New Experiments in Minority Voter Mobilization: Second in a Series of Reports on the California Votes Initiative

During the first phase of the California Votes Initiative, spanning elections from June 2006 to March 2007, participating community-based organizations personally contacted over 82,000 low-propensity voters, through strategies such as door-to-door outreach and phone calls, plus reached an additional 100,000 voters through less direct methods, such as voter forums and messages to congregations. This outreach inspired many to participate in the electoral process for the first time. The initiative evaluation team worked with the community organizations to imbed field experiments into their outreach efforts, comparing turnout among those targeted for contact and those assigned to control groups. This resulted in strong empirical support for a series of best practices that were detailed in a September 2007 report.1 A second phase of the initiative has continued this path-breaking research with further field experiments in the February and June 2008 elections, with more planned for November 2008. This report briefly reviews the results from the first phase of the initiative, adds findings from February 2008 and June 2008 as available,2 and outlines the follow-up studies planned for November 2008. Many findings from the first phase were confirmed, and the two rounds of experiments conducted so far this year provide valuable refinements to the list of best practices established in that earlier report. 1 Michelson, Melissa R., Lisa Garcia Bedolla and Donald P. Green. 2007. "New Experiments in Minority Voter Mobilization: A Report on the California Votes Initiative" (San Francisco, CA: The James Irvine Foundation). Available at www.irvine.org. 2 In many counties, particularly large ones such as Los Angeles, voting information is not released until several months after an election

New Experiments in Minority Voter Mobilization: Third and Final Report on the California Votes Initiative

This report offers new insights about voter mobilization strategies used in our California Votes Initiative. Launched in 2006, the initiative supported nine nonprofit organizations as they reached out to infrequent voters in low-income and ethnic communities in the San Joaquin Valley and parts of Southern California. This publication, the third and final report on the initiative, summarizes findings from the entirety of the project's experiments. It examines the long-term effects of voter mobilization and the effects of specific approaches, such as canvassing and phone calls, on voter attitudes toward politics and political engagement. Qualitative analyses explore the components of a successful get-out-the-vote campaign and identify five practices organizations of many types may use to increase turnout

New Experiments in Minority Voter Mobilization: A Report on the California Votes Initiative

Evaluates the effectiveness of efforts in California to mobilize voters in communities with significant low-income and minority populations

BS 820 History of Interpretation

McKim, Donald K. Ed. Dictionary of Major Biblical Interpreters. Downers Grove, IVP, 2007. Greer, Rowan and J. Kugel. Early Biblical Interpretation. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986. Young, Francis M. Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture. Cambridge, 1997. Repr. Hendrickson, 2002. Saint Augustine. On Christian Teaching. R. P. H. Green, trans. Oxford, 1997. Selected Additional Readinghttps://place.asburyseminary.edu/syllabi/3611/thumbnail.jp

Financing Direct Democracy: Revisiting the Research on Campaign Spending and Citizen Initiatives

The conventional view in the direct democracy literature is that spending against a measure is more effective than spending in favor of a measure, but the empirical results underlying this conclusion have been questioned by recent research. We argue that the conventional finding is driven by the endogenous nature of campaign spending: initiative proponents spend more when their ballot measure is likely to fail. We address this endogeneity by using an instrumental variables approach to analyze a comprehensive dataset of ballot propositions in California from 1976 to 2004. We find that both support and opposition spending on citizen initiatives have strong, statistically significant, and countervailing effects. We confirm this finding by looking at time series data from early polling on a subset of these measures. Both analyses show that spending in favor of citizen initiatives substantially increases their chances of passage, just as opposition spending decreases this likelihood

Throwing Out the Baby With the Bath Water: A Comment on Green, Kim and Yoon

Donald P. Green, Soo Yeon Kim, and David H. Yoon contribute to the literature on estimating pooled times-series cross-section models in international relations (IR). They argue that such models should be estimated with fixed effects when such effects are statistically necessary. While we obviously have no disagreement that sometimes fixed effects are appropriate, we show here that they are pernicious for IR time-series cross-section models with a binary dependent variable and that they are often problematic for IR models with a continuous dependent variable. In the binary case, this perniciousness is the result of many pairs of nations always being scored zero and hence having no impact on the parameter estimates; for example, many dyads never come into conflict. In the continuous case, fixed effects are problematic in the presence of the temporally stable regressors that are common IR applications, such as the dyadic democracy measures used by Green, Kim, and Yoon

