In this paper, we study the Dirichlet problem of Hessian quotient equations of the form $S_k(D^2u)/S_l(D^2u)=g(x)$ in exterior domains. For $g\equiv \mbox {const.}$, we obtain the necessary and sufficient conditions on the existence of radially symmetric solutions. For g being a perturbation of a generalized symmetric function at infinity, we obtain the existence of viscosity solutions by Perron’s method. The key technique we develop is the construction of sub- and supersolutions to deal with the non-constant right-hand side g.

This article offers a reconstruction of how the Court of Justice of the European Union (EU) justifies the territorial scope of application of EU law. Scholarship on this issue tends to advocate for an expansive projection of EU norms in the pursuit of global values, subject to the external limits of public international law. This article will develop a critique of this approach by pointing to its underlying assumptions as to the territorial dimension of the EU's rule, the insoluble practical issues that it leads to, and the need to consider differently the EU's spatial identity and relation to the wider world. It will also be argued that, in fact, other case law sometimes already reflects an alternative vision, by imagining the EU implicitly, not as a ‘global actor’ promoting universal values, but as a concretely situated and spatially bounded community. It will be shown that this is so with the methodological help of private international law, and in particular three doctrines that are traditional to this discipline—the localisation of cross-border relations, international imperativeness, and the public policy exception. This will ultimately allow for a more sophisticated understanding of the EU's territory to emerge—irreducible to the physical coordinates of its acts of intervention, or the mere sum of the physical spaces under Member State sovereignty, but as a distinct space of social relations, informed and delineated by the particular axiology and structure of the EU legal system.

We give a new proof of rationality of stable commutator length (scl) of certain elements in surface groups: those represented by curves that do not fill the surface. Such elements always admit extremal surfaces for scl. These results also hold more generally for non-filling $1$–chains.

Currently, much of the literature surrounding Black politics in the 1920s and 1930s understates the role that Black citizens and politicians played in challenging Jim Crow and white supremacy at the national level. Instead, different factors like the “cage” that white Southerners placed on Civil Rights legislation or the influence that New Deal programs had on electoral decisions in the Black community. After realignment, Black Americans and their allies were then able to launch more effective challenges against white supremacy. Although these narratives contain much explanatory power, oftentimes they overlook critical aspects of Black politics during this period that complicate this narrative. Examining the career of Oscar DePriest, the first Black congressman elected in the twentieth Century, this article argues that Black citizens and their representatives were able to explicitly affect politics at the local, state, and federal levels through DePriest’s career prior to realignment.

Two types of formal models—landscape search tasks and two-armed bandit models—are often used to study the effects that various social factors have on epistemic performance. I argue that they can be understood within a single framework. In this unified framework, I develop a model that may be used to understand the effects of functional and demographic diversity and their interaction. Using the unified model, I find that the benefit of demographic diversity is most pronounced in a functionally homogeneous group, and decreases with increasing functional diversity.

Like other oral sources of history, oral traditions constantly respond to political incentives. In the social media world, demographics relegated to the peripheries of modern state-making projects are using oral traditions as a genre of political activism to negotiate belonging. Following this trajectory, Yorùbá homespun historians on social media are refining Yorùbá oral traditions with ethnonationalism contaminants to galvanize netizens in opposition to the ethnicity’s marginalization in Nigeria and to demand a sovereign Yorùbá nation. This article interrogates the methods and approaches that Yorùbá homespun historians employ in recasting oral traditions. Consequently, it considers potential ramifications on oral traditions as a tool for historical inquiry.

The objective was to evaluate energy partitioning and predict the relationship between metabolizable energy (ME) and digestible energy (DE) in hair sheep fed tropical diets at three feeding levels (maintenance, intermediate and high). To evaluate the energy partition, a database with 114 records (54 non-castrated males and 60 females) from comparative slaughter studies was used. To estimate the ratio ME:DE, 207 observations (74 non-castrated males and 133 females) were used from six studies in a multi-study approach, two indirect calorimetry studies (n = 93) and four comparative slaughter (n = 114), using a mixed model and study as random effect. A simple linear regression equation of the ME against DE was fitted to predict the efficiency of DE to ME conversion. Gas losses were greatest (P < 0.05) for animals fed at maintenance level (7.92% of gross energy intake). The variations of energy losses in the urine were 2.64, 2.06 and 2.08%; faecal losses were 34.37, 37.80 and 36.91% for maintenance, intermediary and high level of feeding, respectively. The regression analysis suggested a strong linear relationship between ME and DE, generating the model ME (MJ/day) = −0.1559 (±0.07525) + 0.8503 (±0.005864) × DE (MJ/day). This study highlights the importance of the relationship ME:DE. Equation/factor 0.85 presented herein is alternative that could be used for the calculation of ME from DE in feedlot diets tropical. In conclusion, we suggest that for hair sheep fed tropical diets the conversion factor 0.85 is more adequate to predict ME from DE.

