Germany went to the polls on Sunday, May 25 to elect 96 members of the European Parliament, by far the country in Europe that elects most delegates. The 96 members were elected by a pure proportional electoral system, a real novelty for nationwide elections in Germany, where the minimum threshold has always been 5% for the national elections and 3% for the European elections. This change was th...

The dispute over the conflicting merits of proportional representation (PR) and plurality (PL) electoral systems is mainly a debate over which element, representation or stability, should be emphasized. Advocates of PR do not accept policies as democratically valid if they are made on an inadequate representational base. On the other hand, advocates of PL argue that representation is meaningles...

with level of PT is the average gap between the first and second most popular parties. Regardless of electoral system, which has little association with it, this is the party system variable that is most closely linked with level of PT. It is this form of party system competitiveness that best fosters PT. In terms of elite strategy, grand coalitions very obviously provide the most effective way...

Human convalescent whooping cough serum and whole blood injected intramuscularly have been tried and reported on favourably in whooping cough cases as a curative and prophylactic measure. Some workers claim good results from treatment with injection of maternal whole blood. The writer tried this latter method of treatment in a series of 76 cases, out of which 3 discontinued treatment and one di...

A lagrangian for gauge fields coupled to fermions with the Kac-Moody group as its gauge group yields, for the pure fermions sector, an ideal gas of Kac-Moody fermions. The canonical partition function for the Û(1) case is shown to have a maximum temperature kTM = |λ|/π, where λ is the coupling of the super charge operator G0 to the fermions. This result is similar to the case of strings but unl...