EU Multi-level Governance in the Making - The Community Initiative LEADER+ in Finland and Germany

In order to fully understand the process of European integration it is of paramount importance to consider developments at the sub-national and local level. EU integration scholars shifted their attention to the local level only at the beginning of the 1990s with the concept of multi-level governance (MLG). While MLG is the first concept to scrutinise the position of local levels of public administration and other actors within the EU polity, I perceive it as too optimistic in the degree of influence it ascribes to local levels. Thus, learning from and combining MLG with other concepts, such as structural constructivism, helps to reveal some of the hidden aspects of EU integration and paint a more realistic picture of multi-level interaction. This thesis also answers the call for more case studies in order to conceptualise MLG further. After a critical study of theories and concepts of European integration, above all, MLG, I will analyse sub-national and local government in Finland and Germany. I show how the sub-national level and local governments are embedded in the EU s multi-level structure of governance and how, through EU integration, those levels have been empowered but also how their scope of action has partially decreased. After theoretical and institutional contextualisation, I present the results of my empirical study of the EU s Community Initiative LEADER+. LEADER stands for Liaison Entre Actions de Développement de l'Économie Rurale , and aims at improving the economic conditions in Europe s rural areas. I was interested in how different actors construct and shape EU financed rural development, especially in how local actors organised in so-called local action groups (LAGs) cooperate with other administrative units within the LEADER+ administrative chain. I also examined intra-institutional relations within those groups, in order to find out who are the most influential and powerful actors within them. Empirical data on the Finnish and German LAGs was first gathered through a survey, which was then supplemented and completed by interviewing LAG members, LAG-managers, several civil servants from Finnish and German decision-making and managing authorities and a civil servant from the EU Commission. My main argument is that in both Germany and Finland, the Community Initiative LEADER+ offered a space for multi-level interaction and local-level involvement, a space that on the one hand consists of highly motivated people actively contributing to the improvement of the quality of life and economy in Europe s countryside but which is dependent and also restricted by national administrative practices, implementation approaches and cultures on the other. In Finland, the principle of tri-partition (kolmikantaperiaatte) in organising the executive committees of LAGs is very noticeable. In comparison to Germany, for instance, the representation of public administration in those committees is much more limited due to this principle. Furthermore, the mobilisation of local residents and the bringing together of actors from the local area with different social and institutional backgrounds to become an active part of LEADER+ was more successful in Finland than in Germany. Tri-partition as applied in Finland should serve as a model for similar policies in other EU member states. EU integration changed the formal and informal inter-institutional relations linking the different levels of government. The third sector including non-governmental institutions and interest groups gained access to policy-making processes and increasingly interact with government institutions at all levels of public administration. These developments do not necessarily result in the empowering of the local level.

