Stylized Facts in Brazilian Vote Distributions

Elections, specially in countries such as Brazil, with an electorate of the order of 100 million people, yield large-scale data-sets embodying valuable information on the dynamics through which individuals influence each other and make choices. In this work we perform an extensive analysis of data sets available for Brazilian proportional elections of legislators and city councilors throughout the period 1970–2014, which embraces two distinct political regimes: a military regime followed by a democratic one. We perform a comparative analysis of elections for legislative positions, in different states and years, through the distribution p(v) of the number of candidates receiving v votes. We show the impact of the different political regimes on the vote distributions. Although p(v) has a common shape, with a scaling behavior, quantitative details change over time and from one electorate to another. In order to interpret the observed features, we propose a multi-species model consisting in a system of nonlinear differential equations, with values of the parameters that reflect the heterogeneity of candidates. In its simplest setting, the model can not explain the cutoff, formed by the most voted candidates, whose success is determined mainly by their peculiar, intrinsic characteristics, such as previous publicity. However, the modeling allows to interpret the scaling of p(v), yielding a predictor of the degree of feedback in the interactions of the electorate. Knowledge of the feedback is relevant beyond the context of elections, since a similar interactivity may occur for other social contagion processes in the same population.     

Bayesian Inference on Proportional Elections

Polls for majoritarian voting systems usually show estimates of the percentage of votes for each candidate. However, proportional vote systems do not necessarily guarantee the candidate with the most percentage of votes will be elected. Thus, traditional methods used in majoritarian elections cannot be applied on proportional elections. In this context, the purpose of this paper was to perform a Bayesian inference on proportional elections considering the Brazilian system of seats distribution. More specifically, a methodology to answer the probability that a given party will have representation on the chamber of deputies was developed. Inferences were made on a Bayesian scenario using the Monte Carlo simulation technique, and the developed methodology was applied on data from the Brazilian elections for Members of the Legislative Assembly and Federal Chamber of Deputies in 2010. A performance rate was also presented to evaluate the efficiency of the methodology. Calculations and simulations were carried out using the free R statistical software.     

The political gender gap: gender bias in facial inferences that predict voting behavior

Background

Throughout human history, a disproportionate degree of political power around the world has been held by men. Even in democracies where the opportunity to serve in top political positions is available to any individual elected by the majority of their constituents, most of the highest political offices are occupied by male leaders. What psychological factors underlie this political gender gap? Contrary to the notion that people use deliberate, rational strategies when deciding whom to vote for in major political elections, research indicates that people use shallow decision heuristics, such as impressions of competence solely from a candidate''s facial appearance, when deciding whom to vote for. Because gender has previously been shown to affect a number of inferences made from the face, here we investigated the hypothesis that gender of both voter and candidate affects the kinds of facial impressions that predict voting behavior.

Methodology/Principal Finding

Male and female voters judged a series of male and female political candidates on how competent, dominant, attractive and approachable they seemed based on their facial appearance. Then they saw a series of pairs of political candidates and decided which politician they would vote for in a hypothetical election for President of the United States. Results indicate that both gender of voter and candidate affect the kinds of facial impressions that predict voting behavior. All voters are likely to vote for candidates who appear more competent. However, male candidates that appear more approachable and female candidates who appear more attractive are more likely to win votes. In particular, men are more likely to vote for attractive female candidates whereas women are more likely to vote for approachable male candidates.

Conclusions/Significance

Here we reveal gender biases in the intuitive heuristics that voters use when deciding whom to vote for in major political elections. Our findings underscore the impact of gender and physical appearance on shaping voter decision-making and provide novel insight into the psychological foundations underlying the political gender gap.     

More Tweets,More Votes: Social Media as a Quantitative Indicator of Political Behavior

Is social media a valid indicator of political behavior? There is considerable debate about the validity of data extracted from social media for studying offline behavior. To address this issue, we show that there is a statistically significant association between tweets that mention a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives and his or her subsequent electoral performance. We demonstrate this result with an analysis of 542,969 tweets mentioning candidates selected from a random sample of 3,570,054,618, as well as Federal Election Commission data from 795 competitive races in the 2010 and 2012 U.S. congressional elections. This finding persists even when controlling for incumbency, district partisanship, media coverage of the race, time, and demographic variables such as the district''s racial and gender composition. Our findings show that reliable data about political behavior can be extracted from social media.     

Power through ‘Us’: Leaders’ Use of We-Referencing Language Predicts Election Victory

Leaders have been observed to use distinct rhetorical strategies, but it is unclear to what extent such strategies are effective. To address this issue we analyzed the official election campaign speeches of successful and unsuccessful Prime Ministerial candidates in all 43 Australian Federal elections since independence from Britain in 1901 and measured candidates'' use of personal (‘I’, ‘me’) and collective pronouns (‘we’, ‘us’). Victors used more collective pronouns than their unsuccessful opponents in 80% of all elections. Across all elections, victors made 61% more references to ‘we’ and ‘us’ and used these once every 79 words (vs. every 136 words for losers). Extending social identity theorizing, this research suggests that electoral endorsement is associated with leaders'' capacity to engage with, and speak on behalf of, a collective identity that is shared with followers whose support and energies they seek to mobilize.     

