Deliberative systems theorists have for some time emphasised the distributed nature of deliberative values; they therefore do not focus exclusively on ‘deliberation’ but on all sorts of communication ...that advance deliberative democratic values, including everyday political talk in informal settings. However, such talk has been impossible to capture inductively at scale. This article discusses an electronic approach, Structural Topic Modelling, and applies it to a recent case: the Scottish independence debate of 2012–2014. The case provides the first empirical test of the claim that a deliberative system can capture the full ‘pool of perspectives’ on an issue, and shows that citizens can hold each other to deliberative standards even in mass, online discussion. It also shows that, in deliberative terms, the major cleavage in the ‘indyref’ debate was not so much between Yes and No, but between formal and informal venues.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
This article advances understandings of secessionist strategies by examining how and why secessionist movements make the case for creating a new sovereign state. It draws on new empirical data to ...examine the ways in which pro-independence parties in Catalonia have justified their calls for the creation of an independent Catalan Republic between 2008 and 2018. The findings challenge the widespread scholarly assumption that secessionist mobilisation is underpinned by grievances—cultural, economic, and political—against the state. We find that arguments for an independent Catalonia rarely include cultural claims. Instead, independence is advocated as a way of resolving political and economic grievances and of creating a better, more democratic, and just Catalan society. Such justifications are highly influenced by the political context in which pro-independence parties try to advance towards secession. These insights advance on extant explanations of secessionist mobilisation by highlighting the distinctive nature of, and the motives for, secessionist claims.
Are secessionisms from and within the EU comparable? What motivates them and to what extent do they pose similar challenges to EU territorial governance? This article addresses these questions by ...comparing the framing of the British Leave campaign and the Catalan independence movement. Drawing on the FraTerr database and method, the analysis suggests that secessionism from the EU and secessionism within the EU are different political phenomena despite sharing an emphasis on sovereignty and the common goal of breaking-up from an existing polity. Secessionism from the EU is primarily a call for the recovery of lost sovereignty and of classical functions of the state such as border control. Secessionism within the EU invokes sovereignty as the right to external self-determination and adds narratives around a better future and greater democratic quality and social justice. These two types of secessionism pose different challenges to EU territorial governance because the first entails a full rejection of the European project while the latter calls for a review of European multi-level governance.
On 1 October 2017, Catalonia held an independence referendum. The Spanish state had previously declared this referendum illegal and activated political and security devices to prevent it from being ...held. The referendum was the tipping point of the so‐called Catalan ‘Process’, which would continue with the suspension of Catalonia's self‐government and the imprisonment of several Catalan politicians and activists. Heated political discussion has centred current Spanish (and sometimes even European) politics on issues related to the legitimacy of both the Process and the actors involved in it. This paper aims to understand how the different Catalan political parties framed the Process by looking at the parliamentary discourses which prevailed in the Catalan Parliament one month before and one month after the holding of the referendum. The data are analysed using a mixed‐methods approach. We combine topic models (used to generate different frames associated with different political leanings inductively) with an in‐depth examination of the contents of these frames. The results shed light on how the Catalan Process is framed according to different political leanings and contribute to our understanding of stateless and state‐wide nationalism strategies.
This paper examines the nature of intergovernmental relations (IGR) on immigrant integration in Spain, a relatively recent immigration country, with a focus on Catalonia. By means of qualitative ...document analysis and semi-structured interviews at both levels of government, the paper demonstrates that despite the formal existence of multilateral and institutionalized fora for intergovernmental relations, most intergovernmental relations on immigrant integration tend to be informal and bilateral. The paper also highlights that the conflictual nature of IGR on integration varies across sub-policy areas and over time. The paper contributes to strengthen existing hypotheses regarding institutional features (the distribution of competencies and the territorial organization of power) and party politics for explaining the patterns of IGR.
This article introduces a new dataset on regionalist actors' territorial demands and frames in Europe. The FraTerr dataset advances on existing datasets by proposing a more fine-grained understanding ...of regionalist actors' territorial demands, and is the first to provide comparative data on how these are framed. Methodologically, it develops an original coding scheme for the qualitative content analysis of political documents. Empirically, this approach is applied to a comparative study of regionalist parties and civil society actors in twelve European regions. A preliminary analysis of the data provides new evidence of the complexity of regionalist actors' territorial demands and the multi-dimensional nature of their framing strategies. The dataset has implications for the study of regionalist actors and issues, and for broader scholarly efforts at estimating political actors' territorial issue positions and framing strategies.
This paper examines stateless nationalist and regionalist party (SNRP) discourses on immigration through an exploration of the economic dimensions of the centre-periphery cleavage. Using qualitative ...document analysis, the Republican Left in Catalonia (ERC) and the Scottish National Party (SNP) in Scotland are studied in order to see whether and how the relative economic position of a region shapes SNRP discourses on immigration. The period of analysis encompasses the last three terms of office for both parties, during which immigration and decentralisation have been very salient issues in Catalonia and Scotland. Results suggest that the relative economic situations and the economic crisis do not seem to affect general stances, which are positive in both regions. However, the economic contexts have an influence on how each party selects its main issues for debate, and the ways in which these are managed.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Background
Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarkers have shown incomplete concordance with amyloid‐positron emission tomography (PET). Our goal was to analyze the agreement between CSF biomarkers and ...amyloid‐PET in a multicenter study.
