Suchergebnisse

Casstevens reviews 'The British General Election of 1997' by David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh.

Casstevens reviews 'Making Majorities: Constituting the Nation in Japan, Korea, China, Malaysia, Fiji, Turkey, and the United States' edited by Dru C. Gladney.

'Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure,' edited by Mark Irving Lichbach and Alan S. Zuckerman is reviewed.

Mathematical models of the circulation of political elites that use Poisson distributions of turnovers & exponential distributions of lengths of tenure are reviewed & critiqued. These distributions are equivalent in applications, if tenure is the time between turnovers. The model is broad in scope: it has been applied to 30 jurisdictions, from counties to countries, & 7 types of institutions from county commisioners to reigning monarchs. The model can be used in explanation, prediction, deviant case analysis, & measurement of regime stability, but has conceptual problems in fitting curves, testing statistical theorems, & defining bodies. Nevertheless, the model is a theory of the circulation of elites &, using a least squares algorithm without transformations, the curve fitting can be implemented in BASIC. 5 Tables, 2 Figures, 1 Appendix, 79 References. Modified HA

In legislative systems a bill is commonly considered and reported by an appropriate committee before it is considered on the floor of the house. Since motions on the floor frequently relate to such bills, it is often apposite to refer to a motion's relevant committee. This article presents a mathematical model of the relationship between the relevant committee's divisions on the floor and a motion's probability of passing. Let x be the proportion of the relevant committee voting yea on the floor, z be the proportion of the relevant committee voting nay on the floor, and y be the proportion of the relevant committee neither voting yea nor voting nay on the floor, then a motion's probability of passing is (x2 + y2)/(x2 + y2 + z2). The fit between theory and observation is quite good: six hundred eleven roll calls from the 90th and 91st Congresses have been analyzed; 0.628 of the motions actually passed; and 0.613 of the motions were expected to pass.