Between Order and Disorder: A ‘Weak Law’ on Recent Electoral Behavior among Urban Voters?

A new viewpoint on electoral involvement is proposed from the study of the statistics of the proportions of abstentionists, blank and null, and votes according to list of choices, in a large number of national elections in different countries. Considering 11 countries without compulsory voting (Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Romania, Spain, and Switzerland), a stylized fact emerges for the most populated cities when one computes the entropy associated to the three ratios, which we call the entropy of civic involvement of the electorate. The distribution of this entropy (over all elections and countries) appears to be sharply peaked near a common value. This almost common value is typically shared since the 1970s by electorates of the most populated municipalities, and this despite the wide disparities between voting systems and types of elections. Performing different statistical analyses, we notably show that this stylized fact reveals particular correlations between the blank/null votes and abstentionists ratios. We suggest that the existence of this hidden regularity, which we propose to coin as a 'weak law on recent electoral behavior among urban voters', reveals an emerging collective behavioral norm characteristic of urban citizen voting behavior in modern democracies. Analyzing exceptions to the rule provides insights into the conditions under which this normative behavior can be expected to occur.     

Colonial past,voluntary association and far-right voting in France

We examine whether linked pluralism – association membership along cross-cutting lines – reduces the likelihood of voting for the far right. Data come from surveys of European ex-colonials (pieds noirs) conducted after the French national elections of 2002, 2007 and 2012. Results confirm that pied-noir support for far-right candidates in presidential and parliamentary elections greatly exceeded the average. This pattern was mediated by membership in voluntary associations: far-right voting was significantly higher among those whose association membership insulated them from countering influences. Our study demonstrates the importance for far-right studies of the distinction between bridging and bonding social capital. The effects on politics of France's colonial legacy depend on association membership, which can either uphold or cross social cleavages.     

Post-release monitoring: the Brazilian system,its aims and requirements for information

The Brazilian National Biosafety Committee approved in 2011 a new post release monitoring system for environmental releases of genetically modified organisms. It has a number of novel features in comparison with other established or proposed systems. The new system also allows the proponent to ask for monitoring exemption. General surveillance forms the basis of the monitoring system, similar to the European model, but differs markedly in the way it operates. While the European proposal is based on monitoring measurable variables extracted from environmental observations, from baselines previously established for multiple protection targets, the Brazilian system uses direct alerts of damage, without the aid of baseline values. The strength of the Brazilian form of monitoring is the possibility of generating an information network with the effective participation of many actors from the monitored area. A network constituted by highly qualified members, as proposed elsewhere, is too complex and unrealistic in Brazil and in many other countries. In conclusion, the Brazilian monitoring system is flexible and can be adjusted to the Brazilian reality over the next years, as a response to the ever growing experience in monitoring. It also meets the demands of the Brazilian society for transparency, rational use of resources, opportunity for national companies, and food and environmental biosafety.     

Part A: Assessing the performance of the COMFA outdoor thermal comfort model on subjects performing physical activity

This study assessed the performance of the COMFA outdoor thermal comfort model on subjects performing moderate to vigorous physical activity. Field tests were conducted on 27 subjects performing 30 min of steady-state activity (walking, running, and cycling) in an outdoor environment. The predicted COMFA budgets were compared to the actual thermal sensation (ATS) votes provided by participants during each 5-min interval. The results revealed a normal distribution in the subjects’ ATS votes, with 82% of votes received in categories 0 (neutral) to +2 (warm). The ATS votes were significantly dependent upon sex, air temperature, short and long-wave radiation, wind speed, and metabolic activity rate. There was a significant positive correlation between the ATS and predicted budgets (Spearman’s rho?=?0.574, P?<?0.01). However, the predicted budgets did not display a normal distribution, and the model produced erroneous estimates of the heat and moisture exchange between the human body and the ambient environment in 6% of the cases.     

What Took Them So Long? Explaining PhD Delays among Doctoral Candidates

A delay in PhD completion, while likely undesirable for PhD candidates, can also be detrimental to universities if and when PhD delay leads to attrition/termination. Termination of the PhD trajectory can lead to individual stress, a loss of valuable time and resources invested in the candidate and can also mean a loss of competitive advantage. Using data from two studies of doctoral candidates in the Netherlands, we take a closer look at PhD duration and delay in doctoral completion. Specifically, we address the question: Is it possible to predict which PhD candidates will experience delays in the completion of their doctorate degree? If so, it might be possible to take steps to shorten or even prevent delay, thereby helping to enhance university competitiveness. Moreover, we discuss practical do''s and don''ts for universities and graduate schools to minimize delays.     

