Data Analysis and Data Visualization as Active Learning in Political Science

While data analysis and the related skills of data management and data visualization are important skills for undergraduates in the field of political science, the process of learning these skills can also be used to develop critical thinking, encourage active and collaborative learning, and to apply knowledge gained in the classroom. Drawing on our experiences using data work in upper-level courses in International Relations and American Politics, we discuss how data work and quantitative analysis can be incorporated into subject-based (i.e., nonmethods specific) courses, and how it can also enhance critical reasoning skills. An evaluation of this approach using direct and indirect assessment is included.     

Can Transparency Foster More Understanding and Compliant Citizens?

Voluntary policy compliance is an important yet rarely studied topic in public administration. To address the paucity of research, this article proposes and empirically tests a conceptual framework that ties policy transparency and policy understanding to voluntary policy compliance intentions. The reasoning is that the extent to which citizens understand a policy contributes to their intentions to comply with that policy. Further, the authors argue that policy transparency indirectly influences voluntary policy compliance intentions through a positive effect on citizens’ levels of policy understanding. To enhance the validity of the findings, the authors assess these relationships across two policy domains. The findings reflect an indirect positive effect of transparency on voluntary compliance occurring through policy understanding. However, this emerged only for one policy domain. These results suggest that the effects of policy transparency on policy understanding and voluntary policy compliance intentions may depend on the policy domain.     

Explaining Public Support for Counterproductive Homelessness Policy: The Role of Disgust

Federal, state, and city governments spend substantial funds on programs intended to aid homeless people, and such programs attract widespread public support. In recent years, however, state and local governments have increasingly enacted policies, such as bans on panhandling and sleeping in public, that are counterproductive to alleviating homelessness. Yet these policies also garner substantial support from the public. Given that programs aiding the homeless are so popular, why are these counterproductive policies also popular? We argue that disgust plays a key role in the resolution of this puzzle. While disgust does not decrease support for aid policies or even generate negative affect towards homeless people, it motivates the desire for physical distance, leading to support for policies that exclude homeless people from public life. We test this argument using survey data, including a national sample with an embedded experiment. Consistent with these expectations, our findings indicate that those respondents who are dispositionally sensitive to disgust are more likely to support exclusionary policies, such as banning panhandling, but no less likely to support policies intended to aid homeless people. Furthermore, media depictions of the homeless that include disease cues activate disgust, increasing its impact on support for banning panhandling. These results help explain the popularity of exclusionary homelessness policies and challenge common perspectives on the role of group attitudes in public life.     

The Impact of Prenatal Exposure to Power Plant Emissions on Birth Weight: Evidence from a Pennsylvania Power Plant Located Upwind of New Jersey

To examine the infant health impact of prenatal exposure to power plant emissions, we draw scientific evidence on the impacted region downwind of a large polluter, a coal‐fired power plant located on the border of two states and proven to be the sole contributor to the violation of air quality standards of the impacted region. Our results show that among all live singleton births that occurred during 1990 through 2006, those born to mothers living as far as 20 to 30 miles away downwind from the power plant (which is also an affluent region) during pregnancy are at greater risks of low birth weight (LBW) and very low birth weight (VLBW): the likelihoods of LBW and VLBW could increase approximately by 6.50 and 17.12 percent, respectively. In light of the continual efforts of The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in reducing cross‐state air pollution caused by transboundary power plant emissions, our study is aimed at broadening the scope of cross‐border pollution impact analysis by taking into account adverse infant health effects of upwind polluters, which can impose disproportionate burdens of health risks on downwind states due to air pollutants transported by wind.     

Shaping the Evolution of the Information Flow: The Centralizing Mechanisms in the Evolution of the North American Tobacco Quitline Consortium

The research reported here is an analysis of the evolution of the relationships that comprise a single public health network, focusing especially on the position of the network administrative organization (Provan and Kenis 2008 Provan, K. G. and P. Kenis. 2008. “Modes of Network Governance: Structure, Management, and Effectiveness.” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 18(2): 229–252.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) in the flow of knowledge among a large number of organizations providing similar services. Our study examines the North American Quitline Consortium (NAQC), a multi-sector network that spans the US and Canada and whose members provide telephone-based tobacco cessation services to anyone interested in quitting smoking. Data were collected using web-based surveys at three different points of time. Implications are discussed for network organizing, for both theory and practice, focusing especially on the importance of the network administrative organization in shaping the evolution of the whole network information flow.     

Coercive Leadership

We develop a model of leadership in which an informed leader has some degree of coercive influence over her followers (agents). Agents benefit from coordination but face two distinct challenges: dispersed information and heterogeneous preferences. The leader's coercive power facilitates coordination by weakening the effect presented by both of these challenges through “binding” agents to a strategically chosen policy. The leader's policy choice becomes more informative to the agents about the leader's privately held information as her coercive capacity increases. By adjusting her policy choice in response to available private and public information, the coercive leader achieves her preferred average of agents' actions, and in so doing, neutralizes the possibly deleterious coordinating influence of public information. We develop implications of our analysis for understanding autocratic leadership in different political and organizational contexts.     

Are We Civilized Yet?

The term “civilization” has been used in many contexts where accusations of Western imperialism, racism, and the like do not at all apply. Works on the history of science and technology in ancient cultures provide one such example, when they speak of Egyptian civilization or early Chinese civilization. It is also not true that works of the Enlightenment view the non-western world as less civilized and inferior. An entire genre of writing inspired by Jesuit accounts discovered in China a higher form of society that Europe should emulate. Two such works were Oliver Goldsmith’s Letters from a Citizen of the World and François Quesnay’s Le Despostisme de la chine, which offer, respectively, an extended satire and a sharp critique of European society.     

Detection of diatoms in blood by a combination of membrane filtering and chemical digestion

An improved method for detecting diatom in blood is reported. Blood of cadavers was obtained by cardiac puncture at inquest or from the left atrium directly at autopsy. The blood was hemolyzed by sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) and filtered through membrane filter (47 mm in diameter and 5 microns in pore size). When the blood was putrefied, two or three pieces of membranes filters were needed because of choking membrane pore. The membrane filters were digested with fuming nitric acid and diluted with distilled water. The diluted solution was filtered through membrane filter (25 mm in diameter) again. After drying the membrane filter was immersed in oil. Diatoms on the membrane filter were clearly observed microscopically.