Personality and Political Participation: The Mediation Hypothesis

Recent analyses have demonstrated that personality affects political behavior. According to the mediation hypothesis, the effect of personality on political participation is mediated by classical predictors, such as political interest, internal efficacy, political discussion, or the sense that voting is a civic duty. This paper outlines various paths that link personality traits to two participatory activities: voter turnout in European Parliament elections and participation in protest actions. The hypotheses are tested with data from a large, nationally representative, face-to-face survey of the Spanish population conducted before and after the 2009 European Parliament elections using log-linear path models that are well suited to study indirect relationships. The results clearly confirm that the effects of personality traits on voter turnout and protest participation are sizeable but indirect. They are mediated by attitudinal predictors.     

Leaders, voters and activists in the elections in Great Britain 2005 and 2010

Discussion of the relationship between parties and the electorate is often based on the notion of partisan constituencies, that parties adopt policy positions that correspond to the average position of the party supporters. In contrast, the Downsian “spatial model” assumes that parties are purely opportunistic and maneuver to gain as many votes as possible. A third, more empirical model, based on the early work of Stokes, assumes that voter choice is based on the evaluation of each of the party leader’s competence or ability to deliver policy success. Such an evaluation can be provided by individual voter overall assessment in terms of the leaders’ character traits.This paper attempts to relate these three classes of models by examining the elections in Great Britain in 2005 and 2010. Using the British Election Study, we construct spatial models of these elections in Great Britain as well as in the three regions of England, Scotland and Wales. The models incorporate the electoral perceptions of character traits. We compare the equilibrium vote maximizing positions with the partisan positions, estimated by taking the mean of each of the parties voters’ preferred positions. We define an equilibrium to be a stable attractor if the vote share at the equilibrium exceeds the share at the partisan position by a significant proportion (determined by the implicit error of the stochastic model). We infer that none of the equilibria are stable attractors, and suggest that the partisan positions are also preferred by the party activists, the key supporters of each party.     

Determining Factors of E-government Development: A Worldwide National Approach

ABSTRACT

The implementation of e-government aims at simplifying and improving the relationships and transactions between public administrations and their users or customers. In this vein, the objective of this work is to analyze the factors that promote the development of e-government in the national governments of 192 countries worldwide, differentiating between developed and developing countries. Our findings emphasize that the development of e-government requires that countries have a degree of economic development that enables their citizens to have a certain standard of living, both economic and cultural, as well as important internal government reforms which promote administrative effectiveness. Once these essential factors are fulfilled, the national government's online presence is favored by governments that rule with a majority in their parliaments and with an important fiscal capacity.     

The variable choice set logit model applied to the 2004 Canadian election

Formal work on the electoral model often suggests that parties should locate at the electoral mean. Recent research has found no evidence of such convergence. In order to explain non-convergence, the stochastic electoral model is extended by including a competence and sociodemographic valance in a country where regional and national parties compete in the election. That is, the model allows voters to face different sets of parties in different regions. We introduce the notion of a convergence coefficient, c for regional and national parties and show that when c is high there is a significant centrifugal tendency acting on parties. An electoral survey of the 2004 election in Canada is used to construct a stochastic electoral model of the election with two regions: Québec and the rest of Canada. The survey allows us to estimate voter positions in the policy space. The variable choice set logit model is used to built a relationship between party position and vote share. We find that in the local Nash equilibrium for the election the two main parties with high competence valence, the Liberals and Conservatives, locate at the national electoral mean and the Bloc Québécois, with the highest competence valence, locates at the Québec electoral mean. The New Democratic Party has a low competence valence but remains at the national mean. The Greens, with lowest competence valence, locate away from the national mean to increase its vote share.     

‘Cultures of healing’: spirituality,interdependence and resistance in the African diaspora

ABSTRACT

Concepts of healing and spirituality have remained crucial to generating agency and empowerment for both black women and black men, especially in their diasporic displacement from Africa to the US. Healing has been consistently deployed to fight against the systemic racism and sexism that has pervaded and continues to persist in the lives of African diasporic subjects. Placing the discussion of healing within the current debates about interdependence and spirituality, the paper traces the notion back to its African roots and enslavement times, and attempts to delineate a genealogy of healing up to the present that grounds interdependence and interconnectedness within an ‘ethics of resistance’.     

