Search

Since the inauguration of Mexican democracy in 2000, organised criminal violence had been leaking into the political arena. Yet, it escalated in the 2018 elections, when dozens of local candidates were killed. In most of these cases, the concrete perpetrators and motives remained in the dark. How did Mexican society make sense of this opaque, unprecedented wave of electoral violence? On the basis of a qualitative content analysis of over 1,200 news reports, I examine the structuring power of a shared narrative: the frame of organised crime. By conceiving candidate killings as economic violence within the criminal community, this commonsensical frame of interpretation permitted Mexican society to ‘normalise’ these killings as ‘business as usual’ by criminal organisations.

BACKGROUND: Approximately every third surgical patient is anemic. The most common form, iron deficiency anemia, results from persisting iron-deficient erythropoiesis (IDE). Zinc protoporphyrin (ZnPP) is a promising parameter for diagnosing IDE, hitherto requiring blood drawing and laboratory workup. STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS: Noninvasive ZnPP (ZnPP-NI) measurements are compared to ZnPP reference determination of the ZnPP/heme ratio by high-performance liquid chromatography (ZnPP-HPLC) and the analytical performance in detecting IDE is evaluated against traditional iron status parameters (ferritin, transferrin saturation [TSAT], soluble transferrin receptor-ferritin index [sTfR-F], soluble transferrin receptor [sTfR]), likewise measured in blood. The study was conducted at the University Hospitals of Frankfurt and Zurich. RESULTS: Limits of agreement between ZnPP-NI and ZnPP-HPLC measurements for 584 cardiac and noncardiac surgical patients equaled 19.7 μmol/mol heme (95% confidence interval, 18.0-21.3; acceptance criteria, 23.2 μmol/mol heme; absolute bias, 0 μmol/mol heme). Analytical performance for detecting IDE (inferred from area under the curve receiver operating characteristics) of parameters measured in blood was: ZnPP-HPLC (0.95), sTfR (0.92), sTfR-F (0.89), TSAT (0.87), and ferritin (0.67). Noninvasively measured ZnPP-NI yielded results of 0.90. CONCLUSION: ZnPP-NI appears well suited for an initial IDE screening, informing on the state of erythropoiesis at the point of care without blood drawing and laboratory analysis. Comparison with a multiparameter IDE test revealed that ZnPP-NI values of 40 μmol/mol heme or less allows exclusion of IDE, whereas for 65 μmol/mol heme or greater, IDE is very likely if other causes of increased values are excluded. In these cases (77% of our patients) ZnPP-NI may suffice for a diagnosis, while values in between require analyses of additional iron status parameters.

BACKGROUND This study investigates the impact of preoperative calculated rivaroxaban (RXA) plasma concentration on perioperative red blood cell (RBC) loss. STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS In this retrospective single-center study, we identified patients with RXA intake according to a preoperative determination of RXA levels within 96 hours before surgery. RXA plasma concentration at the beginning of surgery was then calculated from the last RXA intake using a single-compartment pharmacokinetic model with four categories of RXA concentration (≤20, 21-50, 51-100, and >100 μg/L). Patients were classified into surgery with high (≥500 mL) or low (

Competitive political elections are frequent objects of cynicism, but also carriers of great transformative expectations. This chapter reviews the comparative literature about their transformational power in three realms. It discusses the democratizing power of multiparty elections in electoral authoritarian regimes; the capacity of elections to deepen the democratic quality of minimal democracies; and their civilizing power in the face of democratic state repression and societal violence. In all three areas, the balance is sobering. The mere existence of competitive elections does not lead to either democratizing or civilizing progress. Their actual transformative power depends on the willingness and capacity of democratic actors to exploit the institutional opportunities they offer.

Introduction Rivaroxaban (RXA) is a direct oral factor Xa (Xa) antagonist with a short half-life and a fast onset and offset of effect. Before elective surgery, discontinuation is recommended with an interval of at least > 24 hours. In clinical practice, this is, however, not always sufficient to achieve a residual RXA plasma concentration deemed appropriate for surgery, defined as ≤ 50 mcg/L. Our study aimed at identifying factors associated with a higher-than-expected residual RXA plasma concentration in a large group of real-life patients. Materials and Methods This retrospective single-centre study included all patients taking RXA between 2012 and 2016 where RXA plasma concentration was determined by pharmacodynamic anti-Xa assay (518 measurements in 368 patients). Medical records were reviewed. Residual RXA plasma concentrations were then compared with expected values according to a pharmacokinetic model. Results Residual RXA plasma concentration was significantly higher-than-expected in patients with atrial fibrillation, impaired kidney function (glomerular filtration rate [GFR] 50 mcg/L at 24 to 48 hours after the last RXA intake. Conclusion In our group of real-life patients, impaired kidney function (GFR

