The Pseudo-Democrat's Dilemma

Cowinner of the International Studies Association’s Chadwick F. Alger Prize, Winner of the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section Best Book Award, and Cowinner of the Yale University MacMillan Center’s Gustav Ranis International Book Prize. Why did election monitoring become an international norm? Why do "pseudo-democrats" (undemocratic leaders who present themselves as democratic) invite international observers, even when they are likely to be caught manipulating elections? Is election observation an effective tool of democracy promotion, or is it simply a way to legitimize electoral autocracies? This book uses cross-national data on election observations since 1960 and case studies of Armenia, Indonesia, Haiti, Peru, Togo, and Zimbabwe to explain international election monitoring with a new theory of international norms

Coupling online control and inhibitory systems in children with Developmental Coordination Disorder: Goal-directed reaching

For children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD), the real-time coupling between frontal executive function and online motor control has not been explored despite reported deficits in each domain. The aim of the present study was to investigate how children with DCD enlist online control under task constraints that compel the need for inhibitory control. A total of 129 school children were sampled from mainstream primary schools. Forty-two children who metre search criteria for DCD were compared with 87 typically developing controls on a modified double-jump reaching task. Children within each skill group were divided into three age bands: younger (6–7years), mid-aged (8–9), and older (10–12). Online control was compared between groups as a function of trial type (non-jump, jump, anti-jump). Overall, results showed that while movement times were similar between skill groups under simple task constraints (non-jump), on perturbation (or jump) trials the DCD group were significantly slower than controls and corrected trajectories later. Critically, the DCD group was further disadvantaged by anti-jump trials where inhibitory control was required; however, this effect reduced with age. While coupling online control and executive systems is not well developed in younger and mid-aged children, there is evidence of age-appropriate coupling in older children. Longitudinal data are needed to clarify this intriguing finding. The theoretical and applied implications of these results are discussed

Surviving elections: election violence, incumbent victory, and post-election repercussions

It is often assumed that government-sponsored election violence increases the probability that incumbent leaders remain in power. Using cross-national data, we show that election violence increases the probability of incumbent victory, but can generate risky post-election dynamics. These differences in the consequences of election violence reflect changes in the strategic setting over the course of the election cycle. In the pre-election period, anti-incumbent collective action tends to be focused on the election itself, either through voter mobilization or opposition-organized election boycotts. In the post-election period, by contrast, when a favorable electoral outcome is no longer a possibility, anti-government collective action more often takes the form of mass political protest, which in turn can lead to costly repercussions for incumbent leaders

Meta-Analysis

Do informational interventions shape electoral choices and thereby promote political accountability? The chapters in Part II of this book provided answers to this question in particular contexts. The studies individually provide rich insights not only into the impact of interventions that were common to all studies, but also on the effects of alternative interventions that were specific to each one. In this chapter, we assess the larger lessons that we can glean from our coordinated studies. As outlined in Chapter 3, all studies seek to test common hypotheses about the impact of harmonized informational interventions, using consistent measurements of outcome variables. Our preregistered analysis allows us to evaluate whether, pooling data from the set of studies in the initiative, information about politician performance led voters to alter their electoral behavior. It also informs a discussion about the conditions under which they did or did not do so. We find that the overall effect of information is quite precisely estimated and not statistically distinguishable from zero. The analysis shows modest impacts of information on voters' knowledge of the information provided to them. However, the interventions did not appear to shape voters’ evaluations of candidates, and, in particular, they did not discernibly influence vote choice. This slate of null results obtains in nearly all analyses for the individual country studies too. Nor is there strong evidence of impact on voter turnout, though under some specifications we find suggestive evidence that bad news may boost voter mobilization. Our results are robust to different analytic strategies and across a variety of modeling and dataset construction choices. The findings also suggest that the estimated effect in our missing study would have needed to be extremely large to alter our broader conclusions. The size of our meta-analysis reduces the chances that null estimated effects stem from low statistical power, and the fact that our results are so consistent across the individual studies limits the possibility that our mostly null effects are due to idiosyncrasies in implementation or study design. In the rest of this chapter, we first describe the prespecified approach that we use to analyze the pooled dataset. We then report our main findings, point out the consistency of results across studies, and report robustness checks. Next we consider several possible reasons for our null findings by testing the prespecified hypotheses. The most plausible reason for the null effects stems from the failure of the interventions to shape voters’ perceptions of politicians; we do not find evidence, however, that this is due to partisan or ethnic attachments or other heuristic substitutes for information. It is critical to underscore the similarities of these interventions to previous treatments in the experimental research literature and to interventions for which donor organizations in the transparency space routinely advocate. Indeed, our interventions were crafted by researchers with substantial country-specific expertise, usually in collaboration with local NGOs. Our null results across wide array of contexts therefore provide an important baseline of evidence against which future studies can be weighed. This chapter could be profitably read in conjunction with Chapter 3, which discusses the common interventions and our measurement of key variables, but it can be read as a standalone chapter as well

