The left‐wing opposition in Denmark,Norway and Sweden: Cases of Euro‐phobia?

This article maps the three major Left‐Socialist parties in Denmark, Norway and Sweden and their attitude towards European integration. It focuses on why the three parties, despite a common vision of Europe, differ when it comes to the question of membership in the European Union. The analysis stresses that both differences in party history and political context have to be accounted for when explaining the parties’ policy stands.     

Mietrecht,Verbraucherrecht und Verbandsklageverfahren

In einer aktuellen Entscheidung hat der OGH nun schon zum vierten Mal auf Grund einer Verbandsklage nach §§ 28ff KSchG die Verwendung weit verbreiteter Mietvertragsklauseln untersagt. Der Beitrag analysiert ausgew?hlte Apsekte dieses Judikats.     

Validation of new methods

Reliable analytical data are a prerequisite for correct interpretation of toxicological findings in the evaluation of scientific studies, as well as in daily routine work. Unreliable analytical data might not only be contested in court, but could also lead to unjustified legal consequences for the defendant or to wrong treatment of the patient. Therefore, new analytical methods to be used in forensic and/or clinical toxicology require careful method development and thorough validation of the final method. This is especially true in the context of quality management and accreditation, which have become matters of increasing relevance in analytical toxicology in recent years. In this paper, important considerations in analytical method validation will be discussed which may be used as guidance by scientists wishing to develop and validate analytical methods.     

Postmortem toxicology of drugs of abuse

Conducting toxicology on post-mortem specimens provides a number of very significant challenges to the scientist. The range of additional specimens include tissues such as decomposing blood and other tissues, hair, muscle, fat, lung, and even larvae feeding on the host require special techniques to isolate a foreign substance and allow detection without interference from the matrix. A number of drugs of abuse are unstable in the post-mortem environment that requires careful consideration when trying to interpret their significance. Heroin, morphine glucuronides, cocaine and the benzodiazepines are particularly prone to degradation. Moreover, redistributive process can significantly alter the concentration of drugs, particularly those with a higher tissue concentration than the surrounding blood. The designer amphetamines, methadone and other potent opioids will increase their concentration in blood post-mortem. These processes together with the development of tolerance means that no concentration of a drug of abuse can be interpreted in isolation without a thorough examination of the relevant circumstances and after the conduct of a post-mortem to eliminate or corroborate relevant factors that could impact on the drug concentration and the possible effect of a substance on the body. This article reviews particular toxicological issues associated with the more common drugs of abuse such as the amphetamines, cannabinoids, cocaine, opioids and the benzodiazepines.     

EU-China relations–an assessment by the communications of the European union

This paper is an analysis of the EU policy towards the Peoples’ Republic of China (China); focusing only on various aspects of the Communications of the Commission. The focus will be on three aspects of the relation: politics, economics and cooperation. We will start with a general historical overview of the EU-China relationship, taking the three above mentioned aspects into account. Then we will have a look at the current EU-China policy and the policy of China towards the EU. A further section will analyse the various policy papers of the European Commission with a more in-depth examination of the time references within those policy papers, the overall structure of those papers and the official reasons for their publication.Olaf Griese is also part of the Share-Research network ().

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Presidential elections in Finland: A plea for approval voting

The Finnish President is elected by an indirect method-the people elect special electors who carry out the final election. A proposal for a reform aiming at direct elections is, however, presently being considered. This paper agrees with this proposal and suggests that approval voting is a proper method for direct elections. Several properties of the approval voting system are discussed and the method is demonstrated to be superior to the plurality runoff method in presidential elections. It is argued that the approval voting system chooses a candidate who has overall support in the electorate and that the system therefore promotes the position of the President as a neutral and moderating political force.     

Foreign Policy Objectives: Left Socialist Opposition in Denmark, Norway and Sweden

Due to their foreign policy opposition, the left socialist parties in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden remain among the few parties in Western democracies that lack governmental experience. When political parties confront political issues, they can either choose a competitive or a cooperative strategy. The Norwegian and Swedish left socialists chose competition when the EU issue appeared on the scene in the early 1990s. The Danish Socialist People's Party, on the other hand, opted for a cooperative strategy and accepted EU membership and the 1993 Edinburgh Agreement. Drawing on coalition theory, this article asks why.     

Service quality and the optimum number of members in intermunicipal cooperation: The case of emergency primary care services in Norway

Intermunicipal cooperation (IMC) is often used as a mean to reap scale benefits. Most studies on the effects of IMC focus on cost savings, while service quality is overlooked. In this study, the focus is set on input quality in a service characterized by high asset specificity and need for redundancy: emergency primary care. We analyze how mode of governance affect performance by (1) measuring whether IMC versus single-municipal production affects input quality and (2) identifying optimum scale of operation; effect of the number of participants in the cooperation on input quality. The findings indicate that cooperation weakens the input quality of medical workforce, but that this negative effect is balanced out as the number of participants increases, indicating that cooperation needs to reach a certain size to achieve optimum scale of operation. Concerning equipment, both cooperation in general and an increasing number of participants decrease the input quality.     

When is a Reminder Enough? Text Message Voter Mobilization in a European Context

Sending text messages reminding people to vote has only been examined as a mobilization tool in three studies, two of them done in the United States. The results from these studies are mixed. We investigate this tool’s effectiveness using a field experiment in a different context, municipal elections in Norway. We find strong mobilization effects among groups traditionally low in participation (immigrants and youth voters). Young native Norwegians show an intent-to-treat (ITT) effect of 4.58% points, foreign nationals who have recently established Norwegian residency show an ITT effect of 2.93% points, and among immigrants who have lived in Norway for 7 years or more the treatment effect is 2.7% points. Even among native Norwegian voters over 30, with a baseline turnout of 73%, text messages generate a 0.96% points increase in turnout.