After its successful transition to democracy, Mexico has experienced an epidemic of organized societal violence known as the drug war that, to date, has caused well over 100,000 casualties. Most of this violence has been consigned to oblivion, without proper investigation or prosecution. Victims have been organizing and protesting, yet ordinary citizens have remained quiet, except for two short lived waves of nationwide protest. As I hypothesize, a primary reason for their acquiescence is cognitive. The framing of organized violence as a self-contained war among criminals (“bounded violence”) erodes the attitudinal foundation of citizen solidarity and sympathy with the victims of injustice. I explore the cognitive foundations of citizen attitudes towards victims on the basis of original data from the Mexican 2013 National Survey on Organized Violence. Logistic regression analysis confirms the expected framing effect. Even when controlling for alternative explanations, such as personal proximity to violence and social proximity to its victims, the notion of bounded violence within a criminal community induces citizens to view its victims with indifference.

In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework to analyse the communicative imperatives authoritarian regimes face as a consequence of their self-inflicted opacities. The most important facts about the actors and factors that sustain authoritarian rule are unobservable. To demonstrate their power, authoritarian rulers have to render them visible. They have to dramatize their power and present on the front stage what they want people to know about the backstage of authoritarian politics. We conceptualize the communicative strategies of authoritarian rulers with a focus on the primary existential threats they face: the lateral threats that emanate from within the authoritarian elite. We illustrate dictators’ communicative repertoire with empirical material from communist Cuba from 2006 to 2011, during the critical juncture of leadership transition from Fidel Castro to his brother Raul.

This chapter examines Mexico’s gradual and largely peaceful transition to democracy, followed by a sudden descent into civil war. In the closing decades of the twentieth century, Mexico’s major challenge was political democratization. Today, it is organized criminal violence. Vicente Fox’s victory in the presidential elections of 2000 ended more than seventy years of hegemonic party rule. However, a civil war soon broke out, sparking a pandemic escalation of violence related to organized crime. The chapter first traces the history of Mexico from its independence in 1821 to the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920 before discussing the foundations of electoral authoritarianism in the country. It then considers the structural bases of regime change in Mexico, along with the process of democratization by elections. It concludes by analysing why a civil war broke out in Mexico following its transition to democracy.

Erratum to: Z Vgl Polit Wiss 2019 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12286-019-00438-0 The article title has been …

Threats to the integrity of electoral democracy are manifold. The comparative literature has focused on "vertical" threats: the manipulation of elections by central governments. This article, by contrast, draws attention to "horizontal" threats: the societal subversion of democratic elections by criminal violence. It analyzes the so-called drug war in Mexico to illustrate the chilling effects private organized violence has on electoral democracy. After tracing the origins of Mexico's new internal war, the article documents the damages it bears on the democratic integrity of elections as well as on surrounding rights and liberties.

Standard methodological advice in political science warns against the distortion of measurement decisions by judgmental elements. Judgment is subjective, common wisdom asserts, it produces opaque, biased, and unreliable data. This article, by contrast, argues that judgment is a critical intersubjective ingredient of political measurement that needs to be acknowledged and rationalized, rather than exorcised.

Over the past decades, (mostly) private actors have been providing the public good of cross-national political data in a decentralized, uncoordinated, and unregulated fashion. They have been successful in generating an incessant supply of data. However, as this paper claims, the success of current practices of data production has been masking severe structural limitations: the systematic undersupply of data and the systematic inefficiency of data generation. Both types of problems derive from disciplinary coordination failures ("measurer's dilemmas"). On the one hand, private data producers have been unable to coordinate the cross-national collection of two broad categories of data: political data produced by national governments (e.g., election results) and factual data that are not "observable from the outside" of national political systems, but require access to domestic sources of information (e.g., protest events). On the other hand, private data producers have been unable to construct regulatory frameworks that would reduce persistent inefficiencies in the collection of cross-national data: data privatization, data opacity, and data incompatibility. As the paper suggests in its concluding notes, if we are to get serious about resolving these structural problems, we will need to mobilize established collective actors, above all, our professional associations.

The quantitative study of comparative politics is often described as a data-driven enterprise. Employing an original dataset of comparative politics articles published in leading academic journals between 1989 and 2007, this article offers the first empirical analysis of data usage in comparative research. Tracing potential biases induced by data dependence, it assesses the structure of quantitative comparative research (by year, research design, geographic focus, and subject area), the use of country-specific and region-specific datasets, the introduction of original data, and the degree of concentration in data usage. Its empirical findings question cherished assumptions about the structure of the discipline.

