The Contextual Causes of Issue and Party Voting in American Presidential Elections

This paper analyzes the influence of the two most commonly examined causes of presidential vote choice, policy preferences and party identification. The focus is on change across elections in order to assess how the effects of issues and partisanship respond to the larger political context in which voters make their decisions. In contrast to party centric views of politics, I find little direct responsiveness to party issue contrast and substantial influence of candidate issue contrast. Further, I find that leading hypotheses for the “resurgence in partisanship” are not consistent with some important facts suggesting that the explanation remains elusive.     

Ideological congruence over government mandates under majoritarian and proportional representation electoral systems

The existing literature on ideological congruence has typically looked at congruence immediately after elections when governments are formed. This article goes beyond that comparative static approach by examining changes in citizen-government ideological congruence between two fixed points in time, namely at the beginning and end of government mandates. Building on a veto player approach and dynamics of party competition under majoritarian and proportional representation (PR) electoral systems, the results indicate, first, that government positions are more stable in between elections, as the number of parties and their ideological distance increase in cabinet. Second, it appears that single-party and homogeneous coalition governments decrease ideological congruence between elections under low levels of polarisation, while they increase congruence under very high levels of polarisation. Third, it was found that governments under majoritarian systems slightly decrease congruence between elections while congruence stays stable on average under PR systems. The different levels of party system polarisation across majoritarian and PR electoral systems mostly explain this difference.     

A Quarter Century of Participation in School-Based Extracurricular Activities: Inequalities by Race,Class, Gender and Age?

Extracurricular activity participation is linked to positive development, but it is also a setting for inequality. Using a quarter century of data from Monitoring the Future (N?=?593,979; 51% female; 65% non-Hispanic white; 13% non-Hispanic black; 12% Hispanic; 4% non-Hispanic Asian/Pacific Islander; 7% other race), this article documents patterns and trends in school-based extracurricular participation by race, social class, gender, and age, and their links to academic and substance use outcomes. Findings reveal differences by race and confirm a division by social class that has worsened over time. Further, girls are gaining on boys and surpass them in some types of school-based activities. Participation is linked to better academic outcomes and less substance use, affirming the importance of redressing the inequalities revealed.     

The Political Significance of Social Media Activity and Social Networks

This paper examines panel data from two waves of the Youth Participatory Politics Survey, a nationally representative sample of young people in the United States. It employs a cross-lagged design to investigate the extent to which common forms of online activity create pathways to online and offline forms of political activity. Specifically, we examine the influence of Friendship-Driven (FD) and Interest-Driven (ID) online activity on online participatory politics and on offline forms of political action. Our findings reveal that FD and ID activity relate to political engagement, but in different ways. In addition, we find that the size of young people’s social networks interacts with both FD and ID online activity to promote political activity. This indicates that having exposure to “weak-ties” (resulting from large social networks) promote higher levels of political engagement. These findings demonstrate the need to specify the kinds of online activities in which youth are engaged and, more broadly, the political significance of social media and social networks     

Economic Interests and Threat Assessment in the US Congress, 1890–1914

Why do some domestic actors see the international environment as a threatening place populated by untrustworthy powers, when others find opportunities for peaceful cooperation in the same conditions? Because these actors confront the same international environment, the reasons for their divergent evaluations must rest on differences in their own beliefs and interests. In this article, we consider the impact of societal interests in trade and trade protection on elite assessments of the international environment. We examine evaluations of the international environment in speeches given in the US Congress during naval appropriations debates between 1890 and 1914. The manufacturing sector’s interest in trade protection led political leaders who represented manufacturing regions to offer more negative assessments of the international environment, while those representing export-oriented agricultural areas of the country gave more positive evaluations. These effects were roughly comparable to those associated with party, as well as individual-level characteristics, such as having served as a military officer.     

Effect of Victimization on Impulse Control and Binge Drinking among Serious Juvenile Offenders from Adolescence to Young Adulthood

A vast literature has found longitudinal effects of early life stress on substance use and self-regulatory processes. These associations may vary by period-specific development among youth involved in the juvenile justice system. The current study used an accelerated longitudinal design and auto-regressive latent trajectory with structure residuals (ALT-SR) model to examine the within-person cross-lagged associations between binge drinking, impulse control, and victimization from 15 to 25 years of age. A large sample (N?=?1100) of justice-involved youth were followed longitudinally for 7 years (M _{age baseline} ?=?15.8, M _{age conclusion} ?=?22.8). In general, the sample was ethnically diverse (41% Black, 34% Hispanic, 21% White, 4.3% Other) and primarily male (87.2%). Participants reported on their frequency of binge drinking, impulse control, and frequency of victimization at each time point. The results indicated that, during adolescence, victimization and binge drinking attenuated impulse control, which resulted in more binge drinking and victimization during young adulthood. The current study highlights the importance of assessing developmental processes and period-specific transitions among at risk youth, especially for youth experiencing early life stress.     

Affective Development from Middle Childhood to Late Adolescence: Trajectories of Mean-Level Change in Negative and Positive Affect

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Adolescence has long been purported to be a period of emotional upheaval, yet relatively little is known regarding normative patterns of change in youth positive...     

Identifying Fatal Head Injuries on Postmortem Computed Tomography Using Convolutional Neural Network/Deep Learning: A Feasibility Study

Postmortem computed tomography (PMCT) is a relatively recent advancement in forensic pathology practice that has been increasingly used as an ancillary investigation and screening tool. One area of clinical CT imaging that has garnered a lot of research interest recently is the area of “artificial intelligence” (AI), such as in screening and computer-assisted diagnostics. This feasibility study investigated the application of convolutional neural network, a form of deep learning AI, to PMCT head imaging in differentiating fatal head injury from controls. PMCT images of a transverse section of the head at the level of the frontal sinus from 25 cases of fatal head injury were combined with 25 nonhead-injury controls and divided into training and testing datasets. A convolutional neural network was constructed using Keras and was trained against the training data before being assessed against the testing dataset. The results of this study demonstrated an accuracy of between 70% and 92.5%, with difficulties in recognizing subarachnoid hemorrhage and in distinguishing congested vessels and prominent falx from head injury. These results are promising for potential applications as a screening tool or in computer-assisted diagnostics in the future.