Bibliography on HIV/AIDS in Ethiopia and Ethiopians in the Diaspora: The 2006 Update

No Abstract. The Ethiopian Journal of Health Development Vol. 21 (1) 2007: pp. 70-9

The quality of political information

The article conceptualizes the quality of political information and shows how the concept can be used for empirical research. I distinguish three aspects of quality (intelligibility, relevance, validity) and use them to judge the constituent foundations of political information, that is component claims (statements of alleged facts) and connection claims (argumentative statements created by causally linking two component claims). The resulting conceptual map thus entails six manifestations of information quality (component claimintelligibility, connection claim intelligibility, component claimrelevance, connection claim relevance, component claim validity, and connection claim validity). I explain how the conceptual map can be used to make sense of the eclectic variety of existing research, and how it can advance new empirical research, as a guide for determining variation in information quality, as a conceptual template for the analysis of different types of political messages and their common quality deficiencies, and as a generator of new research questions and theoretical expectations

Mycoplasmal conjunctivitis in wild songbirds: the spread of a new contagious disease in a mobile host population.

A new mycoplasmal conjunctivitis was first reported in wild house finches (Carpodacus mexicanus) in early 1994. The causative agent was identified as Mycoplasma gallisepticum (MG), a nonzoonotic pathogen of poultry that had not been associated with disease in wild songbirds. Since the initial observations of affected house finches in the mid-Atlantic region, the disease has become widespread and has been reported throughout the eastern United States and Canada. By late 1995, mycoplasmal conjunctivitis had spread to an additional species, the American goldfinch (Carduelis tristis). This new disease exemplifies the rapid spread of a pathogen following introduction into a mobile wildlife population and provides lessons that may apply to emerging human diseases

Bibliography on HIV/AIDS in Ethiopia and Ethiopians in the Diaspora: The 2011 Update

No abstract

The declining representativeness of the British party system, and why it matters

In a recent article, Michael Laver has explained ‘Why Vote-Seeking Parties May Make Voters Miserable’. His model shows that, while ideological convergence may boost congruence between governments and the median voter, it can reduce congruence between the party system and the electorate as a whole. Specifically, convergence can increase the mean distance between voters and their nearest party. In this article we show that this captures the reality of today’s British party system. Policy scale placements in British Election Studies from 1987 to 2010 confirm that the pronounced convergence during the past decade has left the Conservatives and Labour closer together than would be optimal in terms of minimising the policy distance between the average voter and the nearest major party. We go on to demonstrate that this comes at a cost. Respondents who perceive themselves as further away from one of the major parties in the system tend to score lower on satisfaction with democracy. In short, vote-seeking parties have left the British party system less representative of the ideological diversity in the electorate, and thus made at least some British voters miserable

Piecing Together the American Voting Puzzle: How Votersâ Personalities and Judgments of Issue Importance Mattered in the 2016 Presidential Election

In the wake of the 2016 election, which surprised pundits and voters on both the left and the right, there has been renewed interest in understanding what predicts American votersâ choices. In this article, we investigate the roles of personality and issue importance in how people voted in the 2016 U.S. election. In this longitudinal study of 403 MTurk workers who voted in the election, we assessed the relations between personality (openness, social dominance orientation, and national identity importance) and issue importance (group rights and social justice, economic rights, and individual and national rights), and voting for Clinton or Trump. Our results indicate that both individual differences and issue importance as measured in July 2016 predicted votes in November. We also found that the links between personality and voting were mediated by issue importance. Implications for political psychology and the study of personality, campaign issues, and voting behavior are discussed.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146841/1/asap12157.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146841/2/asap12157_am.pd

Thinking about politics

There are distinctive modes of thinking about politics, three of which are discussed here. A mode consists of a characteristic domain of relevance, filing system, and grammar of beliefs. A person relying on Mode A treats politics as an extension of interpersonal experience. A person relying on Mode B organizes political thinking around a set of salient group identifications. A person relying on Mode C views public objects in terms of their consequences for collective goods. The three modes are illustrated by applying them to concrete issues in a hypothetical manner: Vietnam, bussing, and attitudes toward presidential candidates. The concept of surrogate attitudes is developed and various implications of the theoretical argument are discussed.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45481/1/11109_2004_Article_BF00988519.pd

Does Health Affect Party Identification? : Evidence from German Panel Data

Recent research has shown the effect of health on voter turnout, arguing that attenuated health depresses voting. However, we know little about how health is connected to the psychological factors, such as party identification, that precede actual political participation. Employing data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we show that when a person’s health deteriorates, the degree of partisan attachment declines, whereas health improvement does not automatically restore the level of party identification to previous levels.Peer reviewe

Religion, Partisanship, and Attitudes Toward Science Policy

We examine issues involving science which have been contested in recent public debate. These “contested science” issues include human evolution, stem-cell research, and climate change. We find that few respondents evince consistently skeptical attitudes toward science issues, and that religious variables are generally strong predictors of attitudes toward individual issues. Furthermore, and contrary to analyses of elite discourse, partisan identification is not generally predictive of attitudes toward contested scientific issues

The Forgotten Side of Partisanship: Negative Party Identification in Four Anglo-American Democracies

Early studies of electoral behavior proposed that party identification could be negative as well as positive. Over time, though, the concept became mostly understood as a positive construct. The few studies that took negative identification into account tended to portray it as a marginal factor that went “hand-in-hand” with positive preferences. Recent scholarship in psychology reaffirms, however, that negative evaluations are not simply the bipolar opposite of positive ones. This article considers negative party identification from this standpoint, and evaluates its impact in recent national elections in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. Our findings highlight the autonomous power of negative partisanship. They indicate as well that ideology has an influence on both positive and negative partisan identification