Women,psychosis and violence

Psychosis confers a disproportionate risk of violence on women compared with men, but such women barely affect national crime statistics anywhere. Much research in the field does not include women at all. In our literature review, we found that information about women, psychosis and violence generally had to be extracted from studies including women but focussing on men; not uncommonly analyses ‘controlled for gender’ rather than treating it as interesting in itself. A tendency for women to be older than men at onset of psychosis may not apply to those who become violent, but women with psychosis do seem to start offending later and desist sooner. Rates of seriously adverse childhood experiences are similar between women and men with psychosis, except for sexual abuse—more frequently reported by the women. Some evidence of special patterns for women in the nature of psychosis and violence relationships requires more exploration, as do treatment questions. With so few women in any one service, multi-centre co-operation in research with them will be essential.     

Quasi-National European Identity and European Democracy

Democracy may well be the primary virtue of political systems. Yet European politics is marked by a democracy deficit that will not disappear spontaneously. While legal and political theory on this issue is dominated by supporters of civic institutionalism and constitutional republicanism, liberal nationalists seem to be split. They justify the civic nationhood of member states, but they shrink away from the idea of a European people. This essay claims that a quasi-national conception of European identity can be conducive to the rise of a democratic political union of Europe. It discusses the mechanisms and rules for Europeanization of the sense of equal dignity and solidarity. This approach to supranational identity is explicitly instrumental and orientated towards the long run. However, the main liberal objections against it can be countered.     

Economic voting in Latin America: A general model

Economics and elections have been much-studied in the highincome democracies of North America and Europe. However, little is known, especially comparatively, about economic voting in low-income democracies, such as those of Latin America. Here we offer the first comparative election study of the economic vote in this region. We apply a series of ever-more demanding statistical tests to an election survey pool of 12 Latin American nations, measured at three time periods (total N > 7000). Unambiguously, the finding is of highly significant, even strong, sociotropic retrospective economic effects on the incumbent vote. In Latin America, as in other democratic nations studied thus far, governments are rewarded or punished, according to the economic performance they command.     

Fostering industry-science cooperation through public funding: differences between universities and public research centres

This paper analyses behavioural additionality of subsidies by regional and EU framework programme public funding granted to business enterprises in terms of the ??instalment?? of research cooperation between industry and science. Acknowledging their specificities in terms of research orientation, research scale, and management of research, the science component is divided in universities and public research centres. Drawing on firm level data provided by the OECD bi-annual business R&D surveys of 2004 and 2006 for Belgium, the main result is that funding by regional governments fosters the instalment of industry-science research cooperation. However, this positive effect is limited to the case of cooperation with public research centres (and not with universities). The prerequisite of commercialisation of research in the case of funding by regional governments could explain this. Public funding provided by the EU framework programme did not exert an impact on the instalment of industry-science cooperation, neither with universities nor with public research centres. This could be due the fact that EU funding is targeted at firms that are already cooperating and does not favour the set-up of new cooperation.