Political Districts Research Articles

Cross-Sectoral Comparisons of Process Quality Indicators of Health Care Across Residential Regions Using Restricted Mean Survival Time

Background: Practice guidelines recommend patient management based on scientific evidence. Quality indicators gauge adherence to such recommendations and assess health care quality. They are usually defined as adverse event rates, which may not fully capture guideline adherence over time. Methods: For assessing process indicators where compliance to the recommended treatment can be assessed by evaluating a patient's trace in linked routine databases, we propose using restricted mean survival time or restricted mean time lost, which are applicable even in competing risk situations. We demonstrate their application by assessing the compliance of patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI) to high-power statins over 12 months in Austria’s political districts, using pseudo-observations and employing causal inference methods to achieve regional comparability. Results: We analyzed the compliance of 31,678 AMI patients from Austria’s 116 political districts with index AMI between 2011 and 2015. The results revealed considerable compliance variations across districts but also plausible spatial similarities. Conclusions: Restricted mean survival time and restricted mean time lost provide interpretable estimates of patients’ expected time in compliance (lost), well-suited for risk-adjusted entity comparisons in the presence of (measurable) confounding, censoring, and competing risks.

Studentification and the Political Displacement of the Black Worker Electorate

Studentification research shows how urban universities transform surrounding neighborhoods into more transient, dense, renter, and segregated places. Despite work on economic, social, physical, and cultural changes, there is a dearth of literature that examines racial and political changes. This dimension is especially important given the impact of many American universities upon historic Black neighborhoods which played a crucial role in struggles for political and economic democracy. This paper examines census data aggregated at the political district level and maps election data to understand the extent to which political districts surrounding Philadelphia universities have studentified, whether studentified and Black Worker neighborhoods emerge as distinct political cleavages, and whether these divisions played a role in two recent elections that saw the unseating of Black Worker incumbents. It argues that the studentification of the Black Worker political districts is correlated with the political displacement of the Black Worker electorate.

VYBRANÉ ÚMRTNOSTNÍ UKAZATELE OBYVATELSTVA V RAKOUSKÉM SLEZSKU NA PODKLADĚ ZDRAVOTNÍCH STATISTIK (1896–1908)

In this article, health statistics were used primarily as a source of information for the study of some mortality phenomena in Austrian Silesia at the turn of the 20th century. The period is determined by the preservation of the sources, as these are statistics stored in the Provincial Archives in Opava, i.e., the original written sources compiled by the district doctors. These sources made it possible to track the numbers of births and deaths in the individual political districts and statutory towns in Austrian Silesia. In the birth statistics, the share of children born with qualified obstetric assistance was examined. In the death statistics, the composition of deaths by age and cause of death was monitored. Additionally, the seasonal distribution of these phenomena was also examined to the extent permitted by the data sources. At the beginning of the study, a thorough check of the credibility of the sources, i.e., health statistics, was conducted.

A Study on the Regional Evolution of the Hefei Political and Cultural New District Skyline Based on Exploratory Factor Analysis and Semantic Segmentation

The general population’s assessment and perception of a city can be influenced by its skyline, which is one of its representatives. This paper uses semantic segmentation and exploratory factor analysis to conduct a study from two different perspectives, aiming to analyse the development and current situation of the skyline of Hefei’s political and cultural new district. By collecting pictures of the skyline of the New Administrative and Cultural District, the New Administrative and Cultural District of Hefei’s skyline is being studied for overall changes using the semantic segmentation method, and to evaluate the quality of the skyline in various years, the entropy weight–TOPSIS is employed. Through the literature investigation and creation status of the new political and cultural district, the index system is scientifically formulated to conduct a questionnaire survey, and its reliability and validity are tested. This study is conducted with exploratory factor analysis of factors that are vital in the city skyline. The results of this study show that (1) after the semantic segmentation of the pictures, it is found that the proportion of buildings and the proportion of vegetation are both rising; the proportion of buildings tends to level off after 2018, and the proportion of vegetation shows a uniform increase. In the relative proximity ranking, the overall trend is increasing, and the skyline is ranked first in 2024. (2) Two variables were identified based on the findings of the exploratory factor analysis: ‘skyline value’ and ‘neighbourhood ecological quality’. The results of this study show that the skyline of Hefei’s New Administrative and Cultural District in 2024 is the best overall, and that the skyline of the New Administrative and Cultural District has developed into one of the city images of Hefei, and that its optimisation can be considered in terms of the “quality of the surrounding ecological environment”.

Feasibility and Acceptability of Group-Based Stigma Reduction Interventions for Adolescents Living with HIV and Their Caregivers: The Suubi4Stigma Randomized Clinical Trial (2020-2022).