A communal catalogue reveals Earth’s multiscale microbial diversity

Our growing awareness of the microbial world’s importance and diversity contrasts starkly with our limited understanding of its fundamental structure. Despite recent advances in DNA sequencing, a lack of standardized protocols and common analytical frameworks impedes comparisons among studies, hindering the development of global inferences about microbial life on Earth. Here we present a meta-analysis of microbial community samples collected by hundreds of researchers for the Earth Microbiome Project. Coordinated protocols and new analytical methods, particularly the use of exact sequences instead of clustered operational taxonomic units, enable bacterial and archaeal ribosomal RNA gene sequences to be followed across multiple studies and allow us to explore patterns of diversity at an unprecedented scale. The result is both a reference database giving global context to DNA sequence data and a framework for incorporating data from future studies, fostering increasingly complete characterization of Earth’s microbial diversity

Erratum to: Methods for evaluating medical tests and biomarkers

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1186/s41512-016-0001-y.]

A communal catalogue reveals Earth's multiscale microbial diversity

Our growing awareness of the microbial world's importance and diversity contrasts starkly with our limited understanding of its fundamental structure. Despite recent advances in DNA sequencing, a lack of standardized protocols and common analytical frameworks impedes comparisons among studies, hindering the development of global inferences about microbial life on Earth. Here we present a meta-analysis of microbial community samples collected by hundreds of researchers for the Earth Microbiome Project. Coordinated protocols and new analytical methods, particularly the use of exact sequences instead of clustered operational taxonomic units, enable bacterial and archaeal ribosomal RNA gene sequences to be followed across multiple studies and allow us to explore patterns of diversity at an unprecedented scale. The result is both a reference database giving global context to DNA sequence data and a framework for incorporating data from future studies, fostering increasingly complete characterization of Earth's microbial diversity.Peer reviewe

Systematic review of the prospective association of daily step counts with risk of mortality, cardiovascular disease, and dysglycemia

Background: Daily step counts is an intuitive metric that has demonstrated success in motivating physical activity in adults and may hold potential for future public health physical activity recommendations. This review seeks to clarify the pattern of the associations between daily steps and subsequent all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease (CVD) morbidity and mortality, and dysglycemia, as well as the number of daily steps needed for health outcomes. Methods: A systematic review was conducted to identify prospective studies assessing daily step count measured by pedometer or accelerometer and their associations with all-cause mortality, CVD morbidity or mortality, and dysglycemia (dysglycemia or diabetes incidence, insulin sensitivity, fasting glucose, HbA1c). The search was performed across the Medline, Embase, CINAHL, and the Cochrane Library databases from inception to August 1, 2019. Eligibility criteria included longitudinal design with health outcomes assessed at baseline and subsequent timepoints; defining steps per day as the exposure; reporting all-cause mortality, CVD morbidity or mortality, and/or dysglycemia outcomes; adults ≥18 years old; and non-patient populations. Results: Seventeen prospective studies involving over 30,000 adults were identified. Five studies reported on all-cause mortality (follow-up time 4–10 years), four on cardiovascular risk or events (6 months to 6 years), and eight on dysglycemia outcomes (3 months to 5 years). For each 1000 daily step count increase at baseline, risk reductions in all-cause mortality (6–36%) and CVD (5–21%) at follow-up were estimated across a subsample of included studies. There was no evidence of significant interaction by age, sex, health conditions or behaviors (e.g., alcohol use, smoking status, diet) among studies that tested for interactions. Studies examining dysglycemia outcomes report inconsistent findings, partially due to heterogeneity across studies of glycemia-related biomarker outcomes, analytic approaches, and sample characteristics. Conclusions: Evidence from longitudinal data consistently demonstrated that walking an additional 1000 steps per day can help lower the risk of all-cause mortality, and CVD morbidity and mortality in adults, and that health benefits are present below 10,000 steps per day. However, the shape of the dose-response relation is not yet clear. Data are currently lacking to identify a specific minimum threshold of daily step counts needed to obtain overall health benefit.publishedVersio