The politicization of indigenous identities in Peru

Until now, scholars have argued that, unlike other Latin American countries with sizable indigenous populations, indigenous politics are largely unimportant in Peru because indigenous-based parties or national-level movements are absent. Rather than focusing solely on the emergence of indigenous parties or movements, which ignores the larger consequence of individuals' indigenous identifications for electoral politics, we argue that it is more important to examine the emergence of indigenous political divisions and their effects on indigenous representation. Using data from the World Values Survey across the presidential elections of 1995, 2001, and 2006, we show that, as indigenous identity has become more carefully defined, indigenous voting divisions have emerged in Peru, and concomitantly, parties have begun to recognize and respond to these divisions.

Increasingly ‘Irrational’ Party Systems: Evidence that There Are Increasingly More Than Two at the District level

Recent work has noted an increase in the number of parties at the national level in both proportional and majoritarian electoral systems. While the conventional wisdom maintains that the incentives provided by the electoral system will prevent the number of parties at the district level from exceeding two in majoritarian systems, the evidence presented here demonstrates otherwise. I argue that this has occurred because the number of cleavages articulated by parties has increased as several third parties have begun articulating cleavages that are not well represented by the two larger parties.

Due North? Do American Theories of Legislative Committees Apply to Canada?

Several theories of legislative organisation have been proposed to explain committee selection in American legislatures, but do these theories travel outside the United States? This paper tests whether these theories apply to data from the Canadian House of Commons. It was found that the distributive and partisan models of legislative organisation explain committee composition in Canada. In many cases, committees in the House of Commons are made up of preference outliers. As predicted by partisan models, it was also found that the governing party stacks committees with its members, but this is conditional upon the strength of the governing party.

What’s information got to do with it? Third-party voting in plurality systems

Although strategic voting theory predicts that the number of parties will not exceed two in single-member district plurality systems, the observed number of parties often does. Previous research suggests that the reason why people vote for third parties is that they possess inaccurate information about the parties’ relative chances of winning. However, research has yet to determine whether third-party voting persists under conditions of accurate information. In this article, we examine whether possessing accurate information prevents individuals from voting for third-placed parties in the 2005 and 2010 British elections. We find that possessing accurate information does not prevent most individuals from voting for third-placed parties and that many voters possess reasonably accurate information regarding the viability of the parties in their constituencies. These findings suggest that arguments emphasizing levels of voter information as a major explanation for why multiparty systems often emerge in plurality systems are exaggerated.

Explaining the multiparty systems of Western Europe prior to the adoption of proportional representation

The literature has difficulty explaining why the number of parties in majoritarian electoral systems often exceeds the two-party predictions associated with Duverger’s Law. To understand why this is the case, I examine several party systems in Western Europe before the adoption of proportional representation. Drawing from the social cleavage approach, I argue that the emergence of multiparty systems was because of the development of the class cleavage, which provided a base of voters sizeable enough to support third parties. However, in countries where the class cleavage became the largest cleavage, the class divide displaced other cleavages and the number of parties began to converge on two. The results show that the effect of the class cleavage was nonlinear, producing the greatest party system fragmentation in countries where class cleavages were present – but not dominant – and smaller in countries where class cleavages were either dominant or non-existent.

Optimal Time Series Momentum

We develop a continuous-time asset price model to capture the timeseries momentum documented recently. The underlying stochastic delay differentialsystem facilitates the analysis of effects of different time horizons used bymomentum trading. By studying an optimal asset allocation problem, we find thatthe performance of time series momentum strategy can be significantly improvedby combining with market fundamentals and timing opportunity with respect tomarket trend and volatility. Furthermore, the results also hold for different timehorizons, the out-of-sample tests and with short-sale constraints. The outperformanceof the optimal strategy is immune to market states, investor sentiment andmarket volatility.

