The liberian civil war: new war/old war?

The Liberian civil war has been portrayed as a primary example of ‘new wars’, drawing attention both to the economic motives and the global character of the conflict. However, to focus excessively on material explanations and greed-inspired motivations of actors may lead to one-sided explanations of conflict. This article suggests that there is little ‘new’ about the Liberian war. Rather, it can best be understood as a violent expression of the tendencies, organisation and attitudes towards identity, society and class that have underpinned Liberia since its formation in the 19th century. The ‘new war’ literature helps us to understand one important dimension of the Liberian conflict. However, too much emphasis on this dimension may also lead scholars and policy-makers to neglect the ideational aspect of conflict. These are of immense importance to a full understanding of civil war and its dynamics.     

Local Elections and Local Government Performance

Over the past couple of decades, the level of turnout in Norwegian local elections has shown a steady d. This decline is paralleled by a greater range of variation in turnout across Norwegian municipalities. Arguing from the perspective of rational utility-maximizing voters, the article examines to what extent such variations in the level of turnout may be accounted for by the policy performance of local authorities – in addition to certain structural features of the municipalities and local communities. Using aggregate data on turnout and measures of policy performance. the analysis testifies to the suggestion that policy exerts an influence in determining the level of turnout, indicating a turn in the direction of more rational voting behaviour as far as local elections arc concerned. It is also evident from the analysis that the appearance of smaller single-issue parties does have a mobilizing effect in local elections while the Downsian suggestion about the effect of party competition on turnout levels is not supported by the mule of the analysis.     

Residential Mobility and Turnout: The Relevance of Social Costs,Timing and Education

Residential mobility has substantial negative effects on voter turnout. However, existing studies have been unable to disentangle whether this is due to social costs, informational costs or convenience costs that are related to re-registration. This article analyzes the relevance of the different costs by studying the effect of moving and reassignment to a new polling station in an automatic registration context and using a register-based panel dataset with validated turnout for 2.1 million citizens. The negative effect of moving on turnout does not differ substantially depending on the distance moved from the old neighborhood and it does not matter if citizens change municipality. Thus, the disruption of social ties is the main explanation for the negative effect of moving on turnout. Furthermore, the timing of residential mobility is important as the effect on turnout declines quickly after settling down. This illustrates that large events in citizens’ everyday life close to Election Day can distract them from going to the polling station. Finally, residential mobility mostly affects the turnout of less educated citizens. Consequentially, residential mobility increases inequalities in voter participation, which can be viewed as a democratic problem.     

Committee Assignment Politics in the Danish Folketing

Committees are the backbone of nearly every modern legislature. Yet there is relatively little knowledge about how committee assignment politics occur in the multiparty parliaments with minority coalition governments that so often are the case in many European countries. Is there a pattern to which MPs are assigned to which committees? In this article the Danish case is used to address this question. A dataset of all committee assignments in the Danish Folketing from the period 1994–2007 has been collected; added to this are data on each MP. The data are analysed using a quantitative approach, and drawing on the literature on committee assignments in the United States Congress and the European Parliament, complementing the vast qualitative studies, and updating the few quantitative studies, of the Danish parliamentary committees. The results show that which variables have an influence on committee assignments varies across parties and that no uniform pattern is found.     

Automated extraction of DNA from reference samples from various types of biological materials on the Qiagen BioRobot EZ1 Workstation

We have validated and implemented a protocol for DNA extraction from various types of biological materials using a Qiagen BioRobot EZ1 Workstation. The sample materials included whole blood, blood from deceased, buccal cells on Omni swabs and FTA Cards, blood on FTA Cards and cotton swabs, and muscle biopsies. The DNA extraction was validated according to EN/ISO 17025 for the STR kits AmpF?STR^® Identifiler^® and AmpF?STR^® Yfiler^® (Applied Biosystems). Of 298 samples extracted, 11 (4%) did not yield acceptable results. In conclusion, we have demonstrated that extraction of DNA from various types of biological material can be performed quickly and without the use of hazardous chemicals, and that the DNA may be successfully STR typed according to the requirements of forensic genetic investigations accredited according to EN/ISO 17025.     

Misleading congress about drug development: Reply

The review essay by Donald Light about a Congressional Budget Office report on pharmaceutical research and development (R&D) (Light 2007) contains factual errors, leaves the reader uninformed about rebuttal responses to criticisms made in the review about studies of R&D costs, and draws erroneous conclusions about the nature of industry economics.     

It’s a Group Thing: How Voters go to the Polls Together

Political Behavior - Across European Parliament, local and general elections in Denmark between half and three quarters of voters in households with multiple voters cast their vote within a minute...     

Encouraging Political Voices of Underrepresented Citizens through Coproduction: Evidence from a Randomized Field Trial

Not all citizens’ voices are heard with equal strength in the political chorus. Based on studies of policy feedback, we suggest that engaging underrepresented citizens in the production of public services (i.e., making them “coproducers”) increases their political voice. We use a field experiment to test the effect of involving ethnic minorities in the education of their children on their propensity to directly voice their preferences with the education policy through government citizen surveys and their tendency to vote in elections. Among these normally underrepresented citizens, coproduction increased their propensity to voice their preferences to politicians through citizen surveys but not their tendency to vote. The effect on voicing in government citizen surveys tends to be larger among nonvoters. The results indicate how policies involving underrepresented citizens can raise the voices of people who would not otherwise be heard.     

Moving the campaign from the front door to the front pocket: field experimental evidence on the effect of phrasing and timing of text messages on voter turnout

Despite the widespread scholarly attention given to get-out-the-vote tactics the recent one and a half decade, few have studied the effect of short text messages (SMS) on voter turnout, and no previous such study has been conducted outside the US. We analyze four SMS experiments with more than 300,000 voters conducted in relation to two elections in Denmark and find intention-to-treat (ITT) effects between 0.33 and 1.82 percentage points with a pooled effect of 0.74 percentage points. Furthermore, we vary the timing and the content of the messages to test existing theories of text messages as mobilization tools. In one experiment, we find messages delivered before Election Day to have a higher effect than those delivered on Election Day, while we find no additional effect of delivering multiple messages. We also vary message content and in general find no significant differences from sending different messages.