few years, the major political parties in the largest Indian state of Uttar Pradesh have calibrated their policies with the objective of wooing Muslim voters. It examines the factors which shaped Muslim electoral behaviour in the general election of 2014 to the Lok Sabha (Lower House of the Indian Parliament) and how the electoral arithmetic was transformed in the run-up to this election. By analysing institutional, political and intra-community factors, it explores the reasons for the declining importance and representation of Muslims in the electoral arena of Uttar Pradesh.     

Rising powers at the UN: an analysis of the voting behaviour of brics in the General Assembly

This article examines the long-term trends of foreign policy convergence of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (brics) to determine the similarity of their positions on world issues, as they seek to ‘insert’ themselves more fully into global decision making. The analysis is based upon their votes in the UN General Assembly. The article compiles two indexes of voting for the period 1974–2011. Both demonstrate a high and now growing degree of cohesion among brics. Their voting is broken down by pairs to show common themes and the major issue divergences, and how often individual states voted with others. Nuclear disarmament and human rights are the two areas that reveal persisting divergences between these states.     

业主撤销诉讼当事人研究——兼评最高人民法院两个司法解释的相关规定

《物权法》第78条第二款规定业主有权对业主大会或业主委员会的不当决定请求人民法院予以撤销,规定过于简单,没有明确撤销的效果、请求撤销的期限,缺乏可操作性,无法应对现实生活中复杂多变的情况。撤销诉讼中原告一般应限于具有业主身份者,但在特殊情况下也应扩及房屋所有权人的继承人以及房屋的实际管理、使用人等。作为被告的业主大会或者业主委员会的诉讼主体资格存在疑问,目前可以考虑通过司法解释来解决这个问题。     

Steady State or Second Order? The 2003 Elections to the National Assembly for Wales

This article examines the second National Assembly for Wales election in May 2003. It focuses on the campaign and results, examining the relationship between the process and dynamics of devolution, and identifiable significant shifts in Welsh politics. It compares the 2003 results with those in the first election in 1999 and isolates a number of phenomena, such as turnout and support for the parties most closely associated with the region, that help establish whether the second election signals a return to 'traditional' voting or whether there remains a pattern associated with so-called 'second order' ballots.     

A fissure in ‘unanimous democracy’: parliamentary contestations over property rights on land in early Republican Turkey

The parliamentary politics of Turkey's one-party regime (1925–1946) has been described as a ‘unanimous democracy’, particularly on account of the absence of a voting opposition. Many scholars consider the Law for Providing Land to Farmers of 1945 as the first instance of parliamentary opposition in the one-party legislature. The current article challenges this widespread view and argues that property rights on land tended to provoke backlashes even before 1945. It examines the making of the deportation, land distribution and settlement laws of the 1920s and 1930s, all of which sanctioned intervention into property relations on land in the form of the expropriation of landowners. Going beyond an exclusive focus on voting patterns, this article traces parliamentary resistance by examining how government bills changed as they proceeded through both the reviewing committees and the general assembly. It links the birth of a full-fledged parliamentary opposition in 1945 to the previous waves of discontent and shows that property rights on land was a constant fissure in the early Republic's unanimous democracy.     

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.