This paper uses a case study of the 1993 Russian parliamentary elections to explore the influence of proportional representation and plurality electoral systems on party formation in a post-communist regime. The mixed PR-plurality electoral system used by Russia in the 1993 elections is a particularly useful case for such analysis for it allows the simultaneous study of these two electoral syst...

An optical pulse stretcher and a mathematical algorithm for the detailed calculation of its design and performance is disclosed. The optical pulse stretcher has a plurality of optical cavities, having multiple optical reflectors suchthat an optical path length in each of the optical cavities is different. The optical pulse stretcher also has a plurality of beam splitters, each of which intercep...

General conclusions relating pairwise tallies with positional (e.g., plurality, antiplurality (“vote-for-two”)) election outcomes were previously known only for the Borda Count. While it has been known since the eighteenth century that the Borda and Condorcet winners need not agree, it had not been known, for instance, in which settings the Condorcet and plurality winners can disagree, or must ...

Plurality decisions on the Supreme Court represent extreme dissensus where no clear majority is formed for any one controlling rationale for the final disposition. Studying these decisions is important because they erode the Court’s credibility and authority as a source of legal leadership, and because they provide broader lessons about judicial decision making. This article presents the first ...

The Plurality problem - introduced by Aigner \cite{A2004} - has many variants. In this article we deal with the following version: suppose we are given $n$ balls, each of them colored by one of three colors. A \textit{plurality ball} is one such that its color class is strictly larger than any other color class. Questioner wants to find a plurality ball as soon as possible or state there is no,...

(1) Johnny played a silly prank and had a lot of tasty licorice. phenomenon of perspectival plurality has been shown to pose a serious problem for at least some versions of relativism about predicates of taste (the view that postulates a parameter for perspectives in the circumstances of evaluation with respect to which utterances of sentences are evaluated). Perspectival plurality is the pheno...

We consider plurality consensus in networks of n nodes. Initially, each node has one of k opinions. The nodes execute a (randomized) distributed protocol to agree on the plurality opinion (the opinion initially supported by the most nodes). In certain types of networks the nodes can be quite cheap and simple, and hence one seeks protocols that are not only time efficient but also simple and spa...

This paper both theoretically and experimentally studies the properties of plurality and approval voting when the majority is divided as a result of information imperfections. The minority backs a third alternative, which the majority views as strictly inferior. The majority thus faces two problems: aggregating information and coordinating to defeat the minority candidate. Two types of equilibr...