Electoral systems are uniquely distributive political institutions that shape political outcomes, yet are themselves endogenously shaped outcomes of political choices. In Poland, party system development has involved not only parties adapting to electoral institutions in each election, but also parties modifying these institutions prior to every election. We model electoral system change as dri...

Open government facilitate citizens access to government records, through Freedom of Information laws, and through government archives after a period of years (e.g. 20) has elapsed. However, there are growing challenges in established archival processes that have been brought about by the introduction of digital records and the consequent breakdown of the pre-existing administrative practices w...

Personal Health Records (PHRs), patient-controlled information systems, are believed to be a key to transform healthcare. We argue that a single system, no matter how it is designed, is highly unlikely to have the power to reconfigure a whole sectors. PHRs are not merely technical objects that exist on their own but they should be considered as socio-technical arrangements of systems and users ...

BACKGROUND Although the prognosis for survival in people with severe functional disabilities is a serious concern for their families and health care practitioners, there have been few reports on survival rates for this population. Every year, the Japanese Association of Welfare for Persons with Severe Motor and Intellectual Disability collects anonymous records of individual registrations and d...

PURPOSE The number of elders in institutions has increased as family supporting systems have changed in Korea. The purpose of this study were to understand the life satisfaction among elders in institutions and to identify the factors influencing on life satisfaction. METHODS The instruments used were Yun(1982)'s scale modified Memorial University of Newfoundland Scale for Happiness(MUNSH) in...

Home observations during childhood and criminal records 30 years later are used to address questions of relative impact among features of child rearing influencing male criminal outcomes. The results suggest two mechanisms: Maternal behavior appears to influence juvenile delinquency and, through those eflects, adult criminali@. Paternal interaction with the family, however, appears to have a mo...

Traditionally, political scientists define political institutions deductively. This approach may prevent from discovery of existing institutions beyond the definitions. Here, a principal component analysis was used for an inductive extraction of dimensions in Polity IV data on the political institutions of all nations in the world the last two centuries. Three dimensions of institutions were re...

Although firms use various strategies to try to influence government policy, with lobbying and corruption chiefly among them, and political institutions play an important role in determining policy choices, very little research has been devoted to these topics. This paper tries to fill this gap. Using cross-country enterprise-level data, it investigates (1) the effect of a key political institu...

Historians have long used maternity records to understand the evolution of maternity services. More recently, epidemiologists have become interested in obstetric hospital records as a source of data (e.g. birth weight, social class), to study the influence of early life on future health and disease: life course epidemiology. Edinburgh and Aberdeen are unusual in holding detailed records from se...