How to Analyze Political Attention with Minimal Assumptions and Costs

Previous methods of analyzing the substance of political attention have had to make several restrictive assumptions or been prohibitively costly when applied to large-scale political texts. Here, we describe a topic model for legislative speech, a statistical learning model that uses word choices to infer topical categories covered in a set of speeches and to identify the topic of specific speeches. Our method estimates, rather than assumes, the substance of topics, the keywords that identify topics, and the hierarchical nesting of topics. We use the topic model to examine the agenda in the U.S. Senate from 1997 to 2004. Using a new database of over 118,000 speeches (70,000,000 words) from the Congressional Record , our model reveals speech topic categories that are both distinctive and meaningfully interrelated and a richer view of democratic agenda dynamics than had previously been possible.     

Terrorist networks, support, and delegation

The paper presents a game-theoretic representation of a general terrorist organization (GTO) that delegates responsibility to local terrorist representatives in n countries. The GTO achieves a strategic advantage by deploying a more radical representative when the government is perceived to be weak and terrorist supporters are committed. When the government or terrorist supporters alter their posture, the GTO may regret its local representative. Outside assistance can change a besieged government’s posture, thereby removing the GTO’s delegation advantage. When both the GTO and the government delegate to surrogates, the delegators are worse off if the government appears to be weak.     

Constituent Communication Through Telephone Town Halls: A Field Experiment Involving Members of Congress

Telephone town halls are an increasingly prevalent method for members of Congress (MCs) to communicate with constituents, even while garnering popular criticism for failing to facilitate engagement and accountability. Yet scholars have paid little attention to the events and their effects, and even less to how they might be improved. To remedy this problem, we report on a field experiment in which four MCs joined their constituents in telephone town halls. Overall, participation in an event improved constituents’ evaluations of the format in general, and of the MC in particular. Furthermore, we studied how these events might be improved by evaluating a reform—a single‐topic focus with predistributed briefing materials—designed to enhance deliberative interaction. This reform enhanced effects on opinions of the format without significantly altering effects on attitudes toward the MC. Our results suggest that telephone town halls hold promise for constituents, officeholders, and democratic practice.     

Knowledge-based management of protected areas and hydropower: the case of Norway

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics - How has ecological knowledge been applied in Norwegian management of hydropower and protected areas? By recognizing a diversity...     

A partially randomized field experiment on the effect of an acoustic gunshot detection system on police incident reports

Journal of Experimental Criminology - To examine whether the introduction of an acoustic gunshot detection system (AGDS) allied to CCTV cameras increased the frequency of confirmed incidents of...     

Surveillance of environmental movements in Canada: critical infrastructure protection and the petro-security apparatus

A convergence of post-9/11 security governance practices and a dependence on extractive economies has resulted in changes to the way Canadian policing agencies classify environmental movements. We detail how the category of ‘critical infrastructure protection’ (CIP) now enables surveillance of environmentalists under the banner of national security. We examine the growth of CIP as a security category, its changing character from the Cold War to the present, and the role of threat entrepreneurs. We demonstrate that CIP networks have institutionalized collaborations between national security agencies and energy corporations, creating a petro-security apparatus that aims to suppress dissent. We conclude with reflections on what surveillance regimes driven by the petro-security apparatus mean for debates about national security and social movements.     

The Sexual Violence Risk-20: factor structure and psychometric properties

Although the Sexual Violence Risk-20 (SVR-20) is widely used, its psychometric properties have only been investigated in a limited number of studies. This study explored the factor structure of the SVR-20 and examined its psychometric properties. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to examine the fit of the original three-domain model of the SVR-20. The CFA showed that the original structure was not satisfactory. Exploratory principal components analysis (PCA) was conducted in search of a more optimal factor structure. Psychometric properties (i.e., internal consistency, predictive value, and convergent validity) of both the original domains and alternative factors were investigated. The PCA and subsequent CFAs pointed in the direction of an alternative, more optimal three-factor solution. The three alternative factors were labeled as Antisociality, Sexual deviance, and Problematic thinking and produced better internal consistency coefficients than the original domains. However, the validity of the SVR-20 was modest and no evidence was found indicating that the alternative factors were better in this regard as compared to the original domains. Despite the overall superiority of actuarial measures in predicting recidivism, the structured professional judgment of the SVR-20 proved to be more predictive of sexual, violent, and general recidivism than its actuarial scoring method.     

Sickle cell trait-associated deaths: a case series with a review of the literature

This study presents a series of 16 carriers of hemoglobin S (HbS) who died during various circumstances. Many of the cases were associated with mild to moderate exertion. The onset and/or duration of symptoms varied from a few minutes to several hours with many displaying a prolonged lucid interval with stable vital signs. Despite seeking medical treatment, sickle cell trait-related micro-occlusive crisis was never considered in the differential diagnosis. Several cases were associated with sudden death. In those deaths which were delayed, high anion gap and uncompensated metabolic acidosis were typical and were not heat related. Also characteristic were large increases in creatine kinase, alanine aminotransferase, and aspartate aminotransferase along with myoglobinemia. Although the antemortem diagnosis of rhabdomyolysis was made, the underlying cause was never deduced by the clinicians. The sickling found at autopsy is not always a postmortem artifact, and in the right circumstances can be diagnostic.