High-amylose maize starch (HAMS) can lead to succinate accumulation in the rat colon depending on the colonic microbiota. Since succinate is primarily produced via the vitamin B12 (VB12)-dependent succinate pathway, limited VB12 availability in the colon may impair fermentation. While a portion of dietary VB12 may reach the colon, most of it is absorbed in the upper gastrointestinal tract, potentially resulting in an insufficient supply for colonic bacteria. This study aimed to determine the minimum caecal VB12 concentration required to prevent succinate accumulation and to assess whether dietary cobalt (Co), a structural component of VB12 and its analogues, promotes microbial VB12 analogue synthesis. Sprague-Dawley male rats were used in three experiments. In Experiment 1, HAMS-fed rats were given diets with increasing VB12 doses. Caecal succinate concentrations decreased dose-dependently, with a predicted threshold of 74 pmol/g VB12 required to prevent accumulation. In Experiment 2, rats were fed HAMS diets with varying Co levels. Co supplementation significantly increased VB12-equivalent concentrations, measured by microbiological assay, from 27 to 915 pmol/g without altering cobalamin concentrations, suggesting enhanced microbial synthesis of VB12 analogues. Caecal succinate levels decreased with increasing Co intake, mimicking the effects of dietary VB12. In Experiment 3, rats were fed HAMS diets with or without high-dose Co to confirm these effects and assess microbiota changes. Co supplementation restored the abundance of Akkermansia, which utilises VB12 and its analogues. These findings suggest that maintaining sufficient colonic VB12 – through direct supplementation or Co-stimulated microbial production – may help mitigate HAMS-induced succinate accumulation and support balanced colonic fermentation.

No‐confidence motions (NCMs) are attempts by opposition parties to publicise the government's failings in a salient policy arena, and previous research has shown that they often negatively affect citizens' evaluations of governing parties' competence and damage their electoral prospects. Yet currently there is a lack of understanding of how opposition parties respond ideologically to these NCMs. It is argued in this article that opposition parties should distance themselves from the government challenged by NCMs to show that they are different from the incompetent government and to compete for the votes that the government is likely to lose. Using a sample of 19 advanced democracies from 1970–2007, empirical evidence is presented that NCMs encourage political parties to move their positions away from the government's position, especially in the presence of reinforcing negative signals about government performance. These results have important implications for our understanding of opposition party policy change, for the economic voting literature, and for the spatial and valence models of party competition.

Our review and evaluation focus on the theoretical adequacy of spatial representations of voting and party competition based on survey data. Key assumptions underlying discussion are: (1) voting cannot be properly explained without regard to party competition and vice versa; (2) the type of input crucially determines the nature of the space produced; (3) there is a basic and far-reaching distinction between pure policy-spaces with untrammelled party movement, and other spaces used to represent voting and party competition; (4) explanation requires the use of variables conceptually and if possible temporally antecedent to voting choice. Judged by these criteria current dimensional analyses reveal severe technical limitations (Section 2) and formalizations of their associated hypotheses also reveal theoretical limitations (Section 3). Both prompt an examination and formalization of other approaches not yet common in dimensional analysis (Section 4), which enhance its explanatory potential and foster convergence with other research.

By far the most important issue in national politics was the national referendum on 28 September on Denmark’s participation in the third stage of the EMU, the single currency. After the Danish voters in a national referendum in June 1992 had rejected the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, the Danish government in December 1993 reached an agreement in Edinburgh with the other EU member states. The agreement included four policy areas in which Denmark would not participate fully in the work of the EU (see Political Data Yearbook 1993, pp. 416ff.). The Edinburgh agreement was confirmed by a national referendum in May 1993. Ever since the wisdom of upholding the four exceptions has been an important issue in Danish politics dividing the voters into two almost equal halves. An integral part of the Edinburgh agreement was that the Danish government could only lift the exceptions if it was confirmed by the voters in a national referendum. It was not for the political parties in Parliament to decide alone.

