Extension of Voting Rights to Emigrants

Emigrant voting rights can be broadly defined as the right to vote in elections granted to citizens who reside outside their country of citizenship. States offer different ways for emigrants to cast their vote, such as voting via post, in person in diplomatic missions, or upon physical return to the country. That said, research on emigrant enfranchisement has mainly focused on the voting practices that allow citizens to cast their ballot from abroad. Voting from abroad is not a new phenomenon. Several countries had already granted external voting rights by the beginning of the 20th century. However, these countries tended to restrict such voting rights to temporarily absent citizens with specific professions, such as diplomatic staff, soldiers, or seafarers. Only after the 1950s, states began to develop a more inclusive approach toward granting electoral rights to their nonresident citizens. Currently, more than two-thirds of all countries in the world allow voting from abroad. The majority of these countrieshave adopted external voting only during the last thirty years. Since the early/mid-2000s, the issue of external voting has attracted more intense scholarly attention. From a theoretical perspective, external voting rights challenge the traditional link between citizenship and territoriality and raise questions about how the relationship between states and nonresident citizens changes in times of mass migration and globalization. Today, the research on emigrant voting rights is a research field in its own right and informs related lines of scholarly inquiry on sending state policies, the political behavior of mobile citizens, the impact of the extraterritorial vote on domestic politics, and the cross-border outreach of political parties. In this article, the main contributions to the field of emigrant enfranchisement are divided into four main sections based on the chief four waves of research. It begins with the normative debate, followed by studies of why states grant emigrant voting rights. Third, studieson the creation of special emigrant representation systems are presented. Finally, works that move beyond the state as the main unit of analysis are reviewed by unpacking the role political parties play in the enfranchisement process. Overall, studies have drawn most prominently on the concepts of citizenship and transnationalism for theory building and their research designs. The rapidly growing literature on the consequences of emigrant enfranchisement, notably emigrant electoral participation and its impact on homeland politics, has not been included here

Emerging ethical challenges in researching vulnerable groups during the COVID-19

This article is part of the project MIGRADEMO that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, Grant agreement No.726405.This paper discusses the lasting impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on research ethics in social sciences by focusing on the concept of vulnerability. We unpack the current conceptualisations of vulnerability and their limitations and argue for the need to reconceptualise vulnerability as multidimensional, consisting of both universal and contextual dimensions, as well as their dynamic interplay. Multidimensional vulnerability is inspired by and relevant to social science research during the pandemic but can also be useful in other contexts such as climate change or conflict. The paper puts forwards several considerations about how this revised concept of vulnerability may be useful when evaluating ethical dimensions of social science research

Rural Entrepreneurship Development in Southwest China: A Spatiotemporal Analysis

Rural entrepreneurship has been seen by the central government of China as a key means to rural vitalization. However, research focus on the long-term developmental status of rural entrepreneurship at local scale has been limited. According to industry types of differentiation, this research describes rural enterprises registered in the administrative area of Mianyang, southwest China, from 2011 to 2020. The spatial-temporal distribution rule of rural entrepreneurship is explored via a quantitative approach focused on spatial analysis and correlation analysis, as well as the application of geocoding on web data. How contexts such as the natural base, socio-economic condition, and institutional arrangements impact this distribution are empirically explored and discussed. The paper adds spatial-temporal insights into the role of the context of rural entrepreneurship. In particular, the paper highlights that rural entrepreneurship is a process potentially best explored at the regional scale and that physical condition and institutional support play central roles in rural entrepreneurship in southwest China.hina Scholarship CouncilDeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)Open Access Publication Fund of Humboldt-Universität zu BerlinPeer Reviewe

Evaluation of milk yield losses associated with Salmonella antibodies in bulk-tank milk in bovine dairy herds

The effect of Salmonella on milk production is not well established in cattle. The objective of this study was to investigate whether introduction of Salmonella into dairy cattle herds was associated with reduced milk yield and the duration of any effect. Longitudinal data from 2005 through 2009 were used, with data from 12 months before until 18 months after the estimated date of infection. Twenty-eight case herds were selected based on an increase in the level of Salmonella specific antibodies in bulk-tank milk from < 10 corrected optic density percentage (ODC%) to ≥ 70 ODC% between two consecutive 3-monthly measurements in the Danish Salmonella surveillance program. All selected case herds were conventional Danish Holstein herds. Control herds (n = 40) were selected randomly from Danish Holstein herds with Salmonella antibody levels consistently < 10 ODC%. A date of herd infection was randomly allocated to the control herds. Hierarchical mixed effect models with the outcome test day energy corrected milk yield (ECM)/cow were used to investigate the daily milk yield before and after the estimated herd infection date for cows in parity 1, 2 and 3+. Control herds were used to evaluate whether the effects in the case herds could be reproduced in herds without Salmonella infection. Herd size, days in milk, somatic cell count, season, and year were included in the models. The key results were that first parity cow yield was reduced by a mean of 1.4 kg (95% CI: 0.5 to 2.3) ECM/cow per day from seven to 15 months after the estimated herd infection date, compared with first parity cows in the same herds in the 12 months before the estimated herd infection date. Yield for parity 3+ was reduced by a mean of 3.0 kg (95% CI: 1.3 to 4.8) ECM/cow per day from seven to 15 months after herd infection compared with parity 3+ cows in the 12 months before the estimated herd infection. There were minor differences in yield in second parity cows before and after herd infection, and no difference between cows in control herds before and after the simulated infection date. There was a significant drop in milk yield in affected herds and the reduction was detectable several months after the increase in bulk-tank milk Salmonella antibodies. It took more than a year for milk yield to return to pre- infection levels

Ressenyes

Obra ressenyada: J. LACOMBA, Migraciones y desarrollo en Marruecos. Madrid: Asociación de los Libros de la Catarata, 2004