Election Timing,Electorate Composition,and Policy Outcomes: Evidence from School Districts

There is considerable debate about how election timing shapes who votes, election outcomes, and, ultimately, public policy. We examine these matters by combining information on more than 10,000 school tax referenda with detailed micro‐targeting data on voters participating in each election. The analysis confirms that timing influences voter composition in terms of partisanship, ideology, and the numerical strength of powerful interest groups. But, in contrast to prominent theories of election timing, these effects are modest in terms of their likely impact on election outcomes. Instead, timing has the most significant impact on voter age, with the elderly being the most overrepresented group in low‐turnout special elections. The electoral (and policy) implications of this effect vary between states, and we offer one explanation for this variation.     

Transparency by Conformity: A Field Experiment Evaluating Openness in Local Governments

Sunshine laws establishing government transparency are ubiquitous in the United States; however, the intended degree of openness is often unclear or unrealized. Although researchers have identified characteristics of government organizations or officials that affect the fulfillment of public records requests, they have not considered the influence that government organizations have on one another. This picture of independently acting organizations does not accord with the literature on diffusion in public policy and administration. This article presents a field experiment testing whether a county government's fulfillment of a public records request is influenced by the knowledge that its peers have already complied. The authors propose that knowledge of peer compliance should induce competitive pressures to comply and resolve legal ambiguity in favor of compliance. Findings indicate peer conformity affects both in the time to initial response and in the rate of complete request fulfillment.     

Urbanization,education, and the politics of space on the Tibetan Plateau

This article provides an introduction to a special collection of five articles showcasing the work of rising scholars in the geography and anthropology of Tibetan regions in China (Eveline Washul, Andrew Grant, Tsering Bum, Huatse Gyal and Duojie Zhaxi, published in Critical Asian Studies 50: 4 and Critical Asian Studies 51: 1). It contextualizes the authors’ contributions in the recent promotion of planned urbanization in Tibetan regions as the key to achieving the “Chinese Dream” under President Xi Jinping. The paper calls attention to these authors’ focus on Tibetan experiences of new urbanization policies and practices, as well as their less-appreciated entanglement with shifting education priorities. Providing brief summaries of each author’s case study and arguments, it points to the ways in which all five articles address the relationship between space and subjectivity, as well as the issue of constrained agency (versus simple notions of “choice”), in statist urbanization processes.     

‘Between Slavery and Freedom’: the expulsion and enslavement of free women of colour in the US South before the Civil War

For free black women in the pre-Civil War American South, the status offered by ‘freedom’ was uncertain and malleable. The conceptualization of bondage and freedom as two diametrically opposed conditions therefore fails to make sense of the complexities of life for these women. Instead, notions of enslavement and freedom are better framed as a spectrum. This article develops this idea by exploring two of the ways in which some black women negotiated their status before the law—namely though petitioning for residency or for enslavement. While these petitions are atypical numerically, and often offer tantalizingly scant evidence, when used in conjunction with evidence from the US census, it becomes clear that these women were highly pragmatic. Prioritizing their spousal and broader familial affective relationships above their legal status, they rejected the often theoretical distinction between slavery and liberation. As such, the petitions can be used to reach broader conclusions about the attitudes of women who have left little written testimony.     

Incarceration in the Household: Academic Outcomes of Adolescents with an Incarcerated Household Member

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, yet there is relatively little information on how the removal of these adults from households impacts the youth who are left behind. This study used a child-centered lens to examine the impact of incarceration on the school outcomes of youth who resided with a family member or family associate who was incarcerated prior to the youth’s 18th birthday. We used data from 11 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth: Child and Young Adult (n?=?3,338, 53?% female). Initial analyses indicated that youth who experienced a household members’ incarceration evidenced more socioeconomic challenges, more frequent home adversities, and lower cognitive skills relative to youth who did not experience a household members’ incarceration. Results also revealed that youth who had experienced a household member’s incarceration were more likely to report extended absence from school and were less likely to graduate from high school relative to those youth who did not experience a household members’ incarceration. Counter to our hypotheses, results revealed the incarceration of an extended family member being in the household was the only relation significantly associated with worse school outcomes. Plausibly, families who allow non-immediate criminally involved individuals to reside in the household are experiencing a more pervasive chaotic home environment than those with a parent or sibling incarcerated. Our study suggests that efforts to address the needs of children with incarcerated parents need to be widened to those who experience the loss of any household member due to incarceration.     

Expectations of government’s response to disaster

Citizens’ expectations about what government is capable of doing and what policies government officials intend to pursue can influence their decisions. After a disaster, for instance, expectations of government’s intent and capacity to assist in the rebuilding process will influence the rebuilding strategies that affected citizens adopt. This article develops a typology that categorizes citizens’ expectations of government response to disaster. We then deploy this typology to identify expectation patterns among residents and other private actors in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward communities who have returned following Katrina and explain how these expectations shape their preferred rebuilding strategy.     

Adolescent Sleep Barriers: Profiles within a Diverse Sample of Urban Youth

Most adolescents face numerous obstacles to good sleep, which may undermine healthy development. In this study, we used latent class analysis and identified four categories of sleep barriers in a diverse sample of 553 urban youth (57% female). The majority profile, School/Screens Barriers, reported the most homework and extracurricular barriers, along with high screen time. The Home/Screens Barriers class (i.e., high environmental noise, light, screen use) and the High/Social Barriers class (i.e., high barriers across domains, particularly social) reported the poorest sleep quality and highest depressive/anxiety symptoms. The Minimal Barriers class—predominately male, with low depressive/anxiety symptoms—reported more sleep per night. We discuss implications of our findings for targeting interventions to address poor adolescent sleep among specific clusters of students.