This paper describes the common techniques used in the constitution of candidates-lists for parliamentary elections. A common feature of these techniques is the consultation of party members. But the way in which this is done differs among the parties. AGALEV, the ecologist party, offers every member the possibility to have his say about every candidate. The socialist party uses this system in two constituencies ; in the other constituencies a special congress decides. The christiandemocrats, the liberals and the Flemish nationalists (...) constitute their lists by indirect vote : the leadership performs a first selection and the members then either approve or disapprove of this choice.Our research indicates that there are no essential differences between these two techniques from the point of view of membership participation.In both the ecologist and the socialist party the majority of members does not participate in the candidates-elections. Therefore, as with the indirect vote, candidates-lists are constituted by an active, militant and elitist group of members. Whatever the technique used the infl,uence of the rank-and-file-member is small. (shrink)

We live in a world in which scientific expertise and its epistemic authority become more important. On the other hand, the financial interests in research, which could potentially corrupt science, are increasing. Due to these two tendencies, a concern for the integrity of scientific research becomes increasingly vital. This concern is, however, hollow if we do not have a clear account of research integrity. Therefore, it is important that we explicate this concept. Following Rudolf Carnap’s characterization of the task of (...) explication, this means that we should develop a concept that is (1) similar to our common sense notion of research integrity, (2) exact, (3) fruitful, and (4) as simple as possible. Since existing concepts do not meet these four requirements, we develop a new concept in this article. We describe a concept of epistemic integrity that is based on the property of deceptiveness, and argue that this concept does meet Carnap’s four requirements of explication. To illustrate and support our claims we use several examples from scientific practice, mainly from biomedical research. (shrink)

A well-known problem in the health sciences is the distorted research agenda: the agenda features too little research that is tailored to the health problems of the poor, and it features too little research that supports the development of other solutions to health problems than medicines . This article analyzes these two sub-problems in more detail, and assesses several strategies to deal with them, resulting in some specific recommendations that indicate what governments should do to make the research agenda in (...) the health sciences less distorted. (shrink)

This book aims to distinguish acceptable from unacceptable interest influences in science. Jan De Winter criticizes existing views on the integrity of science and the roles of financial, political, and other interests in science, and develops an alternative view to shed new light on cases from medical science, aerospace science, climate science, and biology.

A well-known problem in the health sciences is the distorted research agenda: the agenda features too little research that is tailored to the health problems of the poor, and it features too little research that supports the development of other solutions to health problems than medicines (e.g., change of lifestyle). This article analyzes these two sub-problems in more detail, and assesses several strategies to deal with them, resulting in some specific recommendations that indicate what governments should do to make the (...) research agenda in the health sciences less distorted. (shrink)

This article reveals that explanatory practice in software engineering is in accordance with pragmatic explanatory pluralism, which states that explanations should at least partially be evaluated by their practical use. More specifically, I offer a defense of the idea that several explanation-types are legitimate in software engineering, and that the appropriateness of an explanation-type depends on (a) the engineer’s interests, and (b) the format of the explanation-seeking question he asks, with this format depending on his interests. This idea is defended (...) by considering examples that are representative for explanatory practice in software engineering. Different kinds of technological explanation are spelled out, and the dependence of their appropriateness on interests and question-formats is extensively illustrated. (shrink)

In this paper, I will argue that ageing can be construed as disease. First, the concept of disease is discussed, where the distinction is made between two lines of thought, an objectivist and a subjectivist one. After determining the disease conception to be used throughout the argument, it is proposed that senescence could be seen as disease. Three common counterarguments are discussed, none of which appears strong enough to effectively counter the advocated view. In the third section, two potential implications (...) of the view advocated here will be briefly touched upon. These are the quest for a cure or treatment for ageing and the general attitude towards the elderly. It is concluded that, utilizing an objective disease concept, ageing could be seen as a disease. None of the considered counterarguments packs enough of a punch to discard this. The implications are complex and intertwined, but need not be negative. (shrink)

The Belgian political system is of ten qualified as a particracy, this is a variation of the classical parliamentary democracy, in which political parties dominate the political decision-making process more than the other subsystems, such as parliament, the government, the public administration, the judiciary power, the broadcasting institutions, the written press etc. This preponderancy is achieved by the partypolitisation of the positions in and the functio ning of these subsystems.Partyleaders exert nowadays a major influence on the constellation of a new (...) government and the designation of its ministers. Through the governmental program and special extraparliamentary pacts they map out more and more government's future policies. The ministerial cabinets execute the control over the public administration on behalf of the parties of the majority and aften take over some of its peculiar functions. The recruitment of public servants and their promotion depend highly upon the institutionalized patronage of the governmental parties.The power to select the candidates for the general elections has shifted away from the rank-and-file member to the local and national partyleaders.Partydiscipline is one of the major causes of the shift of the government making function, the legislative and controlling functions of parliament to the party headquaters.The recruitment and the promotions of magistrates was already before World War II largely politicized.Although the structural integration between the newspapers and parties has decreased since 1945, the political parties have strengthened their control over the designation of the diree:tors and administrators of the Belgian broadcasting institutions. (shrink)

