Leader election is an important problem in distributed computing. Garcia-Molina's Bully Algorithm is a classic solution to leader election in synchronous systems with crash failures. This paper shows that the Bully Algorithm can be easily adapted for use in asynchronous systems. First, we re-write the Bully Algorithm to use a failure detector, instead of explicit time-outs; this yields a modula...

This study examines the proposition that political business cycle theory is relevant to private foreign lenders to developing countries. We find that: credit rating agencies downgrade developing country ratings more often in election years, and do so by approximately one rating level; bond spreads are higher in the 60 days before an election compared to spreads in the 60 days after an election;...

Although not widely known until much later, Al Gore received 202 more votes than George W. Bush on election day in Florida. George W. Bush is president because he overcame his election day deficit with overseas absentee ballots that arrived and were counted after election day. In the final official tally, Bush received 537 more votes than Gore.These numbers are taken from the official results r...

Theory: Contemporary theories of presidential election outcomes, especially the economic voting and spatial issue voting models, are used to examine voter choice in the 1996 presidential election. Hypotheses: First, we look at the e ects of voter perceptions of the national economy on voter support for Clinton. Second we look at the e ects of candidate and voter positions on ideology and on a n...

In addition to the historic events surrounding the Florida vote, the outcome of the 2000 US Presidential Election has sparked a widespread discussion of the current electoral system. This discussion is not likely to fade away with a final resolution of the election outcome. The first part of this note points to some problems surrounding the voting logistics. Problems of this type are in the cen...

A Leader is a Coordinator that supports a set of processes to cooperate a given task. This concept is used in several domains such as distributed systems, parallelism and cooperative support for cooperative work. In completely asynchronous systems, there is no solution for the election problem satisfying both of safety and liveness properties in asynchronous distributed systems. Therefore, to s...

Does campaign duration affect election outcomes? To date, this question has largely evaded political scientists, but it is reasonable to expect systematic links between campaign length and candidate performance in elections. We hypothesize that longer campaigns would help challengers' electoral fortunes, thereby curbing incumbency advantage and potentially boosting competitiveness in elections....

I consider a two-candidate plurality-rule election in which there is aggregate uncertainty about the popularity of each candidate, where voting is costly, and where participants are instrumentally motivated. The unique equilibrium predicts significant turnout under reasonable parameter configurations, and greater turnout for the underdog offsets the expected advantage of the perceived leader. I...