Ionic liquids for efficient hydrogen sulfide and thiol scavenging

Functionalised pyridinium and ammonium ionic liquids bearing a Michael acceptor are shown to scavenge H₂S gas and various thiols, in most cases, without the aid of any added bases. Utilising the effective non-volatility of ionic liquids and ‘tagging’ malodourous substances to an ionic matrix renders them odourless.

The rise of the digital citizen-stakeholder: rebalancing multistakeholder governance

The principle feature in the evolution of the internet has been its ever growing reach to include old and young, rich and poor. The internet’s ever encroaching presence has transported it from our desktop to our pocket and into our glasses. This is illustrated in the Internet Society Questionnaire on Multistakeholder Governance, which found the main factors affecting change in the Internet governance landscape were more users online from more countries and the influence of the internet over daily life. The omnipresence of the internet is self- perpetuating; its usefulness grows with every new user and every new piece of data uploaded. The advent of social media and the creation of a virtual presence for each of us, even when we are not physically present or ‘logged on’, means we are fast approaching the point where we are all connected, to everyone else, all the time. We have moved far beyond the point where governments can claim to represent our views which evolve constantly rather than being measured in electoral cycles.
The shift, which has seen citizens as creators of content rather than consumers of it, has undermined the centralist view of democracy and created an environment of wiki democracy or crowd sourced democracy. This is at the heart of what is generally known as Web 2.0, and widely considered to be a positive, democratising force. However, we argue, there are worrying elements here too. Government does not always deliver on the promise of the networked society as it involves citizens and others in the process of government. Also a number of key internet companies have emerged as powerful intermediaries harnessing the efforts of the many, and re- using and re-selling the products and data of content providers in the Web 2.0 environment. A discourse about openness and transparency has been offered as a democratising rationale but much of this masks an uneven relationship where the value of online activity flows not to the creators of content but to those who own the channels of communication and the metadata that they produce.
In this context the state is just one stakeholder in the mix of influencers and opinion formers impacting on our behaviours, and indeed our ideas of what is public. The question of what it means to create or own something, and how all these new relationships to be ordered and governed are subject to fundamental change. While government can often appear slow, unwieldy and even irrelevant in much of this context, there remains a need for some sort of political control to deal with the challenges that technology creates but cannot by itself control. In order for the internet to continue to evolve successfully both technically and socially it is critical that the multistakeholder nature of internet governance be understood and acknowledged, and perhaps to an extent, re- balanced. Stakeholders can no longer be classified in the broad headings of government, private sector and civil society, and their roles seen as some sort of benign and open co-production. Each user of the internet has a stake in its efficacy and each by their presence and participation is contributing to the experience, positive or negative of other users as well as to the commercial success or otherwise of various online service providers. However stakeholders have neither an equal role nor an equal share. The unequal relationship between the providers of content and those who simple package up and transmit that content - while harvesting the valuable data thus produced - needs to be addressed. Arguably this suggests a role for government that involves it moving beyond simply celebrating and facilitating the on- going technological revolution. This paper reviews the shifting landscape of stakeholders and their contribution to the efficacy of the internet. It will look to critically evaluate the primacy of the individual as the key stakeholder and their supposed developing empowerment within the ever growing sea of data. It also looks at the role of individuals in wider governance roles. Governments in a number of jurisdictions have sought to engage, consult or empower citizens through technology but in general these attempts have had little appeal. Citizens have been too busy engaging, consulting and empowering each other to pay much attention to what their governments are up to. George Orwell’s view of the future has not come to pass; in fact the internet has insured the opposite scenario has come to pass. There is no big brother but we are all looking over each other’s shoulder all the time, while at the same time a number of big corporations are capturing and selling all this collective endeavour back to us.

Green prospects in Greece

The radical left-wing Syriza and the Green party Ecologists Greens/Oikologoi Prasinoi (EG) have been seen as representatives of the left-libertarian/new politics party families in Greece. These type of parties are marked by a commitment to new politics issues such as gender and racial equality, peace and ecology. In countries where two party formations of this kind are in competition to attract a very similar clientele and one of them is electorally significant, it is unlikely for the other to achieve autonomous electoral success. This is a well-known fact that has penetrated discussions on the strategic orientation of both parties since their first electoral participation in 2004 (only European parliament elections for EG).