Der Verfasser, der die sozialwissenschaftliche Diskussion der Bedeutung von Institutionen in Autokratien auf internationaler Ebene mit angestoßen und vorangetrieben hat, gibt einen fulminanten Überblick über den 'neuen Institutionalismus' in der vergleichenden Autokratieforschung, der Institutionen mit 'demokratischem Anstrich', wie Parteien, Parlamente, Gerichte und Wahlen in nicht-demokratischen Systemen ernst nimmt und systematisch untersucht. Der Autor, der für Autokratien, die Wahlen durchführen, den Begriff des 'elektoralen Autoritarismus' geprägt hat, bietet dabei eine analytische Synthese von vier Kernbereichen der Institutionenanalyse in autoritären Regimen: erstens der Forschung zur Funktionslogik autoritärer Institutionen, zweitens der Forschung zu den institutionellen Grundoptionen von Autokratien, drittens der Forschung zu autoritären Kontrollstrategien in unterschiedlichen institutionellen Feldern und viertens der Forschung zur Spannung zwischen regimestabilisierenden und destabilisierenden Effekten von nominell 'demokratischen Institutionen' in autokratischen Regimen. (ICF2)

Andreas Schedler is professor of political science at the Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas (CIDE) in Mexico City. He ed- ited the volume Electoral Authoritarianism: The Dynamics of Unfree Competition (2006). Over the past twenty years, we have seen a good amount of democratic progress across the planet. The collapse of the Soviet empire led to an impressive expansion of electoral democracy, especially in Eastern Eu- rope and sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, we have witnessed the startling spread of multiparty elections without democracy. Today the unambiguously nondemocratic regime types of the Cold War era—sin- gle-party systems, military regimes, and personal dictatorships—have almost disappeared (even as the Chinese single-party regime rules over a fifth of humanity). The new stars in the constellation of nondemocratic governance are "electoral authoritarian" regimes, which conduct regular multiparty elec- tions at all levels of government yet violate basic democratic standards in serious and systematic ways. Some of them are holdovers from earlier periods (such as Singapore and Egypt); some were born in transitions from single-party rule (Gabon and Cameroon); others arose after military coups (Algeria and Gambia); and still others emerged from processes of democratic erosion (Venezuela and Russia). These regimes represent the last line of authoritarian defense in a long history of struggle that has been unfolding since the invention of modern representative institutions. 1 The system of representative government that we call "liberal democ- racy" rests upon a configuration of institutions that were conceived and crafted in the eighteenth century—constitutional government, individual rights and liberties, the rule of law, checks and balances, the functional and territorial division of power, representative legislatures, popular elections, civil society, and independent media. Mass political parties came later, as a product of nineteenth-century suffrage extensions. The

Major cross-national surveys measure popular support for democracy through direct questions about democracy in the abstract. Since people may entertain competing democratic ideas and ideals, however, the academic community ignores the extent to which standard questions capture citizen support for liberal democracy. To solve the validity problems associated with direct measures of democratic support, this article proposes linking them to more concrete, indirect measures of support for democratic principles and institutions. It employs the statistical technique of cluster analysis to establish this linkage. Cluster analysis permits grouping respondents in a way that is open to complex and inconsistent attitudinal profiles. It permits the identification of ‘democrats with adjectives’ who support democracy in the abstract, while rejecting core principles of liberal democracy. The article demonstrates the fruitfulness of this approach by drawing a map of ‘illiberal democrats’ in Mexico on the basis of the country's 2003 National Survey on Political Culture.

Usualmente, las elecciones son tomadas como un símbolo de democracia; sin embargo, también pueden convertirse en una herramienta para quienes ostentan el poder autoritario en la búsqueda de legitimar su mandato

Electoral governance is a crucial variable in securing the credibility of elections in emerging democracies, but remains largely ignored in the comparative study of democratization. This article develops some basic analytical tools to advance comparative analysis and understanding of this neglected topic. It conceptualizes electoral governance as a set of related activities that involves rule making, rule application, and rule adjudication. It identifies the provision of procedural certainty to secure the substantive uncertainty of democratic elections as the principal task of electoral governance. It argues that electoral governance, while socially and institutionally embedded, matters most during the indeterminate conditions that typically attend democratization. Finally, it outlines a research agenda that covers the comparative study of the structures as well as the processes of electoral governance.

