"Life expectancy" of "ecstasy" tablets in Israel in the years 2001-2003

3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) tablets known as "ecstasy" became a very popular drug amongst Israeli youth in the last decade. The ecstasy tablets have a simple design impressed on them (logos) making it relatively easy to distinguish between various logos. The life expectancy of ecstasy tablet logos, defined as the period between the first seizure by the police of a certain logo until the last seizure of the same logo, was monitored during the years 2001-2003. During this time interval, 58 different tablet logos were seized. A total of 26 logos, defined as common logos with at least 10 independent seizures, were observed. At any given time interval during this period, 8-10 common logos were found with an average life expectancy of approximately 9 months. Five of the observed 26 common logos were defined as the most common logos that appeared in at least 200 independent seizures each. Plots of the number of seizures and number of tablets seized as a function of time are presented and discussed as well as explanations for the high turnover rate of any given logo.     

预算监督体系完善对策研究

预算监督是现代公共财政的重要组成部分,是遏制腐败、增强政府财政透明度的制度条件。目前,我国预算监督体系还存在着不完善的地方,为此,必须以提高人大及其常委会的监督能力和增强审计监督的独立性为要点,构建起立法机关、审计机关和社会力量三重监督相互配合与补充的监督体系。     

Ballots,Bargains, and Bombs: Terrorist Targeting of Spoiler Opportunities

Benjamin Netanyahu's come-from-behind victory over Shimon Peres in the Israeli national elections of May 1996, following an apparent intensification of Palestinian terrorism over the course of that spring, reminded observers of the political ramifications of terrorism. Since May 1996 was also the month in which Israel reentered Final Status negotiations with a Palestinian delegation in Taba, Egypt, the timing of this surge in violence encourages us to ask if terrorists regularly conceive of elections and rounds of negotiations as “spoiler opportunities,” or opportune times to undermine peaceful political processes. We address this question in the context of Israel's long‐running experience with elections, negotiations, and terrorism. We hypothesize that attacks resulting in fatalities are likely to increase in periods immediately surrounding Israeli general elections and key rounds of negotiations affecting the fate of the Palestinian population. Negative binomial event count analyses of the period 1970–2007 suggest that violent opponents indeed viewed the periods preceding negotiations and the ends of electoral cycles as “spoiler opportunities.”     

Democracy Promotion versus Engagement with Iran

US President Barack Obama has tried two very distinct policy options in dealing with Iran. The engagement policy was designed to make a break with the past experience and re-start US-Iran relations on a positive footing. This approach was consistent with the advice offered to the new administration by Iran analysts and leaders of non-governmental organisations. The implication of the engagement policy, however, was sidelining the US commitment to democracy and human rights in Iran. This policy could offer little to the budding reform movement in 2009. The alternative policy of containment was not beneficial to the reform movement either. The policy shift at the end of 2009 was a response to Iran's failure to comply with the requirements of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The containment policy, manifested in the fourth round of UN-imposed sanctions on Iran, has led to a further entrenching of the hard-liners in the regime and intolerance of internal dissent.     

Nothing personal: explaining the rise and decline of political machines in Ukraine

This article is the first to explore and compare the dynamics of party-building between the three main political forces that competed for power during the last decade in Ukraine – Viktor Yushchenko's Nasha Ukrayina (Our Ukraine), Yulia Tymoshenko's Batkivshchyna (Fatherland), and Viktor Yanukovych's Partiya Rehioniv (Party of Regions). We show that their political trajectories can be explained by differences in their organizational structure and distribution of resources within the party's leadership. When a party depends on resources linked primarily to one individual, it will develop a personalized decision-making structure advantaging its leader, and the party's fortunes will be tied to the popularity (or lack of same) of the leader. By contrast, when a party relies equally on resources from several groups, a more consociational style of decision-making is likely to emerge. Using Ukraine as a case study, the article shows that personality-led parties will be more vulnerable to defections and less capable of absorbing potential competitors. On the other hand, coalition-led parties are better capable of surviving defeats, maintaining internal cohesion, and merging with like-minded parties.     

Effects of collaborative recall: Denying true information is as powerful as suggesting misinformation

We tested whether someone's ability to tell a good story, in terms of the Reality Monitoring (RM) tool, affects the way s/he judges the stories told by others. Forty participants (undergraduate students) wrote down two statements – one about activities they did 30 minutes ago, and the other about a past event. Subsequently, they rated the quality of a target statement written by someone else. We found that the tendency to provide a not so detailed or a very detailed statement was stable across the two statements the participants wrote. Furthermore, this tendency affected how they judged the target statements: The richer a participant's statements were compared to the target statement, the more critical the participant was in judging the target statement. These findings imply that RM is subject to biases which are related to individual differences. We discuss the implications of these findings for applying the RM lie detection tool in the field.     

Mass Media Paradoxes in the Bulgarian Elections of 2001

ABSTRACT

Electoral year '01 marked another headway of the country along the road of its democratic development.

For the first time after 1989, the parliamentary elections (fifth in a row) were not held before their time, but after a normally completed cycle. The unproductive bipolar model of alternating the main political opponents was broken. A new and unusual player of royal blood emerged, who, without any firm structures, with little funds, and under the conditions of political and media hostility, won firmly the majority vote.

For the first time since the outset of transition, a representative of the Left qualified for the presidential post, which was the most articulate acknowledgement that the Left has changed and the most eloquent criticism of the former bearers of public confidence.

Both parliamentary and presidential elections '01 took part under the conditions of a free media system and after the advent of Internet into political campaigning, information, and analysis. Both campaigns and election returns, however, manifested grave professional problems in the domain of sociology and the media that failed to meet the principal requirement for unbiased information and predictability of developments and results. In this situation, the society manifested considerable civil advancement. The paradox of that electoral year was that both Par-Lilia Raycheva is affiliated with the Faculty of Journalism and Mass Communication, The St. Kliment Ohridsky Sofia University, Bulgaria. Parliament and President were elected contrary to sociological forecasts and attitudes.     

The 2001 British Election Study Internet Poll

ABSTRACT

This paper reports on the findings of the Internet component of the 2001 BES and compares them with those of the other BES pre-election surveys. Part 1 outlines the rationale that underpins the introduction of Internet polling as a supplement to more traditional methods of assessing mass public opinion. Part 2 describes the marginal distributions on the key dependent variable-the projected vote shares of the main political parties-of the three pre-election polls that were conducted using BES questionnaires. Intriguingly, the (unweighted) Internet-based poll provided a better guess of the actual vote shares in the subsequent election than either of the two conventional polls. Part 3 provides a more detailed comparison of the profiles of the face-to-face and Internet-based polls. It shows how the Internet poll, compared with the face-to-face poll, was skewed demographically towards the professional classes and politically towards the Conservative Party. Part 4 explores the extent to which the use of the Internet poll might result in spurious causal inferences being drawn about the sources of voting preferences in the 2001 UK election. A simple, direct-effects causal model is estimated using both the face-to-face probability sample data and the Internet survey data. The results suggest that, although the raw probability and Internet samples differ significantly, the relationships among the key variables do not differ significantly across the two samples. We conclude that Internet polling has an important part to play in gauging and analysing public opinion in future UK elections.