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What types of attitudinal surveys are produced by public administrations? Who commissions, uses and analyses them? What are their methodological characteristics and for which policies are they used? Do the contents of surveys commissioned by public administrations at different territorial levels differ? We lack any systematic empirical information to answer these questions in the Spanish case. Three public sources (corresponding to the local, regional and national level) are used to establish a preliminary picture of the attitudinal surveys commissioned by Spanish public administrations. This paper makes a comparative description of these surveys and discusses their differing characteristics. We create a new database of 350 surveys, where characteristics of the survey promoters, its contents and technical details are discussed. The surveys carried out at each of the three levels are quite different. The policy agendas of these administrations, their resources and especially the organisational characteristics of these institutions at their creation are the most likely explanations of many of their differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parallel trade is a legal movement (arbitrage) of goods from one country where the product is first sourced and protected by intellectual property rights to another one but without the warranty of the manufacturer. This phenomenon takes place as a result of the coexistence of the principles of the free movement of goods and subsidiarity, which implies the existence of different regulatory and price systems. This paper empirically examines whether parallel trade in drugs in three European Union counties has exerted any effect on prices, and it undertakes a breakdown of the effect of parallel trade on its stakeholders. Our results suggest that the effects of parallel trade on drug prices is only moderate. The main beneficiaries of parallel trade are parallel importers themselves, who generate negligible savings for the health care system which are unlikely to overcome the induced costs of drug innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What factors explain whether citizens prefers politicians, citizens or experts to make political decisions? In this article, we show that level of support for the political system plays an important role. In addition, citizens' perceptions of the moral and technical capacities of the traditional actors in democracy (political elite and citizens) help to provide a better picture of the nature of citizens' preferences. Through analysis of survey data, we show that the aforesaid factors are relevant to understand the vectors of citizens' preferences in who should make the political decisions in democracy. Moreover, our results support some of Hibbing and Theiss-Morse's arguments, while others should be revised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]