Fatal Intoxication with α‐PVP,a Synthetic Cathinone Derivative

This study presents the fatal case of a young man who was admitted to the ICAU due to sudden cardiac arrest. An interview revealed that the patient had taken some unspecified crystals. From the moment of admission, his condition deteriorated dramatically as a result of increasing circulatory insufficiency. After a few hours, sudden cardiac arrest occurred again and the patient was pronounced dead. In the course of a medicolegal autopsy, samples of biological material were preserved for toxicology tests and histopathological examination. The analysis of samples using the LC‐MS/MS technique revealed the presence of α‐PVP in the following concentrations: blood—174 ng/mL, urine—401 ng/mL, brain—292 ng/g, liver—190 ng/g, kidney—122 ng/g, gastric contents—606 ng/g. The study also presents findings from the parallel histopathological examination. Based on these findings, cardiac arrest secondary to intoxication with alpha‐PVP was determined as the direct cause of the patient's death.     

Government survival in semi‐presidential regimes

As semi‐presidentialism has become increasingly common in European democracies, so have the debates about the consequences of several of its political and institutional features. In particular, in those regimes, cohabitation between presidents and cabinets of different parties and cabinet dismissal powers on the part of presidents are thought to be a source of inter‐branch conflict and government instability. However, so far, most empirical work on government survival has failed to confirm any of these expectations. This article addresses this disjuncture between theory and empirical results by making a twofold contribution. First, it takes into account the internal diversity within semi‐presidentialism, modeling the implications for government survival of different configurations between presidential powers’ of cabinet dismissal, parliament dissolution and cohabitation in European semi‐presidential systems. Second, it reconsiders traditional government survival using the competing risks framework by adding a distinction between two different types of non‐electoral replacement: those where replacements imply a change in the party of the prime minister and those where they do not. Once such an approach is adopted, that presidential powers of parliamentary dissolution and cabinet dismissal indeed emerge as highly relevant for explaining government survival in these regimes.     

Selective incapacitation: Have we tried it? Does it work?

The selective incapacitation of individuals who pose a threat to society by their frequent criminal activity has been recently discussed widely by academicians, policy makers, and practitioners in criminal justice. Recent research has presented actuarially based scales of predictor variables that identify “career” criminals and derive predictions of the effects of their incapacitation on the overall societal crime rate.While selective incapacitation is currently viewed as a relatively new development in utilitarian criminal justice, this article points out that the prediction of recidivism and the use of actuarially based scales toward that end is a long-standing part of the U.S. federal parole process. An illustration of the selective-incapacitative effects of this process, using a large sample of federal releases, is presented.     

The political economy of fertility

This paper studies the political economy of fertility. Specifically, I argue that fertility may be a strategic choice for ethnic groups engaged in redistributive conflict. I first present a simple conflict model where high fertility is optimal for each ethnic group if and only if the economy’s ethnic diversity is high, institutions are weak, or both. I then test the model in a cross-national dataset. Consistent with the theory, I find that economies where the product of ethnic diversity and a measure of institutional weakness is high have increased fertility rates. I conclude that fertility may depend on political factors.     

Why hasn't integrated health care developed widely in the United States and not at all in England?

There have been influential advocates for financing and organizing health care in the United States and England based on the model of integrated health care delivery systems (IHCDSs). Despite good evidence that a few IHCDSs provide high-quality health care economically, such organizations are rare and localized in a few market areas in the United States and are absent in the English National Health Service (NHS). The explanation of why this is so includes various contributory factors: the way the development of the medical profession in each country pursued specialization; the division in British medicine between general practitioners and specialists; and the characteristics that we identify of established successful IHCDSs, which created formidable barriers to entry for a new IHCDS. This explains why currently the most promising organizational developments in U.S. health care are hybrids resulting from vertical integration. In England government policies of an "internal market," as adopted in the 1990s and currently, were and are based on a purchaser-provider split with the objectives that providers would compete and be funded by a system in which "money follows the patient." These policies recognize the division in British medicine, which also means that it is difficult to implement a reorganized English NHS based on high-performing IHCDSs.