The Participation Gap: Evidence from Compulsory Voting Laws

Why do some people go to the polling station, sometimes up to several times a year, while others always prefer to stay at home? This question has launched a wide theoretical debate in both economics and political science, but convincing empirical support for the different models proposed is still rare. The basic rational voting model of Downs (1957) predicts zero participation because each individual vote is extremely unlikely to be pivotal. One prominent modification of this model is the inclusion of a civic duty term into the voter's utility function (Riker and Ordeshook, 1968) which has been the basis of structural ethical voting models such as Coate and Conlin (2004) and Feddersen and Sandroni (2006). Another branch of structural models looks at informational asymmetries among citizens (Feddersen and Pesendorfer, 1996, 1999). This paper tests the implications of these two branches of structural models by exploiting a unique variability in compulsory voting laws in Swiss federal states. By analyzing a newly compiled comparative data set covering the 1900-1950 period, we find large positive effects of the introduction of compulsory voting laws on turnout. Along with the arguably exogenous treatment allocation, several specification and placebo tests lend support to a causal interpretation of this result. The findings of this study lend support to the ethical voting models since citizens do react to compulsory voting laws only if it is enforced with a fee. At the same time, the informational aspect of non-voting is questioned as „new" voters do not delegate their votes.Compulsory Voting, Voter Turnout, Structural Voting Models

Transgenic Zebrafish as a Novel Animal Model to Study Tauopathies and Other Neurodegenerative Disorders in vivo

Our ageing society is confronted with a dramatic increase in patients suffering from tauopathies such as Alzheimer's disease, frontotemporal dementia and others. Typical neuropathological lesions including tangles composed of hyper-phosphorylated tau protein as well as severe neuronal cell death characterize these disorders. No mechanism-based cures are available at present. Genetically modified animals are invaluable models to understand the molecular disease mechanisms and to screen for modifying compounds. We recently introduced tau-transgenic zebrafish as a novel model for tauopathies. Our model allows recapitulating key pathological features of tauopathies within an extremely short time. Moreover, life imaging of tau-dependent neuronal cell death was performed for the very first time. This demonstrated tau-dependent neuronal cell loss independent of tangle formation. Finally, we exemplified that the zebrafish frontotemporal dementia model can be used to screen for drugs that prevent abnormal tau phosphorylation and neuronal cell death. Copyright (C) 2010 S. Karger AG, Base

Amplification of Cosmological Inhomogeneities by the QCD Transition

The cosmological QCD transition affects primordial density perturbations. If the QCD transition is first order, the sound speed vanishes during the transition and density perturbations fall freely. For scales below the Hubble radius at the transition the primordial Harrison-Zel'dovich spectrum of density fluctuations develops large peaks and dips. These peaks grow with wave number for both the hadron-photon-lepton fluid and for cold dark matter. At the horizon scale the enhancement is small. This by itself does not lead to the formation of black holes at the QCD transition. The peaks in the hadron-photon-lepton fluid are wiped out during neutrino decoupling. For cold dark matter that is kinetically decoupled at the QCD transition (e.g., axions or primordial black holes) these peaks lead to the formation of CDM clumps of masses $10^{-20} M_\odot< M_{\rm clump} < 10^{-10} M_\odot$.Comment: 39 pages, 10 figures, RevTeX; (1) ETH Zuerich, (2) Univ. Frankfurt; improved presentation of 'Introduction' and 'Collisional Damping at Neutrino Decoupling', results unchanged; accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Mixing times for the TASEP in the maximal current phase

We study mixing times for the totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (TASEP) on a segment of size $N$ with open boundaries. We focus on the maximal current phase, and prove that the mixing time is of order $N^{3/2}$, up to logarithmic corrections. In the triple point, where the TASEP with open boundaries approaches the Uniform distribution on the state space, we show that the mixing time is precisely of order $N^{3/2}$. This is conjectured to be the correct order of the mixing time for a wide range of particle systems with maximal current. Our arguments rely on a connection to last-passage percolation, and recent results on moderate deviations of last-passage times.Comment: 42 pages, 10 figures, accepted versio

Fluctuation effects in ternary AB+A+B polymeric emulsions

We present a Monte Carlo approach to incorporating the effect of thermal fluctuations in field theories of polymeric fluids. This method is applied to a field-theoretic model of a ternary blend of AB diblock copolymers with A and B homopolymers. We find a shift in the line of order-disorder transitions from their mean-field values, as well as strong signatures of the existence of a bicontinuous microemulsion phase in the vicinity of the mean-field Lifshitz critical point. This is in qualitative agreement with a recent series of experiments conducted with various three-dimensional realizations of this model system. Further, we also compare our results and the performance of the presently proposed simulation method to that of an alternative method involving the integration of complex Langevin dynamical equations.Comment: minor changes, references adde