Search

The objective of this paper is to understand how the public's beliefs in five countries may change as more families have direct experience with Alzheimer's disease. The data are derived from a questionnaire survey conducted by telephone (landline and cell) with 2678 randomly selected adults in France, Germany, Poland, Spain, and the United States. The paper analyzes the beliefs and anticipated behavior of those in each country who report having had a family member with Alzheimer's disease versus those who do not. In one or more countries, differences were found between the two groups in their concern about getting Alzheimer's disease, knowledge that the disease is fatal, awareness of certain symptoms, and support for increased public spending. The results suggest that as more people have experience with a family member who has Alzheimer's disease, the public will generally become more concerned about Alzheimer's disease and more likely to recognize that Alzheimer's disease is a fatal disease. The findings suggest that other beliefs may only be affected if there are future major educational campaigns about the disease. The publics in individual countries, with differing cultures and health systems, are likely to respond in different ways as more families have experience with Alzheimer's disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses and compares two kinds of logic that explain electoral behaviour: the performance vote and the ideological vote. To be exact, this paper puts one of the main hypotheses of both theories to the test: that the rules guiding citizens' voting decisions are the same, regardless of their level of interest, knowledge and information about political matters. In order to do this, empirical material taken from post-electoral surveys in four democracies —Spain, Portugal, Hungary and Poland— is analysed. The data belongs to the second module of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES 2005) programme which contains information on citizens' electoral conduct and knowledge of politics. The results indicate that while the influence of political knowledge on the logic of the performance vote is clear and conclusive, it is much less conclusive in the case of the ideological vote. All this suggests that democratic control of governments through sanctioning their performance requires citizens to have minimum levels of knowledge and information about politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]