Weather conditions and political party vote share in Dutch national parliament elections, 1971–2010

Inclement weather on election day is widely seen to benefit certain political parties at the expense of others. Empirical evidence for this weather-vote share hypothesis is sparse however. We examine the effects of rainfall and temperature on share of the votes of eight political parties that participated in 13 national parliament elections, held in the Netherlands from 1971 to 2010. This paper merges the election results for all Dutch municipalities with election-day weather observations drawn from all official weather stations well distributed over the country. We find that the weather parameters affect the election results in a statistically and politically significant way. Whereas the Christian Democratic party benefits from substantial rain (10 mm) on voting day by gaining one extra seat in the 150-seat Dutch national parliament, the left-wing Social Democratic (Labor) and the Socialist parties are found to suffer from cold and wet conditions. Cold (5°C) and rainy (10 mm) election day weather causes the latter parties to lose one or two parliamentary seats.     

Bacterial diversity assessment in soil of an active Brazilian copper mine using high-throughput sequencing of 16S rDNA amplicons

Mining activities pose severe environmental risks worldwide, generating extreme pH conditions and high concentrations of heavy metals, which can have major impacts on the survival of organisms. In this work, pyrosequencing of the V3 region of the 16S rDNA was used to analyze the bacterial communities in soil samples from a Brazilian copper mine. For the analysis, soil samples were collected from the slopes (geotechnical structures) and the surrounding drainage of the Sossego mine (comprising the Sossego and Sequeirinho deposits). The results revealed complex bacterial diversity, and there was no influence of deposit geographic location on the composition of the communities. However, the environment type played an important role in bacterial community divergence; the composition and frequency of OTUs in the slope samples were different from those of the surrounding drainage samples, and Acidobacteria, Chloroflexi, Firmicutes, and Gammaproteobacteria were responsible for the observed difference. Chemical analysis indicated that both types of sample presented a high metal content, while the amounts of organic matter and water were higher in the surrounding drainage samples. Non-metric multidimensional scaling (N-MDS) analysis identified organic matter and water as important distinguishing factors between the bacterial communities from the two types of mine environment. Although habitat-specific OTUs were found in both environments, they were more abundant in the surrounding drainage samples (around 50 %), and contributed to the higher bacterial diversity found in this habitat. The slope samples were dominated by a smaller number of phyla, especially Firmicutes. The bacterial communities from the slope and surrounding drainage samples were different in structure and composition, and the organic matter and water present in these environments contributed to the observed differences.     

The spatial distribution of forest biomass in the Brazilian Amazon: a comparison of estimates

The amount of carbon released to the atmosphere as a result of deforestation is determined, in part, by the amount of carbon held in the biomass of the forests converted to other uses. Uncertainty in forest biomass is responsible for much of the uncertainty in current estimates of the flux of carbon from land‐use change. In the present contribution several estimates of forest biomass are compared for the Brazilian Amazon, based on spatial interpolations of direct measurements, relationships to climatic variables, and remote sensing data. Three questions were posed: First, do the methods yield similar estimates? Second, do they yield similar spatial patterns of distribution of biomass? And, third, what factors need most attention if we are to predict more accurately the distribution of forest biomass over large areas? The answer to the first two questions is that estimates of biomass for Brazil's Amazonian forests (including dead and belowground biomass) vary by more than a factor of two, from a low of 39 PgC to a high of 93 PgC. Furthermore, the estimates disagree as to the regions of high and low biomass. The lack of agreement among estimates confirms the need for reliable determination of aboveground biomass over large areas. Potential methods include direct measurement of biomass through forest inventories with improved allometric regression equations, dynamic modelling of forest recovery following observed stand‐replacing disturbances, and estimation of aboveground biomass from airborne or satellite‐based instruments sensitive to the vertical structure plant canopies.     

One More Piece in the VACV Ecological Puzzle: Could Peridomestic Rodents Be the Link between Wildlife and Bovine Vaccinia Outbreaks in Brazil?

Background

Despite the fact that smallpox eradication was declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1980, other poxviruses have emerged and re-emerged, with significant public health and economic impacts. Vaccinia virus (VACV), a poxvirus used during the WHO smallpox vaccination campaign, has been involved in zoonotic infections in Brazilian rural areas (Bovine Vaccinia outbreaks – BV), affecting dairy cattle and milkers. Little is known about VACV''s natural hosts and its epidemiological and ecological characteristics. Although VACV was isolated and/or serologically detected in Brazilian wild animals, the link between wildlife and farms has not yet been elucidated.