Representative democracy gives voters the right to influence who governs but its influence on policy making is only indirect. Free and fair referendums give voters the right to decide a policy directly. Elected representatives usually oppose referendums as redundant at best and as undermining their authority at worst. Democratic theorists tend to take electing representatives as normal and as normatively superior. The nominal association of popular decision making and populism has strengthened this negative view. Public opinion surveys show substantial support for holding referendums on important issues. Two major theories offer contrasting explanations for popular support for referendums; they reflect populist values or a commitment to the civic value of participation. This innovative paper tests an integrated model of both theories by the empirical analysis of a 17‐country European survey. There is substantial support for all three civic hypotheses: referendum endorsement is positively influenced by attitudes towards participation, democratic ideals and whether elected representatives are perceived as responsive. By contrast, there is no support for populist hypotheses that the socioeconomically weak and excluded favour referendums and minimal support for the effect of extreme ideologies. The conclusion shows that most criticisms of referendums also apply to policy making by elected representatives. While referendums have limits on their use, there is a democratic argument for holding such ballots on major issues to see whether or not a majority of voters endorse the choice of their nominal representatives.

There is broad consensus that lobbyists with government experience are valuable to those who employ them, principally because they possess contacts in government and unique insights into the policy process. Yet the near exclusive focus on government experience as the defining feature of lobbyist careers, means the literature has neglected analysis of the mix of different (and important) experiences that actual lobbyists likely accumulate during their careers. We address these gaps through analysis of the career sequences of over 600 lobbyists operating across contract and in‐house roles in Australia. Using the tools of sequence and cluster analysis, we identify four broad types of careers among lobbyists. While half of all lobbyists have had roles with some direct political experience, we find that distinctions between types of lobbying careers are differentiated by experience in other fields such as journalism, public relations, associations and corporate life. Moreover, our multivariate analysis shows that different career types are more strongly associated with in‐house versus contract lobbying roles. We conclude that scholars should move beyond a focus on ‘revolving doors’ to more directly analyse the range of experiences that lobbyists leverage in their professional lives.

Minister of Health Tibor Šagát resigned in July under the pressure of criticism of the functioning of the health care system. The spark that launched the campaign against Šagát was events connected to the President’s serious health problems and misgivings related to the adequacy of his treatment. Šagát was replaced by Roman Kovác (1940, male SDK-DU).

The model of ‘consociational democracy’ is no longer regarded in Anglo-Saxon countries as a curiosity but may be in danger of being accepted too uncritically as a model for the resolution of divisions within a society. This argument is applied in particular to the cases of Canada and Northern Ireland, to suggest that the effect of attempting to introduce consociational practices might make matters worse.

Scholarship has increasingly acknowledged the importance of public attitudes for shaping the European Union's Common Foreign and Security Policy. Economic sanctions emerged as one of CFSP's central tools. Yet despite the emergence of sanctions as a popular instrument in the EU foreign policy toolbox, public attitudes towards sanctions are yet to be studied in depth. This article explains public support for EU sanctions, using the empirical example of sanctions against Russia. It looks at geopolitical attitudes, economic motivations and ideational factors to explain the variation in public support for sanctions. The conclusion suggests that geopolitical factors are the most important, and that economic factors matter very little. Euroscepticism and anti‐Americanism play an important role in explaining the support for sanctions at the individual level.

Chamber of deputies. The party composition of the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic was very stable. Only one change took place, the first since the beginning of the term of the Parliament. On 26 October, Marie Machatá seceded from the political group Freedom Union (US) and became an independent deputy. The reason for her secession was disappointment with the ‘inconsistent right-wing opposition policy of the Freedom Union’. On 15 November Machatá entered the Czech National Social Party (ČSNS). She assessed her change as an expression of courage and responsibility and refused admonitions that she had betrayed the voters. As of 31 December, there were 5 political clubs in the Chamber of Deputies, and one deputy was independent. The political group of ČSSD consisted of 74 members, ODS – 63, KSCM – 24, KDU-Č SL – 20, US – 18 members. The number of deputies of the party in power ČSSD and the main opposition party ODS remained unaltered.

