Voter Learning in State Primary Elections

When voters learn about candidates' issue positions during election campaigns, does it affect how they vote? This basic question about voters remains unanswered in part because of a methodological obstacle: learning candidates' issue positions may influence not only voters' vote choice but also their issue positions. To surmount this obstacle, we attempt to answer this question by examining statewide primary elections, which are arguably less vulnerable to this reverse causation problem because they lack partisan cues and are of much lower salience than presidential elections. Using both existing polling data and our own panel Internet surveys, we find that voters learn about the ideologies of candidates during statewide primary campaigns and that this learning affects their voting decisions in senate and gubernatorial primaries. We fail to find similar results for down‐ballot primaries, raising questions about voters' ability to make informed judgments for these types of elections.     

Do Open Primaries Improve Representation? An Experimental Test of California's 2012 Top‐Two Primary

To improve representation and alleviate polarization among US lawmakers, many have promoted open primaries—allowing voters to choose candidates from any party—but the evidence that this reform works is mixed. To determine whether open primaries lead voters to choose ideologically proximate candidates, we conducted a statewide experiment just before California's 2012 primaries, the first conducted under a new top‐two format. We find that voters failed to distinguish moderate and extreme candidates. As a consequence, voters actually chose more ideologically distant candidates on the new ballot, and the reform failed to improve the fortunes of moderate congressional and state senate candidates.     

E‐Government Technology Transfer: A Case Study of the Implementation of a European Patent Management System in Brazil

In order to bolster the emerging but still underdeveloped conceptualization of e‐government technology transfer, we examine the implementation of a European Patent Management System in Brazil. The case study provided in this article offers opportunities to improve understanding on technical and organizational issues associated with e‐government technology transfer. Our findings provide evidence that the transfer of e‐government technology from a European to a Brazilian context requires multiple adaptations of the original design, intensive learning on the side of the recipient organization, and flexible implementation plans. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mainstream medicine versus complementary and alternative medicine in the witness box: resolving the clash of ideologies

Mainstream medical philosophy and practice differ in many respects from those of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), differences which are explored in this article. Because of a resurgence of CAM therapies, courts and tribunals will scrutinise CAM in more and more contexts in the future. Such court cases may require the resolution of conflicts between opinions of CAM and medical experts. This article considers how courts evaluate such opinions where experts hold conflicting ideologies or philosophical approaches, and addresses the following questions: Do the opinions of CAM practitioners qualify as "expert" opinions in court? How do the courts examine the basis of such opinions? Are they systematically given less weight than the opinions of mainstream medical practitioners? Will recent procedural reforms for hearing expert evidence make it easier for courts to resolve these issues?