Method
Retrospective multicenter study (6 centers). Participants who underwent both CSF biomarkers and amyloid‐PET with a maximum time between tests <18 months were included. Biomarkers were considered abnormal according to cut points of each center, describing different ATN profiles: A+T+N+, A‐T‐N‐, others. Amyloid‐PET was classified as positive/negative visually. Agreement between CSF biomarkers and amyloid‐PET was analyzed by overall percent agreement (OPA).
Result
256 participants were included (age 68(SD9), MMSE score 25(SD4)). Diagnoses were mild cognitive impairment or dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease (49%), Lewy body dementia (21%), frontotemporal dementia (10%) and others (20%). Mean time between tests was 4.9 months (SD4,0). 41% were APOEε4 carriers. CSF biomarkers were analyzed with Innotest® (32%) or Lumipulse® (68%). PET tracers employed were 18F‐Florbetapir (71%), 18F‐Flutemetamol (21%) or 18F‐Florbetaben (8%). OPA between single CSF biomarkers and amyloid‐PET was 75% for Aβ1‐42, 75% for pTau181, 74% for tTau. The use of Aβ1‐42/Aβ1‐40 ratio (n = 155) as an indicator of amyloid deposition increased OPA (86%). The use of other biomarker ratios also improved OPA: 88% for pTau181/Aβ1‐42 and 82% for tTau/Aβ1‐42). Agreement of CSF biomarkers with amyloid‐PET was higher in A+T+N+/A‐T‐N‐ cases (94%), mainly when all CSF biomarkers were altered (97%).
Conclusion
The use of CSF biomarker ratios improved their agreement with amyloid‐PET. A+T+N+/A‐T‐N‐ CSF profiles had an agreement with amyloid‐PET higher than 90%.
Abstract
On the 1st October 2017 an independence referendum was organised in Catalonia. The aim of this paper is to analyse the
nature of the political debate going on in the Catalan Parliament ...during the whole process by focusing on the kind of argumentation
strategies that were used by each of the leanings to legitimise their political decisions. We do that relying on a methodological
distinction that differentiates between sound argumentation and fallacious argumentation. By using a Critical Discourse Analysis approach,
this study offers a wide picture of the kind of argumentation used by the main political actors involved in the process of decision making
in Catalonia. The results show that there is more emphasis in antagonising with the others, than engaging in sound argument exchange that
could facilitate minimal points of consensus. Such results may help explain why the Catalan conflict is still unsolved at the political
level.
Blood-based biomarkers have emerged as minimally invasive options for evaluating cognitive impairment. Most studies to date have assessed them in research cohorts, limiting their generalization to ...everyday clinical practice. We evaluated their diagnostic performance and clinical applicability in a prospective, real-world, memory clinic cohort.
All patients referred with suspected cognitive impairment between July 2019 and June 2021 were prospectively invited to participate. Five plasma biomarkers (tau phosphorylated at threonine 181 p-tau181, glial fibrillary acidic protein GFAP, neurofilament light chain NfL, total tau t-tau, and ubiquitin C-terminal hydrolase L1 UCH-L1) were determined with single-molecule array. Performance was assessed in comparison to clinical diagnosis (blinded to plasma results) and amyloid status (CSF/PET). A group of cognitively unimpaired (CU) controls was also included.
Three hundred forty-nine participants (mean age 68, SD 8.3 years) and 36 CU controls (mean age 61.7, SD 8.2 years) were included. In the subcohort with available Alzheimer disease (AD) biomarkers (n = 268), plasma p-tau181 and GFAP had a high diagnostic accuracy to differentiate AD from non-neurodegenerative causes (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve 0.94 and 0.92, respectively), with p-tau181 systematically outperforming GFAP. Plasma p-tau181 levels predicted amyloid status (85% sensitivity and specificity) with accurate individual prediction in approximately 60% of the patients. Plasma NfL differentiated frontotemporal dementia (FTD) syndromes from CU (0.90) and non-neurodegenerative causes (0.93), whereas the discriminative capacity with AD and between all neurodegenerative and non-neurodegenerative causes was less accurate. A combination of p-tau181 and NfL identified FTD with 82% sensitivity and 85% specificity and had a negative predictive value for neurodegenerative diagnosis of 86%, ruling out half of the non-neurodegenerative diagnoses. In the subcohort without AD biomarkers, similar results were obtained. T-tau and UCH-L1 did not offer added diagnostic value.
Plasma p-tau181 predicted amyloid status with high accuracy and could have potentially avoided CSF/amyloid PET testing in approximately 60% of subjects in a memory clinic setting. NfL was useful for identifying FTD from non-neurodegenerative causes but behaved worse than p-tau181 in all other comparisons. Combining p-tau181 and NfL improved diagnostic performance for FTD and non-neurodegenerative diagnoses. However, the 14% false-negative results suggest that further improvement is needed before implementation outside memory clinics.
This study provides Class I evidence that plasma p-tau181 correlates with the presence or absence of AD and a combination of plasma p-tau181 and NfL correlates moderately well with a diagnosis of FTD.
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