This thesis deals with the nature of the Left-Right scale. Theories and ideas about the Left-Right scale have been tested by a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods. The research questions are, in short, firstly if voters’ preferences on political issues, where economic issues are tested in this specific thesis, can consistently explain voters’ Left-Right self-placement, secondly if this level of explanation can vary depending on changes in national political discourse, and finally if a high level of correlation between issue and Left-Right self-placement facilitates the matching process of parties and voters of similar ideological conviction. A regression is run on data from the World Values Survey and the European Values Study, data which consists of survey questions about attitudes towards economic preferences and self-placement on the Left-Right scale. The selection is restricted to old democracies, as there is some discrepancy between new and old democracies with regards to the capacity of the electorate to relate to the Left-Right scale. The independent variable in this regression is attitudes toward different economic issues, while the dependent variable is self-placement on the Left-Right scale. The first question is answered by the regression, which is if preferences regarding issues can explain self-placement on the Left-Right scale. The answer that is given is that there is indeed a consistent relationship between preferences on economic issues and self-placement on the Left-Right scale, over time. Albeit it is higher for some countries, like Scandinavia, and lower for other countries, like Japan and Ireland. The two remaining questions are answered by case studies, selected through the method of least likely and most likely cases. These are Netherlands, Sweden, Japan and France. In essence, these cases show that the Left-Right scale is indeed flexible, and can adapt to the current political discourse, and that a high relationship between preferences on political issues and self-placement on the Left-Right scale facilitates the matching of voters and parties of similar ideological conviction.

Les cils motiles et statiques jouent d’importants rôles dans la détermination de l’axe gauche-droite (GD) qui, en général, est mis en place par l’intermédiaire de flux directionnels générés dans des structures spécialisées appelées organisateurs gauche-droite (OGD). C’est ce point clé du développement qui dictera une organogenèse asymétrique. Dans mon projet de thèse, nous avons développé une méthode, appelée 3D-Cilia Map, et analysé l’organisation tridimensionnelle de l’implantation des cils afin d’extraire les paramètres clés responsables de la mise en place du flux directionnel et par conséquent de l’asymétrie GD. En résumé, nos résultats suggèrent qu’un mécanisme de signalisation chimique serait le plus plausible pour induire la rupture de la symétrie GD. Plus tard, les cellules réguleront intrinsèquement l’orientation asymétrique des cils à leur surface. Le travail présenté ici contribue de façon importante à nos connaissances actuelles concernant le comportement des cils et les mécanismes de sensation des flux dans l’établissement de l’axe gauche droite au sein de l’organisateur gauche-droite du poisson zèbre. / Both motile and immotile cilia play important roles in left-right (LR) axis determination, which generally involves cilia-mediated directional flows in organized structures (LR organizers, LRO) in which the LR symmetry is broken, thus driving asymmetric organogenesis in the developing embryos. In my PhD project we aimed to developed a method (3D-Cilia Map) and analyze the three-dimensional organization of ciliary implantation in order to extract the key parameters modulating the directional flow involved in breaking the axis of symmetry in the zebra fish LRO. Altogether, our results suggest the initial mechanism to break the LR symmetry is most likely to be based on the transport of achemical signal, while later, cells intrinsically provide their cilia the cues to orient asymmetrically. The work presented here represents an important contribution to our current understanding of cilia behaviors and flow-sensing mechanisms in the establishment of the left-right axis in the zebra fish LRO.

Over the years, a variety of methods have been used in order toestimate policy positions for political parties in national parliaments. This papersets out to apply a novel computational method called Wordfish and apply it to aheavily under-researched form of political text, parliamentary speeches.Quantitative studies of this sort are even more rare the case in Sweden in whichquantitative studies on parliamentary speeches is close to non-existent. In anattempt to contribute to fill the gap in literature this study uses scaling techniqueusing word frequencies and to estimate positions of 4 Swedish political partiesalong two dimensions in political space. By observing the estimated movement bythese 4 parties over a 20-year time period one can draw conclusions of theSwedish political space and how it has shifted over time. One can also evaluatethe chosen method on this specific research material, a combination that has notbeen seen before. The results suggest that there is fine tuning that needs to bedone when using Wordfish considering the output was not in line with conventionalwisdom and previous research. The studied did show interesting movementtowards the authoritarian extreme by the two largest parties in Swedish nationalpolitics.