At the general elections, the Belgian voter can either vote for an entire party or vote for a candidate on that list. The general, elections of november 8th, 1981 featured a notable fall of the percentage of preferential votes by 4,46 %, although this proportion was steadily rising since 1958, by an average of 3,67 % each election year.Although the use of preferential votes is varying from one constituency to another, and from one party to another, the order of constituencies (...) and parties, ranked by their proportion of preferential votes, did not change profoundly.The remarkable drop of the overall proportion of preferential votes is probably due to the shift from preferential votes to list-votes by the bulk of voters who fled from the christian-democratic parties to the liberals, the flemish-nationalists and the ecologists. (shrink)

The lists of candidates, proposed by the parties for the Belgian general elections, is quite determinative. Due to electoral code arrangements, and, notwithstanding the growing proportion of preference votes, only thosecandidates who are placed within the «necessary sequence» of the lists get actually elected. Consequently, the Belgian voter does not appointthe mandataries, hut only the number of mandates due to the several parties.The statutes of the three major Belgian parties, provide large participative opportunities for their members, through the so-called general (...) member polls. In this kind ofprimary system, all party members are franchised to elect the candidates for their party-lists.The elections of the past twenty years show a growing tendency to deviate from these statutary guaranteed participation. In 1958, 89 % of all representatives were placed on their party-lists by general member polls; in 1978, only 10 %. Thus, the conclusive phase of the composition of the partylists has become, since 1958, increasingly a matter where only the national or federal party executives and councils decide upon. (shrink)

In the official statistics, the total number of nonvoters in the post-war parliamentary elections in Belgium, is considerably over-estimated. This is caused by the method of updating the lists of voters, so that many people who appear as nonvoters, are regular voters who died after the moment of updating, but were not droppedfrom the lists. In this article, we endeavoured to calculate the number of deceased voters, who still appear on the lists, using the monthly death-rates of the total Belgian (...) population, abstracting the deceased persons under age and the deceased foreigners. The more realistic rates of nonvoting, calculated this way, are quite lower than the official rates.Yet, because of the introduction of a new method of updating, the problem discussed above, hardly exists any langer since the general election of 1977. (shrink)

With reference to the unsuccessful attempt of the Labour Government to make sex education a statutory part of the National Curriculum, this paper argues in favour of making liberal sex education compulsory at all state schools. First, the main characteristics of a liberal sex education are briefly explained. Promoting the virtue of respect for every adults right of sexual self-determination is presented as one of its central aims. Then the paper shows that state enforcement of liberal sex education is justifiable (...) to reasonable citizens in several ways and therefore meets the liberal criterion of political legitimacy. Finally, the relevant clauses of the Bill of the Labour Government are briefly evaluated. (shrink)

In this article, we integrated the data of four inquiries, concerning various activities and features, computing the relations between all these quantitative variables by partialcorrelation and multiple regression techniques.Remarkably, the most determing factor of the amount of preference votes of a candidate seems to be his various activities in parliament.His clientelist activities and his personal electoral campaign influence also, but in a lesser way, the cast of these votes. Parliamentary seniority correlates positively with the number of cumulated offices, which in (...) turncorrelates with the extent of his electoral campaign. The attendance of a representative during the committee meetings and during the plenary voting sessions seems not at all to be influenced by this cumulations of various offices, and only slightly by bis clientelist occupations. This general pattern of parliamentary behavior differs considerably between parties. Finally, the effect of each particular branch ofextraparliamentary offices on the other activities of each member was examined. (shrink)

The grip of political parties of central government actors in Belgium was most striking in the 1970s and 1980s. In this period Belgium, like Italy, constitutes a very strong case of partitocracy. Yet, white the Italian partitocrazia collapsed brusquely in the early 1990s, the Belgian particratie underwent a number of gradual modifications, which prevented the complete collapse of the partitocratic system and to some degree restored the governability of the country.This article presents for each sector of central government first the (...) main features as they were under full partitocratic rule during the 1970s and 1980s. Second, it indicates which corrections were introduced, that reduced the the grip of political parties on central government actors, structures and processes. Finally, it discusses the problem of the public debt and policy inertia. (shrink)