In developing an analytical framework for the comparative study of processes of democratization by elections, this article first lays out the techniques of electoral manipulation authoritarian rulers employ to control electoral outcomes. It argues next that manipulated elections tend to trigger two-level games in which electoral competition is “nested” inside electoral reform, and outlines the causal interaction and strategic interdependence of the two levels. It describes the basic strategic choices and strategic dilemmas actors face in iterative cycles of conflict. It analyzes the uncertainties of results, relations of power, and strategic responses that characterize the game. Finally, it explains how actors may cope with its ambivalent and uncertain nature—they may devise “mixed” strategies or privilege one level of the game over the other.

The temporal boundaries of democratization are often fuzzy and controversial. Yet students of regime change have paid little systematic attention to issues of temporal delimitation, despite their profound methodological as well as political implications. Scholars routinely define, but almost never study, processes of democratic transition and consolidation in terms of institutional uncertainty. This article, by contrast, proposes to take uncertainty seriously. Concerned with the operational implications of uncertainty, it critically revises the 'inner boundary' of democratization (the threshold between transition and consolidation) as well as its 'outer boundaries' (the onset of transition and the closure of consolidation). It concludes that the latter are structurally indeterminate unless incisive 'focal events' make actor expectations converge at either high or low levels of institutional uncertainty.

The concept of democratic consolidation has become a pivotal concept in comparative politics. In its most widespread acceptation, a “consolidated” democracy is one that is unlikely to break down. For all its apparent thinness and simplicity, this conceptualization poses considerable problems of operationalization and measurement. As the article argues, cholars have been relying on three basic strategies to assess the survival prospects of democratic regimes. They have been studying either behavioral, attitudinal, or structural foudnations of democratic consolidation. This article briefly examines those approaches that rely on different kinds of empirical evidence as well as on different causal assumptions. On the basis of a quick revision of recent Latin American experiences, it concludes that in common judgments about democratic consolidation, behavioral evidence seems to trump both attitudinal and structural data.

After a long history of electoral fraud and especially after the fraudulent and conflictive presidential elections of 1988, Mexicans entered the 1990s with deep skepticism toward political elections. In the present decade, however, government and opposition parties have agreed to several profound electoral reforms that have succeeded in bringing fraud under control. How have Mexican citizens reacted to these institutional changes? Have they hibernated under the protective cover of an unchanging culture of distrust? Alternatively, have they adapted their expectations and perceptions of electoral fraud to the new democratic realities? The present article supports the hypothesis of change. Through analysis of data from various opinion polls, it arrives at an optimistic picture: trust in elections has steadily increased since 1988. Yet this optimism is diminished by a note of caution: more recent surveys indicate that distrust may be reemerging in the face of the critical presidential elections of the year 2000.

Much of the literature on ‘democratic consolidation’ has adopted a forward‐looking, future‐oriented perspective. Rather than studying past regimes, it tries to assess the life expectancies of contemporary ’third wave’ democracies. The article contends that authors have usually been unaware of the methodological complexities this choice of time perspective involves. If we want to reach reasonable judgements about the chances of democratic survival in a given country we have to be conscious of the probabilistic nature of such a prospective exercise. And we have to make (and justify) some basic analytical decisions. We have to explain the time horizons we are adopting as well as the future conditions we are assuming. We have to make clear how we construct the binary opposition between ‘consolidated’ and ‘non‐consolidated’ democracies. We have to decide whose expectations of democratic stability we take into account. And we have to cope with conflicting and unstable perceptions. Unless we ‘consolidologists’ h...

At elections, voters choose among substantive programs and correspondingly, endow winning parties with determinate policy mandates. The article inquires into a neglected side of this `mandate theory' of elections: it explores the normative foundations of democratic mandates. The general norm, which demands that parties honor their campaign promises, is quite uncontroversial. The essay therefore reconstructs the controversial logic of norm application: it argues that different kinds of promises create different kinds of commitments; it explains `rules of transgression' which specify improper promises and `rules of exception' which allow parties to abandon their campaign pledges; and it looks at structural uncertainties electoral mandates are associated with. As the article concludes, electoral accountability is a complex and `essentially contested' task. It provokes (and presupposes) public controversies which in the last instance can be settled only by the supreme judge, the voter.

Time with its many roles and faces is a major player in the field of politics. But up to now, neither political science in general nor studies of democracy in particular have taken explicit and systematic notice of it. The present explorative article outlines some core questions that could (and should) be addressed by future research on political time: the construction of democratic time horizons (future and past), the nature of democracies' current present, the weight of time constraints, the force of institutional time rules, the choice of time strategies, and last but not least, the logic of time discourses in democratic polities.