Les maladies rares sont définies en Europe par une prévalence inférieure à 1/2 000 cas et représentent plus de 7000 entités différentes dont 80% sont d’origine génétique. La majorité est de début pédiatrique. J’ai réalisé l’étude de cas familiaux rares avec récurrence dans la fratrie de cardiopathies congénitales avec hétérotaxie (défaut de latéralité gauche/droite) d’une part, et de mort subite cardiaque inexpliquée chez le nourrisson ou en période néonatale d’autre part. La stratégie d’identification de gène par séquençage de l’exome au sein de ces familles dans l’hypothèse d’une transmission autosomique récessive a permis d’identifier trois gènes et d’en étudier deux sur le plan fonctionnel dans différents modèles : 1) Perte de fonction de MMP21 et malformations cardiaques congénitales par anomalie de latéralité embryonnaire. MMP21 code pour une métallopeptidase matricielle dont nous démontrons le rôle très spécifique au niveau du nœud embryonnaire sur un modèle poisson zèbre et souris. Ceci ouvre de nouvelles perspectives dans la compréhension des mécanismes moléculaires qui sous-tendent la mise en place de l’asymétrie gauche/droite chez la plupart des vertébrés. De manière intéressante, alors que tous les mammifères ont le cœur latéralisé à gauche, tous n’ont pas un gène MMP21 codant. Il existe donc plusieurs voies de signalisation de l’asymétrie gauche/droite chez les vertébrés. 2) Mutations hypomorphes de PPA2 et mort subite cardiaque chez le nourrisson. PPA2 code pour une pyrophosphatase mitochondriale et les données chez la levure ont montré que la fonction de cette enzyme était essentielle au fonctionnement mitochondrial. Nous décrivons une nouvelle présentation clinique de maladie mitochondriale responsable de décès par arrêt cardiaque inattendu chez le nourrisson. 3) Perte de fonction de PLCD3 et cardiomyopathie foudroyante par apoptose et nécrose diffuse des cardiomyocytes en période néonatale. Ce résultat nécessite encore d’être confirmé par l’identification d’autres cas mais la fonction de la protéine et des données chez la souris sont des arguments majeurs en faveur de la causalité du gène. Au total, ces travaux sont déterminants à la fois sur le plan clinique dans le cadre du conseil génétique pour les familles concernées et sur le plan fondamental en éclairant les mécanismes biologiques de mise en place de l’axe gauche-droit au cours du développement embryonnaire avec MMP21, sur le rôle essentiel de PPA2 dans la mitochondrie et sur celui de PLCD3 dans la survie des cardiomyocytes en postnatal. / Rare diseases are defined in Europe by a prevalence of less than 1/2,000 individuals and represent more than 7,000 different diseases of which 80% are genetic. Most have a paediatric onset. My project involved the study of rare cardiac disorders in familial cases with recurrence in siblings, focusing on congenital heart disease in the context of heterotaxia (laterality defects) and sudden unexpected death due to cardiac arrest in infancy and the neonatal period. Whole exome sequencing was used as a tool for disease gene discovery in these families with the hypothesis of autosomal recessive inheritance. This strategy led to the identification of 3 novel disease genes. I performed functional validation for two of these genes in different models, confirming their involvement in each disease. 1) Loss of function of MMP21 and cardiac malformations due to left-right patterning defects during embryonic development. MMP21 encodes a metallopeptidase for which I demonstrated a highly specialized role in the generation of left-right asymmetry at the node using zebrafish. This gives new insight into the molecular mechanisms at the origin of left-right asymmetry in vertebrates. Interestingly, all mammals have a left-sided heart, but some species have lost the Mmp21 gene, indicating that there are different pathways leading to left-right determination in vertebrates. 2) Hypomorphic mutations in PPA2 cause sudden cardiac arrest in infants. PPA2 is a nuclear gene encoding the mitochondrial pyrophosphatase and using a yeast model we showed that this enzyme is essential for the mitochondrial energy transducing system and biogenesis. I described a novel clinical spectrum for a mitochondrial disease responsible for unexpected cardiac arrest in infancy. 3) PLCD3 loss of function and fatal cardiomyopathy by cardiomyocyte apoptosis and necrosis in neonates. Exome sequencing in one familial case with 2 siblings presenting fatal cardiomyopathy led to the identification of compound heterozygous mutations in PLCD3, a gene previously implicated in a similar pathology in a mouse model. Identification of further cases with mutations in this gene will be needed in order to confirm the role of PLCD3 in the disease. In total, these studies are crucial from a clinical point of view for the genetic counseling of the affected families and they contribute to the elucidation of biological mechanisms of embryonic development and left-right determination (MMP21), mitochondrial function (PPA2) and post-natal cardiomyocyte survival (PLCD3).

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The aim of this paper is to empirically examine the ideological trends and positioning of the Swedish liberal party with the Danish social liberal party. This paper also aims to analyze the reasons behind the trends. By examine the development in these two Nordic liberal sisterparties, this paper contributes to our understanding of why and how party change is initiated. The paper commences with an intuitive notion that the Swedish party has in fact, made a lurch towards the right, during the past ten to fifteen years while the Danish party has retained their social-liberal position in the centre of the Danish political spectrum. The questions then asked are: can this hypothesis be verified empirically? If so, how can this phenomenon of divergence, be explained? The method used in this thesis is process-tracing and the empirical material does to a large extent rely on interviews with central agents as they are specified in the theory of each party. The starting point of the paper is theory on party change, which identifies the important agents, goals and determinants of party policy.. It rely on rational choice assumption, pays regard to institutional boundaries and is placed somewhere in the category of new institutionalism. This thesis argues that it is empirically unquestionable that the Swedish party de facto has made a lurch to the right during the last decade, while the Danish party has shown significant stability in their ideological position. The thesis further argues that the development in the Swedish party can be explained through a shift of primary goals, from policy-seeking toward vote-maximising, while the Danish party’s primary goals have since the beginning of the nineties until now, remained primarily policy-seeking. This explains why their ideological trend has kept a stable course. The paper concludes by stating that the divergent development within the two parties is explainable on the basis of the institutional organisation within each party, together with the different political environments they are occupied in.

