Individual campaign contributions and candidate ideology

Individual citizens are the largest source of contributions for congressional candidates in the United States. This paper investigates if and how fundraising from this source is related to the ideological positions of candidates. Specifically, we ask whether the amount of contributions depends on: (1) the extremity of candidate ideology; and (2) the level of candidate divergence in the same race. These results have important implications for candidate positioning strategies, as well as for evaluating the effects of recent campaign finance reforms.     

Bad for Men,Better for Women: The Impact of Stereotypes During Negative Campaigns

In this paper, we examine whether the impact of negative advertising on citizens’ evaluations of candidates depends on the gender of the candidates. Given common gender stereotypes, we expect negative campaigning aimed at women candidates will affect citizens differently than negative campaigning against male candidates. The results of our study, derived from a survey experiment conducted on a nationwide sample of more than 700 citizens, demonstrate that negative commercials are less effective at depressing evaluations of woman candidates, compared to male candidates. The findings are consistent and strong, across a range of forces that people use to assess competing candidates (i.e., affect and trait evaluations, people’s beliefs about issues, anticipated vote choice). The tight control of the experimental design, including randomization of respondents into different conditions that vary in only one way, demonstrates that the gender of the candidate influences people’s reactions to different types of negative commercials.

Terrorist Threat,Leadership, and the Vote: Evidence from Three Experiments

From 9/11 in the U.S. to train, subway, and airport bombings elsewhere, individuals frequently must make political decisions in the shadow of terrorist attacks. To date, few studies have examined how times of terror threat influence voters’ decision-making processes. Using data generated from three experiments we show that, in times of terrorist threat (compared to good times), individuals weight leadership more heavily in the voting booth. Our results also shed light on how much weight is given to other determinants of the vote (issues and partisanship) across these two conditions.     

Leading from Below: How Sub-National Governments Influence Policy Agendas

This article takes a state's eye view of trends towards a more centralised system of governance in Australia. It argues that while globalisation strengthens the roles of national governments it also provides less noticed public policy and management opportunities for sub-national governments. The article shows how state governments in Australia can use high-level policy proposals to reinforce their continuing relevance as key members of a federal system of government. It proposes that skilful deployment of policy ideas and analyses can enable the states to sustain alternative national agendas despite hostility or lack of interest by the federal government. In conclusion, the article examines the implications for federal-state relations under the Rudd government. It suggests that the elements for productive reform agendas are present but that bringing them together will require considerable effort.     

Five Challenges to Legalizing Economic and Social Rights

In recent years, dozens of human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs) across the globe have begun to advocate for economic and social rights, which represents a significant expansion of the human rights movement. This article investigates a central strategy that NGOs have pursued to realize these rights: legalization. Legalization involves specifying rights as valid legal rules and enforcing them through judicial or quasi-judicial processes. After documenting some of the progress made toward legalization, the article analyzes five unique challenges involved in legalizing economic and social rights. It is important to identify these challenges because they must be overcome if the human rights movement wishes to refute the notion that economic and social rights are inherently non-justiciable (and therefore, to some, invalid as rights). These challenges also point to the possibility that legalization is not the only, or even the best, strategic pathway to realize economic and social rights effectively.

Risk assessment and suicide prevention in primary care

General practitioners (GPs) are assumed to occupy an important position in the prevention of suicide through the introduction of risk assessment techniques commonly used in psychiatric practice. Despite this theoretical role for primary care services, it remains unclear how frequently GPs implement risk assessment in patients who may be vulnerable to suicide. To address this, a retrospective survey of probable suicides was conducted within a primary care setting utilizing a questionnaire of GPs who had experienced a patient suicide and was augmented by hospital and coroners' records. 85% of questionnaires were returned and 61 deaths were adjudged as suicides during the year long census period. 75% of suicides were male and 54% were aged under 35.28% were in contact with psychiatric services prior to death, although 60% had some diagnosis of mental disorder. GPs had little knowledge of a patient's life circumstances in up to half of cases. Recording of risk assessment occurred in 38% of subjects, was positively associated with prior psychiatric contact (p = 0.001) but negatively associated with presence of physical illness (p = 0.004), older patient age (p = 0.04), and GPs length in practice (p = 0.05). One GP felt their suicide case was preventable. The low rate of risk assessment and limited knowledge of patient lifestyle point to the need for active engagement of GPs in future suicide prevention strategies and should influence the content of training programs in primary care.     

Ethics and public policy: an analysis of a research tradition ∗

This article focuses on the relevent scholarly literature devoted to ethics and public policy. A literature search revealed an extensive body of research which lacked a coherent ordering. This article provides a model to understand a field of academic inquiry which has a rich tradition.