Arduous Paths to Power

Portuguese Ministers, 1851-1999: Social Background and Paths to Power

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the impact of regime changes in the composition and patterns of recruitment of the Portuguese ministerial elite throughout the last 150 years. The ‘out-of-type’, violent nature of most regime transformations accounts for the purges in and the extensive replacements of the political personnel, namely of the uppermost officeholders. In the case of Cabi...

From edge-disjoint paths to independent paths

Let f(k) denote the maximum such that every simple undirected graph containing two vertices s, t and k edge-disjoint s–t paths, also contains two vertices u, v and f(k) independent u–v paths. Here, a set of paths is independent if none of them contains an interior vertex of another. We prove that f(k) = ( k if k ≤ 2, and 3 otherwise. Since independent paths are edge-disjoint, it is clear that f...

The Arduous Virtue of Fidelity: Originalism, Scalia, Tribe, and Nerve

Power-Law and Stable Distribution of BGP Paths

This paper presents two new properties of BGP routes. First, it shows that the frequency of autonomous systems (ASs) appearing in path vectors follow a Power-Law relationship. Secondly, it shows that path lengths can be characterized accurately by stable distributions. The main implication of these properties is that it allows the creation of realistic forwarding tables for simulation studies. ...

The Power of Quasi-Shortest Paths: ρ-Geodesic Betweenness Centrality

Betweenness centrality metrics usually underestimate the importance of nodes that are close to shortest paths but do not exactly fall on them. In this paper, we reevaluate the importance of such nodes and propose the ρ-geodesic betweenness centrality, a novel metric that assigns weights to paths (and, consequently, to nodes on these paths) according to how close they are to shortest paths. The ...