Enzyme activity of PGM1 in erythrocytes

The enzyme activity of phosphoglucomutase (PGM) has been investigated in red cell haemolysates from 142 individuals and compared to the sub-type as determined by isoelectric focusing. The 10 phenotypes showed significant differences in PGM-activity which indicates that there is a correlation between the level of activity and the isolelectric point of homozygotes. No indication of silent alleles or alleles with reduced activity was found in this collective.     

Error minimization and deterrence in agency control

In the presented oversight model, in which a regulatory agency may collude with regulatees, a watchdog organization may scrutinize the agency’s decision-making and find evidence speaking for collusive behavior. Found evidence is of a specific, stochastic quality. Courts will overturn the administrative decision when the evidence presented in court exceeds a minimum quality standard set by the political principal. Lowering the quality standard increases the odds of finding evidence of sufficient quality and, hence, leads to increasing collusion deterrence and to a lower probability of acquitting collusive administrators (type I error), but also to a higher probability of convicting an innocent administrator (type II error). It is shown that, when welfare-maximization gives rise to an interior solution, the welfare-maximizing standard of evidence is lower than the one that merely minimizes the costs of legal errors without taking deterrence costs into account, but will imply incomplete deterrence. However, conditions can and will be identified under which both error cost minimization and complete deterrence coincide with welfare-maximization.     

Bremse oder Gaspedal? Eine empirische Untersuchung zur Wirkung der direkten Demokratie auf den Steuerstaat

This article analyzes the relationship between the different forms of direct democratic participation and the size of the tax state in the Swiss cantons for the period from 1983 to 2000. The analysis distinguishes between the different effects of the financial referendum and the initiative. Theoretical arguments suppose that the financial referendum curb the tax state, whereas the initiative is expected to contribute to its growth. Pooled time series analyses show that legal conditions of direct democratic participation in general and especially the legislation on financial referenda are much more important than the frequency of plebiscites for the explanation of the different sizes of the tax states in the cantons. As an additional result of the analyses, the impact of direct democracy on the tax state turns out to be much larger in the 1990s compared to the decade before.     

The growth of policies,rules, and regulations: A review of the literature and research agenda

This article reviews the vibrant literature on policy growth in political science and adjacent disciplines, thus offering a conceptual framework for situating past and future research efforts and facilitating the engagement between them. The first part presents important concepts that capture policy growth or aspects of it (rule growth, policy layering, policy mixes, policy accumulation, policyscapes, the policy state) and dominant measurement approaches. The second part provides an overview of the main drivers of policy growth in advanced democracies, discussing the role of societal demands, political competition, institutional fragmentation, and bureaucratic processes. The third part outlines the multi-faceted and far-reaching consequences of policy growth for policy, politics, and the polity. While policy growth is often portrayed as the price to pay for upholding the democratic capitalist order in constantly modernizing and diversifying societies, the existing research also points to the negative consequences emanating from increased state activity. Policy growth not only threatens to overburden bureaucracies and thereby undermine policy effectiveness; it may also transform the institutional structure of the democratic state and make its politics more complicated and conflictual.     

The Virtuous,the Critical and the Trustworthy: Citizen Ideals and Forms of Democratic Participation

A vibrant democratic society requires continuous innovation to actualize and encourage democratic ideals through participation, but no universal answers exist as to which kinds of participation are best suited to achieve this. This article demonstrates that different types of participation correlate with different citizen ideals, implying that the remedies to democratic deficits depend on which ideals need to be strengthened. Citizen survey data is used to examine the relationships between two types of citizen participation – in voluntary associations and workplaces – and three empirical citizen ideals: the virtuous citizen, the critical citizen and the trustworthy citizen. The results suggest that voluntary associations make space for all three ideals, while workplace participation tends to be characterized specifically by the critical citizen's ideal of reason‐giving and critical reflection. The article ends by discussing the implications of these results: new democratic designs should be more effective if tailored to address context‐dependent weaknesses in democratic practices.     

New politics: Just post‐materialist? The case of the Austrian and Swiss Greens

While Inglehart's post‐material model figures very prominently in the literature on new politics, the limits of its relevance have seldom been critically assessed. This article uses various inconsistencies between his model and the socio‐economic features of the Austrian and Swiss Greens to point to some of its theoretical shortcomings. Because of its psychological assumptions, the model neglects various cultural and historical structures which are essential for any full and consistent explanation of new politics in Austria and Switzerland.     

Money, Time, and Political Knowledge: Distinguishing Quick Recall and Political Learning Skills

Surveys provide widely cited measures of political knowledge. Do seemingly arbitrary features of survey interviews affect their validity? Our answer comes from experiments embedded in a representative survey of over 1200 Americans. A control group was asked political knowledge questions in a typical survey context. Treatment groups received the questions in altered contexts. One group received a monetary incentive for answering the questions correctly. Another was given extra time. The treatments increase the number of correct answers by 11–24%. Our findings imply that conventional knowledge measures confound respondents' recall of political facts with variation in their motivation to exert effort during survey interviews. Our work also suggests that existing measures fail to capture relevant political search skills and, hence, provide unreliable assessments of what many citizens know when they make political decisions. As a result, existing knowledge measures likely underestimate people's capacities for informed decision making.     

The political economy of ‘flex trees’: a preliminary analysis

With the rise of ‘bioeconomy’, trees are receiving increasing attention. This contribution conducts a preliminary analysis of the trajectories and the main drivers of change in the rise of new, flexible and multiple uses of trees. It assesses the political dimensions involved in this transformation, which is simultaneously ongoing, anticipated and imagined. Notes are offered on the issues to be considered when the flex-crop framework is operationalized to include the study of trees, and additional conceptualizations that help in analyzing the political economy of tree uses are provided. Areas needing further empirical study are identified and a preliminary research agenda is suggested. The flexible and multiple use of trees and tree-derived commodities is having a large impact on power relations in the global political economy of forestry and the forest industry, the asymmetry of which is based on who is best able to flex or de-multiply, thereby controlling commodity webs and processing technology. It is argued that while flexing seems to increase diversity, in practice it typically increases this only for the processing industry; the converse occurs in terms of the unification of the productive base into monocultures. However, these two processes go hand in hand, and illustrate how flexing is a deeply capitalist process.     

Effects of Insurance on Child Labour: Ex-Ante and Ex-Post Behavioural Changes

In this paper we analyse possible effects of insurance on child labour. First, we develop a theoretical model that separates effects of insurance with and without a shock taking place. We then empirically test the hypotheses derived from the model by analysing the extension of a health insurance product in urban Hyderabad in Pakistan. Consistent with the theoretical model we develop in this paper, the reduction in child labour caused by the extension is largely due to an ex-ante feeling of protection as opposed to an ex-post shock-mitigation effect.