Political Capital in the 21st Century

The Bush and Obama administrations have complemented their capacity to make public appeals by creating grassroots lobbying organizations with the explicit purpose of mobilizing supporters to pressure Congress to pass presidential policy priorities. This paper advances the study of organizations like Organizing for Action by considering their ability to make targeted appeals to the primary electorate of the president's party as well as orchestrate indirect mass persuasion campaigns. Furthermore, this paper defines the costs of lobbying in terms of those tactics' electoral costs. I present a model which predicts that targeted appeals will be more common under unified government and that mass persuasion attempts will be less common as the organizational capital of these organizations can be efficiently applied to electoral ends. The model also predicts that public appeals become less common as the time costs and relative electoral productivity of presidential time increase. I find empirical support for these hypotheses in data obtained from emails sent by Organizing for America/Organizing for Action to subscribers since its creation in early 2009 and in presidential primetime addresses made since 1957

Talking Heads: Measuring Elite Personality Using Speech

Political scientists have long considered ideology, partisanship, and constituency in determining how members of the United States Congress make decisions. Meanwhile, psycholo-\ud gists have held that personality traits play central roles in decision-making. In this paper, we apply recent advances in machine learning (Mairesse et al. 2007) to measure Congressmember personality traits using floor speeches from 1996–2014. We show that these estimates are robust to concerns about strategic behavior and generally conform with findings in the behavior literature linking ideology with the Big Five (e.g. Gerber et al. 2010). We also provide two examples of the utility of our method, one examining the impact of personality on elite survey non-response and the other showing how the conscientiousness of members of Congress affects the contents of bill proposals

Tentative Decisions

Political scientists have long considered ideology, partisanship, and constituency in determining how members of the United States Congress make decisions. Meanwhile, psychologists have held that personality traits play central roles in decision-making. Here, we bridge these literatures by offering a framework for modeling how personality influences legislative behavior. Drawing from experimental economics and neuropsychology, we identify core cognitive constraints for the “Big Five” personality model, parameterizing them in ways useful for crafting formal models of legislative behavior. We then show one example of the applicability of this framework by creating a formal decision-theoretic model of constituency communicatio

What Trump and Clinton’s personality traits tell us about how they might govern as president.

During the course of the 2016 presidential election, the topic of candidate temperament and fitness for office has been widely discussed. Adam J. Ramey, Jonathan D. Klingler, and Gary E. Hollibaugh, Jr. show how their personality traits can be estimated from their speech, and what these estimates imply for how they might govern from the White House: Clinton is likely to push substantive policies and back them up, while Trump would push for bolder and more costly proposals, without as much follow-through

Shotgun metagenomic analysis of microbial communities from the Loxahatchee nature preserve in the Florida Everglades.

BackgroundCurrently, much is unknown about the taxonomic diversity and the mechanisms of methane metabolism in the Florida Everglades ecosystem. The Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge is a section of the Florida Everglades that is almost entirely unstudied in regard to taxonomic profiling. This short report analyzes the metagenome of soil samples from this Refuge to investigate the predominant taxa, as well as the abundance of genes involved in environmentally significant metabolic pathways related to methane production (nitrogen fixation and dissimilatory sulfite reduction).MethodsShotgun metagenomic sequencing using the Illumina platform was performed on 17 soil samples from four different sites within the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, and underwent quality control, assembly, and annotation. The soil from each sample was tested for water content and concentrations of organic carbon and nitrogen.ResultsThe three most common phyla of bacteria for every site were Actinobacteria, Acidobacteria, and Proteobacteria; however, there was variation in relative phylum composition. The most common phylum of Archaea was Euryarchaeota for all sites. Alpha and beta diversity analyses indicated significant congruity in taxonomic diversity in most samples from Sites 1, 3, and 4 and negligible congruity between Site 2 and the other sites. Shotgun metagenomic sequencing revealed the presence of biogeochemical biomarkers of particular interest (e.g., mrcA, nifH, and dsrB) within the samples. The normalized abundances of mcrA, nifH, and dsrB exhibited a positive correlation with nitrogen concentration and water content, and a negative correlation with organic carbon concentration.ConclusionThis Everglades soil metagenomic study allowed examination of wetlands biological processes and showed expected correlations between measured organic constituents and prokaryotic gene frequency. Additionally, the taxonomic profile generated gives a basis for the diversity of prokaryotic microbial life throughout the Everglades

