Differentiation in the European Union and beyond

Published online: 26 September 2022This forum article analyzes differentiation among states in the European Union and among regions within states as a single phenomenon, an arrangement in which one or more constituent units opt out of a common policy. By examining differentiation in a variety of contexts, we seek to shed light on its basic features

Transformation of the political space : a citizens’ perspective

Published online: 11 April 2023A large and growing body of research draws attention to the rising salience of socio-cultural and identitarian issues and, potentially, the emergence of a new political cleavage that divides voters on those issues. However, the micro-foundations of this transformation are less well understood. Here we take a voter-perspective to evaluate how party competition has been restructured in the eyes of the voter. We leverage measures of citizens’ selfreported probabilities to vote for alternative political parties in the European Election Study voter surveys between 1999 and 2019 in order to map electoral affinity and opposition among party families. We estimate to what extent spatial location on the economic left–right dimension and the GAL-TAN dimension explain the patterns that emerge, and how this has changed over time. Our results provide evidence of a substantial shift in voter assessment from party competition structured along the economic left–right dimension to competition structured along the GAL-TAN dimension. We also find great separation of TAN parties from other parties, with the deepest antipathy between the TAN parties and greens

How crises shape circles of solidarity : evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy

Published online: 26 May 2023How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected boundaries of solidarity? Human-induced crises that impose asymmetric costs tend to sharpen pre-existing divides, but natural disasters often strengthen solidarity. The pandemic possesses properties of both kinds of crisis. In a panel survey conducted in Northern Italy, the initial epicenter of the pandemic, we asked respondents to complete conjoint tasks querying who was likely to violate health guidelines (wave 1) and who should be prioritized for vaccine distribution (wave 2). We find that while discrimination towards the rich is nearly universal, bias against other outgroups depends on ideology and personal experience with the crisis. Leftwing individuals display discrimination towards partisan outgroups, while those on the right display ethnic bias. However, this effect is conditional: those who suffered a significant income loss but no health effects display heightened discrimination, while respondents who experienced COVID-19 as a personal health crisis are less likely to penalize outgroups

The social bases of political parties : a new measure and survey

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2022This article proposes a measure of the social structuration of political parties. The measure has some distinctive virtues. It assesses the social bases of partisanship from the standpoint of the political party, and it provides a simple and transparent method for assessing the relative weight of social-structural and behavioral factors for party composition. We illustrate the power of this measure through a comparison of political parties in 30 European countries since 1975

Contesting Covid : the ideological bases of partisan responses to the Covid-19 pandemic

First published: 31 January 2022How do political parties respond to external shocks? Using an original survey of political parties across Europe conducted in June 2020 and Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) data on partisan ideological positioning, we argue that the pre-existing ideological stances of Europe’s political parties shaped their response to emerging Covid19 policy issues, including the tension between economic normalization and containment, legal versus voluntary enforcement and the role of science in policymaking. We find that party ideology powerfully predicts how parties, both in government and in opposition, responded to the pandemic.Article also appear in The COVID-19 Issue First published: 20 September 2021, Last updated: 28 February 202

Habituation and sensitization of protective reflexes: dissociation between cardiac defense and eye-blink startle

We examined the habituation and recovery of two protective reflexes, cardiac defense and eye-blink startle, simultaneously elicited by a white noise of 500 ms as a function of the time interval between stimulus presentations. Participants were 90 volunteers (54 women) randomly distributed into 6 inter-trial interval (ITI) conditions. They all received three presentations of the stimulus with a time interval of 30 min between the first and third noise. The timing of the second noise was manipulated in six steps, using a between-group design, in order to increase the ITI between Trials I and 2 and symmetrically decrease the ITI between Trials 2 and 3. Cardiac defense showed fast habituation at the shortest ITI (2.5 min), but reduced habituation and increased recovery at the longest ITI (27.5 min). In contrast, eye-blink startle showed sensitization irrespective of the ITI. This pattern of findings highlights dissociations between protective reflexes when simultaneously examined. The results are discussed in the context of the cascade model of defense reactions. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Zahvala autorima Sestrinski glasnik/Nursing Journal 2013 godina Thanking to authors Sestrinski glasnik/Nursing Journal year 2013

Earth’s surface and mantle sulphur reservoirs are connected via subduction, crustal recycling and volcanism. Although oceanic hotspot lavas currently provide the best constraints on the deep sulphur cycle, their restricted age range (<200 Ma) means they cannot reveal temporal variations in crustal recycling over Earth history. Sulphur-rich alkaline magmas offer the solution because they are associated with recycled sources (i.e. metasomatized lithospheric mantle and plumes) and, crucially, are found throughout the geological record. Here, we present a detailed study of sulphur isotope fractionation in a Mesoproterozoic alkaline province in Greenland and demonstrate that an enriched subduction-influenced source (δ34S of +1 to +5‰) can be reconstructed. A global δ34S compilation reveals secular variation in alkaline magma sources which support changes in the composition of the lithospheric mantle and/or Ga timescales for deep crustal recycling. Thus, alkaline magmas represent a powerful yet underutilized repository for interrogating crustal recycling through geological time

What is the Optimal Method Assessing for Persistent Villous Atrophy in Adult Coeliac Disease

Background and Aims: Methods of assessing gluten-free diet (GFD) adherence in adults with coeliac disease (CD) include serological testing, dietitian evaluation, questionnaires and repeat duodenal biopsies. Persisting villous atrophy (VA) is associated with CD complications, however gastroscopy with biopsies is expensive and invasive. This study aimed to assess the abilities of a duodenal bulb (D1) biopsy and the Celiac Dietary Adherence Test (CDAT) to detect persisting VA in adults with CD. Methods: A prospective observational study of adult CD patients referred for follow-up duodenal biopsies was performed. Quadrantic biopsies were taken from the second part of the duodenum (D2), in addition to a D1 biopsy. Patients underwent follow-up serological testing, and completed the CDAT and Biagi Score. These non-invasive adherence markers were compared against duodenal histology. Results: 368 patients (mean age 51.0 years, 70.1% female) had D1 and D2 biopsies taken at follow-up gastroscopy. Compared to D2 biopsies alone, additional D1 biopsies increased detection of VA by 10.4% (p<0.0001). 201 patients (mean age 50.3 years, 67.7% female) completed adherence questionnaires and serology. When detecting VA, sensitivities and specificities of these markers were 39.7% and 94.2% for IgA- tTG, 38.1% and 96.4% for IgA-EMA, 55.6% and 52.2% for CDAT and 20.6% and 96.4% for the Biagi score. Conclusions: Bulbar biopsies increase detection of persisting VA by 10.4%. Serology, CDAT and Biagi performed poorly when predicting VA. The gold standard for predicting persisting VA remains repeat biopsy

Quantitative analysis of the native presynaptic cytomatrix by cryoelectron tomography

The filamentous structures that tether exocytic vesicles to the plasma membrane in the active zone are rearranged in response to synaptic stimulation