Fertile soil: explaining variation in the success of Green parties

Comparative political science has largely ignored the marked cross-national variation in Green party electoral performance. This article uses a unique aggregate dataset of 347 parliamentary elections from 32 countries over the course of 45 years to test competing theories about the causes of Green party success. The findings show that voter demand, institutions and mainstream party strategy all affect the Green vote. Green parties do well in societies with post-materialist conflicts caused by high levels of wealth or the presence of a tangible environmental dispute. The article also shows that regional decentralisation helps Green parties, but electoral systems have little effect on their vote share. Most importantly, it demonstrates that the impact of mainstream party strategy on Green electoral strength is dependent on the age of the Green party. While mainstream parties can undermine young Green parties by adopting the environmental issue, this effect is reversed once the Greens have survived a number of elections. Thus ‘accommodative’ mainstream party strategies eventually boost the Green vote by increasing the salience of the key Green issue.     

Love Thy Neighbour: A Social Capital Approach to Local Government Partnerships

While controversy surrounds compulsory consolidation as a means of improving the operational efficiency of local government, the literature suggests that gains can accrue to groups of local councils which form voluntary alliances as platforms for shared service delivery. However, real‐world experience has demonstrated that voluntary alliances in local government are difficult to establish and do not always endure in the longer term. After reviewing the limited extant scholarly literature on shared services and local council voluntary alliances, as well as applications of the social capital approach to inter‐organisational endeavour, such as the Weber and Weber (2010) venture capital model, this article argues that the social capital approach can offer insights into local council cooperative alliance and shared service models.     

Vitamin C: ascerbic ethical discussions

The issue of a patient's rights to demand treatment has recently been raised by a dramatic case in which a patient made a remarkable recovery following the use of an unconventional treatment that the hospital staff initially refused to administer. The normal position in such cases is that the relatives can take part in a clinical decision but the medical staff are bound to make it according to a clinical assessment of the best interests of the patient. That assessment is only required to take into account what would be regarded as acceptable regimens of treatment for the patient's condition. There is no ethical or legal basis for the patient's relatives being able to demand any treatment that the clinical team do not consider indicated nor to demand a highly unconventional treatment The case therefore poses a problem. When should we allow ourselves to be persuaded to step outside the bounds of accepted medical practice at the urging of relatives or patients? There are plausible arguments that a demonstration of efficacy in a particular patient or some reputable evidence of probability of efficacy would both be good enough grounds. In addition, one could argue that where the patient's predicted clinical course is terminal, then desperate measures of unproven efficacy can be tried in that the balance of harm and benefit cannot be further worsened. The implication of the actual events in the case in question is that a certain humility in the light of the incompleteness of medical knowledge is always appropriate and an objective weighing of the facts of the case, free from prejudicial theoretical commitments, is needed in the face of medical uncertainty.     

Fifty Years After the 1967 Crime Commission Report

In the 50 years since the U.S. President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice under President Johnson issued its report, feminist activism and both feminist and mainstream research have resulted in defining domestic violence (DV) as a social problem. This awareness of the seriousness and expansiveness of DV has spurred the development of unprecedented programs and policies. Although DV policing changes have been significant, so too have been the development of and changes in safehouses, no‐drop court policies, domestic violence courts, community‐coordinated responses, and batterer intervention programs. In this article, we review the nonpolice responses to DV cases and outcomes and provide recommendations. First, research and policies need to more regularly be aimed at addressing victims’ safety and their diverse needs and experiences. Second, assessments should include addressing the processing of these cases through the impact of responses by individual community and criminal legal system actors (e.g., victim advocates, police, prosecutors, and judges) to victims and offenders.     

Differences between multisite postmortem ethanol concentrations as related to agonal events

In a study of postmortem ethanol concentrations, blood was withdrawn from the right atrium, ascending aorta, and inferior vena cava. These samples, vitreous humor, and gastric fluid were analyzed in 307 autopsies, where a minimum blood ethanol concentration of 0.05% weight/volume (w/v) was present. Premortem, agonal, and postmortem events were reviewed in an attempt to account for differences in blood ethanol concentrations between sites. The agonal aspiration of vomitus having at least 0.80% w/v ethanol appears to be associated with an increase in aortic ethanol concentrations. We conclude that valid interpretation of postmortem ethanol concentrations must take into consideration the possible entry of ethanol into the pulmonary venous circulation via the respiratory system.     

Optimum methamphetamine profiling with sample preparation by solid-phase microextraction

Solid-phase microextraction (SPME) is a relatively new technique in which a small, polymer-coated fiber is employed to extract volatile and semivolatile organic compounds from the sealed headspace above a questioned sample. SPME, coupled with gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS), was used to characterize impurities in illicit methamphetamine samples. Trace impurities present in a specimen were tentatively identified using mass-spectral databases and included 1,2-dimethyl-3-phenyl-aziridine (indicating synthesis via a halogenated ephedrine intermediate), ethyl vanillin (a flavoring compound), and caffeine (a stimulant used as cutting agent). The types and numbers of organic compounds sampled by SPME were compared with those collected by various solvent extraction protocols. In addition to unambiguously confirming the presence of methamphetamine, SPME-GC/MS analyses detected approximately 30 more organic analytes than were found by GC/MS following the ethyl acetate extraction method adopted by the United Nations International Drug Control Programme. SPME-GC/MS is a superior method for generating material "fingerprint" profiles in methamphetamine samples. The detection and characterization of increased points of comparison in drug samples provide more detailed chemical signatures for both intelligence and operational information.     

Reform and remembrance: the place of the private sector in the future of health care policy

Although the nation failed during the past decade to enact large-scale, structural change in government health policy, it has seen health care in the private sector remodeled dramatically during the same period. In this article I argue that a new round of equally significant changes is quite possible, this time at the hands of the national government. More specifically, I argue that for a variety of reasons, both enduring and more recently born, support for the private sector and the market in health care is relatively weak: that given likely trends in costs, demographics, and inequalities, it is likely to get even weaker; and that in the potential coming crisis of the health care system. there will be a real opportunity for seizing the agenda and winning policy battles on the part of would-be reformers pushing large-scale, public sector-oriented changes that go well beyond the recent reform efforts directed at managed care and HMOs.