The Dynamics of Issue Attention on the United States Supreme Court

Throughout history, the United States Supreme Court has served as a major player in shaping the character and direction of public policy through the decisions it hands down. The issues that have garnered the Court’s attention have also changed over time, suggesting that the type of cases that receive certiorari fluctuate according to judicial preferences. Most research on certiorari has highlighted the importance of this process for understanding judicial decision-making, especially in regards to which cases are selected for review. But, we know less about the importance of issues in the agenda-setting process, and why issues, not specific cases, explain agenda-setting. This project brings together a theoretical framework that focuses on the influence of macro-level considerations on certiorari with a methodological emphasis on explaining dynamic agenda-setting. The macro-political theory of agenda setting produces three predictions about the dynamics of issue attention on the Supreme Court. First, the Supreme Court’s issue attention should shift toward policy domains over which Republicans exert greater issue ownership as the membership of the Court becomes more conservative, and, conversely, the Court should pay greater attention to policy domains over which Democrats have stronger issue ownership as the Court becomes more liberal. Second, the Court’s issue attention should follow public perceptions of problems in the political, economic, or social environment, leading the Court to take more cases in issue areas where the American people identify important public problems. Finally, the Court’s issue agenda should respond to changes in the political, economic and social environment that produce changes in the volume of litigation activity in particular policy domains, influencing the composition of the set of cases from which the Court constructs its docket and, therefore, its issue agenda. Another contribution of this dissertation is the introduction of compositional dependent variable models to judicial politics. This methodology examines the trade-off relationships that shape the Supreme Court’s agenda over time, with the underlying theory that the composition of the agenda reflects the relative importance of the Court’s partisan priorities. Using this approach, the data indicate that the partisan composition of the Court alters the policy preferences represented on the judicial agenda and that there are trade-off relationships that have been largely masked by exploring the ebb and flow of issue attention across different issue areas separately. The results indicate that issue attention by the U.S. Supreme Court is not merely the result of the incidental aggregation of the policy domains in which individual cases are situated. The Court’s attention to different issues is systematically associated with macro-political dynamics in the ideological orientations of the Court’s members and the political environment. This mirrors patterns of aggregate issue attention in the elected branches of national government and highlight a political economy of judicial issue attention. Further, the data indicate that partisanship and ideology have differential effects on the types of issues the justices place on their agenda, indicating that the related concepts need to be considered independently in more research in judicial politics

The Effects of Animal-Assisted Therapy in Older Adults with Dementia

Abstract not provided

The Effects of Animal-Assisted Therapy in Older Adults with Dementia

Abstract not provided

The Dynamics of Issue Attention on the United States Supreme Court

Throughout history, the United States Supreme Court has served as a major player in shaping the character and direction of public policy through the decisions it hands down. The issues that have garnered the Court’s attention have also changed over time, suggesting that the type of cases that receive certiorari fluctuate according to judicial preferences. Most research on certiorari has highlighted the importance of this process for understanding judicial decision-making, especially in regards to which cases are selected for review. But, we know less about the importance of issues in the agenda-setting process, and why issues, not specific cases, explain agenda-setting. This project brings together a theoretical framework that focuses on the influence of macro-level considerations on certiorari with a methodological emphasis on explaining dynamic agenda-setting. The macro-political theory of agenda setting produces three predictions about the dynamics of issue attention on the Supreme Court. First, the Supreme Court’s issue attention should shift toward policy domains over which Republicans exert greater issue ownership as the membership of the Court becomes more conservative, and, conversely, the Court should pay greater attention to policy domains over which Democrats have stronger issue ownership as the Court becomes more liberal. Second, the Court’s issue attention should follow public perceptions of problems in the political, economic, or social environment, leading the Court to take more cases in issue areas where the American people identify important public problems. Finally, the Court’s issue agenda should respond to changes in the political, economic and social environment that produce changes in the volume of litigation activity in particular policy domains, influencing the composition of the set of cases from which the Court constructs its docket and, therefore, its issue agenda. Another contribution of this dissertation is the introduction of compositional dependent variable models to judicial politics. This methodology examines the trade-off relationships that shape the Supreme Court’s agenda over time, with the underlying theory that the composition of the agenda reflects the relative importance of the Court’s partisan priorities. Using this approach, the data indicate that the partisan composition of the Court alters the policy preferences represented on the judicial agenda and that there are trade-off relationships that have been largely masked by exploring the ebb and flow of issue attention across different issue areas separately. The results indicate that issue attention by the U.S. Supreme Court is not merely the result of the incidental aggregation of the policy domains in which individual cases are situated. The Court’s attention to different issues is systematically associated with macro-political dynamics in the ideological orientations of the Court’s members and the political environment. This mirrors patterns of aggregate issue attention in the elected branches of national government and highlight a political economy of judicial issue attention. Further, the data indicate that partisanship and ideology have differential effects on the types of issues the justices place on their agenda, indicating that the related concepts need to be considered independently in more research in judicial politics

