Are Poor Voters Indifferent to Whether Elected Leaders Are Criminal or Corrupt? A Vignette Experiment in Rural India

Although in theory elections are supposed to prevent criminal or venal candidates from winning or retaining office, in practice voters frequently elect and reelect such candidates. This surprising pattern is sometimes explained by reference to voters’ underlying preferences, which are thought to favor criminal or corrupt candidates because of the patronage they provide. This article tests this hypothesis using 2010 data from the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, where one in four representatives in the state legislature have a serious criminal record and where political corruption is widespread. Contrary to the voter preference hypothesis, voters presented with vignettes that randomly vary the attributes of competing legislative candidates for local, state, and national office become much less likely to express a preference for candidates who are alleged to be criminal or corrupt. Moreover, voters’ education status, ethnicity, and political knowledge are unrelated to their distaste for criminal and venal candidates. The results imply that the electoral performance of candidates who face serious allegations likely reflects factors other than voters’ preferences for patronage, such as limited information about candidate characteristics or the absence of credible alternative candidates with clean records.     

How Much Disagreement is Good for Democratic Deliberation?

The ideal of deliberation requires that citizens engage in reasonable discussion despite disagreements. In practice, if their experience is to match this normative ideal, participants in an actual deliberation should prefer moderate disagreement to conflict-free discussion within homogeneous groups, and to conflict-driven discussion where differences are intractable. This article proposes a research design and methods for assessing the quality of a deliberative event based on the perceptions of the participants themselves. In a structured deliberative event, over 2,000 individuals were assigned to small groups composed of about 10 persons of varying levels of ideological difference to discuss health care reform in California. We find that participants experience higher satisfaction with deliberation under moderate ideological difference than when they are in homogeneous or in highly disparate groups. That moderate disagreement induces optimal deliberation is consistent with normative expectations and empirically demonstrates the deliberative quality of this event.     

Mobilizing party activism: A field experiment with party members and sympathizers

Electoral mobilization and persuasion are often characterized as two-stage processes, where parties activate their core supporters, who then mobilize and persuade larger shares of the electorate. While there is a lot of research on the second stage of this process, the mobilization and persuasion of the wider electorate by party activists, there is little causally identified evidence on whether party elites can encourage campaign activism among party members and sympathizers. To address this question, we conducted a randomized field experiment in cooperation with the Swiss Social Democratic Party in the context of the 2015 cantonal elections in Ticino. The experiment consisted of the randomized administration of telephone calls to members and strong supporters of the party, while their self-reported campaign activism and attitudes towards the campaign were measured in a two-wave online panel survey. Against expectations, we record null effects on various measures of campaign activism, including on the mobilization of relatives, and friends. The results raise questions about omitted variable bias in observational studies of party activism that consistently report large positive effects of party contact on the campaign activism of members and sympathizers.     

Long‐Run Labor Market Effects of the Job Corps Program: Evidence from a Nationally Representative Experiment

Job Corps is the nation's largest and most comprehensive career technical training and education program for at‐risk youth ages 16 to 24. Using the sample from a large‐scale experiment of the program from the mid‐1990s, this article uses tax data through 2015 (20 years later) to examine long‐term labor market impacts. The study finds some long‐term beneficial effects for the older students, with employment gains of 4 percentage points, 40 percent reductions in disability benefit receipt, and 10 percent increases in tax filing rates in 2015. For these students, program benefits exceeded program costs from the social perspective. This study is the first to establish that a national program for disconnected youth can produce long‐term labor market gains, and can be a positive investment made for society. The results suggest that intensive, comprehensive services that focus on developing both cognitive and noncognitive skills are important for improving labor market prospects for this population.     

