Hertie School Research Repository
Not a member yet
2650 research outputs found
Sort by
Forecasting runoff elections using candidate evaluations from first round exit polls
We draw attention to a simple yet underappreciated way of forecasting the outcomes of elections involving two rounds of voting: surveying the voters’ candidate evaluations in first round exit polls, poststratifying the sample proportions of reported votes to official first round election returns, and redistributing the votes for eliminated competitors according to their supporters’ lower-order preferences among the viable alternatives in round two. We argue that the approach is likely to outperform standard pre-election surveys, due to its better coverage and reduced measurement error, and the possibility of correcting for sample selection. We set out the practical details of the method and demonstrate its usefulness by employing a recent German mayoral election as an empirical case. Thirteen candidates were competing in the first round, while there were six candidates in the decisive second round. The runoff result was forecast two weeks in advance with an average absolute error of less than one percentage point
How Society Can Maintain Human-Centric Artificial Intelligence
Although not a goal universally held, maintaining human-centric artificial intelligence is necessary for society's long-term stability. Fortunately, the legal and technological problems of maintaining control are actually fairly well understood and amenable to engineering. The real problem is establishing the social and political will for assigning and maintaining accountability for artifacts when these artefacts are generated or used. In this chapter we review the necessity and tractability of maintaining human control, and the mechanisms by which such control can be achieved. What makes the problem both most interesting and most threatening is that achieving consensus around any human-centred approach requires at least some measure of agreement on broad existential concerns
Mit KI gegen den Terminnotstand bei Ärzten
Besonders in Großstädten ist es für Patienten äußerst schwierig, einen Arzttermin zu bekommen. Künstliche Intelligenz könnte künftig dabei helfen, Engpässe zu verhindern, schreibt Mujaheed Shaikh. Großbritannien zeige bereits, wie das funktionieren könnte
Arguing about Financial Regulation: Comparing National Discourses on the Global Financial Crisis
As we write, the world is still in the grips of a financial crisis. Germany was one of the first countries to bail out a bank in July 2007. Then, in September 2007, the United Kingdom (UK) witnessed a run on a building society, Northern Rock, and the subsequent widespread nationalization of its banking sector. In the United States, the crisis led to a number of collapses among financial institutions, most famously Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, and the bail out of the insurance group, AIG, all in 2008
The Rise and Fall of Good-Governance Promotion
With the 2003 adoption of the UN Convention Against Corruption, good-governance norms have achieved—on the formal level at least—a degree of recognition that can fairly be called universal. This reflects a centuries-long struggle to establish the moral principle of “ethical universalism,” which brings together the ideas of equity, reciprocity, and impartiality. The West’s success in promoting this norm has been extraordinary, yet there are also significant risks. Despite expectations that international concern and increased regulation would lead to less corruption, current trends suggest otherwise. Exchanges between countries perceived as corrupt and countries perceived as noncorrupt seem to lead to an increase in corruption in the noncorrupt states rather than its decrease in the corrupt ones. Direct good-governance interventions have had poor results. And anticorruption has helped populist politicians, who use anti-elite rhetoric similar to that of anticorruption campaigners