The Contingency of Voter Learning: How Election Debates Influenced Voters’ Ability and Accuracy to Position Parties in the 2010 Dutch Election Campaign

Election campaigns are expected to inform voters about parties’ issue positions, thereby increasing voters’ ability to influence future policy and thus enhancing the practice of democratic government. We argue that campaign learning is not only contingent on voters’ characteristics and different sources of information, but also on how parties communicate their issue positions in election debates. We combine a two-wave panel survey with content analysis data of three televised election debates. In cross-classified multilevel auto-regression models we examine the influence of these debates in the 2010 Dutch parliamentary election campaign on voters’ knowledge of the positions of eight parties on three issues. The Dutch multiparty system allows us to separate voters’ ability to position parties from their accuracy in ordering these parties. We reach three main conclusions. First, this study shows that voters become more able and accurate during the campaign. However, these campaign learning effects erode after the elections. Second, whereas voters’ attention to campaigns consistently contributes to their ability to position parties, its effect on accuracy is somewhat less consistent. Third, televised election debates contribute to what voters learn. Parties that advocate their issue positions in the debates stimulate debate viewers’ ability to position these parties on these issues. In the face of the complexity of campaigns and debates in multiparty systems, campaigns are more likely to boost voters’ subjective ability to position parties than their accuracy.     

Assessing the Influence of Political Parties on Public Opinion: The Challenge from Pretreatment Effects

Despite generations of research, political scientists have trouble pinpointing the influence of political parties on public opinion. Recently, scholars have made headway in exploring whether parties in fact shape policy preferences by relying on experimental designs. Yet, the evidence from this work is mixed. I argue that the typical experiment faces a design problem that likely minimizes the extent to which parties apparently matter. Because parties have policy reputations, experimental participants may already know from real-world exposure to political debate where the parties stand before they are told in the experiment—they are “pretreated.” This study investigates how real-world political context interferes with party cue stimulus in experiments. In two experiments I show that two types of “pretreatment” from outside the experiment—exposure-based and reputation-based—dramatically moderate the effects of party cues in experiments. Moreover, the politically aware participants—who are most likely to have been pretreated before entering the experiment—are the most sensitive to this interference from real-world context. Paradoxically, experimenters are most likely to find no effect of parties at the very time that their influence is strongest outside the experiment. These findings emphasize the importance of keeping real-world context in mind when designing and analyzing experiments on political communication effects and might help reconcile disparate results of previous party cue experiments.     

CRIME DIVERSITY*

Large geographic areas should host a greater diversity of crime compared with small geographic areas. This proposition is reasonable given that larger geographic areas should not only support more crime but also contain a greater diversity of criminogenic settings. This article uses a neutral model to characterize crime richness as a function of area. The model starts with two neutral assumptions: 1) that all environments are statistically equivalent and exert no influence on what types of crimes occur there; and 2) that different crime types occur independently of one another. The model produces rigorous predictions for the mean and variance in crime richness with increasing area. Tests of the model against a sample of 172,055 crimes occurring in Los Angeles during the year 2013 are qualitatively consistent with neutral expectations. The model is made quantitatively consistent by constant scaling. Resampling experiments show that at most 20 percent of the mean crime richness is attributable to nonrandom clustering and assortment of crime types. A modified neutral model allowing for variation crime concentration is consistent with observed variance in crime richness. The results suggest that very general and largely neutral laws may be driving crime diversity in space.     

Economic and Sociological Correlates of Suicides: Multilevel Analysis of the Time Series Data in the United Kingdom

For the effects of social integration on suicides, there have been different and even contradictive conclusions. In this study, the selected economic and social risks of suicide for different age groups and genders in the United Kingdom were identified and the effects were estimated by the multilevel time series analyses. To our knowledge, there exist no previous studies that estimated a dynamic model of suicides on the time series data together with multilevel analysis and autoregressive distributed lags. The investigation indicated that unemployment rate, inflation rate, and divorce rate are all significantly and positively related to the national suicide rates in the United Kingdom from 1981 to 2011. Furthermore, the suicide rates of almost all groups above 40 years are significantly associated with the risk factors of unemployment and inflation rate, in comparison with the younger groups.     