Liver fat in the metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes

Introduction: The epidemic of obesity has been accompanied by an increase in the prevalence of the metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). However, not all obese subjects develop these metabolic abnormalities. Hepatic fat accumulation is related to hepatic insulin resistance, which in turn leads to hyperglycemia, hypertriglyceridemia, and a low HDL cholesterol con-centration. The present studies aimed to investigate 1) how intrahepatic as compared to intramyocellular fat is related to insulin resistance in these tissues and to the metabolic syndrome (Study I); 2) the amount of liver fat in subjects with and without the metabolic syndrome, and which clinically available markers best reflect liver fat content (Study II); 3) the effect of liver fat on insulin clearance (Study III); 4) whether type 2 diabetic patients have more liver fat than age-, gender-, and BMI-matched non-diabetic subjects (Study IV); 5) how type 2 diabetic patients using exceptionally high doses of insulin respond to addition of a PPARγ agonist (Study V). Subjects and methods: The study groups consisted of 45 (Study I), 271 (Study II), and 80 (Study III) non-diabetic subjects, and of 70 type 2 diabetic patients and 70 matched control subjects (Study IV). In Study V, a total of 14 poorly controlled type 2 diabetic patients treated with high doses of insulin were studied before and after rosiglitazone treatment (8 mg/day) for 8 months. In all studies, liver fat content was measured by proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and sub-cutaneous and intra-abdominal fat content by MRI. In addition, circulating markers of insulin resistance and serum liver enzyme concentrations were determined. Hepatic (i.v. insulin infusion rate 0.3 mU/kg∙min combined with [3-3H]glucose, Studies I, III, and V) and muscle (1.0 mU/kg min, Study I) insulin sensitivities were measured by the euglycemic hyperinsulinemic clamp technique. Results: Fat accumulation in the liver rather than in skeletal muscle was associated with features of insulin resistance, i.e. increased fasting serum (fS) triglycerides and decreased fS-HDL cholesterol, and with hyperinsulinemia and low adiponectin concentrations (Study I). Liver fat content was 4-fold higher in subjects with as compared to those without the metabolic syndrome, independent of age, gender, and BMI. FS-C-peptide was the best correlate of liver fat (Study II). Increased liver fat was associated with both impaired insulin clearance and hepatic insulin resistance independent of age, gender, and BMI (Study III). Type 2 diabetic patients had 80% more liver fat than age-, weight-, and gender-matched non-diabetic subjects. At any given liver fat content, S-ALT underestimated liver fat in the type 2 diabetic patients as compared to the non-diabetic subjects (Study IV). In Study V, hepatic insulin sensitivity increased and glycemic control improved significantly during rosiglitazone treatment. This was associated with lowering of liver fat (on the average by 46%) and insulin requirements (40%). Conclusions: Liver fat is increased both in the metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes independent of age, gender, and BMI. A fatty liver is associated with both hepatic insulin resistance and impaired insulin clearance. Rosi-glitazone may be particularly effective in type 2 diabetic patients who are poorly controlled despite using high insulin doses.

Perceived Value of Mobile Service Use and its Consequences

The thesis is positioned in the services marketing field. Previous mobile service research has identified perceived value or relative advantage as a stable predictor of use of services. However, a more detailed view of what customers value in mobile services is needed for marketing diverse types of mobile content and attracting committed customers. The direct relationships between multidimensional value and loyalty constructs have received limited attention in the previous literature, although a multidimensional view is needed for differentiating services. This thesis studies how perceived value of mobile service use affects customer commitment, repurchase intentions, word-of-mouth and willingness to pay. The doctoral thesis consists of three journal articles and one working paper. The four papers have different sub-aims and comprise individual empirical studies. Mixed methods including both personal interviews and survey data collected from end-users of different types of mobile content services are used. The conceptual mobile perceived value model that results from the first explorative empirical study supports a six- dimensional value view. The six dimensions are further categorized into two higher order constructs: content-related perceived value (emotional, social, convenience and monetary value) and context-related (epistemic and conditional value) perceived value. Structural equation modeling is used in the other three studies to validate this framework by analyzing the relationships between context- and content-related value, and how the individual perceived value dimensions affect commitment and behavioral outcomes. Analyzing the direct relationships revealed differences in the effect of perceived value dimensions between information and entertainment mobile service user groups, between effects on commitment, repurchase intentions and word-of-mouth intentions, as well as between effects on commitment to the provider and to the mobile channel as such. This thesis contributes to earlier perceived value literature by structuring the value dimensions into two groups. Most importantly, the thesis contributes to the value and loyalty literature by increasing understanding of how the different dimensions of perceived value directly affect commitment and post-purchase intentions. The results have implications for further theory development in the electronic services field using multidimensional latent constructs, and practical implications for enhancing commitment to content provider and for differentiated marketing strategies in the mobile field. The general conclusion of this thesis is that differentiated value-based marketing of mobile services is essential for attracting committed customers who will use the same providers’ content also in the future. Minna Pihlström is associated with the Centre for Relationship Marketing and Service Management (CERS) at Hanken.

