Immigration-related political culture and support for radical right parties

Radical right parties are not equally successful across or within all countries. Most studies have up to now relied on socio-economic, socio-structural and political factors to explain these differences. We examine whether the immigration-related political culture – consisting of integration policies and shared conservative values – in which voters are embedded influences radical right voting. We argue that more exclusive immigration-culture is related to more support for radical right parties. Furthermore, the relationship between immigration attitudes and radical right support is expected to be moderated by immigration-culture. With multilevel regression models using data from the 2011 Swiss Electoral Studies (SELECTS) we compare the effect of immigration-culture in 26 Swiss cantons. We find that cantonal immigration-culture (assessed with integration regimes and shared conservative beliefs) increases radical right support and the effect of individuals' immigration attitude on radical right support is stronger when immigration-culture is exclusive.     

Resource Allocation in Integrated Preoperational and Operational Management of Natural Hazards

The management of natural hazards occurring over a territory entails two main phases: a preoperational —or pre-event—phase, whose objective is to relocate resources closer to sites characterized by the highest hazard, and an operational —during the event—phase, whose objective is to manage in real time the available resources by allocating them to sites where their intervention is needed. Obviously, the two phases are closely related, and demand a unified and integrated treatment. This work presents a unifying framework that integrates various decisional problems arising in the management of different kinds of natural hazards. The proposed approach, which is based on a mathematical programming formulation, can support the decisionmakers in the optimal resource allocation before (preoperational phase) and during (operational phase) an emergency due to natural hazard events. Different alternatives of modeling the resources and the territory are proposed and discussed according to their appropriateness in the preoperational and operational phases. The proposed approach can be applied to the management of any natural hazard and, from an integration perspective, may be particularly useful for risk management in civil protection operations. An application related to the management of wildfire hazard is presented.     

Mothers' Cognitions about Children's Self‐control: Implications for Mothers' Responses to Children's Helplessness

This research examined the role of mothers' cognitions about children's self‐control in their responses to children's helplessness. Mothers and their four‐year‐old children (N = 109) were asked to work on a difficult task in the laboratory. Mothers' hostility and warmth as well as children's helpless (vs. mastery) behavior were coded every minute. Mothers also completed a set of questionnaires assessing their cognitions about children's self‐control. Hierarchical linear modeling indicated variability among mothers in their minute‐to‐minute hostility, but not warmth, in response to children's helplessness. Mothers' cognitions contributed to this variability: The more mothers placed importance on, worried about, and believed they could influence their children's self‐control, the more hostility they demonstrated following their children's helplessness.