This study examined the feasibility and acceptability of two group-based interventions: group-cognitive behavioral therapy (G-CBT) and a family-strengthening intervention delivered via multiple family group (MFG-FS), to address HIV stigma among adolescents living with HIV (ALHIV) and their caregivers. A total of 147 adolescent -caregiver dyads from 9 health clinics situated within 7 political districts in Uganda were screened for eligibility. Of these, 89 dyads met the inclusion criteria and provided consent to participate in the study. Participants were randomized, at the clinic level, to one of three study conditions: Usual care, G-CBT or MFG-FS. The interventions were delivered over a 3-month period. While both adolescents and their caregivers attended the MFG-FS sessions, G-CBT sessions were only attended by adolescents. Data were collected at baseline, 3 and 6-months post intervention initiation. The retention rate was 94% over the study period. Across groups, intervention session attendance ranged between 85 and 92%, for all sessions. Fidelity of the intervention was between 85 and 100%, and both children and caregivers rated highly their satisfaction with the intervention sessions. ALHIV in Uganda, and most of sub-Saharan Africa, are still underrepresented in stigma reduction interventions. The Suubi4Stigma study was feasible and acceptable to adolescents and their caregivers -supporting testing the efficacy of the interventions in a larger trial.

Monastic and Political Culture in the Late Period of the Northern Dynasties: ‘National’ Monasteries, Political Districts, and Battle Sites

Monastic and Political Culture in the Late Period of the Northern Dynasties: ‘National’ Monasteries, Political Districts, and Battle Sites

Unlocking archival censuses for spatial analysis: An historical dataset of the administrative units of Galicia 1857–1910

The lack of long-term assessment of the administrative divisions of Galicia, a former part of the Austrian monarchy, has so far been a serious obstacle in the mapping and spatial analyses of archival census data. To fill this gap, we reconstructed the boundaries of 5944 cadastral communes, court districts, and political districts into circles (https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PXDP41). Geometric boundaries are accompanied by different names according to census and cartographic sources. We found that a detailed reconstruction of the administrative units for Galicia is critically important for appropriately using census data in spatial analyses. So far, it has been neglected or considered difficult to perform because of the large area of the region, frequent administrative changes, and time-consuming map processing.

Gauging Gerrymandering in Pennsylvania

There is currently no widely accepted standard method to determine whether gerrymandering has occurred. To determine a cutoff for unreasonable gerrymandering, simulating collections of districting plans in the absence of partisan bias has been proposed. In simulation-based methods, real-world election outcomes are compared to results from simulated districting plans. Here, a simulation method that creates possible districts in continuous space is proposed. Existing methods use preliminary spatial discretization of the state to perform simulations. This spatial discretization can result in biased estimates, which could lead to inaccurate conclusions regarding gerrymandering. We use our continuous-space method to analyze the political districts in Pennsylvania. All of our simulated elections result in fewer than 13 Republican seats, indicating that the districting plan used in Pennsylvania prior to 2018 was likely gerrymandered. This finding agrees with and confirms the results of simulation-based discrete-space gerrymandering studies without the presence of discretization bias.

The Last Shall Be Last: Ethnic, Racial, and Nativist Bias in Distributive Politics

Examining historical budget and spending patterns from state legislatures, we show that inequality evident in other realms of American politics had a profound, dollars‐and‐cents, impact on the expenditures that flowed to political districts. Given the salience of race, class, and immigration status to American politics, we would expect that distributive spending reflects the same biases that shape voting patterns, representation, and policymaking. But, to our knowledge, this question has not previously been studied. Drawing on detailed, archival data from six states in the 1921–61 era, we uncover clear evidence of bias. Districts with more immigrants win significantly less money, controlling for a host of other factors. So do districts with large numbers of non‐whites. Thus residents of districts dominated by native‐born, Anglo constituencies receive more dollars than those in other districts, even when controlling for the identities of legislators and other characteristics of the districts.

Pelatihan Bahasa Inggris Dasar Speaking Untuk Meningkatkan Motivasi dan Komunikasi Warga Kepada Pengunjung Taman Wisata Purbakala Sumpang Bita Kabupaten Pangkep

This training has done in Balocci district of Pangkep regency Sulawesi-selatan. This training aims to encourage the society in learning and speaking English, and improve their communication between staff of political district, society, citizen in the village of Balocci Pangkep regency, in ordering and confronting tourists and visitor include foreigner or peopple around the place who visiting the ancient park Sumpang Bita Pangkep. This training has done around two days by some lecturers from FKIP Muhammadiyah University of Makassar. And the result achievement was motivation improvement of participant in learning English and Vocabulary improvement in using for communication. The result or positive responses seemed by the participant responses in doing the learning activity, it also seemed by qustioning and answer came from the participant, and also seemed by the participant action and enthusiastic in following the training program.

