Racial Identity and Voting: Conceptualizing White Identity in Spatial Terms

Recent political events have prompted an examination of the analytical tools and conceptual frameworks used in political science to understand voting and candidate choice. Scholars in the behavioral tradition have highlighted the empirical relationship between racial resentment and anti-black affect among white voters during and after President Obama’s successful run for re-election. The theoretical role of white identity within the context of the privileged status of this racial group has seen much less scholarly attention by political scientists, particularly with respect to racial group identification and its implications. To address this lacuna, we argue that racial identification among white voters can be conceived of as a utility-based trait relevant to candidate choice, combining a social-psychological approach of group membership together with a rational choice perspective. This conceptualization of the political utility of white racial identity provides wider conceptual latitude for empirical tests and explanations of voting in U.S. elections

Comparison of the physical and financial performance of organic dairy farming systems (OF0146)

This is the final report from Defra project OF0146 Two different systems of organic milk production were studied during the 1998-2002 period. The systems were established at the IGER Ty Gwyn organic dairy farm during the 1998/99 period. The systems were based either on achieving self-sufficiency in both home-grown forage and concentrate feeds or on the production of home-grown forage and the purchase of concentrate feeds. The data collected included recording the changes in the soil indices, level of crop production, crop quality, level of milk production, milk quality, animal health and herd reproductive performance of the two systems. The main attached report starts with a detailed executive summary. In the modelling work fifty-four different strategies for organic dairy production were evaluated. Performance data from three commercial organic dairy farms with different climatic conditions (Devon, Pembrokeshire and Shropshire) and cropping strategies (arable with all home-grown feed, home-grown forage only, home-grown forage + purchased concentrates) and also data from the two Ty Gwyn systems was inputted into three models (SAC Dairy Systems, SAC FeedByte, IRS OrgPlan) to evaluate the potential performance from different organic systems. The results produced a range of different options and rankings in relation to their potential financial performance and use of resources. The results from the data modelling predicted the best financial performance and utilisation of resources would be achieved by the establishment of an arable system on the Pembrokeshire farm. The lowest financial performance was predicted to be from the establishment of purchased concentrate systems on the Shropshire and Pembrokeshire farms, with the poorest utilisation of resource use indicators from both the establishment of a forage-only system on the Shropshire farm and purchased feed systems on both the Shropshire and Pembrokeshire farms. In relation to financial indicators the modelling work showed little difference between the two Ty Gwyn systems. The financial performance of Ty Gwyn was compared with ten commercial organic dairy farms, monitored during the 1998-2002 period. Of the ten commercial farms, four had been organic for a number of years, three were recently converted and three were in conversion. The net farm income of the Ty Gwyn SS system increased from 1998/99 to 1999/00 to a peak of £25,453 but then declined sharply following a fall in the price paid for organic milk to a loss of -£14,269 in 2001/02. In the Ty Gwyn PC system the net farm income increased to £24,122 in 2000/01 but then fell sharply to a loss of -£4,825 in 2001/02. The peak net farm incomes on the commercial farms were recorded in the 1999/00 period, with either a small loss (<-£50/ha) recorded on the well established farms or a small profit (<£50/ha) on the recently converted farms in 2001/02

Connected Coordination: Network Structure and Group Coordination

Networks can affect a group’s ability to solve a coordination problem. We utilize laboratory experiments to study the conditions under which groups of subjects can solve coordination games. We investigate a variety of different network structures, and we also investigate coordination games with symmetric and asymmetric payoffs. Our results show that network connections facilitate coordination in both symmetric and asymmetric games. Most significantly, we find that increases in the number of network connections encourage coordination even when payoffs are highly asymmetric. These results shed light on the conditions that may facilitate coordination in real-world networks

The Challenge of Flexible Intelligence for Models of Human Behavior

Game theoretic predictions about equilibrium behavior depend upon assumptions of inflexibility of belief, of accord between belief and choice, and of choice across situations that share a game-theoretic structure. However, researchers rarely possess any knowledge of the actual beliefs of subjects, and rarely compare how a subject behaves in settings that share game-theoretic structure but that differ in other respects. Our within-subject experiments utilize a belief elicitation mechanism, roughly similar to a prediction market, in a laboratory setting to identify subjects’ beliefs about other subjects’ choices and beliefs. These experiments additionally allow us to compare choices in different settings that have similar game-theoretic structure. We find first, as have others,that subjects’ choices in the Trust and related games are significantly different from the strategies that derive from subgame perfect Nash equilibrium principles. We show that, for individual subjects, there is considerable flexibility of choice and belief across similar tasks and that the relationship between belief and choice is similarly flexible. To improve our ability to predict human behavior, we must take account of the flexible nature of human belief and choice

