Presidents,Parties, and Prime Ministers: How the Separation of Powers Affects Party Organization and Behavior

This article investigates the consequences of fast-track legislation in the European Union. Previous research has explained why fast-track legislation occurs and evaluated its democratic repercussions. This study focuses on the European Parliament (EP)’s intra-organisational response. It first describes how the early adoption of EU legislation has informalised legislative decision-making, transformed inter-organisational relations, and induced power shifts. It then discusses the political response, showing that actors seek to redress power shifts, that reform attempts centre on the control of negotiation authority and information flows, and that reform is highly contested. The research suggests that the chance of successful redress is low in Parliament as a decentralised organisation unless two conditions are met: (i) the extent of fast-track legislation reaches a critical level, and (ii) the organisation goes through a period of wider reform; the former increases the visibility of disempowerment and reputational loss, the latter allows package deals and/or the strategic use of norms. Based on qualitative document analysis and semi-structured elite interviews an analysis is made of how Parliament’s rules of co-legislation have been contested, negotiated and reformed from the formal introduction of fast-track legislation in 1999 to the adoption of the Code of Conduct for Negotiating in the Context of Codecision Procedures in 2009. The analysis also shows that Parliament may have a price to pay for its successful fight for empowerment, namely a challenge to its institutional legitimacy and discontent of its of rank-and-file members. More generally, understanding the conditions for intra-organisational reform can inform the study of other democratic bodies which undergo a similar restriction and seclusion of de facto decision-making.     

The Relationship between Maternal Overprotection,Adolescent Internalizing and Externalizing Problems,and Psychological Need Frustration: A Multi-Informant Study Using Response Surface Analysis

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Parents and adolescents may hold discrepant views about parents’ behaviors, which may be related to adolescent maladjustment. The goal of the present...     

The Heteronyms of European Law

Book reviewed in this essay:
Phelan, D. Rossa, Revolt or Revolution: The Constitutional Boundaries of the European Community     

Arte Blanco con Motivos Negros: Fernando Ortiz's Concept of Cuban National Culture and Identity

The purpose of this article is to analyze Fernando Ortiz's treatment of the poetic production of the 1920s and 30s movement of Afrocubanismo . The first section explains his belief in a process which would culminate with the consolidation of a mulatto Cuban national identity. It is argued that Ortiz conceived of this process as one which would eliminate what he assumed were pure African forms, which he viewed as primitive and inferior. The second section explores how these notions affected his evaluations of the poetry of the movement. The third section compares Ortiz's methodology in determining identities to what is known in anthropology as an etic perspective. It is argued that Ortiz ascribes mulatto identities to cultural forms without considering the perspectives of their practitioners. The article reaches three main conclusions regarding Ortiz's treatment of afrocubanista poetry. Firstly, that he used it as the confirmation of a process of formation of a mulatto Cuban national identity. Secondly, that he viewed it as a genre which could stylize and make acceptable inferior African cultural forms. Thirdly, that he used it as an instrument through which to dilute conflictive black or African identities.     

Variability of the Entire Mitochondrial DNA Control Region in a Human Isolate from the Pas Valley (Northern Spain)

Abstract: In this study, we analyzed the entire mtDNA control region in 61 unrelated individuals from the Pas Valley (Cantabria), a human isolate from northern Spain, to evaluate the suitability of this analysis to increase the power of discrimination of this locus for forensic purposes in human isolates. Low values obtained for the diversity parameters confirmed the relative isolation of this human group. The main findings of this study indicated that even the analysis of the entire mtDNA control region may have important limitations for use in forensic casework when dealing with human isolates: none of the 44 individuals who exhibited identical HVI‐HVII haplotypes could be further differentiated by analysis of segment HVIII. Nevertheless, analysis of the entire mtDNA control region proved to be useful to determine the ancestry of the samples examined, by contributing to the confirmation, and, on occasion, even to the refinement of the haplogroup assignment.