Consistent evidence confirms that the addition of fluoride to achieve an optimal concentration in potable water supplies is both safe and effective in reducing community caries experience. While public acceptance and use of water fluoridation in Australia has been high for forty years, its implementation in Queensland remained low until December 2008. Political and social scientists have long recognised that the formation and maintenance of public policy in Australia is a complex interactive process involving inter alia government, bureaucracy, pressure groups and voters. However, explanations of the factors influencing the outcome of a proposal to fluoridate a municipal water supply remain inadequate. The long evolution of adjusted fluoridation has its genesis in pre-1930 North American concerns over the disfigurement associated with endemic dental mottling. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, many perceived this affliction as the visible manifestation of a public health problem: chronic fluoride intoxication. Reports of environmental contamination of the food chain from naturally over-fluoridated water and agrarian and industrial practices only increased community doubts about the accumulative and toxic potential of fluoride. For these and other reasons the public perception of fluoride was poor. Between 1937 and 1945, USPHS dental researcher and later Director of the National Institute of Dental Research HT Dean and co-workers emerged as the few who understood the fine line between fluoride therapy and toxicity. Their investigations involved not only specialised interpretations of human dental epidemiology but also multidisciplinary studies of human and animal fluoride exposure and homeostasis. However, decisions to implement water fluoridation had to come from the relevant government authorities. Here scientific knowledge faced political reality. Apart from perceived safety issues and resistance to the compulsory nature of water fluoridation, many other barriers to water fluoridation emerged: incompletely understood pharmacodynamics of fluoride; confounding issues in the initiation and propagation of caries; community acceptance of this epidemic; and political sensitivities regarding water. This scientific and social background explained why adjusted fluoridation was amenable to both challenge and misrepresentation. In the US, the constitutional, institutional and financial network provided the basis for an enduring culture of dental research that eventually provided the multidisciplinary evidence to endorse the safety and efficacy of water fluoridation. Although Australians did not experience a widespread human mottling problem akin to that in the United States, Australian fluoride advocates faced similar opposition. The Australian constitution, state parochialism and decentralisation compounded by vast distances fragmented the responsibilities for research, health and water treatment. Each state had limited resources and faced these responsibilities in its own way. Although there were several early attempts in some states at regional dental field studies, meaningful national dental epidemiology did not emerge until 1993. Hence, much of the supportive evidence for fluoridation in Australia had to be imported from North America. This background meant that wherever fluoridation was widely implemented in Australia, state authority played a role. In addition to the general social and scientific concerns about fluoride and fluoridation, before 1957 there were a number of unresolved scientific factors relating to naturally over-fluoridated ground water, climate, tea consumption and fluid homeostasis involving canecutters. These made Queensland different in the Australian context. After 1957, as these scientific concerns in Queensland diminished, the political landscape changed and provided new foundations for political hesitance and expedience. The timing and circumstances of the promulgation of the Fluoridation of Public Water Supplies Act (1963) influenced its nature to the extent that until 2008, this legislation with its link to various local government acts was unique within Australia. Although there were notable exceptions such as the decisions to fluoridate water supplies at Townsville and Mareeba, this legislative background established the “Queensland difference” as a fixture in fluoride debates across the state. When combined with inadequate state funding and a lack of political resolve from parliamentarians and councillors, prospects for fluoridation in Queensland were virtually paralysed. Nonetheless, while inquiry into the political reasons for the implementing or the failure to implement fluoridation remains thin, developments in Queensland after December 2007 lend significant weight to the finding that a politically resolute centralised authority with the responsibility for both health and water are key components in the outcome.

The diploma thesis Local Referendum in the European Area offers a comprehensive overview of the legal regulation of the institute of local referendum in individual European countries. In four parts devoted to Central, Southern, Western and Northern Europe, it introduces the regulation of this institute in the local legal systems and compares individual solutions not only with the Czech regulation, but across all European states. It deals in detail with individual aspects of the local referendum, including its announcement, binding force and the possibility of a popular initiative.

Doctor of Education / Department of Educational Leadership / David C. Thompson / The purpose of this study was to analyze opinions of selected school district stakeholders regarding potentially critical factors in school bond referendum success and failure in Kansas during the years 2004-2007. Of the 72 eligible school districts, one district was randomly selected from each of six groups formed through a stratified random sampling process utilizing district enrollment (small, medium, large) and bond election result (successful, unsuccessful). Four purposefully selected respondents from each district participated in a mixed methods strategy of inquiry that included completing a 32-item written survey and participating in a personal interview. The survey served as the standardized data collection instrument. Survey data were used to augment and expand upon understanding of the bond referendum process gained from the personal interviews by examining respondents‟ perceptions of how important campaign strategies were, or would have been, in influencing election results. Frequency distributions were constructed in an attempt to identify relationships between variables identified as important to bond election success. Cross-tabulations and Pearson's chi-square were the statistical treatments chosen to further analyze the survey data. During the interviews, participants were asked a set of standard questions as well as questions unique to their role in the election process. The questions were designed to elicit in-depth responses about factors critical to the bond's success or failure and to gather useful advice for other districts preparing for a bond election. Interviews were used to discover new data, further develop existing data, and assist in organizing all data sources to construct a "story" describing bond election experiences in Kansas. The study findings indicate that unsuccessful districts utilize more campaign strategies and perceive them to be more important than successful districts, but that successful districts are more in tune with patrons. As each district is unique, it was found that strategies that were successful in one district might not be in another. Three factors found to be critical included: having unanimous school board support for the bond referendum, developing an on-going public relations strategy with patrons, and communicating the elements of a bond referendum to all patrons in simple, clear, and honest language.

The diploma thesis "Komparace postojů Irska a Velké Británie u vybraných aspektů Evropské integrace" deals with attitudes of Great Britain and Ireland to the politics of the European Union. Based on the available literature (using the descriptive and analytical method), the thesis proves how divergent or vice versa accordance are particular policies and approaches of these two states, whose past is completely different and has fundamental influence on contemporary access of these members to the European Union. In the history of Great Britain's and the European Union's relation it is always possible to find a certain fact that distinguished Britain from other partners in the European Union. It is then also different from the neighbouring Ireland. The diploma thesis analyses first of all the financial framework of the European Union, its regional and foreign policy. It is divided into five chapters - besides already mentioned regional, economic and foreign policy, the diploma thesis delas with the access of Ireland and Great Britain to European referendums, accentuated is first of all the referendum on the Treaty of Nice and the contemporary debate on the rejected Treaty of Lisbon. Finally are analysed last two presidencies of Ireland and Great Britain in years 2004 and 2005. The purpose of the diploma thesis...