Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Political Science Department, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.

<p>The thesis consists of four papers, summarized as follows.</p><p>"Do attitudes towards immigrants matter?" analyses the consequences of negative attitudes towards immigrants to Sweden. If attitudes changed from the average level to the most positive level, the wage earned by a well educated immigrant from a non developed country would increase by 12%. This change in attitudes would increase the welfare of immigrants from Africa and Asia, through their wage and local amenities, by an equivalent to one third of their wage and the welfare of immigrants from South America and Eastern Europe by one fourth of their wage if they are well educated, and one tenth otherwise.</p><p>In "Who is hurt by discrimination?", the effects of discrimination of immigrants on the labour market are studied in a search and wage-bargaining setting, including a risk of losing skills during the experience of unemployment. The negative effects of discrimination in the form of higher unemployment and lower wages spread to all workers, immigrants and natives, in all sectors of the economy. An increase in the share of immigrants in the economy exacerbates the problem of discrimination.</p><p>In "Complementary controls of corruption", a theoretical model shows that when the judiciary and the media are more dependent and the elections less competitive, corruption flourishes. The three institutions are shown to be complementary. The empirical analysis indicates that the dependence of the judiciary and the media has a positive effect on perceived corruption and that the media is complementary with both the judiciary and the electoral system.</p><p>"Decision making in the ECB's Governing Council -- Should minutes and forecasts be published ?" analyses if the publication of forecasts and minutes of the meetings of the Governing Council could have a negative effect due to the influence of governments on their representatives' votes. The information provided is shown to reduce their influence and benefit the Executive Board.</p>

An important task of information retrieval is to induce classifiers capable of categorizing text documents. The fact that the same document can simultaneously belong to two or more categories is referred by the term multi-label classification (or categorization). Domains of this kind have been encountered in diverse fields even outside information retrieval. This dissertation discusses one challenging aspect of text categorization: the documents (i.e., training examples) are characterized by an extremely large number of features. As a result, many existing machine learning techniques are in such domains prohibitively expensive. This dissertation seeks to reduce these costs significantly. The proposed scheme consists of two steps. The first runs a so-called baseline induction algorithm (BIA) separately on different versions of the data, each time inducing a different subclassifier---more specifically, BIA is run always on the same training documents that are each time described by a different subset of the features. The second step then combines the subclassifiers by a fusion algorithm: when a document is to be classified, each subclassifier outputs a set of class labels accompanied by its confidence in these labels; these outputs are then combined into a single multi-label recommendation. The dissertation investigates a few alternative fusion techniques, including an original one, inspired by the Dempster-Shafer Theory. The main contribution is a mechanism for assigning the mass function to individual labels from subclassifiers. The system's behavior is illustrated on two real-world data sets. As indicated, in each of them the examples are described by thousands of features, and each example is labeled with a subset of classes. Experimental evidence indicates that the method can scale up well and achieves impressive computational savings in exchange for only a modest loss in the classification performance. The fusion method proposed is also shown to be more accurate than other more traditional fusion mechanisms. For a very large multi-label data set, the proposed mechanism not only speeds up the total induction time, but also facilitates the execution of the task on a small computer. The fact that subclassifiers can be constructed independently and more conveniently from small subsets of features provides an avenue for parallel processing that might offer further increase in computational efficiency.

The thesis consists of four papers, summarized as follows. "Do attitudes towards immigrants matter?" analyses the consequences of negative attitudes towards immigrants to Sweden. If attitudes changed from the average level to the most positive level, the wage earned by a well educated immigrant from a non developed country would increase by 12%. This change in attitudes would increase the welfare of immigrants from Africa and Asia, through their wage and local amenities, by an equivalent to one third of their wage and the welfare of immigrants from South America and Eastern Europe by one fourth of their wage if they are well educated, and one tenth otherwise. In "Who is hurt by discrimination?", the effects of discrimination of immigrants on the labour market are studied in a search and wage-bargaining setting, including a risk of losing skills during the experience of unemployment. The negative effects of discrimination in the form of higher unemployment and lower wages spread to all workers, immigrants and natives, in all sectors of the economy. An increase in the share of immigrants in the economy exacerbates the problem of discrimination. In "Complementary controls of corruption", a theoretical model shows that when the judiciary and the media are more dependent and the elections less competitive, corruption flourishes. The three institutions are shown to be complementary. The empirical analysis indicates that the dependence of the judiciary and the media has a positive effect on perceived corruption and that the media is complementary with both the judiciary and the electoral system. "Decision making in the ECB's Governing Council -- Should minutes and forecasts be published ?" analyses if the publication of forecasts and minutes of the meetings of the Governing Council could have a negative effect due to the influence of governments on their representatives' votes. The information provided is shown to reduce their influence and benefit the Executive Board.

