This article analyses the development of competitive party politics in post-communist East Central Europe from a comparative perspective. The central concerns are party system stabilisation and change in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and implications for comparative theory. Starting from Lipset and Rokkan’s ‘cleavage model’, the article assesses the relevance of their key va...

This paper uses the Banzhaf power measure to calculate the a priori voting power of individual voters under the existing Electoral College system for electing the President of the United States, as well as under variants of this system in which electoral votes are either apportioned among the states in a different manner or cast by the states in a different manner. While the present winner-take...

In this paper multiphase oscillators built using fractional-order allpass filters are presented. We examine the theory behind their operation and demonstrate their usefulness in the design of both multiphase and quadrature oscillators. Case design examples are given for various scenarios, while PSPICE and experimental results verify their operation

Situations that present individuals with a conflict between local and global gains often result in a behavioral pattern known as melioration — a preference for immediate rewards over higher long-term gains. Using a variant of a paradigm by Tunney & Shanks (2002), we explored the potential role of feedback as a means to reduce this bias. We hypothesized that frequent and informative feedback abo...

We discuss duality in N = 1 SUSY gauge theories in Seiberg’s conformal window, (3Nc/2) < Nf < 3Nc. The ’t Hooft consistency conditions – the basic tool for establishing the infrared duality – are considered taking into account higher order α corrections. The conserved (anomaly free) R current is built to all orders in α. Although this current contains all orders in α the ’t Hooft consistency co...

The notion of Equality of Opportunity (EO) has pervaded much of economic and social justice policy and research over the last half century. The sense that differences in agent outcomes that are the consequence of their individual choice and effort are acceptable, whereas variation in agent outcomes that are the consequence of circumstances beyond their control are not has underpinned much gende...

The “convex hull problem” is a catch-all phrase for computing various descriptions of a polytope that is either specified as the convex hull of a finite point set in R or as the intersection of a finite number of halfspaces. We first define the various problems and discuss their mutual relationships (Section 26.1). We discuss the very special case of the irredundancy problem in Section 26.2. We...

This paper proposes secure regenerating codes that are composed of non-secure regenerating codes and a new all-or-nothing transform. Unlike the previous analysis of secure regenerating codes, the security of the proposed codes is analyzed in the sense of the indistinguishability. The advantage of the proposed codes is that the overhead caused by the security against eavesdropping is much less t...

We study the fundamental problem of how devices, operating over a wireless medium, can discover potential communication partners. For the devices, the spectrum is divided into m frequency channels. As multiple devices share these channels, they have to cope with collisions while they are trying to find other devices in the system. Moreover, we assume an adversarial jammer to block some of the a...