Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2016 February 2

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February 2

Primary Caucus in US presidential election

1. Is it possible to result in a tie in a primary caucus?

2. Has there ever been a primary caucus tie (from either party)?

3. Has there ever been a tie in the Iowa caucus in particular?Johnson&Johnson&Son (talk) 04:33, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

1) For any vote, a tie is always possible; for an even number of options, ties are always possible. For an odd number of options, a tie is possible if there are more than 2 candidates. Wikipedia has an article titled List of close election results which has some actual historical ties.

2) It is unclear if you want just caucuses, just primaries, or either of them. A Primary election is different from a Caucus in the U.S. A primary is run like a standard election: voters show up at a precinct, and submit a ballot with choices marked. In the caucus system, it runs more like a political convention: Potential voters meet in localities to elect representatives to the next highest level convention or caucus, and they keep narrowing down the field of representatives until the state level. In the Iowa caucuses for example (the one we just had), the next phase would be for the just selected local caucus winners to go to the county conventions to select state representatives to the Democratic National Convention.

3) Not that I can find. --Jayron32 13:34, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

This time around, the Democrats came very close to a tie. There are 99 delegates - one voted for the third candidate - so there were 98 delegates for Clinton and Sanders to fight over...and in the end, they were separated by just two delegates (so if just one caucus had gone the other way - it would have been a tie). Worse still, in the individual caucuses to choose those delegates - six of them were tied votes that were decided by a coin flip...and in a one-in-sixtyfour chance, Clinton won all six coin tosses. If she'd lost even one coin toss, it would have been a tie, and if she'd lost two, Sanders would have won by two delegates. You'd expect her to have lost three coin tosses on the average - so Sanders "should" have won by four delegates.

In the event of an actual tie in the delegate count, I think they toss a coin there too - but it hardly matters that this is just chance because of the high probability that the caucuses themselves are decided with a random element. SteveBaker (talk) 16:04, 4 February 2016 (UTC)

Sounds like you've been confused by the media. Even if Sanders had won all the coin tosses, either it's fairly unlikely or point blank impossible (I admit I'm a not totally sure which although the last source strongly suggest it's the later) that he would have overtaken Clinton [1] [2] [3] [4]. And I'm not even sure if we're sure how many coin tosses were won by Clinton vs Sanders. Nil Einne (talk) 18:00, 4 February 2016 (UTC)

Also confusing county-level delegates with state-level delegates, there's a nice NPR article explaining the difference here. Kmusser (talk) 20:18, 4 February 2016 (UTC)

"ADA 103"

What's "ADA 103" on the top right corner of this map[5]? Looking at the contour lines it's not a hill. Johnson&Johnson&Son (talk) 06:06, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

See Nellis Air Force Base Complex. In this context, "ADA" presumably stands for Air defense artillery. Tevildo (talk) 08:28, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

Thanks.Johnson&Johnson&Son (talk) 09:15, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

Resolved

Number of civil servants per capita per EU Member State?

Hi, with the Greek crisis, we hear that number of civil servants would be excessively high and public services offered of very low quality. But in the media I see very few data on all that's pretended. Can anybody help me find data on this? Thy --SvenAERTS (talk) — Preceding unsigned comment added by SvenAERTS (talk • contribs) 15:50, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

I think you're combining two different time periods:

1) Before the crisis, when Greece was spending money it didn't have, number of civil servants would be excessively high and public services offered of high quality.

2) After the crisis, with austerity measures in place, number of civil servants would be low and public services offered of very low quality. StuRat (talk) 16:54, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

Just because there are a lot of civil servants doesn't mean public services are going to be high quality. See e.g. [6] which while not necessarily agreeing there were too many does agree public services were often seen as problematic (and not because there weren't enough). It also has some figures on relative size. Nil Einne (talk) 18:17, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

There may be something wrong with that link. I only saw 3 short paragraphs, which didn't seem to say what you said it did. It mainly talks about corrupt oligarchs, barely mentioning the civil service. StuRat (talk) 18:30, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

Oh, I see, you must login in or register to read the rest. StuRat (talk) 18:32, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

International comparisons of the number of civil servants will be very difficult, even in Europe, because of definitions. In some countries, for example, all the staff in public universities would count as civil servants, while in others they would be seen as public sector or even private sector employees, even though the universities depend on public funding. Then there are the people who mend the roads, firefighters, railway workers, postmen... Itsmejudith (talk) 21:55, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

This comes with the caveat mentioned by Itsmejudith above about definitions of civil servants, but I found this paper from the Institute of Public Administration concerning the the public sector in Ireland which includes a table based on OECD figures, for employment in general government per capita for EU countries in 2001 and 2011. Again stressing the caveat about definitions, but by these figures, Greece actually had the lowest number of government employees per capita in both 2001 and 2011, less than one-third the number of Denmark. (The table is number 6 on page 16 and it's a small PDF file if you click it; the 2013 figures are also on the OECD website here. FlowerpotmaN·(t) 22:35, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

Not sure why the article I linked above requires registration for StuRat, it doesn't require it even in private mode for me so I guess either it's IP based or StuRat has read too many article on ForeignAffairs.com. Anyway the most relevant part to the OP's question is:

But none of these problems are a result of the public sector being too big today. Confirming numbers remains a problem, but in 2008, even before the crisis, the government employed about 19 percent of the labor force, including public corporations, which was about the OECD average (the United Kingdom had 23 percent). If 300,000 employees had not been hired in the 2000s, the rate would have remained well below the average.

In fact, today, after the reforms, about 300,000 employees are gone (including private contractors, where patronage often reigns); this is almost 30 percent of total employees since 2010. After these cuts, the Greek public sector is again understaffed in critical offices, overstaffed in inessential ones, and inefficient in almost all.

Inadequate and inefficient staff, moreover, have three consequences. Procedures take much longer than they should, employees feel overwhelmed and either underperform or become apathetic, and services are unable to reform procedures or automate them. Often, permit applications languish on desks for weeks or months. Or procedures that could be handled online have to be administered in person at multiple locations. All in all, the system leads to millions of lost labor-hours. That’s a state that is inadequate, not too big.

Although there is more discussion of the general problems with the public service regardless of size. Nil Einne (talk) 06:14, 3 February 2016 (UTC)