Auricular Surface Aging: Comparing Two Methods that Assess Morphological Change in the Ilium with Bayesian Analyses

Modern standards in forensic anthropology require rigorous testing and evaluation of methods used for aging skeletal remains. Age estimation has been criticized for bias, inaccuracy, and population specificity; issues which are minimized by the application of Bayesian methodology. Using Bayesian statistics, we compare the Lovejoy et al. (Am J Phys Anthropol, 68, 1985, 15) (original) and Buckberry and Chamberlain (Am J Phys Anthropol, 119, 2002, 231) (revised) auricular surface aging methods. Transition analysis parameters derived from American males (n = 372), in combination with a Thai male (N = 37) informative prior, statistically model age in Portuguese males (n = 221). Cumulative binomial tests assess the accuracy of the generated age ranges. Overall, the application of transition analysis and Bayesian statistics significantly improved age estimation with both methods (also outperforming Suchey‐Brooks pubic symphysis aging). Moreover, the accuracy of the original method was low without statistical modeling, whereas the revised method can be applied accurately without further statistical analysis. Additionally, reference tables for aging Portuguese males are provided.     

Traits and states at work: lure,risk and personality as predictors of occupational crime

This study linked individual characteristics to proximate factors operating in the moment of decision-making to predict occupational crime. We distinguished between people’s task-related conscience, as embodied by the Conscientiousness personality trait, and a more general moral conscience as embodied by the Honesty-Humility trait, hypothesizing that both traits are differentially related to the way situational characteristics, such as costs and benefits, are perceived. We operationalized the concept of ‘felt lure’ emanating from the benefits of a crime, defining it as an affective state that tempts people to commit a criminal act, and examined it next to perceived risk of sanction as a proximate predictor of criminal choice. In line with our predictions, Conscientiousness and Honesty-Humility significantly predicted occupational criminal choice as did felt lure and perceived risk. Specifically, perceived risk and felt lure mediated the relations between Conscientiousness and Honesty-Humility on the one hand, and occupational criminal choice on the other.     

Can we explain the Santa Clara county housing market?

Abstract

Santa Clara County has recently had the highest house prices of any large housing market in the nation. Part of the explanation lies in the extraordinarily low user cost of housing caused by the interaction of high incomes and the tax deductions available to homeowners. But this article also evaluates whether changes in stock wealth have been responsible for the recent increase in housing prices in Santa Clara County.

Although three different stock market measures add explanatory power to a model of housing prices in the region, none of these indexes predicts the housing price increases seen in 1999 and 2000. In fact, the within‐sample models have .R‐squares of only 0.22, and even the best model (based on the Standard & Poor's 500) does not forecast well out of sample. Still, the market is unusual in that stock prices seem to have some impact on house prices.     

Propaganda,effect, and the cold war: Gauging the status of america's “war of words”

The article examines the interrelationship among propaganda, effect, and the Cold War during congressional debates over America's first peacetime propaganda program. Although the rise of the communication research paradigm affected the production of statistical evidence to measure the effectiveness of America's Cold War propaganda, this case study argues that the “war of words” metaphor further heightened the need for empirical proof of America's status in that conflict, Just as with any physical battle that relies on body counts and land measurements to determine the success of America's war efforts, the criteria for measuring the status of America's “war of words” were driven by a similar demand for “objective” proof. The longevity of the Cold War helped ensure the institutionalization of the communication research paradigm, which rejected the use of anecdotal evidence as support for the program's impact.     

城中村多元改造模式与村民市民化

城中村改造是我国城市化进程中面临的共性问题。因各地的具体情况有差异,城中村改造的模式也不同,总体思路概括起来就是土地经营资本化并且将城中村居民现在的生活与日后的生活进行平衡考虑。城中村居民市民化一般要经过四个步骤：拆迁补偿、稳定就业、自主创业、全方位提高。期间城中村居民的代际差异很突出。考虑到各种因素的综合影响,城中村改造不能整齐划一,需要从宏观和微观等多层面入手探索创新改造模式。     

“新农保”个人缴费“捆绑制”的实践考察与理论研判

在实现快速发展、取得显著成果的同时，“新农保”在实施过程中也暴露出了一些问题，其中，个人缴费“捆绑制”引发了巨大争议。批评者认为，“捆绑制”系“新农保”制度设计的最大败笔，已成为制约其深入发展的“桎梏”。从实践来看，“捆绑制”虽存在一些问题，但绝非如批评者所言之“不堪”。立足农村现实情况，综合考量相关因素，目前还应坚持“捆绑制”，同时须在具体制度设计上加以完善。