Search results for "Voting"
showing 10 items of 114 documents
Hybrid Procedure for Automated Detection of Cracking with 3D Pavement Data
2016
Pavement cracks are considered a major indicator of pavement performance. Because traditional manual crack surveys are dangerous, time consuming, and expensive, technologies have been developed to collect high-speed pavement images, and numerous algorithms have been proposed to detect cracks on pavement surface. The latest PaveVision3D Ultra system (3D Ultra) has been implemented to achieve 30-kHz three-dimensional (3D) scanning rate for 1-mm resolution pavement surface data at highway speed up to 100 km/h (60 mi/h). This paper presents the application of a hybrid procedure for automated crack detection on 3D pavement data collected using 3D Ultra. The procedure combines three different me…
Debating Europe: Effects of the “Eurovision Debate” on EU Attitudes of Young German Voters and the Moderating Role Played by Political Involvement
2016
In the run-up to the elections to the European Parliament in 2014, EU citizens had the unprecedented opportunity to watch televised debates between the candidates running for president of the European Commission. The most important debate was the so-called "Eurovision debate", which was broadcasted in almost all EU member states. In this study we explore the responses of a sample of 110 young German voters, who watched this debate, to the candidates' messages and whether exposure to the debate caused a shift in the respondents' attitudes towards the EU. Combining data from a quasi-experiment, real-time response data, and data from a content analysis of the debate, we find that respondents' …
PageRank model of opinion formation on Ulam networks
2013
We consider a PageRank model of opinion formation on Ulam networks, generated by the intermittency map and the typical Chirikov map. The Ulam networks generated by these maps have certain similarities with such scale-free networks as the World Wide Web (WWW), showing an algebraic decay of the PageRank probability. We find that the opinion formation process on Ulam networks have certain similarities but also distinct features comparing to the WWW. We attribute these distinctions to internal differences in network structure of the Ulam and WWW networks. We also analyze the process of opinion formation in the frame of generalized Sznajd model which protects opinion of small communities.
Testing-the-Waters Policy With Hypothetical Investment: Evidence From Equity Crowdfunding
2020
International audience; Digitization has enabled “testing-the-waters” in entrepreneurial finance whereby investors can make nonbinding commitments in equity crowdfunding prior to an actual campaign to ascertain interest in the project. We consider whether these nonbinding equity investment commitments are informative about actual investments during the campaign and, thus, ultimate startup funding success. The data indicate that only 18% of nonbinding commitments are, in fact, invested. The evidence is consistent with hypothetical bias. Hypothetical bias is significantly less pronounced among women and among investors living in higher income areas or in areas with higher levels of education.…
Economic Globalization, Perceptions of the Room to Maneuver of National Governments and Individual Electoral Participation
2013
Recent macro-level research argues that economic globalisation has negative consequences for electoral turnout as globalisation would constrain the leeway of national governments and thereby render elections less meaningful to voters. This article constitutes the first attempt to analyse the link between perceptions of the national government’s room to manoeuvre and turnout on the individual level: Do individual perceptions that national governments enjoy less leeway under economic globalisation lead to a lower individual inclination to vote? The paper draws on the case of UK’s General Election in 2001 and, thus, a context in which the idea of a constraining effect of globalisation was made…
Are Citizens Significant Users of Government Financial Information?
2006
This article reports on the use that the public makes of the budgetary and financial reporting produced by Spanish local authorities. The authors show financial reporting influences voting behaviour. Although citizens cannot decide how much tax they have to pay or the volume or quality of the services, they can control public management when it comes to election time. Accounting information can reflect the results of public policies and consequently serve as a vehicle for communicating the economic effects of political management. The authors make a strong case for more ‘popular’ financial reporting so that government accounts can be understood and properly used by non-specialists.
Don't Tell Us: The Demand for Secretive Behaviour
2009
The matter studied here is how, and with what implications, people may decide that they do not want to be let into secrets that concern them. They could get the information at no cost but they refuse to know. The reasoning is framed in terms of principals and agents, with the principals assumed not to want to know the agents' secrets. For convenience, the context chosen for the exposition is mainly that of voters as principals and the government or the office-holders as agents. After some exploration of the motivations underlying the attitude of the principals, the paper focuses on the case when neither total secrecy nor total disclosure prevails. The demand for partial secrecy is analysed …
Geolocation and voting: Candidate–voter distance effects on party choice in the 2010 UK general election in England
2012
The effect of geographical distance between candidate and voter on vote-likelihood in the UK is essentially untested. In systems where constituency representatives vie for local inhabitants' support in elections, candidates living closer to a voter would be expected to have a greater probability of receiving that individual's support, other things being equal. In this paper, we present a first test of this concept using constituency data (specifically, notice of poll address data) from the British General Election of 2010 and the British Election Survey, together with geographical data from Ordnance Survey and Royal Mail, to test the hypothesis that candidate distance matters in voters' cho…
The formation of aggregate expectations: wisdom of the crowds or media influence?
2017
ABSTRACTThe general elections of 2015 in Spain were elections of change. Two new parties for which voters had no previous historical reference points burst onto the parliamentary scene. Two (partially) opposed theories vie to offer an explanation as to how voters build their aggregate electoral expectations. In this paper, we investigate which mechanism has the greatest influence on the formation of expectations: published opinion or social interactions. Likewise, we also study if there is an ideological bias in the voters’ perception of the future results of the electoral battle. Based on analysis of microdata from a survey (sample size = 14,262) conducted in Spain on the occasion of the g…
Editorial Judgments
2009
Based on participant observation of editors’ decisions for a sociology journal, the paper investigates the peer review process. It shows a hidden interactivity in peer review, which is overlooked both by authors who impute social causes to unwelcome decisions, and by the preoccupation with ‘reliability’ prevalent in peer review research. This study shows that editorial judgments are: (1) attitudes taken by editorial readers toward various kinds of text, as a result of their membership in an intellectual milieu; (2) impressions gained through the reading process (through a ‘virtual interaction’ with the author); and (3) rationalizing statements about manuscripts made by editors and addressed…