• Analyses & Alternatives
• /
• v.8 no.1
• /
• pp.169-196
• /
• 2024

In the House of the Parliament of Kazakhstan, which members are re-elected several times, while others are only first-term? Existing studies on the Kazakhstan political elites have mainly discussed the effect of clans on the appointment or replacement of elites. These studies have contributed to explaining the characteristics of Kazakhstan's clientelistic political structure, but the analysis of the relationship between political background and elite appointment or replacement is very poor. The purpose of this study is to analyze what characteristics of members have continuity in the 4th to 8th House of the Parliament of Kazakhstan. As a result, members with activities in Communist Party of the Soviet Union had a higher average seniority than those who did not in the 4th, 6th, and 7th House of the Parliament. And Nur Otan members had a higher average seniority than those who did not in 4th and 5th House of the Parliament. On the other hand, there was no difference in average seniority by local political experience, and the difference by elite type was only partially found in the 6th House of the Parliament. These results reflect the president's strategy for parliamentary control in that the parliament is used as a means of solidifying Kazakhstan's political regime as an authoritarian state. The significance of this study is that for the first time it empirically proved who sustains political survival in the House of the Parliament of Kazakhstan.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
• /
• v.15 no.2
• /
• pp.305-313
• /
• 2002

The genetic algorithm(GA), an optimization technique based on the theory of natural selection, has proven to be relatively robust means to search for global optimum. It is converged near to the global optimum point without auxiliary information such as differentiation of function. When studying some optimization problems with continuous variables, it was found that premature saturation was reached that is no further improvement in the object function could be found over a set of iterations. Also, the general GA oscillates in the region of the new global optimum point so that the speed of convergence is decreased. This paper is to propose the concept of restarting and elitist preserving strategy as a measure to overcome this difficulty. Some benchmark examples are studied involving 3-bar truss and cantilever beam with plane stress elements. The modifications to GA improve the speed of convergence.

• The Southeast Asian review
• /
• v.27 no.2
• /
• pp.155-184
• /
• 2017

ASEAN marking its 50th anniversary in 2017 draws hopes and concerns. There is hope for the full realization of the vision of ASEAN Community since 2015 while there are increasing concerns about the changing internal and external environments. This article reviews the process of ASEAN's community building and its external relations. First, after reviewing institutionalization and functional cooperation in 2016, it argues that there is increasing pressure for the modification of the 'ASEAN Way' mainly due to the recent political changes in some ASEAN member states. Second, this article considers the nature of ASEAN's external relation focusing on continuity rather than change. The tendency of external relations of ASEAN appears to be 'avoiding conflict' and 'status quo' while it concentrates on development cooperation. We argue that such attitude contributes to the unity of ASEAN as it is useful in searching for regional resilience which is a common goal of ASEAN power elites.