Spatial differences in childhood and adolescent obesity according to sex and migrant status in Vienna, Austria


 
 Background The marked spatial differences in the prevalence of childhood overweight/obesity rates within cities are mainly due to environmental characteristics of individual intracity areas. This is the first analysis of spatial differences in the prevalence of overweight/obesity among children in the Austrian capital Vienna.
 
 
 Subjects and methods In the medical-record-based study, the weight status of 1611 Viennese school children of lower socioeconomic backgrounds at the ages of six, ten, and 15 years from 46 randomly selected public secondary schools were included. Medical data have been obtained at schools by trained members of the Medical school authority. Besides effects of sex and background of migration, associations between weight status and the natural as well as social environments of the residential and school districts were analyzed. Since the 23 political districts of Vienna differ markedly in socioeconomic and environmental characteristics, a comparison between the districts was carried out.
 
 
 Results Especially high overweight and obesity rates were found for the socially disadvantaged areas of the 10th, 12th, and 15th political district of Vienna. Children living and attending schools in better-off districts had lower rates of overweight and obesity, despite their low social status. The most important factors influencing overweight and obesity were parameters of the social environment and characteristics of the residential area of the children. Significant associations between the body mass index and unemployment rates, average monthly income, the educational level of the district population, the proportion of migrants in the district, and sociodemographic cluster areas could be observed. This was equally true for girls and boys, as well as children with or without a migrant background.
 
 
 Conclusion In general, socially disadvantaged, inner-city areas showed extremely high prevalence rates of obesity.
 

Locally Fair Partitioning

We model the societal task of redistricting political districts as a partitioning problem: Given a set of n points in the plane, each belonging to one of two parties, and a parameter k, our goal is to compute a partition P of the plane into regions so that each region contains roughly s = n/k points. P should satisfy a notion of "local" fairness, which is related to the notion of core, a well-studied concept in cooperative game theory. A region is associated with the majority party in that region, and a point is unhappy in P if it belongs to the minority party. A group D of roughly s contiguous points is called a deviating group with respect to P if majority of points in D are unhappy in P. The partition P is locally fair if there is no deviating group with respect to P. This paper focuses on a restricted case when points lie in 1D. The problem is non-trivial even in this case. We consider both adversarial and "beyond worst-case" settings for this problem. For the former, we characterize the input parameters for which a locally fair partition always exists; we also show that a locally fair partition may not exist for certain parameters. We then consider input models where there are "runs" of red and blue points. For such clustered inputs, we show that a locally fair partition may not exist for certain values of s, but an approximate locally fair partition exists if we allow some regions to have smaller sizes. We finally present a polynomial-time algorithm for computing a locally fair partition if one exists.

Undocumented Migration and Electoral Support: Evidence From Spain

Unwrapping the political discourse against immigration is key to understanding the rise of populism in Western democracies. A growing body of literature has found ample evidence that immigration pays a premium to conservative political forces that propose tighter policies. Using data on presidential elections in Spain from 2008 to 2019, we shed light on this debate by highlighting the role played by irregular migration. Some studies show that undocumented immigrants consume less and earn lower wages than documented immigrants with similar observable characteristics. In addition, since they are relegated to working in the informal sector, they cannot contribute to the welfare state with direct taxes. This suggests that undocumented migration might intensify support for right-wing politics and that the effect is independent from the one caused by the presence of documented migrants. We apply an instrumental variable strategy to deal with the non-random distribution of migrants across political districts. Our findings indicate that increasing undocumented migration increases support for the right, while increasing documented migration rises support for the left. When we consider the irruption of the far-right into electoral competitions, we find that undocumented migration redistributes votes from the left to the right, as has been observed in other countries.

From Complexity to Clarity

From Complexity to Clarity

Geopolitical Inhomogeneities in the Registered Voters’ Distribution and Their Influence in the Voters’ Participation Ratio Distribution: The Mexican Case

Stylized facts appear in electoral processes worldwide, from Brazil to India. Here, we update a statistics carried on in Mexican elections but considering the inhomogeneities in electoral districts through the Nominal List (NL) (the list of valid electors in a given decision process) for the last three presidential elections. We find that the NL distribution at polling station detail is composed of, at least, three windows with a step function structure. Next, we study the consequences of the windows structure for the statistical properties of the processes. We obtain that the asymmetric vote distribution by polling station recovers a Gaussian shape for two of the windows; meanwhile, the standardized distribution of votes follows a distorted Gaussian, near to a skew normal. The distribution of the turnout at each polling station or voters’ participation ratio is close to a skew normal one in the bulk and failing at the wings. The average of voters increases in a linear way with the Nominal List and depends on the window considered. The results do not depend on the municipality, political district or urban versus nonurban distinction, and the electoral process considered.

