Doparies: A Novel Party Deliberative and Aggregative Decision-Making Mechanism to Improve the Quality of Representative Democracy

The failings of parties are one of the central problems of contemporary democracies. What can be done to revive citizen participation? In this article, we present a novel party participatory decision-making mechanism named "doparies". They are procedures that are nationally or locally implemented within and by parties, and permit any voter who declares to be an elector of that party (open doparies) or party members (internal doparies)to vote regarding crucial and controversial decisions during the period between one election and another. Whereas primaries are done before elections for choosing party candidates, doparies are done after elections for making party choices on issues. Doparies represent a bidirectional communication system between voters and representatives, and would retain the advantages of primaries (party-voters relationship) and referenda (debate before the vote), but would limit the excessive personalization of politics focusing on issues and not on people. There are both propositional doparies, allowing citizens to raise problems that are absent from their party political agenda, and consultative ones, allowing parties to hear the true voice of their voters, who, differently from what happens in polls, are informed by debates in party circles. We suggest that doparies are a new combination of deliberative and aggregative processes, and hypothesize that they can counteract parties\u27 crisis and abstention. Procedures similar to doparies are now part of the Italian Democratic Party statute and prominent national leaders have gathered signatures to organize local consultations. The use of primaries by Italian left-wing parties has had a contagious effect on right-wing ones as well as European ones. The same could happen with doparies

Duplication of modules facilitates the evolution of functional specialization

The evolution of simulated robots with three different architectures is studied. We compared a non-modular feed forward network, a hardwired modular and a duplication-based modular motor control network. We conclude that both modular architectures outperform the non-modular architecture, both in terms of rate of adaptation as well as the level of adaptation achieved. The main difference between the hardwired and duplication-based modular architectures is that in the latter the modules reached a much higher degree of functional specialization of their motor control units with regard to high level behavioral functions. The hardwired architectures reach the same level of performance, but have a more distributed assignment of functional tasks to the motor control units. We conclude that the mechanism through which functional specialization is achieved is similar to the mechanism proposed for the evolution of duplicated genes. It is found that the duplication of multifunctional modules first leads to a change in the regulation of the module, leading to a differentiation of the functional context in which the module is used. Then the module adapts to the new functional context. After this second step the system is locked into a functionally specialized state. We suggest that functional specialization may be an evolutionary absorption state

Lesson to political parties: here is the method for really listening to citizen

Political parties in Italy are in crisis. Why not really make parties "the tools by which citizens contribute to national politics"? Why not encourage parties (and governments) to listen to the people-for issues, for candidates and for how to change the system itself? Would it not be easier for parties to regain the trust of voters if they used public funding also to involve citizens in their decisions

What does it take to evolve behaviorally complex organisms?

What genotypic features explain the evolvability of organisms that have to accomplish many different tasks? The genotype of behaviorally complex organisms may be more likely to encode modular neural architectures because neural modules dedicated to distinct tasks avoid neural interference, i.e., the arrival of conflicting messages for changing the value of connection weights during learning. However, if the connection weights for the various modules are genetically inherited, this raises the problem of genetic linkage: favorable mutations may fall on one portion of the genotype encoding one neural module and unfavorable mutations on another portion encoding another module. We show that this can prevent the genotype from reaching an adaptive optimum. This effect is different from other linkage effects described in the literature and we argue that it represents a new class of genetic constraints. Using simulations we show that sexual reproduction can alleviate the problem of genetic linkage by recombining separate modules all of which incorporate either favorable or unfavorable mutations. We speculate that this effect may contribute to the taxonomic prevalence of sexual reproduction among higher organisms. In addition to sexual recombination, the problem of genetic linkage for behaviorally complex organisms may be mitigated by entrusting evolution with the task of finding appropriate modular architectures and learning with the task of finding the appropriate connection weights for these architectures

Enabling Deliberations in a Political Party Using Large-Scale Argumentation: A Preliminary Reports

This paper represents a preliminary report on using an argumentation system to enable large scale deliberations, involving over 400 members of the Italian Democratic Party, on electoral law reform. It is, to our knowledge, one of very few evaluations of large-scale argumentation, as well as the first to include a systematic comparison with conventional (web forum based) online deliberation. We will discuss (1) the strengths and limitations of current deliberation technologies, (2) how large-scale argumentation technology can help address these limitations, and (3) preliminary results from the Democratic Party evaluation of this technology

The RNA Binding Protein SAM68 Transiently Localizes in the Chromatoid Body of Male Germ Cells and Influences Expression of Select MicroRNAs

The chromatoid body (CB) is a unique structure of male germ cells composed of thin filaments that condense into a perinuclear organelle after meiosis. Due to the presence of proteins involved in different steps of RNA metabolism and of different classes of RNAs, including microRNAs (miRNAs), the CB has been recently suggested to function as an RNA processing centre. Herein, we show that the RNA binding protein SAM68 transiently localizes in the CB, in concomitance with the meiotic divisions of mouse spermatocytes. Precise staging of the seminiferous tubules and co-localization studies with MVH and MILI, two well recognized CB markers, documented that SAM68 transiently associates with the CB in secondary spermatocytes and early round spermatids. Furthermore, although SAM68 co-immunoprecipitated with MVH in secondary spermatocytes, its ablation did not affect the proper localization of MVH in the CB. On the other hand, ablation of the CB constitutive component MIWI did not impair association of SAM68 with the CB. Isolation of CBs from Sam68 wild type and knockout mouse testes and comparison of their protein content by mass spectrometry indicated that Sam68 ablation did not cause overall alterations in the CB proteome. Lastly, we found that SAM68 interacts with DROSHA and DICER in secondary spermatocytes and early round spermatids and that a subset of miRNAs were altered in Sam68−/−germ cells. These results suggest a novel role for SAM68 in the miRNA pathway during spermatogenesis