The organizational ecology of ethnic cleavages: The nonlinear effects of ethnic diversity on party system fragmentation

The conventional wisdom regarding party system fragmentation assumes that the effects of electoral systems and social cleavages are linear. However, recent work applying organizational ecology theories to the study of party systems has challenged the degree to which electoral system effects are linear. This paper applies such concepts to the study of social cleavages. Drawing from theories of organizational ecology and the experience of many ethnically diverse African party systems, I argue that the effects of ethnic diversity are nonlinear, with party system fragmentation increasing until reaching moderate levels of diversity before declining as diversity reaches extreme values. Examining this argument cross-nationally, the results show that accounting for nonlinearity in ethnic diversity effects significantly improves model fit.

Time-Varying Liquidity and Momentum Profits

A basic intuition is that arbitrage is easier when markets are most liquid. Surprisingly, we find that momentum profits are markedly larger in liquid market states. This finding is not explained by variation in liquidity risk, time-varying exposure to risk factors, or changes in macroeconomic condition, cross-sectional return dispersion, and investor sentiment. The predictive performance of aggregate market illiquidity for momentum profits uniformly exceed that of market return and market volatility states. While momentum strategies are unconditionally unprofitable in US, Japan, and Eurozone countries in the last decade, they are substantial following liquid market states.

Potentially Voting across the Divide in Deeply Divided Places: Ethnic Catch-All Voting in Consociational Northern Ireland

I elaborate a model of cross-bloc party support in deeply divided places. The model expects that the variation in the level of electoral support that citizens in Community A have for parties in Community B is a function of citizens' evaluations of the relative ability of parties in Community B to represent the interests of all communities. This 'ethnic catch-all' model of cross-bloc party support is tested in the context of consociational Northern Ireland, using data from a representative survey conducted directly after the 2010 Westminster general election. The findings are asymmetric: the model explains Protestant support for nationalist parties but not Catholic support for unionist parties. The findings, and their implications, are discussed.

The British conservative party and Europe:The choosing of John Major

This article provides an empirical analysis of voting behaviour in the second ballot of the 1990 Conservative leadership contest that resulted in John Major becoming party leader and prime minister. Seven hypotheses of voting behaviour are generated from the extant literature relating voting to socio-economic variables (occupational and educational background), political variables (parliamentary experience, career status, age and electoral marginality) and ideological variables (drawn from survey data on MPs' positions on economic, European and moral issues). These hypotheses are tested using data on voting intentions gathered from published lists of MPs' declarations, interviews with each of the leadership campaign teams, and correspondence with MPs. Bivariate relationships are presented, followed by logistic regression analysis to isolate the unique impact that each variable had on voting. This shows that educational background, parliamentary experience and (especially) attitudes to Europe were the key factors determining voting. The importance of Europe in the contest is particularly instructive: the severe problems for Major's leadership which were caused by the issue can be attributed to, and understood in the context of, the 1990 contest in which he became leader.

Gas generation in interconnected power systems with high wind power penetration

Increasing installed capacities of wind power in an effort to achieve sustainable power systems for future generations pose problems for system operators. Volatility in generation volumes due to the adoption of stochastic wind power is increasing. Storage has been shown to act as a buffer for these stochastic energy sources, facilitating the integration of renewable energy into a historically inflexible power system. This paper examines peak and off peak benefits realised by installing a short term discharge storage unit in a system with a high penetration of wind power in 2020. A fully representative unit commitment and economic dispatch model is used to analyse two scenarios, one ‘with storage’ and one ‘without storage’. Key findings of this preliminary study show that wind curtailment can be reduced in the storage scenario, with a larger reduction in peak time ramping of gas generators is realised.