Representativeness and Motivations of the Contemporary Donorate: Results from Merged Survey and Administrative Records

Only a small portion of Americans make campaign donations, yet because ambitious politicians need these resources, this group may be particularly important for shaping political outcomes. We investigate the characteristics and motivations of the donorate using a novel dataset that combines administrative records of two types of political participation, contributing and voting, with a rich set of survey variables. These merged observations allow us to examine differences in demographics, validated voting, and ideology across subgroups of the population and to evaluate the motivations of those who donate. We find that in both parties donors are consistently and notably divergent from non-donors to a larger degree than voters are divergent from non-voters. Of great interest, in both parties donors are more ideologically extreme than other partisans, including primary voters. With respect to why individuals contribute, we show that donors appear responsive to their perception of the stakes in the election. We also present evidence that inferences about donor ideology derived from the candidates donors give to may not closely reflect the within-party policy ideology of those donors. Overall, our results suggest that donations are a way for citizens motivated by the perceived stakes of elections to increase their participation beyond solely turning out.     

Optimal taxation and economic growth: a comment

Scully (Public Choice 115: 299–312, 2003) claims that for the United States in 1960–1990, the growth-maximizing size of the state was about 19% of GDP. However if an error in the model specification is corrected and if 2001 vintage data is used (instead of 1996 vintage data), estimates of the growth-maximizing size of the state range between 9% and 29% of GDP. Further, the method spuriously identifies a ‘growth maximizing tax rate’ even if no relationship exists between growth and the size of the state. The model cannot address reliably the question it attempts to answer.     

I CHAT,YOU CHAT,WECHAT

In today's hi-tech global village,no matter where you live,the most important communication question is,"What's the go-to chat app?"In China,it's WeChat.But the Tencentdeveloped app is so much more than just a messaging and social media app.It's a payment platform,a way to buy travel tickets,a news aggregator,a taxi hailer,and amid the novel coronavinas disease pandemic,one of the leading ways to provide a QR-generated health code.     

Making women amateur filmmakers visible: reclaiming women’s work through the film archive

ABSTRACT

This article considers the place of women’s amateur film within regional and national film archive holdings through a specific case study of the ‘Women Amateur Filmmakers in Britain’ project at the East Anglian Film Archive (EAFA). Reflecting on the process of cataloguing and presenting this collection, the article will explore the challenges of making women’s creative filmed work visible, suggesting that women’s amateur films exist at a crucial overlap of archival oversight and cultural stigma. We argue that prevailing associations of archive film with space, place and location could prevent feminist-led projects from gaining traction in the contested world of exhibition where locality often overshadows other thematic or stylistic approaches. We argue that only by reconsidering the types of films that are prioritised for preservation and presentation can women’s films be made fully visible.     

Concordance study between the AmpFlSTR MiniFiler PCR amplification kit and conventional STR typing kits

The AmpFlSTR MiniFiler polymerase chain reaction amplification kit developed by Applied Biosystems enables size reduction on eight of the larger STR loci amplified in the Identifiler kit, which will aid recovery of information from highly degraded DNA samples. The MiniFiler Kit amplifies CSF1PO, FGA, D2S1338, D7S820, D13S317, D16S539, D18S51, and D21S11 as well as the sex-typing locus amelogenin. A total of 1308 samples were evaluated with both the MiniFiler and Identifiler STR kits: 449 African American, 445 Caucasian, 207 Hispanic, and 207 Asian individuals. Full concordance between Identifiler and MiniFiler Kits was observed in 99.7% (10,437 out of 10,464) STR allele calls compared. The 27 differences seen are listed in Table 1 and encompass the loci D13S317 (n = 14) and D16S539 (n = 10) as well as D18S51 (n = 1), D7S820 (n = 1), and CSF1PO (n = 1). Genotyping discrepancies between the Identifiler and MiniFiler kits were confirmed by reamplification of the samples and further testing using the PowerPlex 16 kit in many cases. DNA sequence analysis was also performed in order to understand the nature of the genetic variations causing the allele dropout or apparent repeat unit shift.