Justifications of democracy rest in large part on unacknowledged empirical assumptions regarding the cognitive, informational, and behavioral capacities of individuals and voting populations. The goal of this project was to identify those assumptions and examine them in light of data from the social sciences. To the extent that these assumptions are undermined by empirical evidence, the normative legitimacy of democracy as a system of rule is weakened. Theories of democracy were organized along a continuum from purely instrumental to purely intrinsic or procedural, and a representative sample of theories from along this spectrum were analyzed in order to identify their core empirical assumptions. Interest-based, deliberative, and egalitarian theories of democracy were each demonstrated to be predicated on substantive empirical assumptions which were contradicted by the available evidence. A sophisticated hybrid account incorporating aspects from along the spectrum of available theories was likewise demonstrated to be predicated on unsubstantiated assumptions regarding human capacities. A concluding analysis of the circumstances which undermine the assumptions of democratic theory demonstrated the limited tractability of these circumstances, leading to my assertion that a new conception of what democracy is and what purposes it should serve is warranted, and that in the interim, contemporary attempts to justify the dissemination of democracy are undermined.

California has now become a majority-minority state. Latinos, currently the largest minority group in the Golden State, have made remarkable political gains in the past two decades, more recently since the the approval of Proposition 187 in 1994. How have Latinos used this new political power? This thesis provides an in-depth look into the dynamics of the Latino political entity in California, along with a quantifiable analysis of voting trends. Discussion of policy implictions since the Latino wave into the state Legislature is also provided, along with interviews with notable Latino figures, such as Senator Art Torres and Redistricting Commissioner Gabino Aguirre.

Redistricting is a challenging task in any state, and Alaska, with its vast geography, sparse population, and uneven population concentrations, presents a unique set of difficulties. The state requires that its legislative districts be contiguous, compact, and relatively socio-economically integrated. Further complicating the process are the requirements of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Alaska is one of nine states required to submit its redistricting plans to the federal government for preclearance, as a result of a history of discrimination against a minority population. Under the VRA, Alaska must avoid retrogression of the voting power of its Alaska Native population. Particularly over the last couple of decades, the requirements of the VRA have come into conflict with the requirements of the state constitution. In the following paper, I will explore the impact of the VRA on redistricting in Alaska, with a particular focus on the redistricting cycle following the 2010 Census.

Esta tesis ofrece una justificación para el uso de la pluralidad como una manera óptima de agregar información en las sociedades compuestas por individuos con intereses comunes pero con información diversa. El motivo de esta tesis es seguir una línea de investigación sobre la elección social que se remonta al matemático y filósofo político francés Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marqués de Condorcet (1743-1794). En su Essai sur l'application de l'analyse à la probabilité des decisions rendues à la pluralité des voix (1785), Condorcet afirmó que se garantizaría la justicia social si las naciones adoptaran constituciones políticas que facilitaran el juicio correcto del grupo y argumentó que la votación por mayoría sería la herramienta constitucional más probable para alcanzar este objetivo.Siguiendo esta línea de investigación, la primera parte de esta tesis estudia las condiciones bajo las cuales la pluralidad proporciona a la sociedad el método más adecuado para llegar a decisiones de grupo. Aquí, como en el estudio de Condorcet, supondremos que los votantes actúan honradamente.El desarrollo natural de la teoría de votación, que ha introducido los temas de incentivos e interacción estratégica en la toma de decisiones de grupos, ha sido utilizado para cuestionar la suposición de votación honesta. Austen-Smith y Banks (1996) fueron los primeros en observar que la combinación de información privada e intereses comunes en el sistema propuesto por Condorcet podría crear incentivos para los votantes para actuar estratégicamente. Esta observación les condujo a plantear si la votación honesta sería compatible con el comportamiento de equilibrio de Nash en el juego inducido por la mayoría. La segunda parte de esta tesis expone esta problemática estudiando el comportamiento de los votantes en el juego inducido por la pluralidad.El interés en las instituciones del mundo real, para las cuales la votación es un elemento importante, ha hecho plantear desde hace tiempo la cuestión de si los votantes se comportan tal y como pronostican los modelos teóricos. Otra cuestión ha sido cómo tratar la complejidad del entorno estratégico. La segunda parte de esta tesis pide respuestas a estas preguntas. Puesto que la literatura sobre experimentos de votación parece proporcionar respuestas razonables a estas preguntas, la tercera parte de esta tesis utiliza experimentos de laboratorio para verificar las implicaciones de la segunda parte. / This thesis offers a justification for the use of plurality rule as an optimal way to aggregate information for societies composed of individuals with common interests but diverse information. The motivation of this thesis follows a line of research in social choice that dates back to the French mathematician and political philosopher Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794). In his Essai sur l'application de l'analyse à la probabilité des decisions rendues à la pluralité des voix (1785), Condorcet posited that social justice would be secured if nations would adopt political constitutions that facilitate accurate group judgments, and argued that the majority rule would be the most likely constitutional tool to achieve this goal.Following this line of research, the first part of this thesis discusses the conditions under which plurality rule provides the society with the most likely method to reach accurate group judgments. In this part, as in Condorcet's work, it is assumed that voters act honestly. Natural developments in the theory of voting, that brought in the issues of incentives and strategic interaction in group decision making, were used to challenge the assumption of honest voting. Austen-Smith and Banks (1996) were the first to notice that the combination of private information and common interests in the framework proposed by Condorcet might create an incentive for voters to act strategically. This observation led them to ask the question of whether honest voting is compatible with the Nash equilibrium behavior in the game induced by majority rule. The second part of this thesis advances this problematic by studying voters' behavior in the game induced by plurality rule.The interest in real-world institutions, for which voting is an important element, raised for some time the question of whether voters behave as predicted by the theoretical models. Another question was of how to deal with the complexity of the strategic environment. The second part of this thesis calls for answers to these types of questions. Since the literature on voting experiments seems to provide reasonable answers to these questions, the third part of this thesis uses laboratory experiments to test the implications of the second part.

