bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
De-sophisticating the Framework
Authors: Kirk Robert 
Published: February 2006

AbstractIf the basic package (equivalently, being a decider) requires not only the capacity to acquire and use information, but to do so in a sense which involves the ability to represent the world and to have concepts, then it may seem hard to understand how anything but language-users could have the basic package. In that case, either perceptual consciousness does not require the basic package, or else only creatures with language can be perceptually conscious. It is argued that both alternatives should be rejected. There are no good reasons to adopt sufficiently strong assumptions about the relations between information, belief, concepts, and language. Discussions of the contrary views of Evans, Davidson, and others reinforce these points. The relevance of the notion of ‘non-conceptual content’ is also considered.
Does Absolute Income Matter?
Authors: Frank Robert H. 
Published: February 2006

Abstract
The answer to the question in the title is that abosolute income does matter. An important finding in the literature on well-being is that beyond a fairly low income threshold, measured well-being changes little as the incomes of population members rise over time. It is argued that despite the latter finding, one should be reluctant to conclude that absolute income has no bearing on human well-being.
Correspondence of Sentiments: An Explanation of the Pleasure of Social Interaction
Authors: Sugden Robert 
Published: February 2006

Abstract
This chapter offers an understanding of why the ’right’ kinds of social interaction are an important source of human happiness, while the ’wrong’ kinds generate pain. The idea of correspondence of sentiments, on which the whole argument rests, is an entirely new mechanism designed after a reinterpretation of Adam Smith’s mutual sympathy. It provides the key to a stimulating theory on the pleasure of social interaction.
Testing Theories of Happiness
Authors: Frey Bruno S. , Stutzer Alois 
Published: February 2006

AbstractLatter-day researches based on reported subjective well-being have improved the understanding of utility. The concept of utility has acquired a psychological content, and has proved to be operational in researches on income, unemployment, inflation, inequality, and democratic institutions in their relations with happiness. The authors plead for fostering happiness researches, and give examples in which happiness researches shed light on rational choice and on policy issues.
Rethinking Public Economics: The Implications of Rivalry and Habit
Authors: Layard Richard 
Published: February 2006

Abstract
Rivalry and habit have often been conceived in terms of irrationality or externality by mainstream economists. This chapter argues that this perspective is insufficient. The two classes of phenomena are empirically shown to provide a major source of human happiness, a fact that should not be ignored nor underplayed. A more realistic use of the economist’s tools is called for. Examples are discussed on the choice between consumption and leisure, benefits from public expenditure, and redistribution.
The Evolution of Caring
Authors: Phelps Charlotte D. 
Published: February 2006

Abstract
This chapter focuses on the contribution of interactions between economic change and psychological factors to changes in reports of overall happiness, especially in the U.S. Evidence emerges on an evolutionary explanation of the paradoxes of happiness in economics. This amounts to showing that co-operative attitudes, i.e. caring behaviour and love, have survived competition for scarce resources. Suggestions for social policy are discussed, especially from cases of work satisfaction and child caring.
Paradoxes of Happiness in Economics
Authors: Pasinetti Luigi 
Published: February 2006

Abstract
This chapter focuses on the return to a classical paradigm and perspective in contemporary economics implied by happiness-and-economics studies. Following critical attacks on the neoclassical paradigm through the 20th century, happiness-and-economics promises to bring into focus the fundamental criticisms that need to be addressed on the narrow scope and inadequacy of the dominant paradigm in mainstream economics.
2 A Model for Evaluating the Effectiveness of Liberal Democracies
Authors: Roller Edeltraud 
Published: February 2006

AbstractThis chapter develops a theoretical model for evaluating the effectiveness of liberal democracies. It consists of two parts. In the first part, a set of normative criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of political systems is suggested. It includes four policy goals: domestic security, wealth, socioeconomic security and socioeconomic equality, as well as the protection of the environment. In the second part, a set of indicators for measuring political effectiveness with respect to these policy goals is presented. Additionally, propositions about the relationship between the four policy goals are discussed, whether trade-offs or complementary relationships exist.
3 A Model for Explaining the Performance of Liberal Democracies
Authors: Roller Edeltraud 
Published: February 2006

