We estimate the impact of press coverage on citizen knowledge, politicians’ actions, and policy. We find that voters living in areas where, for exogenous reasons, the press covers their U.S. House ...representative less are less likely to recall their representative’s name and less able to describe and rate him or her. Congressmen who are less covered by the local press work less for their constituencies: they are less likely to stand witness before congressional hearings, to serve on constituency‐oriented committees (perhaps), and to vote against the party line. Finally, federal spending is lower in areas with exogenously lower press coverage of congressmen.
The regression discontinuity (RD) design is a valuable tool for identifying electoral effects, but this design is only effective when relevant actors do not have precise control over election ...results. Several recent papers contend that such precise control is possible in large elections, pointing out that the incumbent party is more likely to win very close elections in the United States House of Representatives in recent periods. In this article, we examine whether similar patterns occur in other electoral settings, including the U.S. House in other time periods, statewide, state legislative, and mayoral races in the U.S. and national or local elections in nine other countries. No other case exhibits this pattern. We also cast doubt on suggested explanations for incumbent success in close House races. We conclude that the assumptions behind the RD design are likely to be met in a wide variety of electoral settings and offer a set of best practices for RD researchers going forward.
We study the agenda-setting political behavior of a large sample of U.S. newspapers during the 1996–2005 period. Our purpose is to examine the intensity of coverage of economic issues as a function ...of the underlying economic conditions and the political affiliation of the incumbent president, focusing on unemployment, inflation, the federal budget and the trade deficit. We investigate whether there is any significant correlation between the endorsement policy of newspapers, and the differential coverage of bad/good economic news as a function of the president's political affiliation. We find evidence that newspapers with pro-Democratic endorsement pattern systematically give more coverage to high unemployment when the incumbent president is a Republican than when the president is Democratic, compared to newspapers with pro-Republican endorsement pattern. This result is robust to controlling for the partisanship of readers. We find similar but less robust results for the trade deficit. We also find some evidence that newspapers cater to the partisan tastes of readers in the coverage of the budget deficit. We find no evidence of a partisan bias – or at least of a bias that is correlated with the endorsement or reader partisanship – for stories on inflation.
► We study the coverage of economic issues by a large sample of U.S. newspapers during the 1996-2005 period. ► We check whether there is any correlation between the endorsement policy of newspapers and the coverage of economic news. ► Democratic newspapers cover more high unemployment under a Republican president than under a Democrat. ► The opposite holds for Republican outlets. Newspapers cater to readers' partisan tastes when covering the budget decit. ► We also analyse as a case study the succession of Otis Chandler as publisher of the Los Angeles Times during the early '60s.
A venerable supposition of American survey research is that the vast majority of voters have incoherent and unstable preferences about political issues, which in turn have little impact on vote ...choice. We demonstrate that these findings are manifestations of measurement error associated with individual survey items. First, we show that averaging a large number of survey items on the same broadly defined issue area—for example, government involvement in the economy, or moral issues—eliminates a large amount of measurement error and reveals issue preferences that are well structured and stable. This stability increases steadily as the number of survey items increases and can approach that of party identification. Second, we show that once measurement error has been reduced through the use of multiple measures, issue preferences have much greater explanatory power in models of presidential vote choice, again approaching that of party identification.
Abstract
Malfeasance in local governments is common in developing democracies. Electoral accountability could mitigate such malfeasance, but may require media market structures that incentivise ...profit-maximising local media to report on incumbent malfeasance. We test this claim in Mexico, leveraging plausibly exogenous variation in the pre-election release of municipal audits revealing misallocated spending and access to broadcast media. We find that each additional local media station amplifies voter punishment (rewards) of high (zero) malfeasance by up to 1 percentage point. Local media’s accountability-enhancing effects are greater when there are fewer non-local competitors and where local outlets’ audiences principally reside within their municipality.
TeraChem was born in 2008 with the goal of providing fast on‐the‐fly electronic structure calculations to facilitate ab initio molecular dynamics studies of large biochemical systems such as ...photoswitchable proteins and multichromophoric antenna complexes. Originally developed for videogaming applications, graphics processing units (GPUs) offered a low‐cost parallel computer architecture that became more accessible for general‐purpose GPU computing with the release of CUDA in 2007. The evaluation of the electron repulsion integrals (ERIs) is a major bottleneck in electronic structure codes and provides an attractive target for acceleration on GPUs. Thus, highly efficient routines for evaluation of and contractions between the ERIs and density matrices were implemented in TeraChem. Electronic structure methods were developed and implemented to leverage these integral contraction routines, resulting in the first quantum chemistry package designed from the ground up for GPUs. This GPU acceleration makes TeraChem capable of performing large‐scale ground and excited state calculations in the gas and condensed phase. Today, TeraChem's speed forms the basis for a suite of quantum chemistry applications, including optimization and dynamics of proteins, automated and interactive chemical discovery tools, and large‐scale nonadiabatic dynamics simulations.
This article is categorized under:
Electronic Structure Theory > Ab Initio Electronic Structure Methods
Software > Quantum Chemistry
Structure and Mechanism > Computational Biochemistry and Biophysics
TeraChem is a quantum chemistry package designed from the ground up for graphical processing units, providing fast on‐the‐fly electronic structure calculations for workflows such as molecular dynamics, geometry optimization, and coarse‐grained fragment approaches.
Curcumin is a natural product with several thousand years of heritage. Its traditional Asian application to human ailments has been subjected in recent decades to worldwide pharmacological, ...biochemical and clinical investigations. Curcumin's Achilles heel lies in its poor aqueous solubility and rapid degradation at pH ~ 7.4. Researchers have sought to unlock curcumin's assets by chemical manipulation. One class of molecules under scrutiny are the monocarbonyl analogs of curcumin (MACs). A thousand plus such agents have been created and tested primarily against cancer and inflammation. The outcome is clear. In vitro, MACs furnish a 10-20 fold potency gain vs. curcumin for numerous cancer cell lines and cellular proteins. Similarly, MACs have successfully demonstrated better pharmacokinetic (PK) profiles in mice and greater tumor regression in cancer xenografts in vivo than curcumin. The compounds reveal limited toxicity as measured by murine weight gain and histopathological assessment. To our knowledge, MAC members have not yet been monitored in larger animals or humans. However, Phase 1 clinical trials are certainly on the horizon. The present review focuses on the large and evolving body of work in cancer and inflammation, but also covers MAC structural diversity and early discovery for treatment of bacteria, tuberculosis, Alzheimer's disease and malaria.
We study the coverage of U.S. political scandals by U.S. newspapers during the past decade. Using automatic keyword-based searches we collected data on 32 scandals and approximately 200 newspapers. ...We find that Democratic-leaning newspapers—i.e., those with a higher propensity to endorse Democratic candidates in elections—provide relatively more coverage of scandals involving Republican politicians than scandals involving Democratic politicians, while Republican-leaning newspapers tend to do the opposite. This is true even after controlling for the average partisan leanings of readers. In contrast, newspapers appear to cater to the partisan tastes of readers only for local scandals.
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