Trade unions have been the object of sustained critique coming from across the political spectrum for several decades now. Based on a discourse theoretical analysis of articles in three Dutch-speaking Belgian newspapers, published in two periods of social protest in 2014 and 2016, this article identifies six strands of critique: (1) critiques that label unions as conservative anachronisms that are out of sync with the realities of our times; (2) critiques that psychologize unions as egoistic, irresponsible and child-like actors; (3) (...) critiques that criminalize unions as vandals, hostage takers or terrorists; (4) critiques that oppose unions to a homogenized general interest; (5) metadiscursive critiques of unions’ discursive practices; and (6) metapolitical critiques that problematize unions as polarizing and ‘political’ actors. These six strands of critique get articulated through discursive logics that operate within and across texts, newspapers and voices. Together they constitute a heterogenous but relatively consonant polyphonic discourse that challenges trade unions and their right to strike. This discourse has metapolitical implications for the debate on the mode(s) of politics that can legitimately be practiced by civil society actors. (shrink)

Summary Colour and space are pervasive topics in both perception and art. This article investigates the role of colour and pattern in relation to space and time in the art works by two artists: Frank Stella, a well-known Post-War American abstract painter, and Pieter Vermeersch, an emerging Belgian abstract painter, representing a contemporary trend to break the barriers between artistic disciplines. While Stella adheres to the Modernist logic of non-illusionistic, non-spatial, non-referential art as object, perceived instantaneously, Vermeersch explores ways to (...) enhance the viewers’ spatial and temporal experiences through complex art installations with multiple objects and architectural elements interacting with each other and with the spaces in which they are embedded. We discuss these major themes in some representative art works, and in the way they are perceived and appreciated by contemporary viewers, investigated in four empirical studies: two laboratory experiments using well-controlled stimuli derived from at works, and two museum studies employing a variety of methods, including mobile eye-tracking and questionnaires. (shrink)

Evaluative conditioning refers to the changes in liking of an evaluatively neutral stimulus (the conditional stimulus or CS) as a result of merely pairing it with another, already liked or disliked stimulus (the unconditional stimulus or US). We examined whether other, non‐evaluative stimulus properties of a US can also be associatively transferred to a CS. In a series of experiments, we tried to transfer perceptions of the gender of children and the gender of first names. We found evidence for the (...) associative transfer of these properties but only when participants were aware of the contingencies. (shrink)

Through the use of rhetoric linking private economic transactions and international labor and human rights standards, the movement has successfully challenged corporate practices that were previously considered unremarkable.

In spite op compulsory voting, the number of non-voters increased at the last general elections in Belgium to 7.3 per cent. This evolution can largely be explained by demographic factors. The number of blank or invalid voters reaches nearly the same level. Concerning this form of political non-participation, we noticed considerable differences occur between the types of elections due to factors such as the importance and the proximity of the proper institution, the social distance between candidate and citizen and the (...) main issue of the elections.The analysis of both phenomena over time at the level of the individual voters based on surveys shows that electoral absenteeism is rather accidental, white blanc and invalid voting is more permanent. From the analysis of absenteeism and blanc and invalid voting emerge on the one hand socio-economic factors which jeopardize electoral participation in a direct or indirect way, and on the other hand, attitudes and behaviour reflecting political indifference, alienation and hostility. (shrink)

While self?evaluation leads to valuable results in some schools, it appears that in other schools this is true only to a lesser extent or not at all. This raises the question of how differences in the results of self?evaluations can be explained. This study looks at to what extent the results of self?evaluation are determined by the way in which self?evaluation is conducted, by characteristics relating to the general functioning of the school and by the support which schools enjoy. One (...) thousand seven hundred and eighty?six school principals and team members from 96 schools (primary and secondary) were surveyed by means of a written questionnaire. The data collected were then analysed using multi?level structural equation modelling. The results provide strong empirical evidence that ?attitude with regard to self?evaluation?, ?self?evaluation as a policy action? and ?self?evaluation as an act of research? are powerful predictors of the quality of self?evaluations. (shrink)

The beanbag genetics controversy can be traced from the dispute between Fisher and Wright, through Mayr''s influential promotion of the issue, to the contemporary units of selection debate. It centers on the claim that genic models of natural selection break down in the face of epistatic interactions among genes during phenotypic development. This claim is explored from both a conceptual and a quantitative point of view, and is shown to be defective on both counts.Firstly, an analysis of the controversy''s theoretical (...) origins demonstrates that this claim derives from a misinterpretation of the conceptual foundations of Fisher''s genetical theory of natural selection, and confounds his fundamentally different concepts of the average excess and average effect of a gene. Secondly, an extension of the genic approach is proposed which models the dynamics of selection among epistatically interacting complexes of many genes. Paradoxically, this preliminary, but fundamentally genic model provides quantitative support for some controversial qualitative claims regarding the evolutionary consequences of strong gene interactions made by opponents of genic selectionism, including Mayr''s theory of peripartric speciation. These findings foster hope that the proposed approach may eventually nudge the beanbag controversy out of its conceptual trenches into a more empirically oriented dialogue. (shrink)

The «law of weak parliaments» states that parliaments with small competences only attract weak candidates, which in turn weakens the parliament even more.Research concerning the Belgian delegates to the European Parliament from 1952 to 1979, confirmed this law, but also qualified it by showing that the downward trend can be crosscut when the parliament gains importance as an institutional platform for a social movement, in this case for the European integration.