Where Else Does Turnout Decline Come From? Education,Age, Generation and Period Effects in Three European Countries

Recent research has found that voter turnout is declining in most advanced industrial countries. The trend is driven by generational replacement because the age cohorts that entered the electorate at the end of the twentieth century are voting at lower than expected rates. In North American countries, the decline is also concentrated among the poorly educated. This article examines the relative contribution of period, life-cycle, generational and educational effects on changes in electoral participation over the last four decades in Sweden, Norway and Germany with individual-level data. Turnout decline is partly driven by generational change in the countries observed as the literature suggests. Additionally, there is also a clear socio-economic correlate. Most strikingly, poorly educated persons of all age groups are increasingly failing to vote in Germany. The results suggest that the causes of the long-term evolution are multidimensional and the relative consequences vary across countries. The debate about turnout decline and its possible remedies has to take into account the fact that both members of new generations and citizens with low education attainment are the main targets of measures aimed at increasing turnout rates, but different actions might be required to attract each specific demographic group to the polls.     

Introducing Purchaser/Provider Separation in the Catalan Health Administration: A Budget Analysis

This article examines the extent to which the Catalan reform launched in 1990 effectively introduced the purchaser/provider separation within the public health administration. The reform had two formulation sources: a law passed by the Catalan Parliament, which left this principle vague, and a further 'new public management' discourse, which interpreted the law in terms of a clear purchaser/provider separation. This study uses Dunleavy's (1991) analytical model of agency types to compare the impact of the reform on the budget structures of the health administration agencies affected — namely, the Department of Health and Social Security, the Catalan Health Service and the Catalan Health Institute. The data show that while the provider role was clearly defined and implemented, the purchaser role was not. Instead, the role of the health authority embodied the complex blend of functions established by the text of the law, which was also reflected in its budget structure, and which blurred the separation between purchaser and provider.     

水牛肝片吸虫病间接ELISA诊断方法的建立及应用

以肝片吸虫的分泌-排泄物作为抗原(ES抗原),建立水牛肝片吸虫病间接ELISA诊断方法,并用此方法与粪便检查法检测江苏和安徽2省10县(市)302户的307头水牛的血清和粪便;间接ELISA诊断法的最佳工作条件,每孔包被0.2 μg抗原,血清稀释度为1960,二抗稀释度为1600.结果粪便检查出虫卵的阳性水牛43头,阳性率为14.01%,其中安徽省为11.61%(18/155),江苏省为16.45%(25/152);用间接ELISA法检测299头水牛血清,阳性87头,阳性率为29.19%,其中安徽省为23.53%,江苏省为34.92%,两种方法的符合率为86.05%.     

Multiproduct activity and competition policy: The Tetra Pak case

We suggest the Tetra Pak case as a real-world example to study the implications of multiproduct activity for European Competition Policy. Tetra Pak, a monopolist in aseptic carton packaging of liquid food, competes with Elopak in the nonaseptic sector. The EC Commission used the effect of Tetra Pak's dominance in the aseptic sector on its rival's performance as an evidence of the former's anticompetitive behavior. With linear demand and cost functions and interdependent demands, the Commission's position can be supported. However, a more general model suggests that the Commission's conclusions cannot be supported as the unique outcome of the analysis of the information available.     

Why do voters forgive corrupt mayors? Implicit exchange,credibility of information and clean alternatives

Corruption cases have limited electoral consequences in many countries. Why do voters often fail to punish corrupt politicians at the polls? Previous research has focused on the role of lack of information, weak institutions and partisanship in explaining this phenomenon. In this paper, we propose three micro-mechanisms that can help understand why voters support corrupt mayors even in contexts with high information and strong institutions: implicit exchange (good performance can make up for corruption), credibility of information (accusations from opposition parties are not credible) and the lack of credible alternatives (the belief that all politicians are corrupt). We test these mechanisms using three survey experiments conducted in Catalonia. Our results suggest that implicit exchange and credibility of information help explain voters’ support for corrupt politicians.