Evaluating democracy in New Zealand under MMP

In the debate that culminated in the November 2011 referendum, arguments for and against New Zealand’s mixed member proportional (MMP) electoral system focused on two values: governmental strength and representational fairness.&nbsp

APPROVAL VOTING IN PRACTICE

electoral systems ; behaviour ; membership ; associations

Does compulsory voting increase support for leftist policy?

Citizens unequally participate in referendums, and this may systematically bias policy in favor of those who vote. Some view compulsory voting as an important tool to alleviate this problem, whereas others worry about its detrimental effects on the legitimacy and quality of democratic decision making. So far, however, we lack systematic knowledge about the causal effect of compulsory voting on public policy. We argue that sanctioned compulsory voting mobilizes citizens at the bottom of the income distribution and that this translates into an increase in support for leftist policies. We empirically explore the effects of a sanctioned compulsory voting law on direct-democratic decision making in Switzerland. We find that compulsory voting significantly increases electoral support for leftist policy positions in referendums by up to 20 percentage points. We discuss the implications of these results for our understanding of the policy consequences of electoral institutions

The behaviour of political parties and MPs in the parliaments of the Weimar Republic

Copyright @ 2012 The Authors. This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below.Analysing the roll-call votes of the MPs of the Weimar Republic we find: (1) that party competition in the Weimar parliaments can be structured along two dimensions: an economic left–right and a pro-/anti-democratic. Remarkably, this is stable throughout the entire lifespan of the Republic and not just in the later years and despite the varying content of votes across the lifespan of the Republic, and (2) that nearly all parties were troubled by intra-party divisions, though, in particular, the national socialists and communists became homogeneous in the final years of the Republic.Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstan

Deep brain stimulation of the anterior nucleus of the thalamus in drug-resistant epilepsy in the MORE multicenter patient registry

Copyright © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc. on behalf of the American Academy of Neurology. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Background and objectives: The efficacy of deep brain stimulation of the anterior nucleus of the thalamus (ANT DBS) in patients with drug-resistant epilepsy (DRE) was demonstrated in the double-blind Stimulation of the Anterior Nucleus of the Thalamus for Epilepsy randomized controlled trial. The Medtronic Registry for Epilepsy (MORE) aims to understand the safety and longer-term effectiveness of ANT DBS therapy in routine clinical practice. Methods: MORE is an observational registry collecting prospective and retrospective clinical data. Participants were at least 18 years old, with focal DRE recruited across 25 centers from 13 countries. They were followed for at least 2 years in terms of seizure frequency (SF), responder rate (RR), health-related quality of life (Quality of Life in Epilepsy Inventory 31), depression, and safety outcomes. Results: Of the 191 patients recruited, 170 (mean [SD] age of 35.6 [10.7] years, 43% female) were implanted with DBS therapy and met all eligibility criteria. At baseline, 38% of patients reported cognitive impairment. The median monthly SF decreased by 33.1% from 15.8 at baseline to 8.8 at 2 years (p 10 implantations) had 42.8% reduction in median monthly SF by 2 years in comparison with 25.8% in low-volume center. In patients with cognitive impairment, the reduction in median monthly SF was 26.0% by 2 years compared with 36.1% in patients without cognitive impairment. The most frequently reported adverse events were changes (e.g., increased frequency/severity) in seizure (16%), memory impairment (patient-reported complaint, 15%), depressive mood (patient-reported complaint, 13%), and epilepsy (12%). One definite sudden unexpected death in epilepsy case was reported. Discussion: The MORE registry supports the effectiveness and safety of ANT DBS therapy in a real-world setting in the 2 years following implantation. Classification of evidence: This study provides Class IV evidence that ANT DBS reduces the frequency of seizures in patients with drug-resistant focal epilepsy.The MORE registry was sponsored and funded by Medtronic, plc.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A Multilaboratory Comparison of Calibration Accuracy and the Performance of External References in Analytical Ultracentrifugation

Analytical ultracentrifugation (AUC) is a first principles based method to determine absolute sedimentation coefficients and buoyant molar masses of macromolecules and their complexes, reporting on their size and shape in free solution. The purpose of this multi-laboratory study was to establish the precision and accuracy of basic data dimensions in AUC and validate previously proposed calibration techniques. Three kits of AUC cell assemblies containing radial and temperature calibration tools and a bovine serum albumin (BSA) reference sample were shared among 67 laboratories, generating 129 comprehensive data sets. These allowed for an assessment of many parameters of instrument performance, including accuracy of the reported scan time after the start of centrifugation, the accuracy of the temperature calibration, and the accuracy of the radial magnification. The range of sedimentation coefficients obtained for BSA monomer in different instruments and using different optical systems was from 3.655 S to 4.949 S, with a mean and standard deviation of (4.304 ± 0.188) S (4.4%). After the combined application of correction factors derived from the external calibration references for elapsed time, scan velocity, temperature, and radial magnification, the range of s-values was reduced 7-fold with a mean of 4.325 S and a 6-fold reduced standard deviation of ± 0.030 S (0.7%). In addition, the large data set provided an opportunity to determine the instrument-to-instrument variation of the absolute radial positions reported in the scan files, the precision of photometric or refractometric signal magnitudes, and the precision of the calculated apparent molar mass of BSA monomer and the fraction of BSA dimers. These results highlight the necessity and effectiveness of independent calibration of basic AUC data dimensions for reliable quantitative studies

A multilaboratory comparison of calibration accuracy and the performance of external references in analytical ultracentrifugation.

Analytical ultracentrifugation (AUC) is a first principles based method to determine absolute sedimentation coefficients and buoyant molar masses of macromolecules and their complexes, reporting on their size and shape in free solution. The purpose of this multi-laboratory study was to establish the precision and accuracy of basic data dimensions in AUC and validate previously proposed calibration techniques. Three kits of AUC cell assemblies containing radial and temperature calibration tools and a bovine serum albumin (BSA) reference sample were shared among 67 laboratories, generating 129 comprehensive data sets. These allowed for an assessment of many parameters of instrument performance, including accuracy of the reported scan time after the start of centrifugation, the accuracy of the temperature calibration, and the accuracy of the radial magnification. The range of sedimentation coefficients obtained for BSA monomer in different instruments and using different optical systems was from 3.655 S to 4.949 S, with a mean and standard deviation of (4.304 ± 0.188) S (4.4%). After the combined application of correction factors derived from the external calibration references for elapsed time, scan velocity, temperature, and radial magnification, the range of s-values was reduced 7-fold with a mean of 4.325 S and a 6-fold reduced standard deviation of ± 0.030 S (0.7%). In addition, the large data set provided an opportunity to determine the instrument-to-instrument variation of the absolute radial positions reported in the scan files, the precision of photometric or refractometric signal magnitudes, and the precision of the calculated apparent molar mass of BSA monomer and the fraction of BSA dimers. These results highlight the necessity and effectiveness of independent calibration of basic AUC data dimensions for reliable quantitative studies