The Life of the Parties: Activists in Presidential Politics

Commentators, especially since the Democratic party reforms following 1968, have expressed serious concerns about the role of party activists in the American political system. Have they become so concerned with ideological purity that they are unable to nominate strong candidates? Are activists loyal only to particular interest groups, with little concern for the parties as institutions? Are the reformed nominating procedures open to takeover by new activists, who exit the party immediately after the presidential nominations fight? With such an unrepresentative set of activists, can parties adjust to changing environments? Based on a survey of more than 17,000 delegates to state presidential nominating conventions in eleven states in 1980, this pathbreaking book addresses these questions in a comprehensive way for the first time. Heretofore most of the generalizations about party activists in the presidential nomination process have been based on studies of national convention delegates, in particular those attending the 1972 conventions. But those delegates were atypical activists, as this book shows. The state of the activist stratum of the parties differs from what many of the critics have suggested. Ronald B. Rapoport and John McGlennon are associate professors of government at the College of William and Mary. Alan I. Abramowitz is an associate professor of political science at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. The research presented here is impressive and sophisticated in its methods. . . The only comprehensive study of caucus delegates that I have seen. —Perspective A significant attempt to bring new and extensive data to the study of party activists and cadres. —Political Science Quarterlyhttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_political_science_american_politics/1028/thumbnail.jp

Congressional campaign effects on candidate recognition and evaluation

To date, most congressional scholars have relied upon a standard model of American electoral behavior developed in the presidential setting. This research extends our knowledge of Congressmen's incumbency advantages and their sources. Candidate preference is viewed as a function of the relative recognition and evaluation of incumbents and their challengers, as well as of Democrats and Republicans. In the recognition model, contact with voters and media effects are quite important, but there is no direct role for party identification. Evaluation is a function of personal contact and party identification, and media variables are insignificant. Relative recognition, relative evaluation, and party identification are three important predictors of candidate preference, and incumbency itself adds little beyond what is contained in incumbent recognition and evaluation advantages.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45489/1/11109_2004_Article_BF00989756.pd

Physics on the edge: contour dynamics, waves and solitons in the quantum Hall effect

We present a theoretical study of the excitations on the edge of a two-dimensional electron system in a perpendicular magnetic field in terms of a contour dynamics formalism. In particular, we focus on edge excitations in the quantum Hall effect. Beyond the usual linear approximation, a non-linear analysis of the shape deformations of an incompressible droplet yields soliton solutions which correspond to shapes that propagate without distortion. A perturbative analysis is used and the results are compared to analogous systems, like vortex patches in ideal hydrodynamics. Under a local induction approximation we find that the contour dynamics is described by a non-linear partial differential equation for the curvature: the modified Korteweg-de Vries equation. PACS number(s): 73.40.Hm, 02.40.Ma, 03.40.Gc, 11.10.LmComment: 15 pages, 12 embedded figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.

The self-force on a static scalar test-charge outside a Schwarzschild black hole

The finite part of the self-force on a static scalar test-charge outside a Schwarzschild black hole is zero. By direct construction of Hadamard's elementary solution, we obtain a closed-form expression for the minimally coupled scalar field produced by a test-charge held fixed in Schwarzschild spacetime. Using the closed-form expression, we compute the necessary external force required to hold the charge stationary. Although the energy associated with the scalar field contributes to the renormalized mass of the particle (and thereby its weight), we find there is no additional self-force acting on the charge. This result is unlike the analogous electrostatic result, where, after a similar mass renormalization, there remains a finite repulsive self-force acting on a static electric test-charge outside a Schwarzschild black hole. We confirm our force calculation using Carter's mass-variation theorem for black holes. The primary motivation for this calculation is to develop techniques and formalism for computing all forces - dissipative and non-dissipative - acting on charges and masses moving in a black-hole spacetime. In the Appendix we recap the derivation of the closed-form electrostatic potential. We also show how the closed-form expressions for the fields are related to the infinite series solutions.Comment: RevTeX, To Appear in Phys. Rev.

Congressional Seat Swings: Revisiting Exposure in House Elections

Oppenheimer, Stimson, and Waterman's exposure thesis of partisan change contends that shifts in the partisan composition of Congress are related to the long-term stability of the electoral system. Applying their exposure model to elections from 1962-1994 produces seat change estimates that generally follow the actual data pattern, but these estimates produce large predictive errors. When the exposure model is reestimated using data from 1962-1994, exposure is not significantly related to partisan seat swings. This article advances a seat change model that relies on an alter nate measure of exposure: the net exposure of the president's party in open seats. Open-seat exposure is significantly related to the partisan seat swing, and substantially improves on the economic evaluation/surge and-decline/ exposure model of seat change. In an era of high incumbent security and strategic retirement from Congress, the balance of open seats is a better indicator of partisan vulnerability, and better reflects the nature of partisan exposure.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Noise-induced switching between vortex states with different polarization in classical two-dimensional easy-plane magnets

In the 2-dimensional anisotropic Heisenberg model with XY-symmetry there are non-planar vortices which exhibit a localized structure of the z-components of the spins around the vortex center. We study how thermal noise induces a transition of this structure from one polarization to the opposite one. We describe the vortex core by a discrete Hamiltonian and consider a stationary solution of the Fokker-Planck equation. We find a bimodal distribution function and calculate the transition rate using Langer's instanton theory (1969). The result is compared with Langevin dynamics simulations for the full many-spin model.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, Phys. Rev. B., in pres

Dynamic Responsiveness in the U.S. Senate

I develop a theory of dynamic responsiveness that suggests that parties that win elections choose candidates who are more extreme and parties that lose elections choose candidates who are more moderate. Moreover, the size of past victories matters. Close elections yield little change, but landslides yield larger changes in the candidates offered by both parties. I test this theory by analyzing the relationship between Republican vote share in U.S. Senate elections and the ideology of candidates offered in the subsequent election. The results show that Republican (Democratic) victories in past elections yield candidates who are more (less) conservative in subsequent elections, and the effect is proportional to the margin of victory. This suggests that parties or candidates pay attention to past election returns. One major implication is that parties may remain polarized in spite of their responsiveness to the median voter

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe