Optimal strategies in political elections

In the Majoritarian Parliamentary System, the government has a constitutional right to call an early election. This right provides the government a control to achieve its objective to remain in power for as long as possible. We model the early election problem mathematically using opinion polls data as a stochastic process to proxy the government's probability of re-election. These data measure the difference in popularity between the government and the opposition. We fit a mean reverting Stochastic Differential Equation to describe the behaviour of the process and consider the possibility for the government to use other control tools, which are termed 'boosts' to induce shocks to the opinion polls by making timely policy announcements or economic actions. These actions improve the government's popularity and have some impact upon the early-election exercise boundary. © Austral. Mathematical Soc. 2005.

Going twice to the polls?: Optimality of two-stage voting procedures

A Masters Thesis, presented as part of the requirements for the award of a Research Masters Degree in Economics from NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Il Pluralismo tra Democrazia ed Autoritarismo: Il Caso Russo

The research explores the mechanisms in the formation and consolidation of a new regime which combines democratic and authoritarian features; it has emerged as result of democratization processes affecting different world areas in recent years. The study analyses a case of great international significance, post-communist Russia: here internal factors strongly prevail in front of the external variables of democratic imitation and contagion, thus showing to what extent Russia differs from other political contexts. The study intends to examine the strategies used by this regime to solve internal conflicts and become stable in spite of the democratizing pressures coming from outside. Indeed, the literature about political transformations has shown the problems in analyzing these polities together with the need to examine their peculiarities more in depth. In this perspective, the first section focuses on the dynamics of State-building in Russia as a fundamental process in tracing the specific characteristics of the current regime: particularly, it is suggested that the State dimension comes out as crucial in determining the level of political and social pluralism accepted in post-Soviet Russia. This argument is worked out in the second section, which analyses the main mechanisms used by the incumbents to limit and control pluralism within the two arenas of political competition and civil society, from where the major threats to the status quo are supposed to come. The main hypothesis is that the leadership interventions in these spheres during the last ten years have shaped a regime which can be characterized as a new type of authoritarianism: with respect to traditional authoritarian forms a certain degree of political contestation is accepted, visible in the presence of a multiparty system, semi-competitive elections and of the several representatives of civil society. Yet, this diversity is curbed basically in two different ways: from one hand the incumbents provide support to political and social actors who sponsor government politics (see the party of power and pro-Kremlin movements). From the other they use some non coercive forms of control and restriction (in legislation, in political elections) against those actors who promote values and priorities opposed to the official ones.

Evaluating social choice techniques into intelligent environments by agent based social simulation

The primary hypothesis stated by this paper is that the use of social choice theory in Ambient Intelligence systems can improve significantly users satisfaction when accessing shared resources. A research methodology based on agent based social simulations is employed to support this hypothesis and to evaluate these benefits. The result is a six-fold contribution summarized as follows. Firstly, several considerable differences between this application case and the most prominent social choice application, political elections, have been found and described. Secondly, given these differences, a number of metrics to evaluate different voting systems in this scope have been proposed and formalized. Thirdly, given the presented application and the metrics proposed, the performance of a number of well known electoral systems is compared. Fourthly, as a result of the performance study, a novel voting algorithm capable of obtaining the best balance between the metrics reviewed is introduced. Fifthly, to improve the social welfare in the experiments, the voting methods are combined with cluster analysis techniques. Finally, the article is complemented by a free and open-source tool, VoteSim, which ensures not only the reproducibility of the experimental results presented, but also allows the interested reader to adapt the case study presented to different environments.

La publicidad institucional en la Junta de Andalucía

A partir de las inserciones publicitarias realizadas por la Junta de Andalucía durante el período 1999-2009, se analiza la evolución de la publicidad gubernamental andaluza perteneciente a los distintos ámbitos (Social, Político, Corporativo y Comercial) y sectores de la publicidad institucional, centrando nuestra atención, primordialmente, en tres cuestiones fundamentales: de qué, cuándo y dónde hace publicidad la Junta de Andalucía. El objeto de la investigación cuyos resultados se presentan en esta investigación es conocer el comportamiento de la Junta de Andalucía como anunciante.

Elephant - "Where's that man Osborn?"

Pencil cartoon from newspaper drawn by artist, last name May, probably from the 1910 Michigan gubernatorial election.

Chase Osborn as David preparing to slay the "brewery interests" as Goliath with "2nd term" of the stone

Original in color

On the origins of electoral systems and political parties. The role of elections in multi-member districts

The old, understudied electoral system composed of multi-member districts, open ballot and plurality rule is presented as the most remote scene of the origin of both political parties and new electoral systems. A survey of the uses of this set of electoral rules in different parts of the world during remote and recent periods shows its wide spread. A model of voting by this electoral system demonstrates that, while it can produce varied and pluralistic representation, it also provides incentives to form factional or partisan candidacies. Famous negative reactions to the emergence of factions and political parties during the 18th and 19th centuries are reinterpreted in this context. Many electoral rules and procedures invented since the second half of the 19th century, including the Australian ballot, single-member districts, limited and cumulative ballots, and proportional representation rules, derived from the search to reduce the effects of the originating multi-member district system in favor of a single party sweep. The general relations between political parties and electoral systems are restated to account for the foundational stage here discussed.

Betting on winner: the effect of local elections on corporate political activity outcomes

How can managers successfully access political rents by way of corporate political strategies (CPA)? Existing research has suggested several endogenous factors that correlate with CPA outcomes. I offer a more robust solution to this problem. Drawing on insights from the perspective of CPA as exchanges between firms and political decision-makers, and from the special interest politics of political economy, I develop and test a causal mechanism that links local elections, legislative bargaining and access to political rents at the national level. I conducted a natural experiment using regression discontinuity design and propensity score matching in municipal elections in Brazil to show that firms enjoy superior access to subsidized financing from the state-owned national development bank (BNDES) when they decide to invest in municipalities whose winning mayoral candidate is coalition-aligned with the national ruler. This effect fades away fades away as the level of competition in the local election decreases. The evidence implies that when managers bet on national coalition-aligned winners in close local elections, they positively affect CPA outcomes. I extend the exchange-based typology of corporate political strategies by offering a novel possibility of targeting voters with financial inducements, which I call a private local development strategy. Finally, these results show that firms exchange their project-execution capabilities for superior access to subsidized financing.