At the World summit for social development in Copenhagen in 1995 the member states committed themselves to “creating an economic, political, social, cultural and legal environment that will enable people to achieve social development” (Commitment 1). This overall commitment was followed by nine additional commitments, which to a large extent can be seen as means to achieve social development; o...

Scholars, jurists, and citizens have long been concerned with the question of whether donations lead to an undue distortion of lawmakers’ behavior. After decades of research, methodological shortcomings have prevented a clearer understanding of the role of campaign donations on political outcomes from emerging. I begin with a methodological critique of observational research’s attempts to answe...

The Blogosphere has more influence on both the general public’s opinions and mainstream media nowadays. As vast political blogs representing grassroots voices go online, it is both interesting and useful to find them and determine their political leanings as either liberal or conservative. In this paper, we address both problems by using front pages of blogs in a corpus we built to create two c...

This paper combines unique individual-level information on ballot votes with state-level data on expenditures to provide new evidence on how women suffrage has affected government spending. Using data from the last country in Europe to adopt suffrage, Switzerland, we demonstrate two main results. First, women suffrage has changed the scope of government much more than its size. Women are more l...

Potential safety issues have been raised with the development and release of virus-resistant transgenic plants. This review focuses on safety assessment with a special emphasis on crops that have been commercialized or extensively tested in the field such as squash, papaya, plum, grape, and sugar beet. We discuss topics commonly perceived to be of concern to the environment and to human health-...

Based on an extensive sample of the literature, this critical review dissects the principal themes that have animated the Canadian political science profession on the topic of medicare. The review considers the coincidence of economic eras and how these are reflected in the methodological approaches to the study of medicare. As is to be expected, most of the scholarly activity coincides with th...

Iran is a developing country in Middle East which has experienced some political and economical turbulence during the past decades. Government of Iran, after the 1979 Islamic revolution, has devoted considerable resources on national health, including the pharmaceutical sector. As a result, health indicators have improved substantially over the past two decadesnd the availability and affordabil...

Iran is a developing country in Middle East which has experienced some political and economical turbulence during the past decades. Government of Iran, after the 1979 Islamic revolution, has devoted considerable resources on national health, including the pharmaceutical sector. As a result, health indicators have improved substantially over the past two decadesnd the availability and affordabil...