In the Swedish general elections of 2010, the party the Sweden Democrats for the first time entered the parliament. In an election otherwise characterised by competition between two explicit political blocs, the Sweden Democrats profiled itself as a party free from ideological blinders, ready to represent the will of the people. Commonly referred to as a populist party, there is considerable disagreement about where in the Swedish political space the party actually belongs. At the same time, there exist within political science a multitude of methodological approaches aimed at answering such questions. By combining election manifesto content analysis and survey-based approaches, the study of this paper presents cross-validated estimates of where in Swedish political space the Sweden Democrats belong. The study also evaluates strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches to the estimation of policy positions in the specific context of the Sweden Democrats. The party is found to be economically centrist but highly authoritarian, making it an outlier along both a "traditional" and a Swedish left-right continuum. Some methodological difficulties that may be particularly important to consider when analyzing parties such as the Sweden Democrats, e.g. bias, dimensional salience and linguistic volatility, are suggested.

Clarifying the underlying spatio-temporal mechanisms that determine body pattern is important for detailed understanding of embryonic development. A crucial question of vertebrate embryogenesis remains: when and how are single blastomeres determined for differentiation that subsequently leads to body axes specification and the formation of different tissues and organs? The answer to this question will be beneficial for primary research as well as in the field of applied medicine. The main aim of the presented thesis was to study spatio-temporal molecular gradients of cell fate determinants during early embryonic development. The African clawed frog Xenopus laevis was used as a model organism because of their large size of oocytes and external embryonic development. Due to late activation of embryonic transcription, a crucial mechanism of early blastomeres determination is dependent on asymmetric localization of maternal factors within oocyte and their uneven distribution into single blastomeres during early cell division. Two main localization patterns were identified along the animal-vegetal axis of the mature Xenopus oocyte using qPCR tomography. The localization gradient with preference in either animal or vegetal hemisphere was found for maternal mRNA as well as miRNAs. Moreover, two vegetal...

Given a full-range simply-invariant shift-invariant subspace <i>M</i> of the vector-valued <i>L²</i> space on the unit circle, the classical Beurling-Lax-Halmos (BLH) theorem obtains a unitary operator-valued function <i>W</i> so that <i>M</i> may be represented as the image of of the Hardy space <i>H²</i> on the disc under multiplication by <i>W</i>. The work of Ball-Helton later extended this result to find a single function representing a so-called dual shift-invariant pair of subspaces <i>(M,M^Ã)</i> which together form a direct-sum decomposition of <i>L²</i>. In the case where the pair <i>(M,M^Ã)</i> are finite-dimensional perturbations of the Hardy space <i>H²</i> and its orthogonal complement, Ball-Gohberg-Rodman obtained a transfer function realization for the representing function <i>W</i>; this realization was parameterized in terms of zero-pole data computed from the pair <i>(M,M^Ã)</i>. Later work by Ball-Raney extended this analysis to the case of nonrational functions <i>W</i> where the zero-pole data is taken in an infinite-dimensional operator theoretic sense. The current work obtains analogues of these various results for arbitrary dual shift-invariant pairs <i>(M,M^Ã)</i> of the <i>L²</i> spaces on the real line; here, shift-invariance refers to invariance under the translation group. These new results rely on recent advances in the understanding of continuous-time infinite-dimensional input-state-output linear systems which have been codified in the book by Staffans. / Ph. D.

The purpose of this study is to increase knowledge about gender differences in ideological orientations in Europe. We use quantitative methods and survey data from European Social Survey (ESS) to examine 25 countries in Europe over time and investigate if there is a correlation between gender equality and the gender gap in self-placement on the political left-right scale. The study examines how the political gender gap has developed through time, and how the trends differ between men and women. The study also examines how gender equality has evolved over time in comparison to the gender gap in political ideology. Furthermore, it examines whether different ideological dimensions might affect self-placement on the left-right scale for men and women. The results show that the gender gap has increased in general across Europe. However, there is substantial variation across the countries. In several countries, the gender gap in ideological orientations decreases over time. The study found different tendencies in how the gender gap has been changing through time in relation to how gender equality has developed. We also found that some ideological factors have a greater effect on women’s self-placement compared to men’s and vice versa.