Going Private: Presidential Grassroots Lobbying Organizations, Targeted Appeals, and Neighborhood Persuasion Campaigns

Abstract: The Bush and Obama administrations have added to their capacity to make public appeals by creating grassroots lobbying organizations with the expressed purpose of mobilizing supporters to pressure Congress to pass presidential policy priorities. This paper advances the study of organizations like Organizing for Action by examining their ability to make targeted appeals to the primary electorate of the president's party as well as orchestrate mass persuasion campaigns. Furthermore, this paper incorporates the capacity which these organizations may contribute to winning future elections. I present a model which suggests that, when the utility of winning the next election is reduced under divided government, the eff orts of presidential grassroots lobbying organizations will be more strongly oriented toward mass persuasion. The model also suggests that, with some additional considerations, targeted partisan appeals will be optimal under uni ed government and mass persuasion will be optimal under divided government. I find empirical support for the fi rst two claims in data obtained from emails sent by Organizing for America/Organizing for Action since its creation in early 2009

Three papers on Internet centered activism: governance, mobilization, and lobbying

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Department of Political Science, 2013.Digital media have dramatically lowered the costs of interest group communication with their members, altering the definition of what it means to be a member of an organization. Though organizations have a new ability to inexpensively maintain and mobilize large lists of non-paying members, the implications of this ability for interest group decision-making, mobilization and lobbying have not been explored. This project examines the circumstances under which presidents can use personal grassroots lobbying organizations to make targeted appeals to their partisan supporters, and finds that these appeals are only effective when there is unified government and the president takes relatively extreme policy positions. This project also uses survey data from a large non-profit advocacy organization to break down the membership experience and analyze how various media forms update individual beliefs about the expected utility of membership, finding that one-way messages like email and mailers influence goal beliefs and direct experience influences efficacy beliefs, but social media is not influential. Finally, this project also introduces a leadership model of interest group policy determination that allows separate provision of club and private goods to members, allowing some so-called members to affiliate but not pay dues, but choose a third option where they remove themselves from no-cost membership. I find that, when the preferred policies of individuals with financial resources differ from those of voters as a whole, groups which can cheaply provide valuable material incentives to contributors choose policies closer to those preferred by the financially well-endowed, while decreasing the costs of affiliation-only, or ersatz, membership causes leaders to choose policies closer to that of the mean voter

Measuring Elite Personality Using Speech

We apply recent advances in machine learning to measure Congressmember personality traits using floor speeches from 1996 to 2014. We also demonstrate the superiority of text-based measurement over survey-based measurement by showing that personality traits are correlated with survey response rates for members of Congress. Finally, we provide one empirical application showcasing the importance of personality on congressional behavior

More than a Feeling: Personality and Congressional Behavior

Political scientists have long considered the primacy of ideology, party affiliation, and constituency preferences in determining how members of the U.S. Congress make decisions. At the same time, psychologists have held that individuals' immutable personality traits play a central role in individual decision-making. In this paper, we seek to bridge these literatures by offering a rational-choice based characterization of how personality informs legislator decision-making, independently of policy preferences. Specifically, we provide an decision-theoretic grounding for the "Big Five'' personality model and identify how different personality traits affect the legislative behavior -- broadly defined -- of members of Congress. We apply recent advances in computer science to estimate personality across each of the "Big Five" dimensions using speeches recorded in the Congressional Record. In particular, we use Support Vector Machines (SVM) models to connect linguistic cues in legislator speech with known personality correlates of those cues. These results in hand, we study how legislators personality traits affect their behavior in Congress. Our results are substantively fascinating and a significant contribution to the discipline, as they show that personality has a strong relationship with legislator behavior -- even after controlling for legislator ideology