Some US states have introduced measures to increase voter participation. I develop a formal model of elections to study how these measures affect political outcomes. I find that at high enough levels, measures to increase turnout lead to candidates converging at the median voter’s ideal point, as candidates switch from choosing policies that motivate their partisan base to competing over centri...

This article uses a microsimulation model to estimate how freezing all remaining private-sector and one-third of all public-sector defined benefit (DB) pension plans over the next 5 years would affect retirement incomes of baby boomers. If frozen plans were supplemented with new or enhanced defined contribution (DC) retirement plans, there would be more losers than winners, and average family i...

Self-criticism of physicians and patient participation are the pillars of modern medical ethics and medical programmes. Patients expect risk minimisation from physicians, mostly without realising how much they could actively do themselves in this respect. But what about the willingness of German people to take risks, how high is it really at present? Direct empirical data are not available, but...

BACKGROUND A person's participation is acknowledged as an important outcome of the rehabilitation process. The Participation Scale (P-Scale) is an instrument that was designed to assess the participation of individuals with a health condition or disability. The scale was developed in an effort to better describe the participation of people living in middle-income and low-income countries. The a...

The authors investigated a possible contextual effect of neighborhood on individual use of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and antihypertensive medication (AHM) and the impact of neighborhood social participation on individual use of these medications. They attempted to disentangle contextual from individual influences. Multilevel logistic regression modeling was used to analyze data on 15,45...

PURPOSE To validate a shortened version of the Participation Scale (P-scale) that will be quicker to use and to describe the factor structure found in the P-scale data in various study samples. METHODS A large multi-country and multi-cultural database was compiled consisting of 5125 respondents. Item analysis, explanatory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were applied to identi...

BACKGROUND Community mobilisation is an important component of a participatory approach to health and development interventions. However, it is challenging to define, measure and assess community participation and ownership of a programme, especially at scale. METHODS An iterative cross-sectional survey was designed for implementation across a representative sample of community-based groups, ...

the purpose of this study is the analysis of the farmers economic behavior to reduce the adverse environmental effects of agricultural chemical inputs by using contingent valuation approach and tobit model by heckman's two stage. to achieve the desired goal, 100 questionnaires collected by a random sampling from farmers of kashaf- rood basin in mashhad city in 2013. results showed that variable...

background : the aim of this study was to describe the coverage for cervical cancer screening among the visitors of a food exhibition in brussels, belgium and to describe the factors that affect their participation in the screening programs. methods : the participants aged between 25 and 64 years were recruited during a food exhibition at the brussels exhibition centre from 6 until 21 october 2...