News Media, Crime and Fear of Violence

Finland witnessed a surge in crime news reporting during the 1990s. At the same time, there was a significant rise in the levels of fear of crime reported by surveys. This research examines whether and how the two phenomena: news media and fear of violence were associated with each other. The dissertation consists of five sub-studies and a summary article. The first sub-study is a review of crime reporting trends in Finland, in which I have reviewed prior research and used existing Finnish datasets on media contents and crime news media exposure. The second study examines the association between crime media consumption and fear of crime when personal and vicarious victimization experiences have been held constant. Apart from analyzing the impact of crime news consumption on fear, media effects on general social trust are analyzed in the third sub-study. In the fourth sub-study I have analyzed the contents of the Finnish Poliisi-TV programme and compared the consistency of the picture of violent crime between official data sources and the programme. In the fifth and final sub-study, the victim narratives of Poliisi-TV s violence news contents have been analyzed. The research provides a series of results which are unprecedented in Finland. First, it observes that as in many other countries, the quantity of crime news supply has increased quite markedly in Finland. Second, it verifies that exposure to crime news is related to being worried about violent victimization and avoidance behaviour. Third, it documents that exposure to TV crime reality-programming is associated with reduced social trust among Finnish adolescents. Fourth, the analysis of Poliisi-TV shows that it transmits a distorted view of crime when contrasted with primary data sources on crime, but that this distortion is not as big as could be expected from international research findings and epochal theories of sociology. Fifth, the portrayals of violence victims in Poliisi-TV do not fit the traditional ideal types of victims that are usually seen to dominate crime media. The fact that the victims of violence in Poliisi-TV are ordinary people represents a wider development of the changing significance of the crime victim in Finland. The research concludes that although the media most likely did have an effect on the rising public fears in the 1990s, the mechanism was not as straight forward as has often been claimed. It is likely that there are other factors in the fear-media equation that are affecting both fear levels and crime reporting and that these factors are interactive in nature. Finally, the research calls for a re-orientation of media criminology and suggests more emphasis on the positive implications of crime in the media. Keywords: crime, media, fear of crime, violence, victimization, news

Precarious Pregnancies : Alcohol, drugs and the regulation of risks

Since the 1970s alcohol and drug use by pregnant women has become a target of political, professional and personal concern. The present study focuses on prenatal substance use and the regulation of risks by examining different kinds of societal responses to prenatal alcohol and drug use. The study analyses face-to-face encounters between professionals and service users at a specialised maternity clinic for pregnant women with substance abuse problems, medical and political discourses on the compulsory treatment of pregnant women as a means of FAS prevention and official recommendations on alcohol intake during pregnancy. Moreover, the study addresses the women s perspective by asking how women who have used illicit drugs during pregnancy perceive and rank the dangers linked to drug use. The study consists of five empirical sub-studies and a summary article. Sub-study I was written in collaboration with Dorte Hecksher and Sub-study IV with Riikka Perälä. Theoretically the study builds on the one hand, on the socio-cultural approach to the selection and perception of risks and on the other on governmentality studies which focus on the use of power in contemporary Western societies. The study is based on an ethnographic approach and makes use of the principles of multi-sited ethnography. The empirical sub-studies are based on three different types of qualitative data: ethnographic field notes from a maternity clinic from a period of 7 months, documentary material (medical journals, political documents, health education materials, government reports) and 3) interviews from maternity clinics with clients and members of staff. The study demonstrates that the logic of the regulation of prenatal alcohol use in Finland is characterised by the rise of the foetus , a process in which the urgency of protecting the foetus has gradually gained a more prominent role in the discourses on alcohol-related foetal damage. An increasing unwillingness to accept any kinds of risks when foetal health is at stake is manifested in the public debate on the compulsory treatment of pregnant women with alcohol problems and in the health authorities decision to advise pregnant women to refrain from alcohol use during pregnancy (Sub-studies I and II). Secondly, the study suggests that maternity care professionals have an ambivalent role in their mundane encounters with their pregnant clients: on the one hand professionals focus on the well-being of the foetus, but on the other, they need to take into account the women s needs and agency. The professionals daily encounters with their clients are thus characterised by hybridisation: the simultaneous use of technologies of domination and technologies of agency (Sub-studies III and IV). Finally, the study draws attention to the women s understanding of the risks of illicit drug during pregnancy, and shows that the women s understanding of risk differs from the bio-medical view. The study suggests that when drug-using pregnant women seek professional help they can feel that their moral worth is threatened by professionals negative attitudes which can make service-use challenging.