Abstract
This chapter develops a causal model for explaining the performance of liberal democracies. The model builds on explanatory models from three theoretical strands: comparative research on democracy, comparative public policy, and the veto player approach advocated in the context of the new institutionalism. It integrates formal and informal institutional factors as well as the three most-important non-institutional factors for explaining performance: the national level of wealth, the ideological orientation of the government, and the openness of the economy. The causal relationship between these factors is conceptualized on the basis of rational choice institutionalism. Furthermore, this chapter includes a discussion of the constitutional and partisan veto-player indices for measuring institutions. It concludes with a set of specific hypotheses on the effect of formal and informal institutions on political effectiveness.
Conclusions
Authors: ROLLER EDELTRAUND 
Published: February 2006

AbstractThis concluding chapter summarizes the most important results of this investigation into the development of political effectiveness in western democracies since 1974, and the impact of political institutions. The findings are discussed with respect to their theoretical and practical implications. The study stresses that the effect of institutions is more complicated than most of the neo-institutionalist approaches assume. No clear predictions can be made on the basis of institutional factors. Consequently, the analyses do not support the widely-held assumption that fundamental political problems can simply be resolved through institutional reforms of liberal democracies.
1 A Theory of Exit Options, Boundary Building, and Political Structuring
Authors: Bartolini Stefano 
Published: February 2006

Abstract
This first chapter sketches the elements of a theory of voice structuring under different conditions of territorial confinement of actors and resources. Using Hirschman and Rokkan’s work, the chapter formulates theoretical propositions about how processes of internal conflict generation and opposition development (political structuring) relate to the processes of boundary demarcation in a large-scale territorial polity, and how the two relate to the internal institutional hierarchy of the same territory. A correspondence is established between micro-individual choices of exit and the corresponding systemic processes of boundary building and control; the micro-individual loyalty and the systemic structures and processes of system maintenance; and the micro-individual propensity to voice and the systemic structuring of channels and organizations for representation. It is argued that the framework is general enough to be applied to different territorial political formations, to characterize pre-nation-state polities, as well as to understand post-nation-state polities.
2 Structuring Europe: The Experience of the ‘Nation‐State’
Authors: Bartolini Stefano 
Published: February 2006

Abstract
The analytical framework sketched in Chapter One is used to review the history of state formation in Europe at a number of critical junctures from the sixteenth to the twentieth century: state formation, capitalist development and market formation, nation formation, generalisation of participation rights (democratization), and development of social sharing institutions (welfare systems). The recasting emphasizes how the processes of boundary control in various spheres contributed to the specific and historically unique constellation of centre-periphery structuring, interest intermediation structuring, and cleavage structuring in the Western experience. This key idea — that domestic political structures are historically grounded in specific configurations of economic, cultural, administrative and coercion confinement of actors and resources — suggests that political developments affecting the boundary configuration of the nation state will also affect the domestic forms of its political structures. This is the starting point for the succeeding chapters devoted to the European integration process.
4 The Political Production of the EU: Boundary Building and Boundary Removing
Authors: Bartolini Stefano 
Published: February 2006

Abstract
This chapter analyses the main activities and policies of the EU new centre in the light of their capacity to remove internal boundaries (among member states), and to set external boundaries to the new enlarged system. It focuses on the economic and the coercion boundary (with its external and internal dimensions), and then moves on to analyse those other crucial boundaries that preside over the creation of a ‘system’: identity building, participation rights, and social sharing institutions. It argues that internal boundary removal proceeded at a much higher speed and scope than external boundary setting; that the EU produced a progressive disjoining and lack of coincidence of the previously highly coterminous economic, cultural, coercion and politico-administrative boundaries of the nation states; and that while the centre consolidated economic and legal integration, it did not create a ‘system’. This configuration can be interpreted in an institutional perspective (focussing on the relationship between the institutional structure of the new centre and its strategy of boundary control) and in a political perspective (focussing on the political elites preference for externalizing the pressure for domestic change, setting external constraints that ‘objectify’ the need for internal discipline).
Elections, Parties, Democracy
Authors: McDonald Michael D. , Budge Ian 
Published: February 2006