Reviews

The following publications have been reviewed by the mentioned authors;Windsor Chairmaking by Thos Moser, reviewed by Bernard AylwardRelief Woodcarving by E. J. Tangerman, reviewed by Bernard AylwardWorking Green Wood with PEG by Patrick Spielman, reviewed by J. W. ThompsonWork Experience in Secondary Schools edited by John Eggleston, reviewed by Charles PeaceScale Model Cannon by Richard Stewart and Donald Heyes, reviewed by John EgglestonHow to Make Your Own Picture Frames by Hal Rogers and Ed Reinhardt, reviewed by John EgglestonThe Story of Craft by Edward Lucie Smith, reviewed by John EgglestonThe Landsdowne Book of Handcrafts reviewed by Roger BensonUnderstanding Design in the Home by Margaret Picton, reviewed by John EgglestonWoodturning Projects for Dining by John Sainsbury, reviewed by M. P. BourneCrafts Conference for Teachers - April 1982 published by Crafts Council, reviewed by Bernard L. MyersCraft Design Technology reviewed by M. JohnArt and Imaginations: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind by Roger Scruton, reviewed by G. H. Bantock'Forget all the rules you ever learned about Graphic Design including the ones in this Book by Bob Gill, reviewed by Cal SwannProfessional Smithing by Donald Streeter, reviewed by J. N. AtkinsGraphic Communication by John Twyford, reviewed by Cal Swan

BE Ursae Majoris: A detached binary with a unique reprocessing spectrum

New infrared photometry, optical and UV spectrophotometry, and a photographic ephemeris are presented for the detached binary BE UMa. Results show the primary to be a DO white dwarf with an effective temperature of 80,000 + or - 15,000 K and a mass of 0.6 + or - 0.1 solar masses. No evidence is found for variability of the primary. The main sequence secondary star is shown to be of early M spectral type, with a formal range of M1 to M5 being possible. A reflection effect in reprocessed line and continuum radiation is produced by EUV radiation from the primary incident on the secondary atmosphere. It is suggested that the temperature of the reprocessed component of the secondary's atmosphere is in the 5000 to 8500 K range, and that emission lines of decreasing ionization form deeper in the irradiated envelope. Relatively narrow He II and high excitation metal lines are formed from recombination and continuum fluorescence processes

Book Reviews

The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Michael McKeon) (Reviewed by John Kucich, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832 (Jon P. Klancher) (Reviewed by John Kucich, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)Images of Power: Medieval History/Discourse/Literature (Kevin Brownlee) (Reviewed by H. Jay Siskin, Northwestern University)John Rainolds\u27s Oxford Lectures on Aristotle\u27s Rhetoric, (Lawrence D. Green) (Reviewed by Donald N. Mager, Johnson C. Smith University)Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (Ernest B. Gilman) (Reviewed by John. N. Wall, North Carolina State University)One Foot in Eden: Modes of Pastoral in Romantic Poetry (Lore Metzger) (Reviewed by Ian Balfour, York University)Dickens and the Dialectic of Growth (Badri Raina) (Reviewed by Cathy Comstock, University of Colorado)Representation and Revelation: Victorian Realism from Carlyle to Yeats (John P. McGowan) (Reviewed by George Levine, Rutgers University)Dimensions of Science Fiction (William Sims Bainbridge) (Reviewed by Len Hatfield, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University)Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari) (Reviewed by Stuart Barnett, SUNY / Buffalo)Recent Theories of Narrative (Wallace Martin) (Reviewed by Gerald Prince, University of Pennsylvania)Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (W.J.T. Mitchell) (Reviewed by Marianna Torgovnic, Duke University