La tesis de doctorado "Understanding, Evaluating and Selecting Voting Rules Through Games and Axioms" de Danilo Santa Cruz Coelho está compuesta de cuatro capítulos. La introducción es el primero y describe brevemente el contenido de los capítulos siguientes. En el Capítulo 2, en el contexto de un modelo de votación probabilística propuesto por Rae (1969), el autor investiga las consecuencias de elegir reglas de votación según el criterio de maximin. En el modelo, una regla de votación es el número mínimo de votantes favorables necesarios a una propuesta para que esta sea aceptada. El autor demuestra que la regla de votación que satisface el criterio de maximin puede ser distinta de la mayoría simple que es la que maximiza la suma de las utilidades esperadas de los votantes. El autor proporciona una caracterización de las reglas de votación que satisfacen el criterio de maximin. En el Capítulo 3, dos juegos que pueden ser inducidos por la regla de los k nombres son propuestos y analizados. El autor proporciona para cada uno de los juegos una caracterización del conjunto de los resultados del equilibrio fuerte de Nash. Estas caracterizaciones permiten al autor discutir las preferencias de los jugadores sobre diferentes variantes de la regla de los k nombres. Una parte importante de la regla de los k nombres es el procedimiento utilizado para seleccionar los k nombres que son propuestos al individuo que toma la decisión final. Seis reglas diferentes de selección que son utilizadas en la realidad por diferentes cuerpos decisorios alrededor del mundo son documentadas. En el Capítulo 4, el autor estudia si estas reglas satisfacen la propiedad de estabilidad. Una regla cumple esta propiedad si esta siempre selecciona un conjunto Weak Condorcet y cuando exista un conjunto con esta característica. El autor demuestra que todas estas seis reglas violan esta propiedad si los votantes no actúan estratégicamente. El autor entonces propone dos reglas estables. Finalmente, él proporciona dos justificaciones para el uso extensivo de las reglas inestables. / The dissertation entitled "Understanding, Evaluating and Selecting Voting Rules Through Games and Axioms" by Danilo Santa Cruz Coelho is composed of four chapters. The introduction is the first one and describes briefly the contents of the following chapters. In Chapter 2, in the context of a probabilistic voting model proposed by Rae (1969), the author investigates the consequences of choosing among threshold voting rules according to the maximin criterion. A threshold voting rule is given by the minimum number of votes needed to approve a proposal of change from the status quo. The author shows that the voting rules that satisfy the maximin criterion are different from the simple majority rule which is the one that maximizes the sum of voter's expected utilities. He provides a characterization of the threshold voting rules that satisfy this criterion as a function of the distribution of voters' probabilities to favour change from the status quo. In Chapter 3, two different game theoretical models that can be induced by the rule of k names are proposed and analysed. A characterization of the set of strong Nash Equilibrium outcomes of each of the games is provided. These characterizations enable the author to discuss the preferences of the players over different variants of the rule of k names. An important part of the rule of k names is the procedure used to screen out the k names to be proposed to the individual who takes the final decision. Six different screening rules which are used in reality by different decision bodies around the world are documented. In Chapter 4, he studies whether these screening rules satisfy stability. A screening rule is stable if it always selects a weak Condorcet set whenever such set exists. He shows that all of the six screening rules violate stability if the voters act not strategically. He then proposes two screening rules which satisfy stability. Finally, he provides two possible justifications for the widespread use of unstable screening rules.

This thesis explores reasons why a voter would vote for a ¡§independent¡¨candidate in a city council¡¦s election. Since respondents in a telephone survey are not able to give their thoughts and description of vote intention thoroughly. given few survey questions .I therefore chose in-depth interview conducted before the election day to explore the real thoughts of the voters. My in-depth interview respondents are selected by telephones surveys and were interviewed regarding four topics, including party identification, political views, candidates and social networks. I find that partisanship is not the main factor of voting for an independent candidate. Instead, the key is his or her ability to serve the voters. The second factor is the ability to execute the public welfare policies and the third is education background and experiences in the field of public service. Fourth social network has limited effects on voters who were born in the 70¡¦s and 80¡¦s. Moreover, I discovered that the effects of the party ideology on voting behavior might differ across levels of elections. In particular, Kaohsiung voters will take the cue of party ideology at the city mayor¡¦s election, while this may not apply to a city council¡¦s election.