Do Islamist Parties Help or Hinder Women? Party Institutionalization, Piety and Responsiveness to Female Citizens

Does electing Islamist parties help or hurt women? Due to Ennahda winning a plurality in the 2011 elections and women from all parties winning 31% of seats, Tunisia offers an opportunity to test the impact of legislator gender and Islamist orientation on women\u27s representation. Using original 2012 surveys of 40 Tunisian parliamentarians (MPs) and 1200 citizens, we find that electing female and Islamists MPs improves women\u27s symbolic and service responsiveness by increasing the likelihood that female citizens are aware of and contact MPs. Electing Islamist female MPs has a positive impact on women\u27s symbolic and service responsiveness, but decreases the likelihood that men will interact with legislators. We argue that Islamist deputies are more responsive to women due to an Islamic mandate effect—that is, Islamist parties\u27 efforts to institutionalize their constituency relations, provide services to the marginalized through direct contact with citizens, and respect norms of piety by using female parliamentarians to reach women in sex-segregated spaces. While Islamist parties positively impact some dimensions of women\u27s representation, they also reinforce traditional gender relations. Our results extend the literature on Islam, gender, and governance by demonstrating that quotas and party institutionalization improve women\u27s representation in clientelistic contexts

Does Casework Build Support for a Strong Parliament? Legislative Representation and Public Opinion in Morocco and Algeria.

Why do legislatures lengthen the tenure of authoritarian regimes? In order to gain insight into this question, this dissertation examines how parliamentary institutions influence members’ participation in debate and provision of casework and how the representative link shapes constituent attitudes toward the parliament. It argues that public opinion serves as a contextual factor in future rounds of elite-level bargaining over the prerogatives of the legislature and is a neglected part of a causal story which accounts for the empirical regularity identified by Gandhi and Przeworski. The project provides a description and analysis of casework practices in Morocco and Algeria. It makes three empirical contributions. First, it demonstrates that parliamentary institutions vary within a class of authoritarian regimes and shape members’ choice of activities. It suggests that representation is a mechanism of cooptation occurring as members bargain for reelection in elite and mass arenas. Incumbent preferences for level of debate and casework capacity vary by regime type, explaining why Moroccan members participate more frequently in parliamentary debate and have higher caseloads than do Algerian members and why debate and casework are substitutes in Algeria and complements in Morocco. Second, it illustrates that incumbent preferences for debate in Morocco create an institutional opening for opposition elites, in this case Islamist parties, to more fully develop party-focused strategies and programmatic benefits than their counterparts in Algeria. It shows that Moroccan Islamist deputies are more likely to perceive incentives to cultivate a party reputation and to devote time to policymaking, but no more or less likely to have higher caseloads than are members of other parties. Algerian Islamist deputies do not differ from other parties on these outcomes. Third, it demonstrates that incumbent strategies to engineer loyal parliaments have implications for public opinion. Provision of casework—arguably the primary representative function in Morocco and Algeria—is not associated with greater popular support for strong parliamentary prerogatives. Rather, individual-level support is related to perceptions that elections are more transparent and that political parties and deputies are more effective. The results inform literature on authoritarian politics and have implications for legislative strengthening programs.Ph.D.Public Policy & Political ScienceUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/61674/1/lbenstea_1.pd

Explaining Backlash: Social Hierarchy and Men’s Rejection of Women’s Rights Reforms

Governments promote gender-sensitive policies, yet little is known about why reform campaigns evoke backlash. Drawing on social position theory, we test whether marginalized (women’s organizations) or intrusive (Western donors) messengers cause resistance across public rights (quotas) and private rights (land reform). Using a framing experiment implemented among 1,704 Malawians, we find that females’ attitudes are unaffected by campaigns, while backlash occurs among patrilineal and matrilineal males. Backlash among men is more common for sensitive private rights (land reform) than public rights (quotas) and Western donors than women’s organizations, suggesting complex effects generally more consistent with the intrusiveness hypothesis

Methanol promotes atmospheric methane oxidation by methanotrophic cultures and soils?

