Mapping giant honey bee nests in Palawan,Philippines through a transdisciplinary approach

This article reports on a study that uses participatory mapping with indigenous Tagbanua honey hunters and gatherers to understand the spatial distribution of giant honey bees in a community forest in Palawan, Philippines. Through the use of global positioning system devices, digital cameras, and a solar home system as an electricity source, local collaborators mapped 31 bee nests from April to June 2015. This study provides a replicable long-term participatory methodology and promotes participatory learning and mutual knowledge creation. By combining applied sustainability research with local stakeholder participation, the article suggests that novel knowledge and solutions can aid sustainable rural development.     

Intimate Partner Homicide in Portugal: What Are the (As)Symmetries Between Men and Women?

European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research - There is consensus that intimate partner homicide (IPH) is a gender crime and that it is one of the most extreme forms of violence. This study...     

Comparing Inference Approaches for RD Designs: A Reexamination of the Effect of Head Start on Child Mortality

The regression discontinuity (RD) design is a popular quasi‐experimental design for causal inference and policy evaluation. The most common inference approaches in RD designs employ “flexible” parametric and nonparametric local polynomial methods, which rely on extrapolation and large‐sample approximations of conditional expectations using observations somewhat near the cutoff that determines treatment assignment. An alternative inference approach employs the idea of local randomization, where the very few units closest to the cutoff are regarded as randomly assigned to treatment and finite‐sample exact inference methods are used. In this paper, we contrast these approaches empirically by re‐analyzing the influential findings of Ludwig and Miller ( 2007 ), who studied the effect of Head Start assistance on child mortality employing parametric RD methods. We first review methods based on approximations of conditional expectations, which are relatively well developed in the literature, and then present new methods based on randomization inference. In particular, we extend the local randomization framework to allow for parametric adjustments of the potential outcomes; our extended framework substantially relaxes strong assumptions in prior literature and better resembles other RD inference methods. We compare all these methods formally, focusing on both estimands and inference properties. In addition, we develop new approaches for randomization‐based sensitivity analysis specifically tailored to RD designs. Applying all these methods to the Head Start data, we find that the original RD treatment effect reported in the literature is quite stable and robust, an empirical finding that enhances the credibility of the original result. All the empirical methods we discuss are readily available in general purpose software in R and Stata; we also provide the dataset and software code needed to replicate all our results.     

Coalition-Targeted Duvergerian Voting: How Expectations Affect Voter Choice under Proportional Representation

Inspired by analyses of majoritarian systems, students of consensual polities have analyzed strategic voting due to barriers to party success, namely, district magnitude and threshold. Given the prevalence of coalition governments in proportional systems, we analyze a type of strategic voting seldom studied: how expected coalition composition affects voter choice. We identify Duvergerian behavior by voters targeted at the coalition formation stage. We contend that when voters perceive their preferred party as unlikely to participate in the coalition, they often desert it and instead support the lesser of evils among those they perceive as viable coalition partners. We demonstrate our argument using data on coalition expectations from the 2006 Israeli elections. We find an appreciable albeit differential effect of coalition expectations on voter choice. Importantly, results hold controlling for ideological and coalition preferences. Lastly, we explore a broad cross-national comparison, showing that there is less, not more, proximity voting where coalitions are prevalent.