Mark P. Jones - Böcker

In Electoral Laws and the Survival of Presidential Democracies, political scientist Mark P. Jones addresses the conditions necessary for the survival of democratic presidential systems, arguing that the electoral laws employed by such systems are intricately and inextricably linked to the longevity of democracy.Throughout the book Jones's focus is on the most realistic and feasible mechanism for facilitating the proper functioning and survival of democratic presidential systems: electoral law reform. In order to demonstrate the importance of a strong presidential legislative contingent for the successful functioning of democratic presidential government, Jones structures his argument into two parts. He first employs a review of the relevant literature plus a multitiered set of empirical analyses of Latin American presidential systems. Maintaining that certain electoral laws are more compatible with the successful functioning of democratic presidential systems than others, Jones then offers an examination of electoral data and examples from two separate populations: sixteen Latin American presidential democracies and twenty-three Argentine provincial (gubernatorial) systems. Jones uses these data as evidence to support his argument that presidential systems that consistently fail to provide their president with adequate legislative support are inherently unstable and ineffective.Political scientists and Latin Americanists will appreciate Electoral laws and the Survival of Presidential Democracies as a comprehensive examination of the impact of electoral laws on presidential systems, and as a challenge to the conventional wisdom that the presidential form of government is insuperably flawed.

This book describes the use of qualified types to provide a general framework for the combination of polymorphism and overloading. For example, qualified types can be viewed as a generalization of type classes in the functional language Haskell and the theorem prover Isabelle. These in turn are extensions of equality types in Standard ML. Other applications of qualified types include extensible records and subtyping. Using a general formulation of qualified types, the author extends the Damas/Milner type inference algorithm to support qualified types, which in turn specifies the set of all possible types for any term. In addition, he describes a new technique for establishing suitable coherence conditions that guarantee the same semantics for all possible translations of a given term. Practical issues that arise in concrete implementations are also discussed, concentrating in particular on the implementation of overloading in Haskell and Gofer, a small functional programming system developed by the author.