The impact of after‐school programs on the routine activities of middle‐school students: Results from a randomized,controlled trial*

Research Summary Unsupervised after‐school time for adolescents is a concern for parents and policymakers alike. Evidence linking unsupervised adolescent socializing to problem behavior outcomes heightens this concern among criminologists. Routine activities theory suggests that, when youth peer groups congregate away from adult authority, both opportunity for and motivation to engage in deviant acts increase. After‐school programs are a possible solution to unsupervised teen socializing during afternoon hours and are much in demand. However, empirical research has yet to test the relationship between the availability of after‐school programs and youth routine activities. This study presents evidence from a multisite, randomized, controlled trial of an after‐school program for middle‐school students in an urban school district. Policy Implications Youth in the treatment group engaged in less unsupervised socializing after school than youth in the control group but not as much less as would be expected if the after‐school program was providing consistent supervision to youth who would otherwise be unsupervised. Additional analyses examined why the influence of the after‐school program was not more pronounced. We found that, although program attendance was related to decreases in unsupervised socializing, the program did not attract many delinquency‐prone youths who were unsupervised, which suggests that the students most in need of the program did not benefit. Furthermore, data obtained from a mid‐year activity survey revealed that youth in the study were highly engaged in a variety of after‐school activities. The addition of the after‐school program into the mixture of available activities had little effect on the frequency with which students participated in organized activities after school.     

侦查实验规则的法律思考

侦查实验作为一种侦查措施,在侦查实践中具有不可替代的作用。侦查实验应当遵循以下三个规则,即：相近条件规则、反复实验规则和文明、安全实验规则。     

PROJECTED OFFENDING AND CONTEMPORANEOUS RULE‐VIOLATION: IMPLICATIONS FOR HETEROTYPIC CONTINUITY*

This study integrated two methodologies, the vignette‐based survey and the randomized laboratory experiment, to investigate the relationship between projected and actual offending behavior. Findings indicate that respondents' estimates of the likelihood they would drive drunk in a hypothetical vignette were positively correlated with whether they simultaneously cheated on a laboratory task to earn a cash bonus. Implications are discussed for both the prospective measurement and heterotypic continuity of criminal and antisocial behavior.     

Artificial Intelligence and Technology in Teaching Negotiation

Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), affective computing, and big‐data techniques are improving the ways that humans negotiate and learn to negotiate. These technologies, long deployed in industry and academic research, are now being adopted for educational use. We describe several systems that help human negotiators evaluate and learn from role‐play simulations as well as applications that help human instructors teach negotiators at the individual, team, and organizational levels. AI can enable the personalization of negotiation instruction, taking into consideration factors such as culture and bias. These tools will enable improvements not only in the teaching of negotiation, but also in teaching humans how to program and collaborate with technology‐based negotiation systems, including avatars and computer‐controlled negotiation agents. These advances will provide theoretical and practical insights, require serious consideration of ethical issues, and revolutionize the way we practice and teach negotiation.     

宁夏生态建设的难点及对策研究

宁夏生态建设面临三个方面的困难,这就是中部缺水、集体缺权、政府缺钱。解决中部生态建设所需用水道路有三条:一是恢复清水河流域流水,将苦水河变为甜水河;二是以全新的思路和措施力争大柳树水利枢纽工程早日开工建设;三是南引北提,共同济中。农村集体土地确权为集体土地生态建设的责、权、利相统一提供了难得机遇。宁夏生态建设政府缺钱的对策有三:一是化政治优势为生态优势,二是动员社会力量参与生态建设,三是将生态建设与社会管理创新结合起来。     

针灸治疗糖尿病胃轻瘫随机对照试验文献质量评价

［摘要］目的 对针灸治疗糖尿病胃轻瘫随机对照试验文献质量进行分析,为进一步的临床试验研究提供参考。方法 检索近30年针灸治疗糖尿病胃轻瘫临床研究文献,采用循证医学的原则及评价方法,制定临床文献评价及信息采集表,对纳入文献进行分析和评价。结果 检索到符合纳入标准的临床对照试验文献21篇,在样本量估算、疾病诊断标准及疗效判定标准、盲法和分配隐藏、随机化实施、随访及病例脱失剔除情况、结局指标选择、安全性观察、结论推导等方面存在一些问题。结论 针灸治疗糖尿病胃轻瘫的临床研究文献存在样本量较少、研究方法实施不严谨、结局指标选取不统一的缺点,尚不能得出针灸优于其他疗法的确切结论,故有必要进一步做多中心、大样本及高质量的临床试验研究。