Cheap, Easy, or Connected: The Conditions for Creating Group Coordination

In both legal and political settings there has been a push toward adopting institutions that encourage consensus. The key feature of these institutions is that they bring interested parties together to communicate with each other. Existing research about the success or failure of particular institutions is ambiguous. Therefore, we turn our attention to understanding the general conditions when consensus is achievable, and we test experimentally three crucial factors that affect a group\u27s ability to achieve consensus: (1) the difficulty of the problem, (2) the costs of communication, and (3) the structure of communication. Using multiple experimental approaches, we find that difficult problems impede consensus, costs make consensus less likely (even relatively very small costs), and the structure of communication has significant effects and interacts with both problem difficulty and costs. In particular, the structure of communication can reduce the negative effect of costs and facilitate consensus. Together these results imply that consensus is only likely to occur if problems are easy, costs to communicate are low, or the communication structure helps overcome the other two problems. These findings can provide insight about the institutional designs that can be utilized to promote consensual outcomes

Making Talk Cheap (and Problems Easy): How Legal and Political Institutions Can Facilitate Consensus

In many legal, political, and social settings, people must reach a consensus before particular outcomes can be achieved and failing to reach a consensus may be costly. In this article, we present a theory and conduct experiments that take into account the costs associated with communicating, as well as the difficulty of the decisions that groups make. We find that when there is even a small cost (relative to the potential benefit) associated with sending information to others and/or listening, groups are much less likely to reach a consensus, primarily because they are less willing to communicate with one another. We also find that difficult problems significantly reduce group members’ willingness to communicate with one another and, therefore, hinder their ability to reach a consensus

The Effects of Certain and Uncertain Incentives on Effort and Knowledge Accuracy

In many situations, incentives exist to acquire knowledge and make correct political decisions. We conduct an experiment that contributes to a small but growing literature on incentives and political knowledge, testing the effect of certain and uncertain incentives on knowledge. Our experiment builds on the basic theoretical point that acquiring and using information is costly, and incentives for accurate answers will lead respondents to expend greater effort on the task and be more likely to answer knowledge questions correctly. We test the effect of certain and uncertain incentives and find that both increase effort and accuracy relative to the control condition of no incentives for accuracy. Holding constant the expected benefit of knowledge, we do not observe behavioral differences associated with the probability of earning an incentive for knowledge accuracy. These results suggest that measures of subject performance in knowledge tasks are contingent on the incentives they face. Therefore, to ensure the validity of experimental tasks and the related behavioral measures, we need to ensure a correspondence between the context we are trying to learn about and our experimental design

Modelling Organic Dairy Production Systems

In this study, a large number of organic dairy production strategies were compared in terms of physical and financial performance through the integrated use of computer simulation models and organic case study farm data. Production and financial data from three organic case study farms were used as a basis for the modelling process to ensure that the modelled systems were based on real sets of resources that might be available to a farmer. The case study farms were selected to represent a range of farming systems in terms of farm size, concentrate use and location. This paper describes the process used to model the farm systems: the integration of the three models used and the use of indicators to assess the modelled farm systems in terms of physical sustainability and financial performance

Good Edge, Bad Edge: How Network Structure Affects a Group’s Ability to Coordinate

Coordination is a core concern in social science. Problems as diverse as deciding where to go to dinner, what price to charge for a good or service, which political candidate to support or what regulatory policy to adopt all contain coordination as a core element. Most coordination problems arise among actors connected in a network, and these connections can both improve and impede a group’s ability to achieve coordination. To model how links influence coordination we distinguish between “constraining edges” that make coordination harder by reducing the number of equilibrium outcomes, and “redundant edges” that make coordination easier by merely increasing communication without affecting the number of equilibria. We show experimentally that the addition of constraining edges reduces coordination, while redundant edges improve subjects’ ability to solve a coordination problem