Social background and citizen–legislator congruence in candidate-centred systems

Legislatures are arenas where diverse policy preferences are honed into practical policy proposals. Given that legislative membership is a result of free democratic elections, there is an assumption that the attitudes and opinions of MPs are representative of the population as a whole. Thus, pre-legislative bargaining is founded on an unbiased sample of public opinion. However, considerable opinion incongruence exists between citizens and the political elite in many systems, potentially undermining this ideal democratic starting point for legislative business. Candidate-centred voting systems offer the potential to remedy this disconnect. While citizens tend to emphasise personal characteristics as an explanation for vote choice in one of the most candidate-centred systems in existence, proportional representation-single transferable vote, the disconnect of opinion congruence between citizens and elites persists. This paper finds that citizens’ emphasis on MPs’ personal characteristics when choosing representatives causes significant opinion congruence between citizens and elites on a demographic basis, particularly for under-represented groups such as women, younger citizens and those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, but aggregate congruence is undermined by the lack of demographic diversity among MPs.     

Democracy for the youth? The impact of mock elections on voting age attitudes

Should 16-year-olds be entitled to participate in elections? We theorize that mock elections for adolescents, who are not eligible to vote, affect the short-term support among the general public for lowering the voting age. To test our theoretical expectation, we utilize variation among municipalities in the organization of mock elections during the Danish local elections in 2009. Difference-in-difference estimates with data from the subsequent local elections in 2013 demonstrate that citizens in municipalities with mock elections for adolescents were more supportive of lowering the voting age and that their support was strongly rooted in ideological differences.     

Death related to coronary artery fistula after rupture of an aneurysm to the coronary sinus.

Large coronary fistulas are considered to cause myocardial ischemia due to diversion of the coronary blood flow. In this case the authors report the reverse effect--the spontaneous closure of a large fistulation between the left circumflex artery and the coronary sinus evoked angina pectoris in a middle aged man, who died several years later. Postmortem examination revealed a coronary aneurysm that had ruptured and dissected into the coronary sinus and finally thrombosed. The origin of the aneurysm could be congenital but perhaps also represents a healed stage of Kawasaki disease.     

Bottom-up market-facilitation and top-down market-steering: comparing and conceptualizing green finance approaches in the EU and China

Asia Europe Journal - To address environmental problems, efforts to green financial systems are proliferating across the globe. However, green finance policy approaches differ substantially and in...