Electromagnetic signatures of lightning near the HF frequency band

The dissertation deals with remote narrowband measurements of the electromagnetic radiation emitted by lightning flashes. A lightning flash consists of a number of sub-processes. The return stroke, which transfers electrical charge from the thundercloud to to the ground, is electromagnetically an impulsive wideband process; that is, it emits radiation at most frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum, but its duration is only some tens of microseconds. Before and after the return stroke, multiple sub-processes redistribute electrical charges within the thundercloud. These sub-processes can last for tens to hundreds of milliseconds, many orders of magnitude longer than the return stroke. Each sub-process causes radiation with specific time-domain characteristics, having maxima at different frequencies. Thus, if the radiation is measured at a single narrow frequency band, it is difficult to identify the sub-processes, and some sub-processes can be missed altogether. However, narrowband detectors are simple to design and miniaturize. In particular, near the High Frequency band (High Frequency, 3 MHz to 30 MHz), ordinary shortwave radios can, in principle, be used as detectors. This dissertation utilizes a prototype detector which is essentially a handheld AM radio receiver. Measurements were made in Scandinavia, and several independent data sources were used to identify lightning sub-processes, as well as the distance to each individual flash. It is shown that multiple sub-processes radiate strongly near the HF band. The return stroke usually radiates intensely, but it cannot be reliably identified from the time-domain signal alone. This means that a narrowband measurement is best used to characterize the energy of the radiation integrated over the whole flash, without attempting to identify individual processes. The dissertation analyzes the conditions under which this integrated energy can be used to estimate the distance to the flash. It is shown that flash-by-flash variations are large, but the integrated energy is very sensitive to changes in the distance, dropping as approximately the inverse cube root of the distance. Flashes can, in principle, be detected at distances of more than 100 km, but since the ground conductivity can vary, ranging accuracy drops dramatically at distances larger than 20 km. These limitations mean that individual flashes cannot be ranged accurately using a single narrowband detector, and the useful range is limited to 30 kilometers at the most. Nevertheless, simple statistical corrections are developed, which enable an accurate estimate of the distance to the closest edge of an active storm cell, as well as the approach speed. The results of the dissertation could therefore have practical applications in real-time short-range lightning detection and warning systems.

Genetic Mechanisms Underlying Autism Spectrum Disorders

Autism is a childhood-onset developmental disorder characterized by deficits in reciprocal social interaction, verbal and non-verbal communication, and dependence on routines and rituals. It belongs to a spectrum of disorders (autism spectrum disorders, ASDs) which share core symptoms but show considerable variation in severity. The whole spectrum affects 0.6-0.7% of children worldwide, inducing a substantial public health burden and causing suffering to the affected families. Despite having a very high heritability, ASDs have shown exceptional genetic heterogeneity, which has complicated the identification of risk variants and left the etiology largely unknown. However, recent studies suggest that rare, family-specific factors contribute significantly to the genetic basis of ASDs. In this study, we investigated the role of DISC1 (Disrupted-in-schizophrenia-1) in ASDs, and identified association with markers and haplotypes previously associated with psychiatric phenotypes. We identified four polymorphic micro-RNA target sites in the 3 UTR of DISC1, and showed that hsa-miR-559 regulates DISC1 expression in vitro in an allele-specific manner. We also analyzed an extended autism pedigree with genealogical roots in Central Finland reaching back to the 17th century. To take advantage of the beneficial characteristics of population isolates to gene mapping and reduced genetic heterogeneity observed in distantly related individuals, we performed a microsatellite-based genome-wide screen for linkage and linkage disequilibrium in this pedigree. We identified a putative autism susceptibility locus on chromosome 19p13.3 and obtained further support for previously reported loci at 1q23 and 15q11-q13. To follow-up these findings, we extended our study sample from the same sub-isolate and initiated a genome-wide analysis of homozygosity and allelic sharing using high-density SNP markers. We identified a small number of haplotypes shared by different subsets of the genealogically connected cases, along with convergent biological pathways from SNP and gene expression data, which highlighted axon guidance molecules in the pathogenesis of ASDs. In conclusion, the results obtained in this thesis show that multiple distinct genetic variants are responsible for the ASD phenotype even within single pedigrees from an isolated population. We suggest that targeted resequencing of the shared haplotypes, linkage regions, and other susceptibility loci is essential to identify the causal variants. We also report a possible micro-RNA mediated regulatory mechanism, which might partially explain the wide-range neurobiological effects of the DISC1 gene.

