Measuring agreement: How to arrive at reliable measures of opinion congruence between voters and parties.

in Representation (in press)

The extent to which voters and parties agree on policies is an important way through which political scientists have empirically studied political representation. This opinion congruence is most often ... [more ▼]

The extent to which voters and parties agree on policies is an important way through which political scientists have empirically studied political representation. This opinion congruence is most often measured by comparing preferences on a number of policy statements. While the selection of policy statements has not escaped scholarly attention, its impact on the reliability of congruence scores, i.e. the degree to which similar levels of opinion congruence are found when different samples of policy statements are used, has been less investigated. This article looks at which factors of statements samples and voters affect the reliability of congruence measures. It does so by simulating over 5 million opinion congruence scores on the basis of a dataset containing 134 voter and party policy preferences. It finds that both the number of statements and their topic diversity positively affect the reliability of congruence estimates. In addition, the congruence estimates of politically less sophisticated voters are more reliable but only when many left-right policy statements are included in the statement selection. Finally, explorative analyses suggest that increasing topic diversity also increases the validity of congruence measures. [less ▲]

The Effects of Natural Sounds and Proxemic Distances on the Perception of a Noisy Domestic Flying Robot

in ACM Transactions on Human - Robot Interaction (in press)

When flying robots are used in close-range interaction with humans, the noise they generate, also called consequential sound, is a critical parameter for user acceptance. We conjecture that there is a ... [more ▼]

When flying robots are used in close-range interaction with humans, the noise they generate, also called consequential sound, is a critical parameter for user acceptance. We conjecture that there is a benefit in adding natural sounds to noisy domestic drones. To test our hypothesis experimentally, we carried out a mixed-methods research study (N=56) on reported user perception of a sonified domestic flying robot with three sound conditions at three distances. The natural sounds studied were respectively added to the robot’s inherent noises during flying; namely a birdsong and a rain sound, plus a control condition of no added sound. The distances studied were set according to proxemics; namely near, middle, and far. Our results show that adding birdsong or rain sound affects the participants’ perceptions, and the proxemic distances play a nonnegligible role. For instance, we found that participants liked the bird condition the most when the drone was at far, while they disliked the same sound the most when at near. We also found that participants’ perceptions strongly depended on their associations and interpretations deriving from previous experience. We derived six concrete design recommendations. [less ▲]

Europol

in Ambos, Kai; Rackow, Peter (Eds.) The Cambridge Companion to European Criminal Law (in press)

Short-Packet Communications in Multi-Hop Networks with WET: Performance Analysis and Deep Learning-Aided Optimization

in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (in press)

The precautionary principle under EU law: a postmodern principle in a post-truth era

in Farah, Paolo (Ed.) Science, Policy and International Law (in press)

We live in a post-truth society, where “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” In this context, the core claim of this chapter is that ... [more ▼]

We live in a post-truth society, where “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” In this context, the core claim of this chapter is that to understand the definition and implications of the post-truth society, it is necessary to analyze the theoretical framework under which the concept of post-truth emerged: post-modernism. Under the theoretical framework of post-modernism, the analysis of the precautionary principle is utterly significant since it can be defined as a “paradigmatic principle” of post-modern law. Indeed, as this chapter will demonstrate, the precautionary principle shares the same features of flexibility (in its double dimension of smooth and adaptable principle) and complexity (as an interdisciplinary principle negotiated by scientific experts and political decision-makers) that belong to post-modern principles. [less ▲]

EU enforcement authorities - Punitive law enforcement in a composite legal order

Book published by Bloomsbury Publishing (in press)

Maximal and Typical topology of real polynomial singularities

in Annales de l'Institut Fourier (in press)

Semiparametric estimation of McKean-Vlasov SDEs

in Annales de l'Institut Henri Poincaré (B), Probabilités et Statistiques (in press)

Le Parquet européen et le blanchiment de capitaux

in Marty, Marie; Kirmann, Florent (Eds.) Le droit criminel à l’épreuve de l’infraction de blanchiment (in press)

Limit theorems for additive functionals of the fractional Brownian motion

in Annals of Probability (in press)