Food Intake and the Role of Food Self-Provisioning

This article investigates the role of food self-provisioning for the intake of nutrients of households in Mongolia. We analyse nutritional outcomes within and across urban wage employees, rural households with small herds, and pastoralists with large herds. Food self-provisioning significantly affects dietary quality and quantity. Farming food crops improves the nutrient intake. In contrast, animal husbandry increases the intake of calories and nutrients from animal sources, while it decreases the intake of carbohydrates and nutrients from vegetal sources. This finding suggests household-specific market failures due to remoteness exist. Last, exposure to a weather shock does not affect households’ calorie intake.     

Empirical Modeling of Policy Diffusion in Federal States: The Dyadic Approach

Policy diffusion is a common phenomenon in federal states: indeed, one of the normative justifications of decentralized policy making is that it permits the development and spread of best practices. Following Berry and Berry (1990), event‐history analysis has been the method of choice for the quantitative investigation of policy diffusion, but Volden (2006) has recently introduced a dyadic variant of this method in which units of analysis are not states but, instead, pairs of states. This article discusses the dyadic approach with a particular focus on the diffusion of policies in Switzerland. The goal is not to introduce a new method, but rather to provide a practical overview for researchers interested in using it. The article shows how the method has migrated from the international relations literature to the policy‐diffusion literature, describes the typical structure of a dyadic dataset in a diffusion context, and discusses several modeling issues. The usefulness of the dyadic approach is illustrated empirically with the example of health‐insurance subsidy policies in Swiss cantons.     

What determines UN approval of greenhouse gas emission reduction projects in developing countries?

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), established by the Kyoto protocol, can generate substantial rents for project participants via the sale of Certified Emission Reductions. For this reason, supposedly technical decisions about the approval of CDM methodologies and about the registration of projects may be driven by benefits to specific countries or interest groups. Our econometric analysis of data for about 250 methodologies and about 1000 projects discussed by the CDM Executive Board (EB) so far, suggests that indeed, along with formal quality criteria, political-economic variables determine the final EB decision.     

Vom ungeliebten Störenfried zum akzeptierten Paradigma? Zum Stand der (Neuen) Politischen Ökonomie in Deutschland

This contribution presents the German state of the art of economic approaches to politics. First, the basic model, the research areas, and the analytical tools used by these approaches are briefly introduced. Second, for each sub-field of political science, the German contribution is presented in relation to the international state of the art. While German scholars hesitated to engage in public choice and positive political theory in the beginning, we nowadays find many contributions from this perspective in the fields of electoral studies, the European Union, and veto player analysis.     

The Individual-Level Determinants of Exiting German Parties

With respect to explaining declining party membership, the question who leaves political parties and why has so far been neglected. This article aims to fill this gap by applying Hirschman’s theory of “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty” to both current and former party members, and at combining it with the resource model of political participation. We find that neither individual resources nor reasons for discontent are sufficient to explain the different reactions to discontent, but that the exit-voice-loyalty model has a certain explanatory power.     

United Nations Peacekeeping Decisions: Three Hierarchies,Upward Mobility and Institutionalised Inequality among Member States

ABSTRACT

This article explores the multiple and evolving hierarchies shaping UN decisions on peacekeeping operations. Three hierarchies—based on Security Council membership, financial assessments, and troop contributions—currently distribute influence over these decisions among UN member states. These hierarchies differ in their relationship to global stratification patterns, and in the states they empower. Their gradual “layering” has thus expanded the potential for upward mobility within the UN: states unable to increase their influence in one hierarchy can seek empowerment in another. Yet the UN peacekeeping case also highlights the limitations of hierarchy layering as an equalising mechanism in international organisations. New hierarchies supplement rather than replace older ones, and the degree to which they challenge existing rankings varies. Moreover, each new hierarchy inherently highlights, and creates institutional consequences for, a particular type of inequality among states. Consequently, hierarchy layering is best understood as recalibrating rather than eliminating institutionalised inequality in international organisations.     

Inhalant deaths in South Australia: a 20-year retrospective autopsy study

A 20-year retrospective study of inhalant deaths in South Australia, autopsied at Forensic Science SA, was undertaken from January 1983 to December 2002. Thirty-nine cases were identified from an autopsy pool of 18,880 cases, with a male to female ratio of 12:1. Sixty-four percent of the victims (N = 25) died during voluntary inhalation of volatile substances and 28% (N = 11) committed suicide utilizing a volatile substance or gas. The remaining 3 cases involved a workplace accident (N = 1) and 2 cases of autoerotic death where inhalants were being used to augment solitary sexual activity. The mean age of the 28 victims of accidental inhalant death of 21 years (range, 13-45 years) was considerably less than that of the 11 suicide victims of 31.5 years (range, 17-48 years). No homicides were found. Approximately one quarter of the victims were Aboriginal (N = 11), 10 of whom had died as a result of gasoline inhalation ("petrol sniffing"). Other common substances of abuse were aliphatic hydrocarbons such as butane. The study has shown that those most at risk for accidental or suicidal inhalant deaths were young males, with 92% of victims overall being male, and with 77% of victims being under 31 years of age. Gasoline inhalation remains a significant problem in Aboriginal communities in South Australia.