State Legislatures as National Actors

Legislatures as spin glasses

I present a method for partitioning legislatures into subsets of legislators that vote in a similar fashion by modelling legislatures as Potts spin glasses. I apply the method to find partitions of the UK House of Commons and the US Senate. I explain how the method is related to methods designed to find partitions of networks into densely connected subsets of nodes.

Professionalization and Public Opinion of State Legislatures

Directing Discipline: State Medical Board Responsiveness to State Legislatures.

State medical boards are increasingly responsible for regulating medical and osteopathic licensure and professional conduct in the United States. Yet, there is great variation in the extent to which such boards take disciplinary action against physicians, indicating that some boards are more zealous regulators than others. We look to the political roots of such variation and seek to answer a si...

Specifying Finite-State Actors

Programmers often code up asynchronous message-passing systems as communicating finite-state actors. An actor in some state listens for messages, responds to those messages, and transitions to another state. Most of these systems allow messages to carry actor addresses. This paper presents a kernel language for implementing and specifying such systems. A specification consists of finite-state m...

Mixing Metaphors: Actors as Channels and Channels as Actors

Channeland actor-based programming languages are both used in practice, but the two are often confused. Languages such as Go provide anonymous processes which communicate using buffers or rendezvous points—known as channels—while languages such as Erlang provide addressable processes—known as actors—each with a single incoming message queue. The lack of a common representation makes it difficul...