15 research outputs found
ODEs and Mandatory Voting
This paper presents mathematics relevant to the question whether voting should be mandatory. Assuming a static distribution of voters’ political beliefs, we model how politicians might adjust their positions to raise their share of the vote. Various scenarios can be explored using our app at https: //centrism.streamlit.app/. Abstentions are found to have great impact on the dynamics of candidates, and in particular to introduce the possibility of discontinuous jumps in optimal candidate positions. This is an unusual application of ODEs. We hope that it might help engage some students who may find it harder to connect with the more customary applications from the natural sciences
ODEs and Mandatory Voting
This paper presents mathematics relevant to the question whether voting
should be mandatory. Assuming a static distribution of voters' political
beliefs, we model how politicians might adjust their positions to raise their
share of the vote. Various scenarios can be explored using our web-based app
(see text for the link). Abstentions are found to have great impact on the
dynamics of candidates, and in particular to introduce the possibility of
discontinuous jumps in optimal candidate positions. This is a paper intended
for undergraduate students. It is an unusual application of ODEs. We hope that
it might help engage some students who may find it harder to connect with the
more customary applications from the natural sciences.Comment: 16 page
Three Essays on Political Responses to Opioid Use in the United States
In the first two decades of the 21st century, opioid use in the United States has grown to unprecedented levels. Approximately half of the U.S. adult population has been prescribed an opioid based pain reliever, 1.7 million people have an opioid use disorder, and nearly 50,000 people die of opioid related overdoses each year. Public attitudes and drug policy have transformed in the wake of this staggering loss of life. These changes are often attributed to the racial, socioeconomic, and geographic profile of those most affected by the overdose and addiction epidemic, as well as the perceived culpability of physicians, pharmaceutical executives, and regulators. I introduce this dissertation by briefly framing contemporary trends in historical context, then present three essays on aspects of the political response to increased opioid use in the United States. The first of these essays characterizes mass perceptions of who uses opioids illegally, including heroin and prescription opioids not taken as directed by a doctor. I compare perceptions regarding who uses opioids illegally to perceptions of who uses cocaine and methamphetamine. I find that perceptions of who uses various drugs do differ in ways that mirror media coverage and observed demographic patterns of drug use. People who use opioids, however, are not generally seen to be uniquely White, wealthy, or likely to be living in rural areas. This group is similarly not viewed in a distinctly positive light. Survey respondents vastly overestimate the rate at which people who use opioids (as well as people who use other drugs) commit theft and assault. In the second essay, I estimate the effect of perceptions regarding who uses illegal opioids on patterns of blame for opioid addiction and drug policy preferences. In an original survey experiment, I offer informational corrections regarding the proportion of people who use illegal opioids who are White, engaged in violent crime, or were prescribed opioids prior to illegal use. Results indicate that the information regarding racial composition of this group can affect perceptions of exposure to prescription opioids, and vice versa. These perceptions appear to shape some patterns of blame, but I only detect an effect of information regarding violent crime on punitiveness of drug policy preferences. Finally, I move from the realm of public opinion to an essay on local policy development in response to increased opioid use. Many U.S. localities face high vulnerability to infectious disease outbreak among people who inject drugs. I analyze political, economic and epidemiological conditions in the 440 counties most vulnerable to HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) and HCV (hepatitis C virus) outbreaks, as identified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2015. Examining policymaking in counties with similar vulnerability that were or were not targeted for CDC outreach, no effect of the risk signal on policy response is distinguishable from zero. However, I find that political and economic conditions are predictive of local efforts to reduce the risk of outbreak
A Note on Increases in Inattentive Online Survey-Takers Since 2020
Lucid, a popular source of online convenience survey samples, has seen a significant increase in inattentive respondents since 2020. Inattentive participants – respondents who incorrectly answer directed query attention check questions – may be introducing substantial measurement error and attenuation bias. Using data from 152,967 survey respondents across multiple studies conducted between January 2020 and June 2021, we find that inattentive respondents report less reliable demographic data, less stable responses, and are systematically different from attentive respondents. We find some evidence of attenuation bias and mixed evidence that data quality has decreased slightly since 2020 even after filtering for inattentive respondents. We conclude that researchers using Lucid should report if they screened on attentiveness and consider replicating any null results. Such an unexpected increase in inattentiveness in a widely-used platform suggests that future researchers relying on online convenience survey samples should continuously assess data quality
Replication Data for: The Policy Basis of Measured Partisan Animosity in the United States
Understanding and addressing the consequences of partisan animosity requires knowledge of its foundations. To what extent is animosity between partisan groups motivated by dislike for partisan out groups per se, policy disagreement, or other social group conflicts? In many circumstances, including extant experimental research, these patterns are observationally equivalent. In a series of vignette evaluation experiments, we estimate effects of shared partisanship when additional information is or is not present, and benchmark these effects against shared policy preference effects. Partisanship effects are about 71% as large as shared policy preference effects when each is presented in isolation. When an independently randomized party and policy position are presented together, partisanship effects decrease substantially, by about 52%, while policy effects remain large, decreasing by about 10%. These results suggest that common measures of partisan animosity may capture programmatic conflict more so than social identity-based partisan hostility
Violence and Discrimination Against Men Who Have Sex With Men in Lebanon: The Role of International Displacement and Migration
Religion, political thought and the English civil war
Religion has always been central to explanations of the political and ideological causes and course of the English civil war. Where historians once privileged aspects of the conflict that associated it with a broader narrative about the historic development of religious toleration and parliamentary democracy, the 1980s witnessed a shift whereby it was more firmly contained within local and European contexts. More recently, there has been an effort to place the civil war within another broad context, yet one that traces its roots in the Reformation rather than its legacies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, a question remains as to what the English Reformation meant for the relationship of civil and ecclesiastical power: in many ways this was the key issue that shaped the politics of religion in the English civil war. This essay suggests that we understand the politics of religion more effectively by situating the conflict within the wider contexts opened up by Atlantic, and imperial history