Michael A. Redmond

Issues in Comparative Politics

A normative concern with democracy lies at the core of research in comparative politics. In particular, scholars have devoted substantial attention to the determinants of successful democratization. Experts disagree on which factors are important in the creation of a successful Democracy. We chose five experts from the field and determined which factors they considered essential to successful democritization. These experts are, Linz (1990, 1994), Przeworski (1991, 1995), Diamond et al. (1997); Diamond (1994, 1996, 1997, 1999), Linz and Stepan (1996b,a), and Putnam et al. (1993).

Set–Valued Statistical Methods

We now present a summary of Set–Valued Statistical Methods as introduced by Li and Yen (1995). This method can be used to overcome the difficulty of determining pairwise comparisons for large universes.

The Analytic Hierarchy Process

Thomas Saaty was a pioneers in the field of Operations Research. He authored the first Mathematical Methods of Operations Research textbook and the first queueing textbook.

Issues in International Relations

The Cold War was marked by a nuclear stand-off between the United States and the Soviet Union. Not surprisingly, many scholars focused their research on considering the best means for avoiding a nuclear exchange between the two superpowers. A primary issue in this genre was related to deterrence, the idea that rational states could be dissuaded from engaging in a first strike. While the threat to international stability is demonstrably more multi-faceted than during the Cold War, scholars and US policy makers have nonetheless continued to devote substantial attention to deterring the use of nuclear weapons.

Jeffrey’s Rule

Section 7.1.3 introduced Jeffrey’s Rule as a special case of the Guiasu method. In this Chapter we will use Jeffrey’s Rule to produce a prediction of how democratic a country is based on the eight hypothetical causes introduced in Section 4.1. This chapter also introduces three popular indices of democratic consolidation; the Freedom House, Vanhanen, and Polity IV indexes. We contrast our results of applying Jeffrey’s Rule with the values produced by fuzzifying the indices of democratic consolidation.

The Guiasu Method

In this section, we present some of the work of GuiasuGuiasu Guiasu (1994). Due to the importance of this work we present the entire paper to close the book.

Issues of Hearing Impairment

In this section, we consider a public policy issue and examine data related to Hearing Impaired Children. The opinion of experts from a Midwestern preschool for young deaf and hard of hearing students will be used to determine the best predictors of success when these students are mainstreamed in the public school system. We also use techniques from fuzzy mathematics to develop metrics for measuring how well these deaf and hard of hearing preschool students are closing the gap with respect to language growth.

Methods Based on Fuzzy Set Theory

In this chapter, we apply another method developed by Yen (1992). This method involves various measures of subsethood and extends Dempster-Shafer theory by including a measure of subsethood S(A, B), the degree to which the fuzzy subset A is included in the fuzzy subset B.

Yen’s Method

In Yen (1990), Yen developed an approach that addressed the issue of managing imprecise and vague information in evidential reasoning by combining Dempster-Shafer theory with fuzzy set theory. Later we will apply Yen’s method to arrive at the degree of belief of certain subsets of a set {x 1, ..., x k }. We assume we have n subsets of X, A j , j = 1, ... , n, which are the focal elements of a function m of the power set of X into the closed interval [0, 1], i.e., m(A j ) > 0, j = 1, ... , n.

Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets and Political Stability

A human being is, in general, not a computer. For a person the amount of whiteness of the sky and the amount of not whiteness of the sky are not always complementary. To model this inconsistency, Krassimir Atanassov introduced the concept of an intuitionistic fuzzy set (IFS): Atanassov (1986, 1999); Atanassov et al. (2005); Cornelis et al. (2003a). An IFS is characterized by two functions that expressing, respectively, the degree of belongingness and non-belongingness of an object to an attribute, for example the object could be the sky and the attribute could be whiteness. Furthermore, Atanassov does not rule out that an observer may object to committing themselves completely to a whiteness – not whiteness view of the sky. An observer may decide that an attribute is a poor classifier of an object and refuse to commit to either belongingness or not belongingness. Thus if an object is abstract, like love, an observer may question the amount of blueness we could attribute to love. Similarly, if the object is concrete, say that we are examining a rock, it may be hard to determine its honesty, an abstract quality.