Penerapan Algoritma K-Medoids pada Pengelompokan Wilayah Desa atau Kelurahan di Kabupaten Kutai Kartanegara

Kutai Kartanegara Regency (Kukar) was recorded as the largest contributor to the poor population in East Kalimantan (Kaltim) Province in 2017, so that appropriate strategies are needed to solve proverty problems. The development strategy is prioritized for the regions with the largest number of poor people. Identification is conducted based on facilities, infrastructures, access, social, population and economy is provided in the Village Potential data (PODES). K-Medoids is a grouping method that uses representative objects as a central point, which can be used to find out the characteristics of a region. This research is aimed to find out the optimal cluster formed by choosing the largest value of Silhouette Coefficient (SC) from the grouping of villages / political district in Kukar Regency using PODES data in 2018. Clusters that will be formed in this research are 2 clusters, 3 clusters, 4 clusters and 5 clusters. Based on the analysis, it can be seen that the value of SC 2 cluster is 0.430, the value of SC 3 cluster is 0.174, the value of SC 4 cluster is 0.175 and the value of SC 5 cluster is 0.196. So that the largest SC or optimal cluster values ​​obtained in the grouping of 2 clusters with a SC value of 0.430. Cluster 1 consists of 186 villages / political dsitrict and cluster 2 consists of 46 villages / political district.

How Compassionate? Political Appointments and District Court Judge Responses to Compassionate Release during COVID-19

This paper seeks to examine how judges are deciding compassionate-release motions in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has proven particularly deadly inside the nation’s prisons. I explore how judges appointed by Republicans and Democrats have ruled in more than 4,000 federal compassionate-release cases since March 2020, finding that judges appointed by Democrats are granting compassionate release at far higher rates than their Republican counterparts, with Trump judges granting among the fewest requests. The First Step Act of 2018 gave incarcerated individuals the right to file a motion for early release in court in light of “extraordinary and compelling” circumstances, and requests for release have skyrocketed since the outbreak of the virus. The unique conditions of the pandemic, high levels of virus transmission in prisons, and the highly discretionary nature of the compassionate-release statute together offer a natural experiment for considering how judicial ideology impacts real lives. The results of this analysis underscore the importance of the fight over control of the judiciary going forward.

To Ensure Normal Administrative Order, and for the Population’s Greater Comfort? Aspects of Post-war Transition in the Political District of Volosca-Abbazia / Volosko-Opatija

To Ensure Normal Administrative Order, and for the Population’s Greater Comfort? Aspects of Post-war Transition in the Political District of Volosca-Abbazia / Volosko-Opatija

Historical dataset of administrative units with social-economic attributes for Austrian Silesia 1837\u20131910

Scientists from many disciplines need historical administrative boundaries in order to analyse socio-economic data in space and time. In this paper, we present a set of historical data consisting of administrative unit boundaries and exemplary socio-economic attributes for Austrian Silesia, an historical region located in modern Czechia and Poland. The dataset covers nearly 700 administrative unit boundaries on the level of cadastral or political communes and their subparts and was acquired through manual vectorisation of historical maps (1:28,800) from the period 1837–1841. The local-level units can be easily joined into higher-level divisions such as court or political districts for the period 1837–1910. The data can then be combined with statistical data collected approximately every 10 years for a similar period. Within the quality assessment, the relations between cartographic and census data and their credibility are analysed. The present dataset provides many possibilities for joining a wide range of historical statistical data to better understand various demographic and economic processes based on advanced analyses, e.g., by using GIS.

The “Paris-End” of Town? Deriving Urban Typologies Using Three Imagery Types

Urban typologies allow areas to be categorised according to form and the social, demographic, and political uses of the areas. The use of these typologies and finding similarities and dissimilarities between cities enables better targeted interventions for improved health, transport, and environmental outcomes in urban areas. A better understanding of local contexts can also assist in applying lessons learned from other cities. Constructing urban typologies at a global scale through traditional methods, such as functional or network analysis, requires the collection of data across multiple political districts, which can be inconsistent and then require a level of subjective classification. To overcome these limitations, we use neural networks to analyse millions of images of urban form (consisting of street view, satellite imagery, and street maps) to find shared characteristics between the largest 1692 cities in the world. The comparison city of Paris is used as an exemplar and we perform a case study using two Australian cities, Melbourne and Sydney, to determine if a “Paris-end” of town exists or can be found in these cities using these three big data imagery sets. The results show specific advantages and disadvantages of each type of imagery in constructing urban typologies. Neural networks trained with map imagery will be highly influenced by the structural mix of roads, public transport, and green and blue space. Satellite imagery captures a combination of both urban form and decorative and natural details. The use of street view imagery emphasises the features of a human-scaled visual geography of streetscapes. However, for both satellite and street view imagery to be highly effective, a reduction in scale and more aggressive pre-processing might be required in order to reduce detail and create greater abstraction in the imagery.