Privatize your name: Symbolic work in a post-Soviet linguistic market

This paper analyzes the new names given to Russian private businesses that have appeared after the collapse of the Soviet State in 1991. By naming new private ventures their owners members of the new business class attempt to privatize public space not only legally but also symbolically and linguistically. They strive to construct their particular new version of social reality, to represent it as positive and meaningful, and to impose themselves publicly as legitimate authors, owners, and masters of this new reality. This paper proceeds on several distinct levels of analysis. First, it analyzes a number of discourses, representing various subcultures and periods of Soviet and Russian history, from which new business names draw their complex meanings. Second, it considers concrete linguistic and semiotic techniques that are employed by the new names in this process. Third, it examines the cultural and social implications of this process of nomination for post-Soviet developments in the Russian society.     

Competition for popular support: a valence model of elections in Turkey

Models of elections tend to predict that parties will maximize votes by converging to an electoral center. There is no empirical support for this prediction. In order to account for the phenomenon of political divergence, this paper offers a stochastic electoral model where party leaders or candidates are differentiated by differing valences??the electoral perception of the quality of the party leader. If valence is simply intrinsic, then it can be shown that there is a ??convergence coefficient??, defined in terms of the empirical parameters, that must be bounded above by the dimension of the space, in order for the electoral mean to be a Nash equilibrium. This model is applied to elections in Turkey in 1999 and 2002. The idea of valence is then extended to include the possibility that activist groups contribute resources to their favored parties in response to policy concessions from the parties. The equilibrium result is that parties, in order to maximize vote share, must balance a centripetal electoral force against a centrifugal activist effect. We estimate pure spatial models and models with sociodemographic valences, and use simulations to compare the equilibrium predictions with the estimated party positions.     

The Nation as a Framework for Political Life

The stable existence of the state is impossible without nationalist discourse.     

Bioeconomics of Managing the Spread of Exotic Pest Species with Barrier Zones

Exotic pests are serious threats to North American ecosystems; thus, economic analysis of decisions about eradication, stopping, or slowing their spread may be critical to ecosystem management. The proposed bioeconomic model assumes that the rate of population expansion can be reduced (even to negative values in a case of eradication) if certain management actions are taken along the population front. The area of management can be viewed as a dynamic barrier zone that moves together with the population front. The lower is the target rate of spread, the higher would be both benefits and costs of the project. The problem is to find the optimal target rate of spread at which the present value of net benefits from managing population spread reaches its maximum value. If a population spreads along an infinite habitat strip, the target rate of spread is optimal if the slope of the cost function versus the rate of spread is equal to the ratio of the average pest-related damage per unit time and unit area to the discount rate. In a more complex model where the potential area of expansion is limited, two local maxima of net benefits may exist: one for eradication and another for slowing the spread. If both maxima are present, their heights are compared and the strategy that corresponds to a higher value of net benefits is selected. The optimal strategy changes from eradication to slowing the spread and finally to doing nothing as the area occupied by the species increases. The model shows that slowing the spread of pest species generates economic benefits even if a relatively small area remains uninfested. The cost of slowing the spread can be estimated from a model of population expansion via establishment of isolated colonies beyond the moving front. The model is applied to managing the spread of the gypsy moth (Lymantria dispar) populations in the United States.     

Conditional moments of record times

Conditional moments of record times when record values are fixed, are being studied in the paper     

Sequential determination of the number of bootstrap samples

The primary purpose of this paper is that of developing a sequential Monte Carlo approximation to an ideal bootstrap estimate of the parameter of interest. Using the concept of fixed-precision approximation, we construct a sequential stopping rule for determining the number of bootstrap samples to be taken in order to achieve a specified precision of the Monte Carlo approximation. It is shown that the sequential Monte Carlo approximation is asymptotically efficient in the problems of estimation of the bias and standard error of a given statistic. Efficient bootstrap resampling is discussed and a numerical study is carried out for illustrating the obtained theoretical results.     

Estimating the effects of activists in two-party and multi-party systems: comparing the United States and Israel

This article presents an electoral model where activist groups contribute resources to their favored parties. These resources are then used by the party candidates to enhance the electoral perception of their quality or valence. We construct an empirical model of the United States presidential election of 2008 and employ the electoral perception of the character traits of the two candidates. We use a simulation technique to determine the local Nash equilibrium, under vote share maximization, of this model. The result shows that the unique vote-maximizing equilibrium is one where the two candidates adopt convergent positions, close to the electoral center. This result conflicts with the estimated positions of the candidates in opposed quadrants of the policy space. The difference between estimated positions and equilibrium positions allows us to estimate the influence of activist groups on the candidates. We compare this estimation with that of Israel for the election of 1996, and show that vote maximization leads low valence parties to position themselves far from the electoral origin. We argue that these low valence parties in Israel will be dependent on support of radical activist groups, resulting in a degree of political fragmentation.     

Moments-Based Approximation to the Renewal Function

Asymptotic behavior of the number of independent identically distributed observations in a left or right neighborhood of k _n th order statistic from the sample of size n, for k _n /n → α ? [0, 1], is studied. It appears that the limiting laws are of the Poisson type.     

Violence,resistance, and social transformation in anarchist thought and practice

ABSTRACT

Dating to the nineteenth century, anarchism has been commonly associated with violence and revolutionary upheaval. Yet, there have also been a number of nonviolent anarchists, including those that set up social work projects, alternative organizations, or those that advocated for educational or spiritual transformation. To date, violence and its relation to anarchism remain vague. This study analyzes a sample of historical and contemporary anarchists (N = 56) along with their respective viewpoints and experiences with violence and its alternatives. It discovers several tendencies inherent to violence rejection and acceptance in anarchism. These findings raise implications for anarchism and its relation to social work.     

Policy convergence in a two-candidate probabilistic voting model

We propose a generalization of the probabilistic voting model in two-candidate elections. We allow the candidates have general von Neumann–Morgenstern utility functions defined over the voting outcomes. We show that the candidates will choose identical policy positions only if the electoral competition game is constant-sum, such as when both candidates are probability-of-win maximizers or vote share maximizers, or for a small set of functions that for each voter define the probability of voting for each candidate, given candidate policy positions. At the same time, a pure-strategy local Nash equilibrium (in which the candidates do not necessarily choose identical positions) exists for a large set of such functions. Hence, if the candidate payoffs are unrestricted, the “mean voter theorem” for probabilistic voting models is shown to hold only for a small set of probability of vote functions.