During the COVID‐19 pandemic, the imposition of moralistically justified costs on unvaccinated individuals was used to incentivize vaccination uptake. Here, we ask whether such a strategy creates adverse consequences in the form of lowered trust in the pandemic response among unvaccinated individuals, which could jeopardize their compliance with the broader set of health interventions. As our empirical case, we use a press conference held by the Danish government on 8 November 2021, where COVID‐19‐vaccination passports were reintroduced, in part, to pressure unvaccinated people to take up the vaccine. We analyse the effects of the press conference using daily, nationally representative survey data (total N = 24,934) employing a difference‐in‐differences design. We demonstrate that the press conference decreased the trust in the pandemic management by 11 percentage points among unvaccinated individuals, while trust remained high among vaccinated individuals. Moralistic cost imposition also reduced collective action motivation and coping appraisal among unvaccinated individuals, and, while it increased societal threat appraisal among vaccinated people, it failed to do so among unvaccinated individuals. Our findings imply that decision‐makers using moralized cost imposition as a health intervention should be aware of its potential unintended adverse consequences.

This article examines how Latina Republican Congressional candidates frame themselves as both embodying and representing the “real Latino electorate,” who they claim has been ignored in the U.S. political arena. In this article, I engage in an in-depth analysis of these candidates — including content analyses of their public interviews, speeches, advertisements, websites, newspaper coverage, and social media presences — in four border districts in Texas. I find that the ways in which these candidates strategically reframe Latinidad and the immigrant experience to align with Republican ideology allow these candidates to advocate for comprehensive immigration reform while simultaneously engaging in the Latino threat narrative that dehumanizes the very community they claim to represent. More specifically, these candidates articulate an alternate, intersectional vision of Latinidad which presents Latino immigrant women and children as victims, Latino immigrant men as criminals, and themselves as unique authorities on immigration given their status as border patrol wives. These candidates’ race-gender consciousness also allows these candidates to express political anger, which has generally been denied to women of color in the Republican Party. In so doing, they offer a pointed critique claiming that Latinos are a captured group in American political parties.

This article investigates to what extent social democratic parties still benefit from the support of union members at the polls. Not only are social democratic parties confronted with new competitors in the party systems, but also the union confederations of the socialist labour movement are in some countries losing their dominant position due to the rise of separate professional confederations. It is argued in the article that the effect of union membership on voting choice is conditioned by the structure of the trade union movement. The support of union members for social democracy is fostered by the strength of the confederations historically close to this party family, while it is hampered when strong separate (or politically unaffiliated) white‐collar confederations exist. Using European Social Survey and Swedish Public Opinion data, the article shows that social democratic parties still enjoy important support from trade union members, but at the same time are under fierce competition from bourgeois and green parties among members of white‐collar confederations. This reinforces the challenges for social democracy to build new voters’ coalitions in post‐industrial societies.

The optimal jurisdiction size has been debated since Plato and Aristotle. A large literature has studied economic and democratic scale effects, but we have almost no knowledge of the effects of jurisdiction size on the effectiveness of local services. This is due to two methodological problems. First, selection bias and reverse causality often render change in jurisdiction size an endogenous variable. Second, there is a lack of empirical indicators of effectiveness, and most studies therefore focus on spending measures. Extant research thus studies economies of scale, leaving effectiveness of scale unexamined. We address both problems in a quasi‐experimental study of public schools. Our findings from the school area indicate that jurisdiction size does not have systematic effects on effectiveness. Our analysis therefore supports recent studies of economic and democratic scale effects that indicate that the search for the optimal jurisdiction size is futile.