Orphan drug incentives in the pharmacogenomic context: policy responses in the US and Canada

Advances in pharmacogenomic research and increasing industry interest in personalized medicine have important implications for the way that orphan drug policies are interpreted and applied. Concerns have been raised about the potential impact of pharmacogenomics and new genomic technologies on our understanding of how disease categories are delineated, and subsequently, how the concept of rare disease should be defined for the purposes of orphan drug policies. This article considers whether orphan drug legislation can be drafted in a way that will maximize benefits and minimize concerns relating to the impact of pharmacogenomics on orphan drug research and development. After reviewing the issues that may arise at the intersection of orphan drug policies and pharmacogenomics, this article will discuss the potential impact of pharmacogenomics at two critical points: orphan designation and approval of the drug product. At each of these points, the relevant aspects of current US orphan drug legislation are examined, focusing on the extent to which recent amendments may address concerns that have been raised previously. This analysis will then provide the foundation for a critical review and recommendations regarding the proposed new Canadian orphan drug framework.     

Methodologies of election forecasting: Calling the 2010 UK “hung parliament”

Election forecasting has experienced considerable growth as a subfield within political science. Research work on United Kingdom elections has been cutting edge here. The recent 2010 general election afforded the opportunity for a trial of different forecasting methodologies. These efforts are showcased in this volume, and include standard, and not-so-standard, statistical models. Overall, these models perform well, foreseeing the unprecedented outcome of a “hung parliament”, as most pollsters and pundits did not. Moreover, they achieved this accuracy with forecasts well in advance of the election itself.     

Measuring Attitudes toward the United States Supreme Court

It is conventional in research on the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court to rely on a survey question asking about confidence in the leaders of the Court to indicate something about the esteem with which that institution is regarded by the American people. The purpose of this article is to investigate the validity of this measure. Based on a nationally representative survey conducted in 2001, we compare confidence with several different measures of Court legitimacy. Our findings indicate that the confidence replies seem to reflect both short-term and long-term judgments about the Court, with the greater influence coming from satisfaction with how the Court is performing at the moment. We suggest a new set of indicators for measuring the legitimacy of the Court and offer some evidence on the structure of the variance in these items.     

False advertising and experience goods: the case of political services in the U.S. senate

This study uses the voter-shopping construct to analyze signaling of moderateness in the U.S. Senate. We compare legislator-provided signals (advertising)—such as membership in the U.S. Senate’s Centrist Coalition—with actual voting histories in order to characterize these types of advertising cues as sincere or insincere. Following recent research indicating that moderate legislators receive greater financial support, we test whether or not Political Action Committees (PACs) are willing to support financially those who send false signals of moderateness. Our results show that the mean level of real PAC contributions garnered by non-moderate Democrats who send false signals exceeds that of the non-moderate Democrats who do not do so by $182,078. This figure is about 74% of mean level of real PAC contributions for those non-moderate Democrats who do not send false signals.     

Confirmation Politics and The Legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court: Institutional Loyalty, Positivity Bias, and the Alito Nomination

Gibson, Caldeira, and Spence (2003a, 2003b, 2005) expound the theory of positivity bias in their analysis of the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court in the aftermath of Bush v. Gore. This theory asserts that preexisting institutional loyalty shapes perceptions of and judgments about court decisions and events. In this article, we use the theory of positivity bias to investigate the preferences of Americans regarding the confirmation of Judge Samuel Alito as an associate justice of the Supreme Court. More specifically, from the theory of positivity bias, we derive the hypothesis that preferences on the Alito confirmation are shaped by anterior commitments to the Supreme Court. Based on an analysis of a national panel survey, we find that those who have a high level of loyalty toward the Supreme Court rely much more heavily on what we term judiciousness—in contrast to ideology, policy, and partisanship—in forming their opinions on whether to confirm Alito. Thus, institutional loyalty provides a decisive frame through which Americans view the activity of their Supreme Court.     

Making Short Politics Placements Work

Short placements can provide an important and meaningful experience of politics in action for students who are unable to benefit from the generally lengthy placements currently on offer. This article is based on the findings of the three-year HEFCE-funded project The Scholarship of Engagement for Politics and explores the potential of short, local, research-based placements, which are embedded in modules, supported by online journaling and effectively assessed, to enrich students' understanding of politics and enhance their employability.