Abstract
The book proposes a unifying conception which shows that the differences between ‘majoritarian’, ‘consensus’ and other forms of representative democracy are superficial compared to what unites them. The common element is the empowerment of the median voter by making the party (s)he votes for the median party in the legislature. Comparative evidene covering 21 democracies from 1950-1995 is assembled to check out the descriptive credentials of this idea, in contrast to the government mandate which forms the normal description and justification of democracy as providing ‘a necessary link between popular preferences and public policy’. Although, spontaneous majorities rarely emerge, median voter - median party correspondences do (72% of all governments, 82% under PR). Policy correspondence, distortion, long term bias, and responsiveness are examined in both static and dynamic terms. They reveal that underneath short-term fluctuations, the long-term equilibrium positions of governments and median voters map each other closely. Many other questions about democracy are also raised and investigated — economic and retrospective voting (‘ kicking the rascals out’): policy incrementalism, etc. — giving the book an appeal to different groups of specialists in political science. The comparative data on voting, on electoral party and government preferences, and on actual policy outputs are unsurpassed with regards to comprehensiveness over nations and time.
1 Choosing Governments or Identifying Preferences? The Role of Elections in Democracy
Authors: McDonald Michael D. , Budge Ian 
Published: February 2006

Abstract
This chapter lays out the general questions as described in the overview. Is it really satisfactory to have ‘democracy with qualifiers’ (majoritarian, consensus, and so on) each justified in their own terms? A unifying median mandate approach is proposed which also gives a guarantee of a necessary connection between popular preferences and public policy, which no other account of representative democracy provides.
3 Communicating Preferences: The Public Policy Space
Authors: McDonald Michael D. , Budge Ian 
Published: February 2006

AbstractFor democracy to work, politicians and electors have to see the world in the same party–related terms. Evidence is cited from both surveys and party programmes to show this must be the Left–Right dimension. However, issues get squeezed into this only during and round about elections. In inter–election periods, ministerial and procedural structures may well divide political issues up into separable domains, raising the possibility that different parliamentary medians exist, depending on the subject under discussion. This possibility has to be built into our research design.
Choices Parties Offer
Authors: McDonald Michael D. , Budge Ian 
Published: February 2006

AbstractParties and their programmes form the alternatives electors vote for under modern representative democracy. A precondition of mandate theory, as opposed to convergence theories of democracy, is that parties offer clear choices. This chapter asks — Are there choices? Are the choices gently graded or sharply polarised? Are the policy alternatives on offer clear? Do the specific issues within the parties’ bundles fall along a Left–Right continuum correlated with each other, and with the overall party position.
9 From Declared to Actual Policy: Short‐Term Influences on Government Policies
Authors: McDonald Michael D. , Budge Ian 
Published: February 2006

AbstractManifestoes and declarations state priorities for policy rather than getting down to the nitty-gritty. Actual decision-making involves the allocation of scarce resources, and this is examined in this chapter. The policies selected are those that square with those investigated in government declarations. One involves two sets of indicators of the size of a country's public economy — one for 1982 and another for 1992 — measured by central government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP). These are analyzed in relationship both to the Left–Right positions of electorates, parliaments, and governments as well as to the planning versus market orientation of parliaments, governments, and finance ministries. A second set comes from two indicators of support for welfare. One is Esping–Anderson's (1990) scoring of welfare provision from the early 1980s; the other is the level of social spending as a percentage of GDP from the early 1990s. The third policy is covered by another two indicators, of a peaceful versus militarist orientation to international affairs. One is the level of foreign economic aid as a percentage of GDP from the early 1980s, and the other the ratio of foreign economic aid to defence spending from the early 1990s.
12 Politics and Policy Regimes: Setting a Long‐Term Equilibrium
Authors: McDonald Michael D. , Budge Ian 
Published: February 2006

AbstractThis chapter clinches the previous analysis by linking equilibria on both sides, (politics and policy) showing that they correspond closely. Broadly speaking, political preferences are transmitted from median voter to median parliamentary party, from that to government, and then to ministries in the sequence postulated by the median mandate. This implies that under the froth and change of politics, certain stable processes continue, and these are in conformity with a median mandate interpretation of democratic processes.
13 Unifying Theories of Democracy Through the Median Mandate
Authors: McDonald Michael D. , Budge Ian 
Published: February 2006

AbstractThis chapter brings together and tries to answer the questions about democratic politics raised in the text, many of which are classical questions of democratic theory. The purpose here is to bring them together in an integrated account, based on the validated median mandate view of the democratic process. It is shown that this underpins the workings of both ‘consensus’ and ‘majoritarian’ democracy ;provides a normative criterion for evaluating election rules; ; andbrings representative democracy closer to direct democracy.
Assessing semantic similarity measures for the characterization of human regulatory pathways
Authors: Guo Xiang , Liu Rongxiang , Shriver Craig D. , Hu Hai , Liebman Michael N. 
Published: February 2006

