What's at stake? A veto-player theory of voter turnout

Turnout is theorized to reflect elections' policy stakes. All else equal, a highly constrained policymaking context is expected to lower the potential policy stakes of a given election. This study tests if such contexts, which are characterized by multiple veto players, reduce electoral participation. According to time-series cross-sectional autoregressive dynamic lag models of turnout in 311 elections in 21 advanced industrialized democracies, additional veto players decrease turnout in both the short and long run. Moreover, the results suggest veto players conceptually fine-tune and empirically contribute to existing models of cross-national turnout. Hence this study has crucial implications for the students of electoral participation and scholars interested in the democratic outcomes of institutional design.     

Campaign Activism and the Spatial Model: Getting Beyond Extremism to Explain Policy Motivated Participation

To date, most models of policy motivated campaign participation claim participation derives from the intensity or extremism of one’s policy views. I approach the policy motivation differently, generalizing the logic of proximity voting to model policy motivated campaign participation. Modeling participation as a function of extremism captures the activist’s policy preferences and suggests those with strong preferences participate more, while modeling participation as a function of proximity captures both the activist’s policy preferences and the relevant comparisons to the positions of the candidates. Noting the two alternatives lead to different predictions about variation in individual participation beyond turnout (e.g. campaign activities), I find consistent support for a proximity model of activism and I find no independent effect of extremism once I control for proximity. Moreover, the proximity model’s predictions about ideological responsiveness to changes in the candidates’ locations over time prove robust, while predictions based solely on ideological extremism do not.

Using Booking Data to Model Drug User Arrest Rates: A Preliminary to Estimating the Prevalence of Chronic Drug Use

Public policy is often concerned with the size and characteristics of special populations that are difficult to reach in household surveys. Chronic drug users, who often live outside conventional households, provide the illustration motivating this paper. An alternative to household surveys is to question chronic drug users where they congregate—jails, treatment programs, and shelters, for example. Using such opportunistic data for prevalence estimation raises difficult problems for statistical inference: Study subjects who arrive at the collection points cannot be deemed a random sample of the general population. However, if we could estimate the rates at which chronic drug users arrive at the collection points, then we could use those estimates to weight the sample to represent the population. This paper presents a modified Poisson mixture model used to estimate the stochastic process that accounts for how chronic drug users get arrested. It uses that model to estimate arrest rates for 38 counties using up to sixteen quarters of data from the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring survey.

Beyond parenting: An examination of the etiology of self-control

While prior research testing Gottfredson and Hirschi's (1990) theory of low self-control had demonstrated a significant relationship between parenting and self-control, it had also recognized significant effects of other social factors, suggesting the etiology of self-control may be more complex than the theory specifies. In an effort to better understand this process, the current study examined first whether social factors other than parenting predicted self-control using both contemporaneous and lagged effects models, and second, whether the effect of parenting on self-control varied according to these social factors. Findings offered partial support for self-control theory. In implicit support of the theory, this study found that the effect of parenting on self-control was not conditioned by the competing social factors examined. Contrary to the theory, however, was the finding that self-control was predicted by both peer pressure and school social factors contemporaneously, even after controlling for parental monitoring.     

Tlatelolco's Persistent Legacy: A Comparative Analysis of Three Mexican Novels

This article analyses how three Mexican novels, published between 1971 and 1999, respond to the effects of political violence on national identity. It focuses particularly on fictional representations of state-sponsored, politically motivated murder and on how survivors negotiate a social space forever changed by unsolved crimes. The article concludes that an important consequence of political violence is that it undermines the validity of systems of representation that once seemed capable of portraying the national community. Each of the three novels interpreted here adopts a different stance regarding literary language's relationship to its ever-changing sociopolitical contexts.     

Optimization of a Statistical Algorithm for Objective Comparison of Toolmarks

Due to historical legal challenges, there is a driving force for the development of objective methods of forensic toolmark identification. This study utilizes an algorithm to separate matching and nonmatching shear cut toolmarks created using fifty sequentially manufactured pliers. Unlike previously analyzed striated screwdriver marks, shear cut marks contain discontinuous groups of striations, posing a more difficult test of algorithm applicability. The algorithm compares correlation between optical 3D toolmark topography data, producing a Wilcoxon rank sum test statistic. Relative magnitude of this metric separates the matching and nonmatching toolmarks. Results show a high degree of statistical separation between matching and nonmatching distributions. Further separation is achieved with optimized input parameters and implementation of a “leash” preventing a previous source of outliers—however complete statistical separation was not achieved. This paper represents further development of objective methods of toolmark identification and further validation of the assumption that toolmarks are identifiably unique.