Narrow Results

Our publication focuses on two different but related topics in politics: in the first part of this publication, we investigate the influence of election results in the elections for the parliaments of the German states and for the German Diet (federal parliament) on the member numbers of the largest parties in the various states. In the second part of this publication, we consider the correlations between opinion polls and election results and focus on the question whether real election results can be predicted by opinion polls.

We analyze the pre- and post-election processes as a two-period game between an incumbent and a challenger. Before the election, in period 1, an incumbent allocates resources into production, fighting with the challenger, and providing public goods, which impact the probability of winning an election. After the election, in period 2 the incumbent may accept the election result, or a coalition or standoff may follow. Six outcomes are that the incumbent wins, the challenger wins, and that a standoff or coalition arises after one of the players wins. We analyze the incumbent’s and challenger’s strategic choices, how these choices depend on a variety of parameters, and the impact of the choices. The analysis is mapped to and tested against empirics of 48 African elections during 2009–2015 which are classified into the six outcomes. To test the model empirically, the correlations between three variables (the incumbent’s fighting and public goods provision and the challenger’s fighting, in period 1) and the six election outcomes are determined for 48 African elections.

Conventional maps of election results can give a misleading picture of the popular support that candidates have because population is highly non-uniform and equal areas on a map may not correspond to equal numbers of voters. Taking the example of the 2004 United States presidential election, we show how this problem can be corrected using a cartogram — a map in which the sizes of regions such as states are rescaled according to population or some other variable of interest.

The availability and ease of access of social media have allowed the general public to interact in political discussion. Social media are a widely-used instrument for political engagement. The purpose of this study is to understand Twitters users’ involvement in politics and in particular in political elections and to explore the use of Twitter as a tool to predict the opinion leaders that will influence the general users in the context of a political election. This study also explores the reliance of campaigns on Twitter as a tool to affect the voters’ opinions. The scope is the United States 2016 president election. The outcomes of this study indicated the importance of social media, specifically Twitter, as a tool to encourage Twitter users to participate in the elections and influence their opinions. The study revealed that the majority of opinion leaders were individual users rather than campaigns, organizations, or affiliations.

This paper presents a novel mechanism which can be used to support the optimistic approach to network partitioning problem in distributed database systems. Our protocol provides the partitioning point effectively, by checking the status of the network only when necessary, and the system reconfiguration is performed in a highly reliable way. Its correctness for providing necessary changing points for partition operation is presented.