Partisan Infighting Among House Republicans: Leaders, Factions, and Networks of Interests

Congressional parties are commonly regarded as highly unified legislative teams, but the Tea Party Caucus has revealed factional divisions with the Republican Party. Using annual ratings from 290 interest groups, we estimate the ideological locations of Republican legislators to map their party’s factional structure. We project a bipartite network of annual scores to relate interest groups by the similarity of their ratings and legislators by the similarity in which they have been rated. Cluster analysis identifies factions of moderate and extreme Republicans. Further investigation shows that Republican leaders withhold legislative rewards from both subgroups, but that moderates are denied disproportionately

Fox in the Henhouse: The Delegation of Regulatory and Privacy Enforcement to Big Tech

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has ordered tech giants to police the app developers that use their platforms, requiring them to remove apps that employ deceitful sales tactics or violate consumer privacy. Tech giants have often resisted FTC orders to police the companies on their platforms because policing takes significant resources and diminishes profits. But some firms, after paying modest fines for neglecting enforcement, have eventually complied with FTC demands, removing predatory apps and banning problematic developers. Other firms have continued to shirk enforcement obligations at the risk of escalating fines. What accounts for the differences? Using process tracing to track decisions by Apple and Facebook, we find that tech giants willingly police consumer fraud but not consumer privacy violations. Failures to police fraud leads to public complaints and negative press attention, while failures to police data breaches often go undetected by consumers, the media, and thus the FTC

Complementary and Alternative Medicine for Diabetes

Although diabetes was identified by a Greek physician, Aretaeus of Cappadocia, about 2,000 years ago, this old disease remains incurable. Diabetes is characterized by insulin deficiency, insulin resistance, and aberrant glucose, protein, and lipid metabolism. Genetic and environmental factors are the primary causes of diabetes. It is estimated that about 300 million people globally are afflicted with this disease. However, current oral antidiabetic agents using orthodox medicine have unmet efficacy and undesirable side effects in patients, leading to the development of microvascular and macrovascular complications. Research and development of new remedies for diabetes are, therefore, in great demand

Enhancing easy-plane anisotropy in bespoke Ni(II) quantum magnets

We examine the crystal structures and magnetic properties of several S = 1 Ni(II) coordination compounds, molecules and polymers, that include the bridging ligands HF2-, AF62- (A = Ti, Zr) and pyrazine or non-bridging ligands F-, SiF62-, glycine, H2O, 1-vinylimidazole, 4-methylpyrazole and 3-hydroxypyridine. Pseudo-octahedral NiN4F2, NiN4O2 or NiN4OF cores consist of equatorial Ni-N bonds that are equal to or slightly longer than the axial Ni-Lax bonds. By design, the zero-field splitting (D) is large in these systems and, in the presence of substantial exchange interactions (J), can be difficult to discriminate from magnetometry measurements on powder samples. Thus, we relied on pulsed-field magnetization in those cases and employed electron-spin resonance (ESR) to confirm D when J 0) and range from ≈ 8-25 K. This work reveals a linear correlation between the ratio d(Ni-Lax)/d(Ni-Neq) and D although the ligand spectrochemical properties may also be important. We assert that this relationship allows us to predict the type of magnetocrystalline anisotropy in tailored Ni(II) quantum magnets

Populist Mobilization: A New Theoretical Approach to Populism*

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/112280/1/j.1467-9558.2011.01388.x.pd

Smoking does not accelerate leucocyte telomere attrition:A meta-analysis of 18 longitudinal cohorts

Smoking is associated with shorter leucocyte telomere length (LTL), a biomarker of increased morbidity and reduced longevity. This association is widely interpreted as evidence that smoking causes accelerated LTL attrition in adulthood, but the evidence for this is inconsistent. We analysed the association between smoking and LTL dynamics in 18 longitudinal cohorts. The dataset included data from 12 579 adults (4678 current smokers and 7901 non-smokers) over a mean follow-up interval of 8.6 years. Meta-analysis confirmed a cross-sectional difference in LTL between smokers and non-smokers, with mean LTL 84.61 bp shorter in smokers (95% CI: 22.62 to 146.61). However, LTL attrition was only 0.51 bp yr−1 faster in smokers than in non-smokers (95% CI: −2.09 to 1.08), a difference that equates to only 1.32% of the estimated age-related loss of 38.33 bp yr−1. Assuming a linear effect of smoking, 167 years of smoking would be required to generate the observed cross-sectional difference in LTL. Therefore, the difference in LTL between smokers and non-smokers is extremely unlikely to be explained by a linear, causal effect of smoking. Selective adoption, whereby individuals with short telomeres are more likely to start smoking, needs to be considered as a more plausible explanation for the observed pattern of telomere dynamics

One-party deliberations in the U.S. House of Representatives

Over the last two decades, the majority party in the U.S. House of Representatives has increasingly bypassed committee deliberations and restricted floor debate to prevent the minority party from shaping provisions in bills. In response to this rising partisanship, scholars have attempted to measure the direct influence that parties have on legislative outcomes, often by examining roll-call votes. However, they have done relatively little work on the decline of the committee system and the increasing control that majority-party leaders exert on legislative deliberations. In this project, I examine the way in which increasingly cohesive parties draft bills at the prefloor and floor stages of the legislative process. I ask two questions. First, when does the House majority party seize full control of bill development and exclude the minority party from decision-making? Second, what are the policy consequences of the House majority party barring the minority party from formal legislative deliberations? To answer the first question, I construct multiple measures of legislative actions and procedures for major bills developed between 1983 and 2008 in the House. I find that the majority party controls deliberations when its majority status is threatened or its policy goals face strong opposition. I also find that the majority limits discussion on bills designed to promote its electoral brand. These party-brand bills involve tax and welfare policies as well as moral issues. To answer the second question, I create new measures of bill defects and bill extremity to assess how legislative processes affect bill quality. I determine that truncated deliberation tends to produce substantively problematic legislation. Thus, the findings in this project reinforce concerns over and provide evidence of the negative effects of one-party lawmaking.Arts, Faculty ofPolitical Science, Department ofGraduat