Abstract
Motivation: Pathway modeling requires the integration of multiple data including prior knowledge. In this study, we quantitatively assess the application of Gene Ontology (GO)-derived similarity measures for the characterization of direct and indirect interactions within human regulatory pathways. The characterization would help the integration of prior pathway knowledge for the modeling.
Results: Our analysis indicates information content-based measures outperform graph structure-based measures for stratifying protein interactions. Measures in terms of GO biological process and molecular function annotations can be used alone or together for the validation of protein interactions involved in the pathways. However, GO cellular component-derived measures may not have the ability to separate true positives from noise. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the functional similarity of proteins within known regulatory pathways decays rapidly as the path length between two proteins increases. Several logistic regression models are built to estimate the confidence of both direct and indirect interactions within a pathway, which may be used to score putative pathways inferred from a scaffold of molecular interactions.
Contact: s.guo@wriwindber.org
Matched-pairs tests of homogeneity with applications to homologous nucleotide sequences
Authors: Ababneh Faisal , Jermiin Lars S. , Ma Chunsheng , Robinson John 
Published: February 2006

Abstract
Motivation: Most phylogenetic methods assume that the sequences of nucleotides or amino acids have evolved under stationary, reversible and homogeneous conditions. When these assumptions are violated by the data, there is an increased probability of errors in the phylogenetic estimates. Methods to examine aligned sequences for these violations are available, but they are rarely used, possibly because they are not widely known or because they are poorly understood.
Results: We describe and compare the available tests for symmetry of k-dimensional contingency tables from homologous sequences, and develop two new tests to evaluate different aspects of the evolutionary processes. For any pair of sequences, we consider a partition of the test for symmetry into a test for marginal symmetry and a test for internal symmetry. The proposed tests can be used to identify appropriate models for estimation of evolutionary relationships under a Markovian model. Simulations under more or less complex evolutionary conditions were done to display the performance of the tests. Finally, the tests were applied to an alignment of small-subunit ribosomal RNA sequences of five species of bacteria to outline the evolutionary processes under which they evolved.
Availability: Programs written in R to do the tests on nucleotides are available from
Contact: lars.jermiin@usyd.edu.au
Thyroid function in human immunodeficiency virus patients treated with highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART): a longitudinal study
Authors: Madeddu Giordano , Spanu Angela , Chessa Francesca , Calia Giovanna Maria , Lovigu Carla , Solinas Patrizia , Mannazzu Marco , Falchi Antonio , Mura Maria Stella , Madeddu Giuseppe 
Published: February 2006

SummaryObjective  Given that few and controversial data have been reported on thyroid function in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) patients on highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), we further investigated whether HAART affects thyroid hormones.Design and patients  Two hundred two consecutive adult HIV patients in stable clinical condition were enrolled, 182 on HAART and 20 naïve; 128 were rechecked during follow‐up. Body mass index (BMI), CD4 cell count, HIV RNA, hepatitis C and B virus status and infection duration were determined in all HIV patients and HAART duration in treated patients. In all patients and in 60 controls, the following were measured: FT4 and FT3 by radioimmunoassay; TSH, antithyroid peroxidase (TPO) and antithyroglobulin (TG) antibodies by immunoradiometric assay.Results  Abnormalities in thyroid function tests were found in 23/182 (12·6%) HAART patients, but not in naïve patients. Most abnormalities were subclinical hypothyroidism, with mean FT4 and TSH levels lower and higher, respectively, in HAART patients compared to naïve patients and controls, FT4 levels being significantly lower than controls. TSH negatively correlated with CD4 count nadir and positively with HAART duration. During follow‐up, FT4 and FT3 significantly decreased and TSH increased in patients continuing HAART, whereas CD4 counts were unmodified; subclinical hypothyroid conditions persisted and further cases occurred, whereas the only hypothyroid patient who interrupted HAART shows a normalization of thyroid tests. Patients on stavudine, included in most hypothyroid patient protocols, had significantly lower FT4 levels with prolonged treatment.Conclusions  HAART, particularly stavudine, is associated with a high prevalence of subclinical hypothyroidism. Hypotheses are made regarding responsible mechanisms and risk factors. Thyroid function should be tested and sequentially rechecked in HAART patients.