Two methanotrophic bacteria, Methylobacter albus BG8 and Methylosinus trichosporium OB3b, oxidized atmospheric methane during batch growth on methanol. Methane consumption was rapidly and substantially diminished (95% over 9 days) when washed cell suspensions were incubated without methanol in the presence of atmospheric methane (1.7 ppm). Methanotrophic activity was stimulated after methanol (10 mM) but not methane (1,000 ppm) addition. M. albus BG8 grown in continuous culture for 80 days with methanol retained the ability to oxidize atmospheric methane and oxidized methane in a chemostat air supply. Methane oxidation during growth on methanol was not affected by methane deprivation. Differences in the kinetics of methane uptake (apparent K(m) and V(max)) were observed between batch- and chemostat-grown cultures. The V(max) and apparent K(m) values (means ± standard errors) for methanol- limited chemostat cultures were 133 ± 46 nmol of methane 108 cells-1 h-1 and 916 ± 235 ppm of methane (1.2 μM), respectively. These values were significantly lower than those determined with batch-grown cultures (V(max) of 648 ± 195 nmol of methane 108 cells-1 h-1 and apparent K(m) of 5,025 ± 1,234 ppm of methane [6.3 μM]). Methane consumption by soils was stimulated by the addition of methanol. These results suggest that methanol or other nonmethane substrates may promote atmospheric methane oxidation in situ

New Bird Records for Nusa Tenggara Islands: Sumbawa, Moyo, Sumba, Flores, Pulau Besar and Timor

We present a total of 59 new island records comprising more than 100 independent site records of 52 species for selected Nusa Tenggara islands: Sumbawa (21) and its satellite Moyo (18); Sumba (4); Flores (3) and its satellite islands including Pulau Besar (12); and Timor (3). Records were gathered between 1994 and 2001 during surveys by BirdLife international Indonesia Programme, Dames and Moore Pry Ltd (especially within the Batu Hijau Project Area), and an extended bird watching visit. Records of particular note include those of the globally vulnerable Flores Green Pigeon Treron Jloris and two near-threatened species: Beach Thick-knee Esacus neglectus and Great-billed Heron Ardea sumatrana. A Superb Fruit-dove Ptilinopus superbus on Sumba represents the first record for Nusa Tenggara. Significant records of Palearctic migrants are accumulating for the region. We document the first two Nusa Tenggara records of the migrant Grey-streaked Flycatcher Muscicapa griseisticta and numerous records of Chinese Sparrowhawk Accipiter soloensis and Japanese Sparrowhawk A. gularis

Poor People\u27s Beliefs and the Dynamics of Clientelism

Why do some poor people engage in clientelism whereas others do not? Why does clientelism sometimes take traditional forms and sometimes more instrumental forms? We propose a formal model of clientelism that addresses these questions focusing primarily on the citizen’s perspective. Citizens choose between supporting broad-based redistribution or engaging in clientelism. Introducing insights from social psychology, we study the interactions between citizen beliefs and values, and their political choices. Clientelism, political inefficacy, and inequality legitimation beliefs reinforce each other leading to multiple equilibria. One of these resembles traditional clientelism, with disempowered clients that legitimize social inequalities. Community connectivity breaks this reinforcement mechanism and leads to another equilibrium where clientelism takes a modern, instrumental, form. The model delivers insights on the role of citizen beliefs for their bargaining power as well as for the persistence and transformation of clientelism. We illustrate the key mechanisms with ethnographic literature on the topic

Identification and analysis of mutational hotspots in oncogenes and tumour suppressors

Background: The key to interpreting the contribution of a disease-associated mutation in the development and progression of cancer is an understanding of the consequences of that mutation both on the function of the affected protein and on the pathways in which that protein is involved. Protein domains encapsulate function and position-specific domain based analysis of mutations have been shown to help elucidate their phenotypes. Results: In this paper we examine the domain biases in oncogenes and tumour suppressors, and find that their domain compositions substantially differ. Using data from over 30 different cancers from whole-exome sequencing cancer genomic projects we mapped over one million mutations to their respective Pfam domains to identify which domains are enriched in any of three different classes of mutation; missense, indels or truncations. Next, we identified the mutational hotspots within domain families by mapping small mutations to equivalent positions in multiple sequence alignments of protein domains We find that gain of function mutations from oncogenes and loss of function mutations from tumour suppressors are normally found in different domain families and when observed in the same domain families, hotspot mutations are located at different positions within the multiple sequence alignment of the domain. Conclusions: By considering hotspots in tumour suppressors and oncogenes independently, we find that there are different specific positions within domain families that are particularly suited to accommodate either a loss or a gain of function mutation. The position is also dependent on the class of mutation. We find rare mutations co-located with well-known functional mutation hotspots, in members of homologous domain superfamilies, and we detect novel mutation hotspots in domain families previously unconnected with cancer. The results of this analysis can be accessed through the MOKCa database (http://strubiol.icr.ac.uk/ extra/MOKCa)