In this paper we examine how political contexts mediate citizens' ability to understand political parties' ideological positions, focusing on education level. Using cross-national data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), we build on the approach developed by Palfrey and Poole (1987) to study individuals' ability to place parties in on a`left-right' spectrum. We explore how the eect of individual education level is mediated by contextual factors in inuencing the supply and clarity of`left-right' information in a party system. The results show that the eect of education levels in improving citizens' ability to perceive party ideological locations is conditional on political context. First, in cases where the supply of such information is limited due to less democratic experience and less programmatic party politics, the eect of education is weakened. However, the eect of education increases in the contexts where we expect less clarity of party position information where parties are least polarized and where institutional factors add complexity to party competition.

Estimates of party ideological positions in Western Democracies yield useful party-level information, but lack the ability to provide insight into intraparty politics. In this paper, we generate comparable measures of latent individual policy positions from elite survey data which enable analysis of elite-level party ideology and heterogeneity. This approach has advantages over both expert surveys and approaches based on behavioral data, such as roll call voting and is directly relevant to the study of party cohesion. We generate a measure of elite positions for several European countries using a common space scaling approach and demonstrate its validity as a measure of party ideology. We then apply these data to determine the sources of party heterogeneity, focusing on the role of intraparty competition in electoral systems, nomination rules, and party goals. We find that policy-seeking parties and centralized party nomination rules reduce party heterogeneity. While intraparty competition has no effect, the presence of these electoral rules conditions the effect of district magnitude.

This study examines whether bicameralism affects cabinet composition in parliamentary democracy. While previous studies have examined the effect of bicameralism on the legislative process and cabinet duration, little is known about its effect on cabinet post allocation. Therefore, this study examines how and why the institutional and partisan strengths of upper chambers affect the outcome of coalition bargaining and post allocation. Theoretically, I argue that partisan strength in upper chambers enhances a party's bargaining position, resulting in disproportionality between the party seat and cabinet portfolio share of the lower chamber in coalition governments. The empirical results indicate that the level of disproportionality in cabinet portfolio allocation is higher in countries with strong upper chambers than in countries with weak or no upper chambers. I also investigate party level data in countries with strong upper chambers. After controlling for the party share of lower chambers in these countries, the advantage accrued by the upper chamber in terms of party seat share is likely to result in obtaining a higher share of cabinet portfolios.

Using an optical-flow technique, we have quantitatively analyzed tissue motion due to artery pulsation accompanied with blood flow in a neonatal cranial ultrasonogram. The tissue motion vector was successfully calculated at each pixel in a series of echo images (32 frames, 640x480 pixels/frame, 8 bits/pixel, 33 ms/frame) taken in the brightness mode by using an ultrasound probe of 5.0MHz. The optical-flow technique used was a gradient method combined with local optimization for 3 x 3 neighbors. From two-dimensional mappings of tissue motion vectors and their timesequence variations, it was found that the tissue motion due to artery pulsation revealed periodic to-and-fro motion synchronized with heartbeat (300-500 ms), clearly distinguishing from unwanted non-periodic motion due to the sway of neonatal head during diagnosis.