Confidence and Constraint: Public Opinion, Judicial Independence, and the Roberts Court

This Article uses statistical models to show the relationship between public opinion of the Supreme Court and the Court’s propensity to invalidate federal laws on constitutional grounds. Merril, Conway, and Ura analyze this connection to underscore the loss of judicial independence as a result of declining public opinion. The authors note this decline in public opinion allows the President and Congress to leverage public opinion against the Court in order to influence whether a federal law will be invalidated

Stellar Wind Yields of Very Massive Stars

The most massive stars provide an essential source of recycled material for young clusters and galaxies. While very massive stars (VMS, M>100M) are relatively rare compared to O stars, they lose disproportionately large amounts of mass already from the onset of core H-burning. VMS have optically thick winds with elevated mass-loss rates in comparison to optically thin standard O-star winds. We compute wind yields and ejected masses on the main sequence, and we compare enhanced mass-loss rates to standard ones. We calculate solar metallicity wind yields from MESA stellar evolution models in the range 50 - 500M, including a large nuclear network of 92 isotopes, investigating not only the CNO-cycle, but also the Ne-Na and Mg-Al cycles. VMS with enhanced winds eject 5-10 times more H-processed elements (N, Ne, Na, Al) on the main sequence in comparison to standard winds, with possible consequences for observed anti-correlations, such as C-N and Na-O, in globular clusters. We find that for VMS 95% of the total wind yields is produced on the main sequence, while only ~5% is supplied by the post-main sequence. This implies that VMS with enhanced winds are the primary source of 26Al, contrasting previous works where classical Wolf-Rayet winds had been suggested to be responsible for Galactic 26Al enrichment. Finally, 200M stars eject 100 times more of each heavy element in their winds than 50M stars, and even when weighted by an IMF their wind contribution is still an order of magnitude higher than that of 50M stars.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS. 14 pages, 10 figure

Screening prevalence of fetal alcohol spectrum disorders in a region of the United Kingdom: a population-based birth-cohort study

We are extremely grateful to all the families who took part in this study, the midwives for their help in recruiting them, and the whole ALSPAC team, which includes interviewers, computer and laboratory technicians, clerical workers, research scientists, volunteers, managers, receptionists and nurses. This study was funded by a doctoral studentship from Cardiff University (awarded to CM). The UK Medical Research Council and Wellcome Trust (Grant ref.: 102215/2/13/2) and the University of Bristol provide core support for the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC). Funding for the facial scan data was provided by Cardiff University.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Automated speech tools for helping communities process restricted-access corpora for language revival efforts

Many archival recordings of speech from endangered languages remain unannotated and inaccessible to community members and language learning programs. One bottleneck is the time-intensive nature of annotation. An even narrower bottleneck occurs for recordings with access constraints, such as language that must be vetted or filtered by authorised community members before annotation can begin. We propose a privacy-preserving workflow to widen both bottlenecks for recordings where speech in the endangered language is intermixed with a more widely-used language such as English for meta-linguistic commentary and questions (e.g. What is the word for 'tree'?). We integrate voice activity detection (VAD), spoken language identification (SLI), and automatic speech recognition (ASR) to transcribe the metalinguistic content, which an authorised person can quickly scan to triage recordings that can be annotated by people with lower levels of access. We report work-in-progress processing 136 hours archival audio containing a mix of English and Muruwari. Our collaborative work with the Muruwari custodian of the archival materials show that this workflow reduces metalanguage transcription time by 20% even with minimal amounts of annotated training data: 10 utterances per language for SLI and for ASR at most 39 minutes, and possibly as little as 39 seconds.</p

Learning-by-doing as an approach to teaching social entrepreneurship

Many studies have explored the use of learning-by-doing in higher education, but few have applied this to social entrepreneurship contexts and applications: this paper addresses this gap in the literature. Our programme involved students working with different stakeholders in an interactive learning environment to generate real revenue for social enterprises. Our results show that learning-by-doing enables students to develop their entrepreneurial skills and enhance their knowledge of social businesses. The findings also show that students became more effective at working in teams and in formulating and applying appropriate business strategies for the social enterprises. Overall, the learning-by-doing approach discussed in this paper is capable of developing the entrepreneurial skills of students, but there are challenges that need to be addressed if such an approach is to be effective