Disappearance of ethyl glucuronide during heavy putrefaction

Adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) is involved in systemic reactions to stress. The aim of the present study was a comprehensive analysis of serum and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) levels of ACTH, and the pituitary immunohistochemistry with special regard to fatal hypothermia in routine forensic autopsy cases (n=162: 5-97 years of age; 114 males and 48 females; 4 h to 3 days postmortem, median, 19.2 h). The ACTH concentrations were independent of the postmortem time, gender, or age of the subjects. The serum ACTH level was similar to the clinical reference value for sharp instrument injury, fire fatality, and hypothermia, but was lower in other groups including hyperthermia, in particular for asphyxia and poisoning. The CSF level was usually much higher than the serum level, but was significantly lower for hypothermia and hyperthermia than in other groups (p<0.01). The rate of ACTH-immunopositivity in the anterior pituitary was low in cases of fatal hypothermia and hyperthermia, while it was high in cases of blunt injury, fire fatality, and acute ischemic heart disease. These observations showed that ACTH levels in the serum and CSF depended on the cause of death. The serum level was maintained despite a low CSF level and pituitary immunopositivity for fatal hypothermia, while the serum and CSF levels as well as pituitary immunopositivity were decreased for hyperthermia.     

MARRIAGE,IN‐LAWS,AND CRIME: THE CASE OF DELINQUENT BROTHERS‐IN‐LAW*

With marriage comes in‐laws, and if the in‐laws include delinquent males, their delinquency could affect the prosocial effects of the given marriage. In this article, I focus on the effect of having a convicted brother‐in‐law as a general indicator of this broader phenomenon of family‐formation processes impairing the positive impact of marriage on crime desistance. I use registry data on all men from birth cohorts 1965–1975 in Denmark (N = 69,066) to show that when a man marries, his new family ties to delinquent brother(s)‐in‐law do indeed hinder his criminal desistance. The results that take into account the characteristics of husbands, wives, their shared family‐formation process, and the criminality of male family members suggest that 1) family dynamics tend to keep criminality within family networks and 2) influences from one's broader social network through marriage are important for the protective effects of marriage. Analyses of previous conviction, co‐offending between a man and his brother‐in‐law, as well as analyses of in‐laws who reside in close proximity confirm the two mentioned main findings. In all, the findings reported in this article add to our understanding of the processes by which families are tied, and how these family‐formation processes influence men's behavior.     

Climate politics in hard times: How local economic shocks influence MPs attention to climate change

Most countries struggle to implement CO₂ reducing policies. Implementation is politically difficult since it typically forces politicians to trade-off different concerns. The literature on how parties and members of parliament (MPs) handle these trade-offs is sparse. We use structural topic models to study how MPs in an oil dependent environment responded to a shock in the oil price that created spatially concentrated costs of climate policies. We leverage the rapid oil price drop between parliamentary sessions and MPs’ constituency adherence in a difference-in-differences framework to identify if MPs respond differently to variation in the salience of trade-offs. We find that MPs facing high political costs of climate policies tried to avoid environmental topics, while less affected MPs talked more about investments in green energy when the oil price declined. Our results suggest that the oil price bust created a ‘window of opportunity’ for advocates of the ‘ green shift’.     

Campaigning on behalf of the party? Party constraints on candidate campaign personalisation

This article analyses what makes political candidates run a party‐focused or personalised election campaign. Prior work shows that candidates face incentives from voters and the media to personalise their campaign rhetoric and promises at the expense of party policy. This has raised concerns about the capacity of parties to govern effectively and voters’ ability to hold individual politicians accountable. This article builds on the literature on party organisation and considers the possible constraints candidates face from their party in personalising their election campaigns. Specifically, it is argued that party control over the candidate nomination process and campaign financing constrains most political candidates in following electoral incentives for campaign personalisation. Using candidate survey data from the 2009 EP election campaign in 27 countries, the article shows how candidates from parties in which party officials exerted greater control over the nomination process and campaign finances were less likely to engage in personalised campaigning at the expense of the party programme. The findings imply that most parties, as central gatekeepers and resource suppliers, hold important control mechanisms for countering the electoral pressure for personalisation and advance our understanding of the incentives and constraints candidates face when communicating with voters. The article discusses how recent democratic reforms, paradoxically, might induce candidate personalisation with potential negative democratic consequences.     

