When presidential candidates voice party issues,does Twitter listen?

ABSTRACT

Presidential candidates often speak to their party’s issues because parties are thought to have “greater competence on handling” some issues versus others [Petrocik 1996, “Issue Ownership in Presidential Elections, with a 1980 Case Study.” American Journal of Political Science 40 (3): 825–850, 825]. The present study considers whether Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump tend to use different vocal inflections when talking about their party’s issues. Using the audio from the three 2016 presidential debates, we not only find Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump seem to be more emotionally invested in their party’s issues, but they use distinct vocal patterns which suggest they “own” some issues more than others. To assess whether viewers responded more positively to these different vocal inflections, we used the valence of 428,185 live-tweets. Ultimately, we found Twitter was net-positive when the candidates raised their vocal pitch while talking about their party’s issues. This suggests nonverbal cues are an important component of issue ownership.     

Monopoly Money: Foreign Investment and Bribery in Vietnam,a Survey Experiment

Prevailing work argues that foreign investment reduces corruption, either by competing down monopoly rents or diffusing best practices of corporate governance. We argue that the mechanisms generating this relationship are not clear because the extant empirical work is too heavily drawn from aggregations of total foreign investment entering an economy. Alternatively, we suggest that openness to foreign investment has differential effects on corruption even within the same country and under the same domestic institutions over time. We argue that foreign firms use bribes to enter protected industries in search of rents, and therefore we expect variation in bribe propensity across sectors according to expected profitability. We test this effect using a list experiment embedded in three waves of a nationally representative survey of 20,000 foreign and domestic businesses in Vietnam, finding that the effect of economic openness on the probability to engage in bribes is conditional on policies that restrict investment.     

Does transformational leadership stimulate user orientation? Evidence from a field experiment

While doing good for specific citizens and users is often considered a powerful motivator among public service employees, little research has rigorously evaluated how public managers can promote individualized prosocial motivation. We follow recent studies on the behavioural implications of ‘user orientation’ to explore how public managers can use a specific leadership strategy—transformational leadership—to reinforce employees' individualized prosocial motivation. Combining a field experiment with 80 childcare centre managers and survey reports from their 590 preschool teachers, we assess the effect of a transformational leadership training programme on user orientation. The results show a positive effect on user orientation three months after the training programme but no persistent effect 15 months after the intervention. This implies that, at least in the short term, public managers can use transformational leadership behaviours to stimulate user orientation.     

Releasing managed care's chokehold on healthcare providers

This article addresses the imbalance of power between managed care organizations and physicians regarding the content of treatment information given to patients. The author provides a thoughtful discussion surrounding informed consent issues in a managed care environment, and how managed care organizations maintain their control over physicians. The author concludes by offering varied and insightful methods to even out the disparity of power.     

Increased risk of fatal intoxication and polypharmacy among psychiatric patients at death

Patients suffering from psychiatric disorders have an excess mortality and a shorter life span expectancy compared to the general population. Furthermore, they are treated with multiple drugs and are known to have an increased risk of drug abuse. In this study, we aimed at investigating the pharmaceutical drug and drug of abuse profiles of the deceased included in the Danish prospective autopsy‐based forensic study on psychiatric patients, SURVIVE. Using the postmortem systematic toxicological analysis results, we identified 129 different consumed compounds in our population (n = 443). Polypharmacy (≥5 compounds) was detected in 39.5% of the deceased. Deceased with a psychiatric diagnosis or who died from a fatal intoxication had significantly more compounds at the time of their death compared to having either no psychiatric diagnosis or another cause of death, respectively. Evidence of drug abuse was present, as 29.8% of our total population had consumed either methadone or illicit drugs of abuse, excluding tetrahydrocannabinol. Of those deceased with a psychiatric diagnosis, 33.6% had either consumed methadone or illicit drugs of abuse, a greater number than those without a psychiatric diagnosis. Fatal intoxication was the most frequent cause of death (40.6%) with methadone as the major intoxicant. Here, we found that those without a psychiatric diagnosis had fewer fatal pharmaceutical drug intoxications compared to the psychiatric diagnosis groups. Our findings add further context to understanding the excess mortality of psychiatric patents, since there is an increased occurrence of fatal intoxication, polypharmacy, and drug abuse in this population.     

Politics and white collar crime: Explaining government intervention in the Savings and Loan Scandal

The Savings and Loan Scandal of the 1980s was the biggest crime ever perpetrated in the United States. While several studies have examined the causes of the crime (e.g., deregulation, increase of insurance coverage to $100,000, fluctuations in the economic markets, greed), few scholars to date have studied state intervention in the industry after the crime had been committed. We explore the questions of when and how state managers intervene in the actions of the powerful by supplementing state theory with the literature on the social construction of social problems. Revised version of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, Miami, November 1994. The authors would like to thank the College of Criminal Justice of Sam Houston State University for financial support in searching newspaper data bases and Henry Pontell for comments on an earlier version of this paper.     

States and Common Pool Resources

The neo-institutionalist theory on the management of common pool resources by states in terms of international regimes is based on dubious assumptions about states as players. If one starts from alternative assumptions about interaction between asymmetrical players and the advantages of opportunistic behaviour, then it is easier to account for the collective action difficulties in a regime such as the Helsinki Commission (HELCOM), which handles the environmental problems in the Baltic Sea region.