In heart surgery in infants, a strategy consisting predominantly of circulatory arrest is associated with greater central nervous system perturbation in the early postoperative period than a strategy consisting predominantly of low-flow cardiopulmonary bypass. Assessment of the effect of these findings on later outcomes awaits follow-up of this cohort.

Hemodilution to a hematocrit level in wide use for cardiopulmonary bypass and thought to be safe is associated with adverse perioperative and developmental outcomes in infants.

Considers the organizational consequences for parties of the professionalization of election campaigning. This process has gone through three main stages, from pre‐modern, through the TV‐dominated modern stage, and onto the current advanced‐modern stage of campaigning personified by the use of new telecommunications technology. The chapter shows party organizations to be highly adaptive, investing heavily in time and resources in the new campaign techniques, professionalizing, and centralizing their organizations (particularly around their top leaderships), and paying far more attention to image and specific campaign issues as opposed to traditional ideological standpoints. There has been a shift from parties selling themselves to voters to designing an appropriate product to match voter needs. Because of these changes, contemporary political parties have repositioned themselves to survive the uncertainties of operating as representative institutions in the increasingly participatory age of the end of the millennium.

Competing interests: A.Fu. serves on the Board of Directors of Common Cause and Everyday Democracy and is an occasional consultant to Apple.

This article introduces the first findings of the Political Party Database (PPDB) project, a major survey of party organizations in parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies. The project's first round of data covers 122 parties in 19 countries. In this paper we describe the scope of the database, then investigate what it tells us about contemporary party organization in these countries, focussing on parties' resources, structures and internal decision-making. We examine party-family and within country organizational patterns, and where possible we make temporal comparisons with older datasets. Our analyses suggest a remarkable coexistence of uniformity and diversity. In terms of the major organizational resources on which parties can draw, such as members, staff and finance, the new evidence largely confirms the continuation of trends identified in previous research: i.e., declining membership, but enhanced financial resources and 2 more paid staff. We also find remarkable uniformity regarding the core architecture of party organizations. At the same time, however, we find substantial variation between countries and party families in terms of their internal processes, with particular regard to how internally democratic they are, and in the forms that this democratization takes.3

Use of the pH-stat strategy in infants undergoing deep hypothermic cardiopulmonary bypass was associated with lower postoperative morbidity, shorter recovery time to first electroencephalographic activity, and, in patients with D-transposition, shorter duration of intubation and intensive care unit stay. These data challenge the notion that alpha-stat management is a superior strategy for organ protection during reparative operations in infants using deep hypothermic cardiopulmonary bypass.

This article addresses the issue of specialization and committee formation in the European Parliament in the light of the largely US-centred debates on these issues. Clear evidence is found of specialization of behaviour, both with regard to committee assignment and the use of parliamentary questions. This is also accompanied by a trend towards a greater role for the party groups in co-ordinating and controlling behaviour across these specializations.

No abstract