Until 1838 the U.S. government lent railroads Army engineers to survey routes. Though not strictly regulators, these army engineers would consequently face powerful versions of the incentives that make regulatory capture a pervasive problem—including an intensified “revolving door,” the opportunity for institutional empire building, and a fertile ground for cognitive capture. Nevertheless, engineering officers would push to abolish federal railroad aid, succeeding by 1838. This article argues that they turned against railroad aid when the nation’s growing rail network revitalized long-standing republican hopes of replacing standing armies and fortifications with floating batteries and militias. Though this scheme was strategically quixotic, Jacksonian populism and fiscal retrenchment during the Panic of 1837 combined with the transportation revolution to make it appear a credible threat to the Corps’s institutional raison d’être—building coastal fortifications. Engineers thus turned against railroad aid to protect their core competency, highlighting underappreciated tensions between institutional and industry interests.

States in conflict often have divergent interpretations of the past. They blame each other for starting the conflict and view their own actions as justified retaliation, which makes them reluctant to cooperate. This phenomenon, while common in international relations, is not well understood by existing formal theories of cooperation. In the context of the Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma framework, we show that strategies that demand atonement for past misdeeds are outperformed by strategies that do not. The latter are able to get out of retaliatory cycles and return to cooperation more quickly when there are divergent perceptions of the past. We conclude with a case study of Chinese and U.S. responses to the Tiananmen protests of 1989. China and the United States strongly disagree about the cause of the Tiananmen uprising and the legitimacy of the Chinese response, but nevertheless returned to cooperation after a limited period of mutual punishment.

This article provides an analysis of the potential danger to a president’s policy agenda that comes from appointing a sitting elected official to the cabinet. We present historical data on cabinet secretaries since the founding and demonstrate that concerns about seats falling to the other party following the appointment of an elected official to the cabinet date back at least to Martin Van Buren’s establishment of the first American mass political party in 1828. We then focus on the post-Seventeenth Amendment cabinet and show that almost 30 percent of cabinet secretaries in this era who were elected officials at the time of their appointment left seats that flipped to the other party by the next regular general election. We conclude by discussing how our results compare with Alexander Hamilton, Martin Van Buren, and Woodrow Wilson’s differing views on the cabinet and the implications for the president’s policy agenda.

The reform era began with the removal of Mao-era elites from leadership positions on a scale theretofore unseen in the People's Republic of China. Rather than depending on incentives to mobilize Mao-era cadres to support Reform and Opening, the new reform leadership brought in younger, better educated pro-reform elites. This article thus proposes a Personnel Model, in which the Communist Party brings in sympathetic cadres to implement major shifts in the Party line. Furthermore, personnel changes were first imposed on the military, then on the civilian apparatus. We show the large scale and rapid implementation of these reforms in 1982–1984 using an original database of over 60,000 cadres drawn from Organizational Histories.

Possessing neither purse nor sword, the unelected US Supreme Court relies on sustained public confidence in its institutional credibility to give force to its decisions. Previous research shows that Supreme Court justices are increasingly making public appearances to engage in a course of institutional maintenance to preserve its legitimacy. Amid a potential legitimacy crisis, justices seek to shore up the Court’s public support in these public appearances by emphasizing the apolitical nature of the Court and its decision making. The question for a growing body of literature is whether these attempts at institutional maintenance do, in fact, lead to higher support for the Court. Using an original survey experiment where we manipulate the identity of the justice giving legitimizing rhetoric, we find that respondents’ ideological preferences and female respondents’ level of gender identity do impact the effectiveness of such rhetoric. These results build on previous work by demonstrating the importance of justice identity in conditioning how different ideologues respond to the Court’s elite signals.