Collateral damage: The short and turbulent life of Quebec's agency for public‐private partnerships

This article seeks to explain the surprisingly short lifespan of the Quebec government's central unit for promoting public‐private partnerships (PPPs), the Agence des partenariats public‐privé du Québec (APPP). I used a theoretical framework based on neo‐institutional analysis informed by empirical research including interviews with key actors, a review of all briefs submitted to the Quebec legislature and pertinent parliamentary debates, and a partial review of the media coverage. The government severely underestimated the strength of the opposition to its plan. Electoral cycles and elements of the dominant political culture in Quebec also help to explain its demise. However, the prospects for PPPs may not be as negative as the rise and fall of the APPP might suggest.     

Territorialising Sustainable Development: The Politics of Land-use Planning in Laos

Since the emergence of the sustainable development paradigm in the late 1980s, land-use planning has become a key arena for political debates over society-environment interactions and, in practice, an important means for territorialisation projects. The paper reviews the main planning approaches that have been employed over the past three decades in the Lao People's Democratic Republic, a country that has long been viewed as a valuable policy testing ground for the proponents of sustainable development. It highlights three concurrent territorialisation projects that have shaped the history of land-use planning and have fuelled tensions between central and subnational governments and local actors, national and foreign institutions, and land suitability and sustainability approaches. The paper argues that the latter tensions reflect an important dynamism and reactivity in the planning arena. It concludes that the capacity of land-use planners to adapt to specific contexts and evolving socio-environmental challenges should be harnessed in order to reconcile conflicting approaches to planning and, perhaps, to achieve sustainable development.     

French communism: The challenge of environmentalism and the ecologism

Existing political parties are often slow to react to new social issues, paying little attention to questions which are not directly political. They have also firm basic strategies for dealing with ‘intruders’ who wish to mobilise on such issues. The French Communist Party has successively and sometimes simultaneously resorted to four strategies. The results, however, are far from satisfactory.     

Incumbents' Interests and Gender Quotas

The introduction of mandatory gender quotas in party lists is a reform that many countries have recently adopted or have been considering. The electoral system affects the incumbents' incentives to make such reforms, their details, and their effectiveness. We show that male incumbents can actually expect an increased incumbency advantage when gender quotas are introduced, if they are elected through single‐member district majority rule. On the other hand, no expectation of male advantage can reduce the incumbents' fear of being replaced if they are elected through closed‐list proportional representation. As France has both electoral systems, we validate the above argument using a formal model of constitutional design as well as an empirical analysis of the legislative elections in France, displaying the existence of male bias in the last three elections. We also show that parity may have Assembly composition effects and policy effects that vary with the electoral system.     

Institutional competitiveness,social investment,and welfare regimes

Are the rather generous welfare regimes found in most European countries sustainable; that is, are they competitive in a globalizing economy? Or will they, on the contrary, be crowded out by the more austere and less expensive regimes generally found in liberal Anglo‐Saxon countries? We first discuss this issue conceptually, focusing on the notions of institutional competitiveness, social investment, and short‐term and long‐term productivity. We then briefly present the results of an empirical study of 50 social indicators of policies and outcomes in 20 Organization for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) countries during the early 2000s. We conclude that welfare regimes have not been forced to converge through a “race to the bottom.” There remain three distinct ways to face the “trilemma” of job growth, income inequality, and fiscal restraint: Nordic countries achieve high labor market participation through high social investment; Anglo‐Saxon countries attain the same objective through minimal public intervention; while Continental European countries experience fiscal pressures because their social protection schemes are not promoting participation to the same extent.     

Age Estimation in Living Adults using 3D Volume Rendered CT Images of the Sternal Plastron and Lower Chest

Age estimation is commonly of interest in a judicial context. In adults, it is less documented than in children. The aim of this study was to evaluate age estimation in adults using CT images of the sternal plastron with volume rendering technique (VRT). The evaluation criteria are derived from known methods used for age estimation and are applicable in living or dead subjects. The VRT images of 456 patients were analyzed. Two radiologists performed age estimation independently from an anterior view of the plastron. Interobserver agreement and correlation coefficients between each reader's classification and real age were calculated. The interobserver agreement was 0.86, and the correlation coefficients between readers classifications and real age classes were 0.60 and 0.65. Spearman correlation coefficients were, respectively, 0.89, 0.67, and 0.71. Analysis of the plastron using VRT allows age estimation in vivo quickly and with results similar than methods such as Iscan, Suchey–Brooks, and radiographs used to estimate the age of death.