Candidate selection is a major function exercised by political parties. Yet they differ a lot regarding who selects their candidates, varying on both dimensions of inclusiveness and centralisation. One can wonder whether these variations in the modes of candidate selection do really matter. The paper classifies ten Belgian political parties, for two federal elections – a regular (2007) and an earl

Political parties throughout Europe are witnessing a significant professionalization of their daily functioning. Professionalization refers to an institutional process “by which professionals become more central to an organization, in this case a party” (Webb & Kolodny 2006: 338). The centrality of professionals is most obvious in parties’ reliance on an expanding body of professional staff me

Political Data Yearbook

This chapter analyses a ‘negative case’ of change in candidate section. Although one expects the political crisis to trigger the emergence of new parties – and together with them of innovative (inclusive) forms of candidate selection, no major reform of internal party democracy has been observed in Belgium. The last decades have witnessed the rise of new parties, but these rather tend to select th

A black box in the study of representation in European democracies is our knowledge about elected but also unelected candidates. What is their background? How are they recruited? What are their campaign aims, strategies, resources and tools? How do they relate to their (constituency and central) party and their voters? How do they consider democratic governance at national and European levels? Thi

The Neotropical region is the most biodiverse on Earth, in a large part due to the highly diverse tropical Andean biota. The Andes are a potentially important driver of diversification within the mountains and for neighboring regions. We compared the role of the Andes in diversification among three subtribes of Ithomiini butterflies endemic to the Neotropics, Dircennina, Oleriina, and Godyridina.

We derive an analytic expression for the composition of a ternary solid material nucleating from a quaternary liquid melt. The calculations are based on the two-component nucleation theory with realistic descriptions of the liquid and solid phases. We apply this theory to gold-catalyzed, nucleation limited vapor-liquid-solid growth of ternary III-V nanowires. We consider ternary gallium, indium, a

Mitophagy is a conserved cellular process that is important for autophagic removal of damaged mitochondria to maintain a healthy mitochondrial population. Mitophagy also appears to occur in plants and has roles in development, stress response, senescence, and programmed cell death. However, many of the genes that control mitophagy in yeast and animal cells are absent from plants, and no plant prot

In response to customer specific service time guarantee requirements, service providers can offer differentiated services. Although response time agreements offer more flexibility, most of the theoretical models for customer differentiation are based on fill rates, due to the difficulty of calculating the response time distribution in the presence of priorities. In this paper we focus on the (S−1,

An extremely acid mine soil polluted with Cu was amended with pine bark, crushed mussel shell or a 1:1 mixture of these two by-products. The performance of the soil microbial community was measured as the bacterial and fungal community growth, which were monitored during 2 years following the amendments. Pine bark caused significant increases of microbial growth rates, but with distinct difference

In this work we report on the increase in photocurrent obtained by using thylakoid membranes “wired” with an osmium redox polymer (OsRP) immobilized onto screen-printed carbon and gold electrodes (SPCEs and SPAuEs), modified with gold microparticles (AuMPs) and gold nanoparticles (AuNPs). Both AuMPs and AuNPs were electrodeposited by using the same electrodeposition method in order to study the in

Previous inferences of oyster-dominated communities occupying mangrove-like depositional settings in the Kristianstad Basin, Sweden, during the late early Campanian are reassessed. A significant percentage of oysters (Acutostrea incurva) from the Belemnellocamax mammillatus zone in Bed 3 at Åsen bear indentations on their left valves indicating attachment to plant axes. Many of these axes bear mor

We examined associations between prenatal exposure to perfluorohexane sulfonic acid (PFHxS), perfluoroheptanoic acid (PFHpA), perfluorononanoic acid (PFNA), and perfluorodecanic acid (PFDA) - and child behaviour (SDQ-total) and hyperactivity (sub-scale) at 5–9 years of age in birth cohorts from Greenland and Ukraine. Pregnancy serum samples (N = 1023) were analysed for perfluoroalkyl substances (P

Solution techniques such as small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) play a central role in structural studies of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs); yet, due to low resolution, it is generally necessary to combine SAXS with additional experimental sources of data and to use molecular simulations. Computational methods for the calculation of theoretical SAXS intensity profiles can be separated in

Serpentinite-hosted ecosystems are potential sites where life may first have evolved on Earth. Serpentinization reactions produce strongly reducing and highly alkaline fluids that are typified by high concentrations of molecular hydrogen (H2) and methane (CH4), which can be used as an energy source by chemosynthetic life. Low-temperature serpentinization at slow-spreading mid-ocean ridges provides