Instability and inequality in the British state

The UK state has been through many periods of perceived crisis, but the instability of the last decade has shaken some of the foundational institutions of British politics. Our main argument is that the rise of political instability relates to the failure of British politics to respond to structural inequality in society and politics. This includes growing economic and geographic disparities, as well as destabilizing divisions over long-standing social injustices. The infusion of these trends into the political process is the subject of the ‘asymmetric power model (APM)’, which acts as the theoretical underpinning of this paper and the special issue it introduces. In this editorial to the Parliamentary Affairs Special Issue on ‘Instability and inequality in the British state’, we elaborate these arguments and provide a brief overview of the eight papers in the issue, which cover the APM, the constitution, the UK Union, the Conservative Party, public policymaking, gender inequalities, intersectional inequalities, and geographical inequalities. Together, the papers identify the causes and features of the UK’s troubling inequality-instability dialectic and offer various practical and theoretical ways forward

Whose policy is it anyway? Public support for clean energy policy depends on the message and the messenger

Environmental policy advocates are increasingly proposing ‘bundled’ clean energy policies to combat climate change while also creating jobs and transforming the economy. While such strategies may broaden the appeal of climate policies, these broad constituencies create challenges for policy communicators – how do messages about different aspects of the policy, coming from different messenger groups, influence public support for clean energy policies? This study uses a modified conjoint survey experiment (n = 2145) to test how the interaction between message frames (addressing climate change vs. creating jobs) and sources (business, environmental, or labor groups) influenced policy support for clean energy policies. Results show that job creation frames from business or environmental groups were most effective. We find evidence that certain message/source combinations work across partisanship divides: messages that were effective for one partisan group did not backfire – and often also increased policy support – when presented to the other group

Free-for benefit: A stragety to improve the quality of health care and control costs through reimbursement incentives

AbstractObjectives. The purpose of this study was to determine whether reimbursement in direct proportion to expected therapeutic benefit is capable of improving the utilization and cost of health care.Background. The benefit associated with a particular medical or surgical treatment varies widely from patient to patient. Nevertheless, payment to the provider of the treatment is essentially invariant under the current fee-for-service system. Under an alternative fee-for-benefit strategy, empiric data are used to construct a multivariable model to predict the exprcted benefit to an individual patient from a particular health care service on the basis of conventional clinical descriptors. The payers and the providers of the service then openly negotiate an explicit economic relation between expected benefit and monetary payment such that payment is directly proportional to benefit.Methods. Computer simulations were performed to determine the potential impact of this fee-for-benefit strategy with respect to medical versus surgical treatment of coronary artery disease.Results. Compared with conventional fee-for-service, fee-for-benefit resulted in a 12% improvement in patient benefit (quality-adjusted survival), a 22% reduction in provider payments and a 55% increase in cost/benefit (the ratio of benefit to payment).Conclusions. The incentives embodied in a fee-for-benefit strategy can be an effective mechanism for encouraging more appropriate health care utilization while simultaneously controlling health care costs

PUBLIC EXPENDITURE MANAGEMENT REFORM IN SELECTED AFRICAN COUNTRIES

Selected African Countries, was prepared by a staff team of the International Monetary Fund. The report summarizes the IMF’s internal evaluation, delivered to a sample of 10 primaril

Hormonal alteration of the response of the rat uterus to catecholamines

The influence of circulating ovarian hormones on the uterine response to catecholamines in the rat has been studied. Uterine smooth muscles from untreated ovariectomized rats, or from ovariectomized rats under the influence of progesterone, are relaxed by norepinephrine. This response is blocked by [beta]-adrenergic blocking drugs. Samples taken from estrogen-dominated rat uteri, on the other hand, are usually stimulated by norepinephrine, a response which can be prevented by [alpha]-adrenergic blocking agents.Thus, the response of the rat uterus to norepinephrine appears to depend on a balance between [alpha] and [beta] adrenergic receptors in the myometrium, and this balance is in turn regulated by the ovarian hormones.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/33402/1/0000803.pd

Political strategies of external support for democratization

Political strategies of external support to democratization are contrasted and critically examined in respect of the United States and European Union. The analysis begins by defining its terms of reference and addresses the question of what it means to have a strategy. The account briefly notes the goals lying behind democratization support and their relationship with the wider foreign policy process, before considering what a successful strategy would look like and how that relates to the selection of candidates. The literature's attempts to identify strategy and its recommendations for better strategies are compared and assessed. Overall, the article argues that the question of political strategies of external support for democratization raises several distinct but related issues including the who?, what?, why?, and how? On one level, strategic choices can be expected to echo the comparative advantage of the "supporter." On a different level, the strategies cannot be divorced from the larger foreign policy framework. While it is correct to say that any sound strategy for support should be grounded in a theoretical understanding of democratization, the literature on strategies reveals something even more fundamental: divergent views about the nature of politics itself. The recommendations there certainly pinpoint weaknesses in the actual strategies of the United States and Europe but they have their own limitations too. In particular, in a world of increasing multi-level governance strategies for supporting democratization should go beyond preoccupation with just an "outside-in" approach

Face processing in autism: Reduced integration of cross-feature dynamics

Characteristic problems with social interaction have prompted considerable interest in the face processing of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Studies suggest that reduced integration of information from disparate facial regions likely contributes to difficulties recognizing static faces in this population. Recent work also indicates that observers with ASD have problems using patterns of facial motion to judge identity and gender, and may be less able to derive global motion percepts. These findings raise the possibility that feature integration deficits also impact the perception of moving faces. To test this hypothesis, we examined whether observers with ASD exhibit susceptibility to a new dynamic face illusion, thought to index integration of moving facial features. When typical observers view eye-opening and -closing in the presence of asynchronous mouth-opening and -closing, the concurrent mouth movements induce a strong illusory slowing of the eye transitions. However, we find that observers with ASD are not susceptible to this illusion, suggestive of weaker integration of cross-feature dynamics. Nevertheless, observers with ASD and typical controls were equally able to detect the physical differences between comparison eye transitions. Importantly, this confirms that observers with ASD were able to fixate the eye-region, indicating that the striking group difference has a perceptual, not attentional origin. The clarity of the present results contrasts starkly with the modest effect sizes and equivocal findings seen throughout the literature on static face perception in ASD. We speculate that differences in the perception of facial motion may be a more reliable feature of this condition