Better Know a District: Competition,Demographics, Ideology and the Use of Pollsters in the 2010 U.S. House Elections

Why do some congressional candidates hire pollsters, while others do not? Prior work claims candidates hire them when they face close contests. This argument does not explain the selection of pollsters in uncompetitive races, especially by incumbents, who also use pollsters to monitor the ramifications of some demographic changes in their districts and ideological incongruity with the constituencies. These determinants should be evident for the use of the most prestigious pollsters, and I argue that candidates hold in higher demand those survey research specialists who have worked for party campaign committees than those without party ties. But while challengers in close races can attract the services of these firms, incumbents in some vulnerable contexts, such as facing experienced challengers, are less able to do so. This study shows that constituency conditions and voter attitudes beyond electoral competition alone shape candidate use of pollsters, who serve representational needs to the extent they are contractually tied to the party organization, which extends its influence over but does not control the political consulting industry.     

Online clustering,fear and uncertainty in Egypt’s transition

Does the uncertainty associated with post-authoritarian transitions cause political and social polarization? Does ubiquitous social media exacerbate these problems and thus make successful democratic transitions less likely? This article examines these questions in the case of Egypt between the 11 February 2011 fall of President Hosni Mubarak and the 3 July 2013 military coup, which overthrew President Mohamed el-Morsi. The analysis is based on a Twitter dataset including 62 million tweets by 7 million unique users. Using a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods, we demonstrate how clusters of users form and evolve over time, the density of interactions between them, and the flow of particular types of information through the clustered network structure. We show that the Egyptian Twitter public developed into increasingly isolated clusters of the like-minded which shared information unevenly. We argue that the growing distance between these clusters encouraged political conflict and facilitated the spread of fear and hatred, which ultimately undermined the democratic transition and won popular support for the military coup.     

Constitutional Dynamics in the European Union: Success,Failure, and Stability of Institutional Treaty Revisions

ABSTRACT

Despite high institutional hurdles for constitutional change, one observes surprisingly many EU treaty revisions. This article takes up the questions of what determines whether a treaty provision is successfully changed and why provisions are renegotiated at subsequent Intergovernmental Conferences. The article presents an institutionalist theory explaining success and renegotiation and tests the theory using all core institutional provisions by means of Qualitative Comparative Analysis. The causal analysis shows that low conflict potential of an issue is sufficient for successfully changing the treaties. Furthermore, high conflict potential of an issue and its fundamental change are sufficient for it to be renegotiated.     

Empowering women through the positive birth movement

Childbirth has been positioned as a life changing event that has profound long-term psychological effects upon women. This paper adopts a community psychology approach to explore the role that the Positive Birth Movement (PBM) may have in tackling negative birth experiences by supporting women before and after birth. Six women who all regularly attend UK-based PBM meetings and had given birth to at least one child participated in one to one semi-structured interviews designed to explore the support they received before, during and after their birth, as well as their experiences with the PBM. A Foucauldian inspired discourse analysis explores themes relating to the lack of support and information provided by the NHS and the function of the PBM as a transformative community space which offers social support and information. Within these themes a focus on neoliberalism, choice and the woman’s position as an active consumer of health care is critically discussed. It is argued that the PBM has the potential to prepare women for positive birth experiences but more attention needs to be paid to the wider contexts that limit women’s ability to make ‘free’ choice.     

Members of parliament and governments in Western Europe: Agency relations and problems of oversight

Abstract. The vast majority of West European polities feature an agency relationship between members of parliaments and members of cabinets as the latter depend on the confidence of the majority of the former to remain in office. In this article, the terminology used by principalagent theory to characterise oversight activities – contract design, screening, monitoring and the use of institutional checks – and elements of transaction cost economics are applied to the agency relationship between members of parliaments and cabinet members in Western Europe. Traditional studies of parliamentary oversight have narrowly concentrated on monitoring, although parliaments (with considerable cross–national variations) use a broad range of oversight mechanisms including equivalents of contract design, screening and institutional checks. In addition, traditional studies have focused almost exclusively on one particular type of monitoring often referred to as 'police–patrol oversight', whilst neglecting or underestimating the effectiveness and low transaction costs associated with 'fire–alarm oversight'. Despite the valuable insights the principal–agent framework has already added to the study of executive–legislative relations in parliamentary democracies, future research will have to account more realistically for the role and organisation of political parties which structure the delegation process, help to solve a number of co–ordination problems in parliaments (for example, the co–ordination of committees and floor activities) and generate important internal agency relationships that are fundamental to an understanding of executive–legislative relations in Western Europe.     

The Powell Hypothesis: Race and non-capital sentences for murder in Kentucky, 1976–1991

The 1987 U.S. Supreme Court decision McCleskey v. Kemp ruled, in part, that the findings of the Baldus study, offered by the petitioner to support a claim of racial bias in death penalty cases, were insufficient to demonstrate unconstitutional discrimination under the Fourteenth Amendment. Justice Lewis Powell offered additional justification for the ruling when he wrote, “If we accepted McCleskey’s claim that racial bias has impermissibly tainted the capital sentencing decision, we could soon be faced with similar claims as to other types of penalty. ” This statement has become labeled as the “Powell Hypothesis. ” This paper tests the “Powell Hypothesis” to determine whether race has an impact on sentences levied in noncapital murder cases in Kentucky between 1976 and 1991. The results indicate racial factors influenced sentence length in these cases.     

IDENTIFYING HEALTH CARE COST CRISES IN OECD NATIONS

This study develops an empirical model for determining whether a nation's health care expenditures are experiencing a crisis based on the trend over time of the ratio of total health spending to total domestic expenditures. A dynamic regression model is applied to 22 OECD nations for the 1960–1994 period to estimate whether or not levels of health spending are converging towards a stable equilibrium and, if they are, what this equilibrium is and how long it will take to reach it. Crisis is defined as an empirically divergent process. The principal findings from this analysis are that: 1) three nations (France, Greece, and the United States) are experiencing a crisis according to this definition; 2) although the crisis potential is relatively high in all the OECD nations, there appears to be a critical region or threshold where the tendency towards crisis increases dramatically; 3) the time to reach equilibrium is generally quite long, indicating the opportunity for substantial policy intervention; and 4) Denmark stands out as a successful case where health costs have been contained.     

Digital Social Multitasking (DSMT), Friendship Quality,and Basic Psychological Needs Satisfaction Among Adolescents: Perceptions as Mediators

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Most existing research assumes “phone use during face-to-face interactions” to be psychosocially detrimental. Drawing on the digital social...     

Democracy Beyond Secrecy: Assessing the Promises and Pitfalls of Collective Voting

This paper assesses collective voting as a specific mode of democratic decision‐making and compares it to secret voting. Under collective voting, voters gather in one place and decide by the show of hands. We theorise two potential advantages and two disadvantages of collective voting so defined. We then draw on original survey data from one of the largest polities practising collective voting, the citizen assembly of the Swiss canton of Glarus. We find that both the promises and pitfalls of non‐secret voting are exaggerated. Non‐secret voting’s suspected pitfalls – social pressure and abstention – do not generally materialise in our sample, although for women they do appear to be relevant to some extent. However, the promises of collective voting – enabling cue‐taking and discursive bridging and bonding – are equally realised to a limited extent only.