Priming Gender: Campaigning on Women's Issues in U.S. Senate Elections

The gender gap has been an important feature of American elections since 1980. Yet, most explanations for the effects of gender on voting behavior focus on differences between men and women without taking account of how campaign strategies may serve to highlight or mask these differences. I examine how Senate candidates act strategically in deciding whether and how to target women voters. I find that candidates make these decisions based largely on two factors: (1) the importance of these issues to the state's voters and (2) whether gender gaps had been decisive in previous statewide contests. Analysis of exit-poll data indicates that when campaigns focused more on women's issues, women became more likely to vote Democratic while the vote choices of men were unaffected. Thus, campaign strategies do appear to influence the importance of gender differences in voting behavior.     

Explosions in the Sky: Coverage for Non-Contaminating Properties of Pollutants

Pollution liability and general liability insurance policies, in theory, should afford complementary rather than overlapping coverage. While this works well in theory, non-traditional pollution events challenge this outcome. This article focuses on loss events resulting from explosions, and in particular whether the resulting harms should be considered for coverage under a pollution policy or a general liability policy.     

Research note: Rand's research on terrorism

Repeatedly, during the last few years, small groups of extremists have demonstrated that by using terrorist tactics they can achieve disproportionate effects. They attract worldwide attention to themselves and their causes; they arouse worldwide alarm, and can create international incidents that national governments are compelled to deal with, often before a worldwide audience. To protect against their attacks or to respond to crisis situations they create, they force governments to expend resources—manpower, money, the attention of senior officials—vastly out of scale with the magnitude of the actual threat they pose.¹     

Mt. Laurel: A Major Transition in American Planning Law

American land use law in the late 1960's and early 1970's has been in a period of major and fundamental transition. It has seen a change in the basic policy of the law on one of its most important points as concerns exclusionary zoning, i.e., the attitude towards the three principal parties in interest in land use litigation-developer, neighbor, and excluded party. This entire change has been initiated not by the legislatures, but by the courts. The net result of this transition has been to strengthen the government's ability to impose (under the police power) certain types of regulations, primarily environmental in nature—while at the same time drastically reducing the power to impose regulations deemed exclusionary.