Voting is a habit. People learn the habit of voting, or not, based on experience in their first few elections. Elections that do not stimulate high turnout among young adults leave a 'footprint' of low turnout in the age structure of the electorate as many individuals who were new at those elections fail to vote at subsequent elections. Elections that stimulate high turnout leave a high turnout footprint. So a country's turnout history provides a baseline for current turnout that is largely set, except for young adults. This baseline shifts as older generations leave the electorate and as changes in political and institutional circumstances affect the turnout of new generations. Among the changes that have affected turnout in recent years, the lowering of the voting age in most established democracies has been particularly important in creating a low turnout footprint that has grown with each election.

Reif and Schmitt argued that elections to the European Parliament should be understood as second-order national elections, and advanced several predictions about the results of such elections. Those concerning the impact of government status, party size, party character and the national election cycle on electoral performance are examined here using data on four sets of European Parliament elections. In addition, the consequences of European Parliament elections for the next national election are explored. The analysis demonstrates the validity of most of Reif and Schmitt's original propositions, and further refines their analysis of the relationship between European and subsequent national elections. However, all propositions hold much more effectively in countries where alternation in government is the norm, suggesting that the distinction between first-order and second-order elections may not be so clear cut as Reif and Schmitt imagined.The dominant paradigm for understanding elections to the European Parliament is that they are 'second-order national elections'. This perspective was presented by Karlheinz Reif and Hermann Schmitt following the first European Parliament elections in 1979, 1 and further elaborated and tested by Reif in the context of the 1984 elections. 2 Each set of elections provided only a limited

After six sets of European Parliament elections, do voters primarily use these elections to punish their national governments or to express their views on European issues? We answer this question by looking at all European elections in all 25 EU states. We find that almost 40% of the volatility in party vote-shares in European elections compared to national elections is explained by the transfer of votes from large and governing parties to small and opposition parties. Nevertheless, anti-EU parties and green parties on average do better in European elections than in national elections. But these "European effects" are minor, and the position a party takes on Europe is largely irrelevant to its performance. Hence, despite the growing powers of the European Parliament, neither positions on matters regarding European integration, nor on matters regarding "normal" left-right policy, have much of an effect on electoral outcomes.T he standard theory of European Parliament elections is that they are mid-term contests in the battle to win national government office, and so voters primarily use these elections to punish governing parties. Nevertheless, this is not the impression of the establishment in Brussels or the media in many national capitals, who identify falling turnout and support for anti-European parties as indicators of protest against the EU. 1 Which side is right has implications for the debate about the democratic accountability of the EU, in that if European Parliament elections are simply about punishing national governments and have little to do with EU politics and policies, then increasing the powers of the European Parliament has not increased the connection between European voters and EU governance.In this paper we try to resolve this argument by looking closely at the empirical evidence. In the next section we review the existing claims about how to understand aggregate outcomes in European elections. We then explain our method: We apply a series of statistical models to estimate the amount of votes parties gain or lose in each European election relative to the previous national election. Our data set covers all six European elections since 1979 and includes parties in all 25 member states. The empirical results are then presented.

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Objective: To determine whether 5 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associate with ALS in 3 different populations. We also assessed the contribution of genotype to angiogenin levels in plasma and CSF.Methods: Allelic association statistics were calculated for polymorphisms in the ANG gene in 859 patients and 1047 controls from Sweden, Ireland and Poland. Plasma, serum and CSF angiogenin levels were quantified and stratified according to genotypes across the ANG gene. The contribution of SNP genotypes to variance in circulating angiogenin levels was estimated in patients and controls.Results: All SNPs showed association with ALS in the Irish group. The SNP rs17114699 replicated in the Swedish cohort. No SNP associated in the Polish cohort. Age-and sex-corrected circulating angiogenin levels were significantly lower in patients than in controls (p,0.001). An allele dose-dependent regulation of angiogenin levels was observed in controls. This regulation was attenuated in the ALS cohort. A significant positive correlation between CSF plasma angiogenin levels was present in controls and abolished in ALS.

This article examines how voters attribute credit and blame to governments for policy success and failure, and how this affects their party support. Using panel data from Britain between 1997 and 2001 and Ireland between 2002 and 2007 to model attribution, the interaction between partisanship and evaluation of performance is shown to be crucial. Partisanship resolves incongruities between party support and policy evaluation through selective attribution: favoured parties are not blamed for policy failures and less favoured ones are not credited with policy success. Furthermore, attributions caused defections from Labour over the 1997-2001 election cycle in Britain, and defections from the Fianna Fa´il/Progressive Democrat coalition over the 2002-07 election cycle in Ireland. Using models of vote switching and controlling for partisanship to minimize endogeneity problems, it is shown that attributed evaluations affect vote intention much more than unattributed evaluations. This result holds across several policy areas and both political systems.Reward-punishment models of voting have been extremely influential in the study of voting behaviour. Responding to suggestions that voters knew too little about politics to make coherent decisions about who should govern them, V. O. Key argued that voters knew quite enough to judge whether things they cared about were getting better or getting worse: elections let voters play the 'rational god of vengeance and reward'. 1 Bad governments were rejected, and not so bad ones allowed another term in office. There is now an extensive body of academic research into the link between voting behaviour and government performance, particularly in economic affairs. Initial findings stressed the link between economic indicators and the vote and sought to demonstrate that the electorate operated a system of reward and punishment in which governments who presided over good times were returned and those who did not were ejected. 2 While there is undoubtedly a general link between election results and economics, the strength and nature of this relationship seems to vary. Electors respond to different economic indicators at different times, unemployment at one time,

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