Methodology/Principal Findings

In this study, we describe for the first time, to our knowledge, the isolation of a VACV (Mariana virus - MARV) from a mouse during a BV outbreak. Genetic data, in association with biological assays, showed that this isolate was the same etiological agent causing exanthematic lesions observed in the cattle and human inhabitants of a particular BV-affected area. Phylogenetic analysis grouped MARV with other VACV isolated during BV outbreaks.

Conclusion/Significance

These data provide new biological and epidemiological information on VACV and lead to an interesting question: could peridomestic rodents be the link between wildlife and BV outbreaks?     

Facial appearance affects voting decisions

Human groups are unusual among primates in that our leaders are often democratically selected. Faces affect hiring decisions and could influence voting behavior. Here, we show that facial appearance has important effects on choice of leader. We show that differences in facial shape alone between candidates can predict who wins or loses in an election (Study 1) and that changing context from war time to peace time can affect which face receives the most votes (Study 2). Our studies highlight the role of face shape in voting behavior and the role of personal attributions in face perception. We also show that there may be no general characteristics of faces that can win votes, demonstrating that face traits and information about the environment interact in choice of leader.     

Chromosome numbers and DNA?C values in the genus Lippia (Verbenaceae)

The genus Lippia comprises herbs, shrubs, and small trees, including many species with medicinal properties. The species are distributed throughout South and Central America and Tropical Africa, but the majority of them occur in Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina. The DNA?C value of 28 Brazilian species has been estimated by flow cytometry. Estimated DNA?C values ranged from 0.825?pg (L. corymbosa) to 2.150?pg (L.?brasiliensis). In addition, new chromosome numbers of 12 species have also been described, and meiotic cells with 12, 13, and 14 chromosome pairs were observed. A straightforward correlation between chromosome number and DNA?C value was not observed, probably due to two outlier species of Lippia that have been transferred from the genus Lantana. In general, the data confirm previous reports regarding the variation within the taxonomic sections and also suggest a new revision in section Zapania. Aspects of karyotypic evolution of the genus are also discussed.     

Response of the dung beetle community to different climatic zones: Does the land use system matter?

The conversion of Brazilian savanna into exotic pastures leads to the loss of dung beetles and a decrease in their contribution to ecological functions. We hypothesized that the dung beetle communities from exotic pastures would show greater significant differences between climatic zones, when contrasted to communities from Brazilian savanna in the same region, since dung beetle assemblages in pastures are more simplified. We assessed which variables (purpose of production, type of management, percentage the habitat per buffer, soil penetration resistance, pasture area and herd size) affect more the dung beetle community in exotic pastures. We carried out this study in 48 areas of native Brazilian savannas and exotic pastures distributed across four bioclimatic zones: BZ1, hot with three dry months; BZ2, hot with 4–5 dry months; BZ3, sub-hot with 4–5 dry months and BZ4, meso-thermal with 4–5 dry months of Minas Gerais State, Brazil. In each BZ, six areas of Brazilian savannas and six areas of exotic pasture were selected. In the Brazilian savanna areas, the species richness, abundance and biomass of dung beetles did not differ between the bioclimatic zones, unlike the exotic pastures. The composition of the dung beetle community was different between land use systems and between bioclimatic zones; the interaction between the two factors was also significant. Our results provide evidence that dung beetle communities active in exotic pastures are more susceptible to climatic environmental variations than communities from more complex and stable habitats, such as savannas. Finally, the best model suggested that all the six variables combined explained about 91% of the total variability in species composition observed between sampling sites.     

Field Evaluation of Brazilian Isolates of Neozygites floridana (Entomophthorales: Neozygitaceae) for the Microbial Control of Cassava Green Mite in Benin,West Africa

Two Brazilian isolates and one Benin (indigenous) isolate of Neozygites floridana were released against the cassava green mite, Mononychellus tanajoa , in January 1999 in the Adjohoun district, Ouémé administrative region, Republic of Benin. Post-release monitoring conducted 8, 14, 22 and 36 weeks later showed very low mean infection rates on M. tanajoa by isolate (0.03-0.4%). However, 48 weeks after releases, mean infection rates increased noticeably to between 2.3 and 18.7%, and higher infection rates were observed for the Brazilian isolates compared with the indigenous one. The highest infection rate for the indigenous isolate was 4.5% while it reached over 30% for the Brazilian isolates (36.5 and 34.0%). Observations made to study dispersal from inoculated plants showed the absence of infected mites at 4 m from the inoculated plants in all fields 8 weeks after the releases, while they were already present on those at 2 m away. From the next monitoring, 14 weeks after the releases, infection was found at all three sampling positions (inoculated plants and plants at 2 and 4 m away). Only four mites with resting spores were found in over 460 000 mites examined. The highest infection levels were observed in December during 'harmattan' a period characterized by hot days and cool nights with high relative humidity.