Search results for "ELECTION"
showing 10 items of 2159 documents
VOX Spain: The Organisational Challenges of a New Radical Right Party
2021
This article examines the organisation of VOX, a new radical right party in Spain. It shows that the party has taken early and uneven steps to build a mass organisation and initially opted for open membership recruitment with participatory organisational elements. Also, the party’s rapid growth and quick entrance into political institutions at different state levels led the party leadership to establish more centralised control and limit members’ prerogatives, though recruitment continued. Centralisation in part responds to organisational needs given the party’s quickly acquired political relevance, but also to the desire of the central party leadership to forestall the articulation of terr…
Silvio’s Party
2015
Italy is going through a new crisis in its party system comparable in many respects to the one that brought down the First Republic at the beginning of the 1990s. On 12 November 2011, against the background of a global economic and financial crisis that hit the southern countries in the euro zone particularly severely with Italy according to the experts threatened with bankruptcy in the same way as Greece and Portugal, Silvio Berlusconi, under pressure from Brussels and the financial markets, was forced to tender his resignation as Italy’s Prime minister. A few days later, the President of the Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, appointed Professor Mario Monti who quickly put together a governmen…
Charismatic Leaders in a New Perspective: Reality in Estonia and Italy
2020
The purpose of this explorative study is to put the existing theories on charismatic political leadership in a current post-web media context. It also seeks to better understand why “charismatic politicians” seem to have success in present-day cyber politics. The paper considers political charisma in a Weberian perspective and aims to explain what elements it includes in a current electoral environment characterized by a fast-changing media landscape. The paper places the existing theoretical models in the context of two European societies, by comparing Estonia and Italy as case studies. Estonia, a small ex-Soviet country has emerged in recent years as an advanced e-society with highly “int…
Larval life history, transmission strategies, and the evolution of intermediate host exploitation by complex life-cycle parasites
2007
Complex life-cycle parasites use their intermediate hosts both as an energy source and as a vessel for transmission to the next host in the life cycle. Parasites that grow rapidly to a large size may have high fitness (e.g. time spent in uninfective stages is limited), yet those that grow too aggressively may reduce host viability and their own probability of successful transmission. I examined aspects of both the growth and transmission strategy of an acanthocephalan (Acanthocephalus lucii) in its isopod intermediate host. In an experimental infection, the relative rate of larval parasite growth slowed over time, and eventually parasites seemed to reach a threshold biomass sustainable by t…
Liikunnan aineenopettajakoulutuksen opiskelijavalinnat muutoksessa
2012
Island selection on mammalian life-histories: genetic differentiation in offspring size
2008
BACKGROUND: Since Darwin's pioneering work, evolutionary changes in isolated island populations of vertebrates have continued to provide the strongest evidence for the theory of natural selection. Besides macro-evolutionary changes, micro-evolutionary changes and the relative importance of natural selection vs. genetic drift are under intense investigation. Our study focuses on the genetic differentiation in morphological and life-history traits in insular populations of a small mammal the bank vole Myodes glareolus. RESULTS: Our results do not support the earlier findings for larger adult size or lower reproductive effort in insular populations of small mammals. However, the individuals li…
Genome-wide mapping of signatures of selection using a high-density array identified candidate genes for growth traits and local adaptation in chicke…
2023
Abstract Background Availability of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotyping arrays and progress in statistical analyses have allowed the identification of genomic regions and genes under selection in chicken. In this study, SNP data from the 600 K Affymetrix chicken array were used to detect signatures of selection in 23 local Italian chicken populations. The populations were categorized into four groups for comparative analysis based on live weight (heavy vs light) and geographical area (Northern vs Southern Italy). Putative signatures of selection were investigated by combining three extended haplotype homozygosity (EHH) statistical approaches to quantify excess of haplotype homoz…
Semantics of Voids within Data: Ignorance-Aware Machine Learning
2021
Operating with ignorance is an important concern of geographical information science when the objective is to discover knowledge from the imperfect spatial data. Data mining (driven by knowledge discovery tools) is about processing available (observed, known, and understood) samples of data aiming to build a model (e.g., a classifier) to handle data samples that are not yet observed, known, or understood. These tools traditionally take semantically labeled samples of the available data (known facts) as an input for learning. We want to challenge the indispensability of this approach, and we suggest considering the things the other way around. What if the task would be as follows: how to buil…
Tutkiva oppiminen evoluution opetuksessa lukiossa
2017
Uusi opetussuunnitelma velvoittaa opettajia kokeellisuuden ja tutkimuksellisuuden hyödyntämiseen opetuksessa, ja eräs keino tähän on tutkiva oppiminen. Tutkivassa oppimisessa tietoa ei omaksuta suoraan oppikirjasta tai opettajalta, vaan sitä hankitaan tieteelle tuttujen toimintamallien, kuten kysymysten, hypoteesien, selitysten ja kokeiden avulla. Tutkivan oppimisen vaiheet muodostavat yhdessä tutkivan oppimisen polun, jossa tieto tarkentuu vaihe vaiheelta. Opiskelijoita voidaan haastaa tutkivassa oppimisessa eri tavalla riippuen ovatko tutkimuskysymykset, menetelmät tai ratkaisut annettu heille etukäteen. Tutkivaa oppimista voidaan hyödyntää erilaisten aihepiirien opetuksessa kaikenikäiste…
Introgression of mitochondrial DNA among Myodes voles: consequences for energetics?
2011
Background Introgression of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is among the most frequently described cases of reticulate evolution. The tendency of mtDNA to cross interspecific barriers is somewhat counter-intuitive considering the key function of enzymes that it encodes in the oxidative-phosphorylation process, which could give rise to hybrid dysfunction. How mtDNA reticulation affects the evolution of metabolic functions is, however, uncertain. Here we investigated how morpho-physiological traits vary in natural populations of a common rodent (the bank vole, Myodes glareolus) and whether this variation could be associated with mtDNA introgression. First, we confirmed that M. glareolus harbour mtD…