Voting for Democracy: Campaign Effects in Chile's Democratic Transition

In a global context in which authoritarian regimes often hold elections, defeating dictators at the polls can play a key role in transitions to democracy. When the opposition is allowed to campaign for votes in such elections, there are strong reasons to believe that its efforts will be more persuasive than those of the authoritarian incumbent. This article examines the effect of televised campaign advertising on vote choice in the 1988 plebiscite that inaugurated Chile's transition to democracy. Using matching to analyze postelectoral survey data, it shows that the advertising of the opposition's no campaign made Chileans more likely to vote against dictator Augusto Pinochet, whereas the advertising of the government's yes campaign had no discernible effect. These findings suggest that the no campaign played an important causal role in the change of political regime.     

Can George dance? Biosemiotics and human exceptionalism with a lyrebird in the viewfinder

Are the movements of the Australian Albert’s lyrebird “George” best identified as dance, “dance,” proto-dance, or functional gestures? I draw on the tools of biosemiotics to shed light on human signifying practice vis-à-vis dance – specifically, how humans make sense of avian dance, how they compare and contrast it with human dance, and what a definition tells us about its makers. In both the natural sciences and humanities, competing discourses abound to the contention that animal movements could fruitfully be considered as dance. A trend emerges in some definitions of dance (which may also invoke human exceptionalism) of characterizations that ignore extant reports of animal abilities – of a classificatory rather than an evaluative posture. I argue that in overcoming the limitations of human exceptionalism in analytic frameworks by explicitly incorporating animal efforts into theory development, validation, and revision (theories often dominated by human and elite Western concerns), we will arrive at a less-distorted version of the multimodal behavior we call dancing.     

Scientist entrepreneurship across scientific fields

Knowledge generated in universities can serve as an important base for the commercialization of innovation. One mechanism for commercialization is the creation of a new company by a scientist. We shed light on this process by examining the role of scientist characteristics, access to resources and key university conditions in driving the likelihood of a scientist to start a company. Our sample comprises 1,899 university scientists across six different scientific fields. We make a methodological contribution by using self-reported data from the scientists themselves, whereas most previous research relied on university or public data. Our consideration of six scientific fields is a substantive contribution and reveals that scientist startups are heterogeneous in nature. Our findings are largely consistent with extant research on the role of individual and university variables in scientist entrepreneurship; in addition, we uncover the novel finding that the type of research field is also a key driver of scientist startup activity.     

Inverse Productivity or Inverse Efficiency? Evidence from Mexico

Using a unique panel data set from rural Mexico, we find strong evidence of a negative relationship between farm size and both productivity and technical efficiency: large farms not only have a lower value of output per hectare than small farms, they also produce further from the efficiency frontier. Our findings suggest that, in spite of the ongoing transformation of agricultural supply chains and economists’ recommendations for small farmers to exit crop production, there may be sustained advantages for smallholder farms. Our analysis offers new insights into inverse-farm size relationship, the productivity–efficiency relationship, and the use of stochastic frontier techniques.