Declining partisan representation at the sub-national level: assessing and explaining the strengthening of local lists in Italian municipalities (1995–2014)

In Western democracies political representation at the national level is still dominated by (old and new) political parties. This article shows that, instead, the representative role of parties may have declined at the local level. In Italy, for instance, the average share of municipal seats held by non-partisan councillors has almost tripled in the last 20 years. By using an original data set, this article classifies different types of Italian local lists, assesses their relationship with traditional parties and explains territorial variation in their success. The results suggest that local lists have become substantially stronger in small municipalities, in regions characterised by weak or declining political subcultures and where regionalist parties are absent or irrelevant. Finally, contrary to the expectation that declining partisanship is linked to modernisation processes and direct civic engagement, local lists have achieved their best results in the less developed areas of the country

Reinvigorating Devolution: Enhancing Central-Local Relations in Scotland

This report examines how devolution has reshaped territorial governance in Scotland while leaving deeper questions of central–local balance unresolved. It highlights three interrelated dynamics. First, economic and demographic activity has become increasingly concentrated in Edinburgh and the East-Central Belt since 1999, widening gaps with other parts of Scotland. Second, political power has also centralised at Holyrood, with local authorities constrained financially and institutionally, limiting their role as meaningful counterweights. Third, public opinion reflects these imbalances, with many Scots in rural and peripheral areas perceiving devolution as having disproportionately benefited central and affluent regions

Estudio de la entropía y complejidad wavelet en la fragmentación del complejo QRS

Hemos evaluado la señal del ECG a partir de su entropía normalizada (H) y la complejidad wavelet (C) de complejos QRS, utilizando la transformada wavelet continua, como un método eficaz para cuantificar alteraciones anormales en la actividad eléctrica-cardiaca en pacientes post IM.Facultad de Ingenierí

Local representative democracy and protest politics:the case of the Five-star Movement

In recent years, protest politics has become a relevant phenomenon in various European countries. Italy has witnessed the rise of the Five-star Movement (M5S), an anti-establishment party, which, at the 2013 general election, obtained one-fourth of the total votes. However, the story of this ‘party-movement’ started at the local level, as a civic network aimed at changing administrative practices in municipal government. By using an original dataset on representation in 671 Italian municipalities from 2010 to 2014, this article aims to explain not only the subnational political success of the M5S but also the challenges and contradictions that a newly formed movement faces in multi-level electoral arenas

La facultad va a la escuela del barrio : Las Ciencias Naturales entre la universidad y la escuela primaria

Docentes, estudiantes e investigadores de distintas Unidades Académicas de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata, nos acercamos a las Escuelas Públicas Estatales con la intención de enriquecer, contribuir y mejorar a la enseñanza de las Ciencias Naturales, en el marco del proyecto de Extensión "La Facultad va a La Escuela del Barrio". A partir del compromiso de los directivos de las distintas instituciones realizamos un trabajo conjunto, dinámico y horizontal con los docentes, basado en la metodología taller, según sus intereses y la currícula escolar. Esta forma de trabajo no se reduce a una capacitación puntual o a una muestra llamativa de materiales y experimentos sino que, recupera y valora el saber particular de los maestros respecto a la "vida" en el aula y aporta nuestros conocimientos y metodologías, propias de una formación científico-profesional. A partir de esta "ida y vuelta" aportamos herramientas y estrategias permitiendo a los docentes llevar a cabo propuestas didácticas basadas en el trabajo de laboratorio y, a su vez, enriquecemos nuestra formación como profesionales críticos comprometidos con la sociedad.Trabajos del área Ciencias NaturalesDepartamento de Ciencias Exactas y Naturale

Lightwave-driven quasiparticle collisions on a subcycle timescale

Ever since Ernest Rutherford scattered alpha-particles from gold foils(1), collision experiments have revealed insights into atoms, nuclei and elementary particles(2). In solids, many-body correlations lead to characteristic resonances(3)-called quasiparticles-such as excitons, dropletons(4), polarons and Cooper pairs. The structure and dynamics of quasiparticles are important because they define macroscopic phenomena such as Mott insulating states, spontaneous spin-and charge-order, and high-temperature superconductivity(5). However, the extremely short lifetimes of these entities(6) make practical implementations of a suitable collider challenging. Here we exploit lightwave-driven charge transport(7-24), the foundation of attosecond science(9-13), to explore ultrafast quasiparticle collisions directly in the time domain: a femtosecond optical pulse creates excitonic electron-hole pairs in the layered dichalcogenide tungsten diselenide while a strong terahertz field accelerates and collides the electrons with the holes. The underlying dynamics of the wave packets, including collision, pair annihilation, quantum interference and dephasing, are detected as light emission in high-order spectral sidebands(17-19) of the optical excitation. A full quantum theory explains our observations microscopically. This approach enables collision experiments with various complex quasiparticles and suggests a promising new way of generating sub-femtosecond pulses

The strategies of party competition: a typology

This chapter provides a typology of different strategies of party competition, which, inspired by Bonnie Meguid’s work, are defined as dismissive, adversarial and accommodative. It achieves two objectives. First, it aims to facilitate the work of our contributors in Part II of the volume, as they assess how parties (populists or not, newer or more seasoned) relate to one another in different contexts, hence ultimately making it possible for the editors to compare different case studies. Second, it provides a theoretical contribution to the discussion of party competition more generally. We argue that our typology contains several elements of novelty. It can be applied to interactions between all parties, and at different territorial levels of political competition, including local, regional, national and possibly supranational electoral arenas. Moreover, it develops Meguid's categorization by including subcategories, which better capture specific competition strategies. Finally, the strategies identified here can be used both as explanandum and explanans, that is, as dependent and independent variables. Hence hypotheses can be developed to explain why some parties tend to adopt certain strategies when engaging with others