When and why does education matter? Motivation and resource effects in political efficacy

Education increases political engagement because it bolsters motivations and cognition on the one hand, and relative resources on the other. However, personality traits have recently been found to partially confound the education effect. Focusing on internal and external political efficacy allows us to disentangle the different effects of education. It is argued in this article (a) that personal dispositions confound the cognitive and motivational effect of education, which is the predominant effect of education on internal efficacy, but not resource effects which are important for external but not internal efficacy; and (b) that resource effects are context‐dependent whereas cognitive and motivational effects are not. Accordingly, the article shows that the competitive context in which individuals find themselves conditions the effect of education on external, but not on internal, efficacy.     

‘There is no racism here’: public discourses on racism,immigrants and integration in Denmark

ABSTRACT

Jensen, Weibel and Vitus's article critically discusses contemporary Danish policies aimed at the elimination of ethnoracial discrimination, drawing on policy analyses and qualitative interviews with local and national authorities in Denmark. It illustrates how questions of discrimination and racism are marginalized and de-legitimized within the dominant integration discourse, resulting in the marginalization of anti-racism in policymaking. The side-stepping of racism is being naturalized in public policies through strategies of denial and by addressing discrimination as a product of ignorance and individual prejudice rather than as embedded in social structures. The authors examine how immigration, integration and (anti-)racism as concepts and phenomena are understood and addressed in Danish public policies and discourses. Despite denials of racism in Denmark, Jensen, Weibel and Vitus show that, based on re-definitions of identities and relations, it continues to exist and is evident in public debates and policies on immigration and integration.     

REVENUE SCARCITY AND GOVERNMENT OUTSOURCING: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM NORWEGIAN LOCAL GOVERNMENTS

It is often said that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. In this article, we assess whether this also applies to the design of public authorities' service provision. In particular, we evaluate whether revenue scarcity – as an indicator of fiscal stress – induces government outsourcing. In contrast to previous studies, we exploit arguably exogenous variation in local government revenue across time and space to derive stronger inferences on the role of revenue scarcity for outsourcing. Using data from Norwegian local governments covering the period 1995–2012, our main results indicate that a decrease in local government revenues is linked to more outsourcing of both infrastructure and support services.     

Succession,power-sharing and the development of representative institutions in medieval Europe

Historians have documented that in medieval Europe, bargaining over the loyalty of lay magnates and high clergy was most intense during successions and that this often forced monarchs to give political concessions. We argue that matters related to succession predict short-term power-sharing concessions by rulers but that – because they do not permanently alter the balance of power between ruler and elite – they only trigger lasting changes of political institutions if these changes are in the mutual interest of the ruler and the elite groups. It follows that successions are unlikely to have long-term effects on representative institutions but that they may consolidate the rules regulating succession (the succession order). Using the natural deaths of monarchs as an instrument for successions, we confirm these claims with a new dataset that includes fine-grained data on succession and parliament-like assemblies in 16 European polities between 1000 and 1600. These findings shed new light on the development of representative institutions in medieval Europe, on the changes in succession orders that brought about clear rules about primogeniture and on the political leeway of legislatures in authoritarian regimes more generally.     

Democracy and the demand for government redistribution: A survey analysis

This article uses survey data to study the impact of democracy on the demand by poor citizens for government redistribution. Taking the well‐known Meltzer‐Richard theory as the point of departure, three arguments are presented as to why such a demand should be stronger in democracies than in autocracies: in democracies low‐income groups are: (1) exposed to elections that can make a policy difference: (2) better informed about the income distribution; and (3) better equipped to process such information. The argument receives empirical support in a Bayesian multilevel analysis which combines 188 World Values Surveys with cross‐sectional and longitudinal macro data from 80 countries.