1,721,077 research outputs found
When Territory Matters: Parliamentary Profiles and Legislative Behaviour in Italy (1987–2008)
No full textThis paper ponders the question of whether Members of Parliaments’ (MPs) previous experiences and personal attributes may have any impact on the way they behave once elected. In agreement with a recent stream of literature, the authors hypothesise that MPs with strong territorial roots might behave as agents of the local community, promoting its interests and demands in their parliamentary activity. The assertion that individual biographies influence legislative activity in parliamentary democracies runs counter to the commonly held view that in this kind of institutional setting, legislative assemblies are dominated by parties, leaving little room for individually oriented behaviour and little incentive to do anything that is not coordinated by party organisations. The article builds an original ‘index of localness’, the main independent variable, based on the place of birth and previous political experience at local level of MPs. Then, taking into
account territorially targeted Private Members’ Bills as a proxy for the territorial behaviour of each legislator, the hypothesis is tested by looking at both aggregate evidence and individual-level data. Aggregate data support the hypothesis, as they show a monotonically increasing relationship between the two variables: the more a legislator is linked to his/her territory, the more (on average) he/she will sponsor bills concerning the local area. Individual-level data confirm this finding, as the correlation between the two variables also holds when entering a number of control variables
N-3 fatty acids in the Mediterranean diet
No full textA review. Dietary fats in countries in the Mediterranean basin are typically represented by olive oil, but high consumptions of vegetables and to some extent of fish also result in appreciable intakes of n-3 fatty acids. Various plant foods are relatively rich in a-linolenic acid (ALA, C18:3n-3), while the generally moderate consumption of fish, except for certain communities living close to the sea, contributes to dietary intakes of long-chain n-3 fatty acids. Although the amts. of fats in ALA-contg. plant foods are low, the relatively high concns. of this fatty acid and the large portions consumed allow to reach appreciable doses of ALA that can have favorable effects in cardiovascular protection. Consumption of relatively small amts. of certain typical dry fruits, such as walnuts, provides a sizable supply of ALA that can be efficiently converted to eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA, C20:5n-3). Rather typical wild foods in certain countries, i.e. snails and frogs, are also appreciable sources of ALA. Thus, the consumption of typical Mediterranean foods provides relevant intakes of n-3 fatty acids, esp. ALA, that appears to be efficiently absorbed and transformed at least to EP
A method for the direct evaluation of the fatty acid status in a drop of blood from a fingertip in humans : applicability to nutritional and epidemiological studies
No full textSeveral studies have shown that the fatty acid composition of circulating lipids reflects dietary fat intake, in turn being related to health status. The fatty acid composition of plasma lipids is therefore an important parameter in studies on dietary interventions. The aim of our study was to develop a rapid and inexpensive method for the analysis of circulating fatty acids applicable to large population groups. Drops of blood collected from fingertips have been directly subjected to transmethylation for gas chromatography analysis. This new method, validated for reproducibility, has been compared with the conventional method, based on withdrawal of blood from the antecubital vein followed by lipid extraction, and identical data have been obtained with the two techniques. Observed and predicted differences between blood and plasma fatty acids are related to the contribution of circulating cell membranes in blood. Finally the application of the methods to samples from 100 healthy subjects and the assessed correlation between dietary habits and blood fatty acid profiles demonstrate the validity of the new method and its applicability to nutritional and epidemiological studie
Rebels with a cause – but which one? Defections from legislative party unity in Italy and their individual and institutional determinants
No full textThe topic of legislative party unity has received growing attention from scholars of comparative politics in recent years; however, the study of legislative party unity in the Italian context has been by and large excluded from most of the literature. The purpose of this article is to fill this gap by shedding light on the magnitude of the phenomenon of legislative voting defections and offering some possible explanations for these defections. Drawing on an original dataset spanning over three legislative terms (13th, 14th, and 15th), the results of this study suggest that the traditional image of Italian politics dominated by strong party organisations overwhelming the individual components of representation is to a large extent still valid, at least in the field of legislative voting. This does not mean that parties are able to perfectly control the parliamentary activity of their members. On the contrary, defections from the official party line are present in Italy as in other parliamentary democracies and here too they are driven by the structure of opportunities in which elected representatives operate. In particular, we show that individual characteristics have no discernable impact on legislative voting, while party reputation, inclusion in government coalitions, and the electoral system are all relevant factors in explaining the propensity of MPs to break party discipline
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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