Voter Information Campaigns and Political Accountability: Cumulative Findings From a Preregistered Meta-analysis of Coordinated Trials

Voters may be unable to hold politicians to account if they lack basic information about their representatives’ performance. Civil society groups and international donors therefore advocate using voter information campaigns to improve democratic accountability. Yet, are these campaigns effective? Limited replication, measurement heterogeneity, and publication biases may undermine the reliability of published research. We implemented a new approach to cumulative learning, coordinating the design of seven randomized controlled trials to be fielded in six countries by independent research teams. Uncommon for multisite trials in the social sciences, we jointly preregistered a meta-analysis of results in advance of seeing the data. We find no evidence overall that typical, nonpartisan voter information campaigns shape voter behavior, although exploratory and subgroup analyses suggest conditions under which informational campaigns could be more effective. Such null estimated effects are too seldom published, yet they can be critical for scientific progress and cumulative, policy-relevant learning.FSW – Publicaties zonder aanstelling Universiteit Leide

The TESLA cryogenic distribution system

The construction of the 33 km long 500 GeV centre-of-mass energy (upgradeable to 800 GeV) superconductinglinear collider TESLA at DESY with an integrated X-ray FEL facility of 0.1 nm wavelength has been proposed by an international collaboration. The collider will consist of more than 21000 superconducting 9-cell 1.3 GHz RF cavities assembled in about 1800 cryomodules containing also a superconducting magnet package with a quadrupole and dipole steering coils. The paper describes the cryogenic distribution system necessary for cooling to 2 K, mainly consisting of twelve 2.5 km long cooling chains (cryogenic units) of cryomodules, and gives information on the heat load budget, on operating modes as well as on the energy upgrade philosophy