Political Institutions,Elites, and Territorial Identity Formation in Belgium

Territorial identities in Belgium require a political rather than a cultural or structural explanation. The forces behind the development of identities in Flanders, Wallonia, Brussels and the German-speaking area are similar to the ones that produced the Belgian identity they are challenging. Political institutions and elites are at the heart of the process of territorial identity formation in Belgium. The emergence of Walloon and Flemish identities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the by-product of a struggle between the dominant French-speaking bourgeoisie and the traditional Flemish lower bourgeoisie within the institutional context of the early Belgian state. Transformations in the party system and reforms to political-territorial institutions in the last 40 years have strengthened these identities and created entirely new ones.     

Physical Activity, Depression and Anxiety Among the Elderly

The aim of this study was to compare by sex, physical activity, and academic qualifications the symptomatology of depression among elders. The sample consisted of 140 elderly, 70 elements were male and 70 female, aged over 62 years. The instruments used to assess the dependent variables were the Scale of Moderate to Vigorous Physical Activity, the Beck Depressive Inventory and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. Significant gender effects were obtained demonstrating that those who practiced physical activity had lower rates of depression and anxiety. Comparisons showed that women had higher values than men. At the level of educational attainment it was found that individuals with lower level of education tended to have higher values for both depression and anxiety. Finally, a significant correlation was identified between physical activity, depression and anxiety, and for trait anxiety, however this correlation was not statistically significant. It was concluded that physical activity is associated with lower levels of depression and anxiety.     

On backbone coloring of graphs

Let G be a graph and H a subgraph of G. A backbone-k-coloring of (G,H) is a mapping f: V(G)→{1,2,…,k} such that |f(u)−f(v)|≥2 if uv∈E(H) and |f(u)−f(v)|≥1 if uv∈E(G)\E(H). The backbone chromatic number of (G,H) is the smallest integer k such that (G,H) has a backbone-k-coloring. In this paper, we characterize the backbone chromatic number of Halin graphs G=T∪C with respect to given spanning trees T. Also we study the backbone coloring for other special graphs such as complete graphs, wheels, graphs with small maximum average degree, graphs with maximum degree 3, etc.     

Building evaluation capacity in Spain: a case study of rural development and empowerment in the European Union

The development of European Community administrative authority has greatly influenced the development of an evaluation culture among the southern and central member states of the European Union. The present case study from Spain provides an example of this diffusion through the use of an empowerment evaluation approach to build evaluation capacity within the context of rural development. The study focuses on the evaluation process over a 10-year period of three local development programs run by three local partnerships created in the rural areas of the Madrid region through the European LEADER initiative. Critical components of empowerment evaluation are discussed, as well as the impact, limitations, difficulties, and applicability of the approach to rural development in the European Union. Conclusions are presented concerning evaluation capacity building and the development of an evaluation culture.     

Work-to-Family Enrichment and Employees’ Well-Being: High Performance Work System and Job Characteristics

Research has demonstrated the importance of job characteristics to explain work-to-family enrichment (WFE) and the value of this enrichment to explain employees’ wellbeing. However, there is no comprehensive framework to explain the relationship between these variables. This study uses the Job Demands-Control-Support model as a guiding framework, and examines the relationship between these job characteristics and WFE and, more interestingly, the WFE as a mechanism for explaining the relationship between job characteristics and employees’ well-being. Furthermore, we analyzed the relationship of employees’ perceptions of High Performance Work System (HPWS) with job characteristics. With a sample of 1,390 employees from a Portuguese bank, job demands were found to be negatively related to WFE while autonomy and supervisor support displayed a positive relation. We also observed that WFE is an important mechanism to explain the relationship between these job characteristics and employees’ well being. As expected, HPWS was a relevant organizational characteristic to explain job characteristics, however, we observed that it was also directly related to WFE.     

Postulates and paradoxes of relative voting power — A critical re-appraisal

This paper re-evaluates the problem of measuring thea priori relative voting power of a voter in an assembly. We propose several new intuitively compelling postualtes that any reasonable index of voting power ought to satisfy. At the same time we argue that most of the paradoxes of voting power discussed in the literature are paradoxical only in a weak sense, if at all. This leaves three crippling paradoxes — the well-known paradox ofweighted voting, and two new ones presented here: thebloc anddonation paradoxes. We evaluate the four main relative power indices discussed in the literature with respect to these three severe paradoxes. The Shapley-Shubik index is seen to be immune to all three paradoxes, while the Deegan-Packel index is vulnerable to all three. The Banzhaf and the Johnston indices are demonstrably immune to the paradox of weighted voting. However, they are shown to suffer from both the bloc and the donation paradoxes. We argue that this seriously undermines these indices in a hitherto unsuspected way. Several other theoretical issues relating to voting power are discussed.     

Exit is the answer: The political nature of Central American migration

This article provides evidence that many Central Americans who have joined the migrant caravans to the north manifest a profound discontent with the political institutions of their home countries. It is based on surveys with migrants in refugee centres, compared with similar data from the AmericasBarometer survey, and complemented with contextual qualitative data on the experience of immigrants passing through Mexico. The article shows that several Central Americans in route to the north do not trust their political institutions and express little support for their political system. It demonstrates that in contexts where economic instability, rampant crime, and environmental uncertainty prevail, many citizens keep exiting their countries under the conviction that government institutions have lost the capability to protect them from existential threats.     

A geometrically motivated parametric model in manifold estimation

The general aim of manifold estimation is reconstructing, by statistical methods, an m-dimensional compact manifold S on ^d (with m≤d) or estimating some relevant quantities related to the geometric properties of S. Focussing on the cases d=2 and d=3, with m=d or m=d?1, we will assume that the data are given by the distances to S from points randomly chosen on a band surrounding S. The aim of this paper is to show that, if S belongs to a wide class of compact sets (which we call sets with polynomial volume), the proposed statistical model leads to a relatively simple parametric formulation. In this setup, standard methodologies (method of moments, maximum likelihood) can be used to estimate some interesting geometric parameters, including curvatures and Euler characteristic. We will particularly focus on the estimation of the (d?1)-dimensional boundary measure (in Minkowski's sense) of S. It turns out, however, that the estimation problem is not straightforward since the standard estimators show a remarkably pathological behaviour: while they are consistent and asymptotically normal, their expectations are infinite. The theoretical and practical consequences of this fact are discussed in some detail.     

Distributions with Generalized Skewed Conditionals and Mixtures of Such Distributions

Mixtures of skewed distributions (univariate and bivariate) provide flexible models. An alternative modeling approach involves distributions with skewed conditional distributions and mixtures of such distributions. We consider the interrelationships between such models. Examples are provided to show that several skewed distributions already considered in the literature can be viewed as having been constructed via a combination of mixing and skewing.     

Varying-Coefficient Functional Linear Regression Models

This article considers a generalization of the functional linear regression in which an additional real variable influences smoothly the functional coefficient. We thus define a varying-coefficient regression model for functional data. We propose two estimators based, respectively, on conditional functional principal regression and on local penalized regression splines and prove their pointwise consistency. We check, with the prediction one day ahead of ozone concentration in the city of Toulouse, the ability of such nonlinear functional approaches to produce competitive estimations.