Measurement of the tt̅ cross section in pp̅ collisions at √s=1.96 TeV using dilepton events with a lepton plus track selection

This paper reports a measurement of the cross section for the pair production of top quarks in ppbar collisions at sqrt(s) = 1.96 TeV at the Fermilab Tevatron. The data was collected from the CDF II detector in a set of runs with a total integrated luminosity of 1.1 fb^{-1}. The cross section is measured in the dilepton channel, the subset of ttbar events in which both top quarks decay through t -> Wb -> l nu b where l = e, mu, or tau. The lepton pair is reconstructed as one identified electron or muon and one isolated track. The use of an isolated track to identify the second lepton increases the ttbar acceptance, particularly for the case in which one W decays as W -> tau nu. The purity of the sample may be further improved at the cost of a reduction in the number of signal events, by requiring an identified b-jet. We present the results of measurements performed with and without the request of an identified b-jet. The former is the first published CDF result for which a b-jet requirement is added to the dilepton selection. In the CDF data there are 129 pretag lepton + track candidate events, of which 69 are tagged. With the tagging information, the sample is divided into tagged and untagged sub-samples, and a combined cross section is calculated by maximizing a likelihood. The result is sigma_{ttbar} = 9.6 +/- 1.2 (stat.) -0.5 +0.6 (sys.) +/- 0.6 (lum.) pb, assuming a branching ratio of BR(W -> ell nu) = 10.8% and a top mass of m_t = 175 GeV/c^2.

Hyvän hallinnon muunnelmat : Julkisoikeudellinen tutkimus

This doctoral thesis analyses the concepts of good governance and good administration. The hypothesis is that the concepts are radically indeterminate and over-inclusive. In the study the mechanisms of this indeterminacy are examined: why are the concepts indeterminate; how does the indeterminacy work and, indeed, is it by any means plausible to try to define the concepts in a closed way? Therefore, the study focuses on various current perspectives, from which the concepts of good governance and good administration are relevant and what kind of discursive contents they may include. The approach is both legal (a right to good administration) and one of moral philosophy and discourse analysis. It appears that under the meta-discourse of good governance and good administration there are different sub-discourses: at least a legal sub-discourse, a moral/ethical sub-discourse and sub-discourses concerning economic effectiveness and the promotion of societal and economic development. The main claim is that the various sub-discourses do not necessarily identify each other s value premises and conceptual underpinnings: for which value could the attribute good be substituted in different discourses (for example, good as legal, good as ethical and so on)? The underlying presumption is, of course, that values are ultimately subjective and incommensurable. One possible way of trying to resolve the dynamics of possible discourse collisions is to employ the systems theory approach. Can the different discourses be interpreted as autopoietic systems, which create and change themselves according to their own criteria and are formed around a binary code? Can the different discourses be reconciled or are they indifferent or hostile towards each other? Is there a hegemonic super discourse or is the construction of a correct meaning purely contextual? The questions come back to the notions of administration and governance themselves the terms the good in its polymorphic ways is attempting to define. Do they engage different political rationalities? It can be suggested that administration is labelled by instrumental reason, governance by teleological reason. In the final analysis, the most crucial factor is that of power. It is about a Schmittian battle of concepts; how meanings are constructed in the interplay between conceptual ambiguity and social power. Thus, the study deals with administrative law, legal theory and the limits of law from the perspective of revealing critique.