Being small in a big union: punching above their weights? How small states prevailed in the vodka and the pesticides cases

Compared with bigger states, smaller states have fewer votes, less economic power, fewer administrative resources and less staff and experts. This leads to disadvantages in negotiations. Yet smaller states can concentrate their limited resources on issues of great importance and can—under certain conditions—punch above their weight. This is especially effective if small states use their ideational resources in applying different argumentative strategies. Each strategy is only effective under certain scope conditions. The vodka and the pesticides cases illustrate that active small states can punch above their weight if they make arguments that fit the nature of the issue and resonate well with prior beliefs of the addressees of the arguments. A regulatory issue that is technical in nature, such as the pesticides case, requires good scientific arguments. A political issue with prevalent distributive effects, such as the vodka case, calls for normative arguments to persuade neutral actors and the re-framing of the distributional elements into common-good questions to talk actors with opposing preferences into acceptance.     

Nitrous Oxide Determination in Postmortem Biological Samples: A Case of Serial Fatal Poisoning in a Public Hospital*

Abstract: In a public hospital, eight cases of fatal poisoning by nitrous oxide (N₂O) occurred under oxygen administration, due to an erroneous swapping of the lines in the gas system. The aim of the study was to clarify the factors involved in asphyxia by characterizing gases from different lines and measuring N₂O concentrations in postmortem biological samples from bodies exhumed. Analyses carried out on the gas system confirmed the erroneous substitution of O₂ line with N₂O and air line with O₂. Consequently, high N₂O amounts were revealed in several tissues and gaseous biological samples. All specimens were analyzed by headspace gas chromatography technique. A rigorous quantitative analysis was possible only in blood (11.29–2152.04 mg/L) and urine (95.11 mg/L) and in air samples from stomach and trachea (from 5.28 to 83.63 g/m³). This study demonstrates that N₂O can be detected in biological samples even 1 month after death.     

Die Wohnungsmiete nach italienischem Recht

Der vorliegende Beitrag setzt die Reihe "Soziales Mietrecht in Europa" fort; die Beitr?ge werden im Rahmen eines von Prof. Dr. Paul Oberhammer (Zürich) und Univ.-Prof. Dr. Andreas Kletečka (Salzburg) geleiteten und vom Jubil?umsfonds der Oesterreichischen Nationalbank gef?rderten Projekts (Projektnummer 11997) erstellt und sollen rechtsvergleichende Impulse für die ?sterreichische Diskussion bieten.     

Ethnicity as political cleavage: the political agenda of the Polish national minority in Lithuania

This article examines the role of ethnicity in the formation of political cleavage and is based on the analysis of the political agenda of the Polish national minority in Lithuania after the re-establishment of the independent state in 1990. It analyzes the political performance of the Electoral Action of Poles in Lithuania (EAPL), an ethnic-based “niche” political party that tends to keep a monopoly over the representation of interests of the Polish minority in Lithuania and collects a vast majority of the votes of citizens of Polish origin. The article considers how specific in comparison to the titular nation the interests of the Polish national minority are, and how different in comparison to the political agendas of other political parties the political agenda of the EAPL is.     

Tenderness,Tittle-tattle and Truth in Mother–Daughter Letters: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,Mary Wortley Montagu Stuart,Countess of Bute,and Lady Louisa Stuart

The correspondence of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her daughter and granddaughter is one of the most extensive collections of English mother–daughter letters for the period. Through it one can see the nature of their political and social activity and their sense and construction of their own social identities and responsibilities. But what is most distinct about the Montagu–Bute–Stuart sequence is their reflection on what mother–daughter letters meant.     

Sleeping Beauties of Political Science: The Case of AF Bentley

Recognition is what makes science move forward. Yet, late recognition has been an existing phenomenon in the scientific community for centuries. Does this phenomenon of “Sleeping Beauties”, as these works are sometimes called in academic literature, exist in Political Science? The bibliometric analysis we applied showed a positive answer. Our paper is the first case study of “Sleeping Beauty” that is not an article but a book. The book by A. F. Bentley, The Process of Government, serves as an example of “Sleeping Beauty” in the Political Science domain. What put this work to “sleep”? And why, at some point, it has been suddenly “awakened” by a large number of citations? Although it has been discussed previously as a neglected classic, no bibliometric analysis has been applied to examine it and assumptions for its neglect and rediscovery presented by previous authors differ from our bibliometric findings.     

Deregulation despite transitional gains

Acemoglu and Robinson (in The American Economic Review 90(2):126–130, 2000) argue that historically economic rents have been less of a barrier to regulatory reform and innovation than political rents. Contrary to this conclusion, I argue that the important margin of distinction for factors preventing deregulation is not whether rents are economic or political, but rather what alternative profit opportunities are available and how innovation has changed the entrepreneurial opportunity set. Using the example of medieval Cologne, I show that the transitional gains trap framework, as developed by Tullock (in The Bell Journal of Economics 6(2):671–678, 1975), applies in a static environment and can successfully prevent reform over long periods of time, but that neither political nor economic entrepreneurs will ignore an opportunity for increased profitability in the long run. In addition, the organization of the political unit to which the regulation applies can determine the persistence of said regulation.