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Exploring the Impact of Social Support on Wellbeing: Insights from People Who Hear Distressing Voices
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Portuguese Army Lesson Learning:Challenges and Opportunities in a Volatile Environment
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Electoral Gender Quotas and Democratic Legitimacy
Full text linkGender quotas are used to elect most of the world’s legislatures. Still, critics contend that quotas are undemocratic, eroding institutional legitimacy. We examine whether quotas diminish citizens’ faith in political decisions and decision making processes. Using survey experiments in twelve democracies with over 17,000 respondents, we compare the legitimacy-conferring effects of both quota-elected and non-quota-elected local legislative councils relative to all-male councils. Citizens strongly prefer gender balance, even when it is achieved through quotas. Though we observe a quota penalty, wherein citizens prefer gender balance attained without a quota relative to quota-elected institutions, this penalty is often small and insignificant, especially in countries with higher-threshold quotas. Quota debates are thus better framed around the most relevant counterfactual: the comparison is not between women’s descriptive representation with and without quotas, but between men’s political dominance and women’s inclusion
The critical group of a combinatorial map
Full text linkMotivated by the appearance of embeddings in the theory of chip-firing and the critical group of a graph, we introduce a version of the critical group (or sandpile group) for combinatorial maps, that is, for graphs embedded in orientable surfaces. We provide several definitions of our critical group, by approaching it through analogues of the cycle--cocycle matrix, the Laplacian matrix, and as the group of critical states of a chip-firing game (or sandpile model) on the edges of a map.Our group can be regarded as a perturbation of the classical critical group of its underlying graph by topological information, and it agrees with the classical critical group in the plane case. Its cardinality is equal to the number of spanning quasi-trees in a connected map, just as the cardinality of the classical critical group is equal to the number of spanning trees of a connected graph.Our approach exploits the properties of principally unimodular matrices and the methods of delta-matroid theory
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