Many public information documents attempt to persuade the recipients that they should engage in or refrain from specific behaviour. This is based on the assumption that the recipient will decide about his or her behaviour on the basis of the information given and a rational evaluation of the pros and cons. An analysis of 20 public information brochures shows that the argumentation in persuasive brochures is often not marked as such. Argumentation is presented as factual information, and in many instances (...) the task of making argumentational links and drawing conclusions is left to the reader. However, since the information offered does follow familiar argumentational schemes, readers can, in principle, reconstruct the argument. All the brochures make use of pragmatic argumentation (argumentation from consequences),i. e.,they formulate at least certain benefits of the desirable behaviour or disadvantages of the undesirable behaviour. In addition, they make regular use of argumentation from cause to effect and argumentation from example. Argumentation from rules and argumentation from authority are less frequently used. This empirical analysis of the use of argumentation schemes is a solid base for interesting and rich hypotheses about the cognitive processing of persuasive brochures. Central processing requires the reader to be able to reconstruct argumentation from informational texts and to identify and evaluate various types of argumentation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The number of people suffering from dementia will rise considerably in the years to come. This will have important implications for society. People suffering from dementia have to rely on relatives and professional caregivers when their disorder progresses. Some people want to determine for themselves their moment of death, if they should become demented. They think that the decline in personality caused by severe dementia is shocking and unacceptable. In this context, some people consider euthanasia as a way to (...) avoid total deterioration. In this article, we discuss some practical and ethical dilemmas regarding euthanasia in persons with severe dementia based on an advance euthanasia directive. We are using a personalist approach in dealing with these ethical dilemmas. (shrink)

BackgroundA patient who fulfils the due diligence requirements for euthanasia, and is medically suitable, is able to donate his organs after euthanasia in Belgium, the Netherlands and Canada. Since 2012, more than 70 patients have undergone this combined procedure in the Netherlands. Even though all patients who undergo euthanasia are suffering hopelessly and unbearably, some of these patients are nevertheless willing to help others in need of an organ. Organ donation after euthanasia is a so-called donation after circulatory death (DCD), (...) Maastricht category III procedure, which takes place following cardiac arrest, comparable to donation after withdrawal of life sustaining therapy in critically ill patients. To minimize the period of organ ischemia, the patient is transported to the operating room immediately after the legally mandated no-touch period of 5 min following circulatory arrest. This means that the organ donation procedure following euthanasia must take place in the hospital, which appears to be insurmountable to many patients who are willing to donate, since they already spent a lot of time in the hospital. Case presentationThis article describes the procedure of organ donation after euthanasia starting at home (ODAEH) following anesthesia in a former health care professional suffering from multiple system atrophy. This case is unique for at least two reasons. He spent his last conscious hours surrounded by his family at home, after which he underwent general anaesthesia and was intubated, before being transported to the hospital for euthanasia and organ donation. In addition, the patient explicitly requested the euthanasia to be performed in the preparation room, next to the operating room, in order to limit the period of organ ischemia due to transport time from the intensive care unit to the operating room. The medical, legal and ethical considerations related to this illustrative case are subsequently discussed.ConclusionsOrgan donation after euthanasia is a pure act of altruism. This combined procedure can also be performed after the patient has been anesthetized at home and during transportation to the hospital. (shrink)

This volume includes the critical edition of five apologias in which Erasmus defended his New Testament translation and commentary against Diego López de Zúñiga and Sancho Carranza. The edition is partly based on manuscript sources never used before.

This volume includes the critical edition of five apologias in which Erasmus defended his New Testament translation and commentary against Diego López de Zúñiga and Sancho Carranza. The edition is partly based on manuscript sources never used before.

This paper presents a single case-study of a longitudinal shared reading programme that took place in Dutch kindergartens with first language speakers of 4 to 6 years old. As will be shown, children participate both in a traditional instructional structure and in a participation framework characterised by a more or less free discussion. These structures establish an optimal learning environment both together and in relationship to each other. Our case study demonstrates how the teacher and the pupils participate in these (...) successive frameworks and how this supports the construction of conceptual knowledge. It will be shown that participation during shared reading of picture books at kindergarten is directly linked to interactional learning opportunities. (shrink)