How do issues end up on the agenda? Why do lawmakers routinely invest in program oversight and broad policy development? What considerations drive legislative policy change? For many, Congress is an ...institution consumed by partisan bickering and gridlock. Yet the institution's long history of addressing significant societal problems - even in recent years - seems to contradict this view. Congress and the Politics of Problem Solving argues that the willingness of many voters to hold elected officials accountable for societal conditions is central to appreciating why Congress responds to problems despite the many reasons mustered for why it cannot. The authors show that, across decades of policy making, problem-solving motivations explain why bipartisanship is a common pattern of congressional behavior and offer the best explanation for legislative issue attention and policy change.
A substantial literature has used field experiments to assess the mobilization effects of non-partisan mailers. However, little work has examined whether partisan mailers affect voters as intended. ...We report findings from two field experiments conducted in cooperation with partisan campaign strategists that allow us to assess the effects of negative and positive mailers. We find that mailers can affect voters—particularly their recognition of candidate names and their intent to turn out to vote. Notably, we find evidence that both negative and positive mailers stimulate intent to turn out.
Meta-analyses suggest that political advertising does not affect participation (Lau and Rovner 2009; Lau, Sigelman and Rovner 2007). Other work finds that the effects depend on message timing ...(Doherty and Adler 2014; Krupnikov 2011) and characteristics of the messenger (Krupnikov and Bauer 2014; Krupnikov and Piston 2015). A possibility that has not been directly explored is that participants in survey and lab experiments do not respond to campaign messages in a way that reflects responses to messaging encountered in day-to-day life (Arceneaux 2010; Barabas and Jerit 2010; Gaines, Kuklinski and Quirk 2007; Kinder 2007; Shadish, Cook and Campbell 2002).We present findings from a survey experiment that mirrors a pair of field experiments reported by Doherty and Adler (2014). Those field experiments – conducted in Colorado state Senate districts in August and October of 2012 – found that both positive and negative partisan mailers increased reported intent to turnout among the unaffiliated likely voters they targeted and surveyed by phone shortly after the mailers were sent. Results of our survey-based experiment, which used images of the mailers as stimuli, indicate that exposure to these messages depresses intent to turnout among likely Independent voters. The findings demonstrate that field and survey-based experiments that look remarkably similar on their face can yield divergent answers to a seemingly simple question: Does political advertising mobilize or demobilize Independent voters?
The president is the most influential policy actor in US politics, and his legislative program greatly influences Congress's agenda. Yet little research has focused on what factors affect the ...president's choices when constructing his agenda. We develop a theory that determines when a president will include an issue in his program. We hypothesize that presidents structure their agendas around the congressional calendar for consideration of expiring laws and salient issues. Using data over 28 years and across 12 policy areas, we find presidents build their programs around these policymaking opportunities. We assert that presidential agendas are less driven by individual priorities than previous accounts have concluded.
A suite of sensors has been assembled to map surface elevation and topography with fine resolution from small unmanned aircraft systems. The sensor package consists of a light detecting and ranging ...(LIDAR) instrument, an inertial measurement unit (IMU), a Global Positioning System (GPS) module, and digital still and video cameras. The system has been utilized to map ice sheet topography in Greenland and to measure sea ice freeboard and roughness in Fram Strait off the coast of Svalbard and in the Southern Ocean near McMurdo, Antarctica. The elevation measurement accuracy is found to be <; 10 cm (1σ) when short-baseline differential GPS processing is used to position the aircraft, and IMU data are used to correct for off-nadir pointing of the LIDAR. The system is optimized to provide coincident surface topography measurements and imagery of ice sheets, glaciers, and sea ice, and it has the potential to become a widely distributed observational resource to complement manned-aircraft and satellite missions.
The macropolitics of Congress Adler, E. Scott; Lapinski, John S
2006., 20111016, 2011, 2006, 2006-01-01, 20060101
eBook
How do public laws, treaties, Senate confirmations, and other legislative achievements help us to gain insight into how our governmental system performs?
This well-argued book edited by Scott Adler ...and John Lapinski is the first to assess our political institutions by looking at what the authors refer to as legislative accomplishment. The book moves beyond current research on Congress that focuses primarily on rules, internal structure, and the microbehavior of individual lawmakers, to look at the mechanisms that govern how policy is enacted and implemented in the United States. It includes essays on topics ranging from those dealing with the microfoundations of congressional output, to large N empirical analyses that assess current theories of lawmaking, to policy-centered case studies.
All of the chapters take a Congress-centered perspective on macropolicy while still appreciating the importance of other branches of government in explaining policy accomplishment.The Macropolitics of Congressshines light on promising pathways for the exploration of such key issues as the nature of political representation. It will make a significant contribution to the study of Congress and, more generally, to our understanding of American politics. Contributors include E. Scott Adler, David Brady, Charles M. Cameron, Brandice Canes-Wrone, Robert S. Erikson, Grace R. Freedman, Valerie Heitshusen, John D. Huber, Ira Katznelson, Keith Krehbiel, John S. Lapinski, David Leblang, Michael B. MacKuen, David R. Mayhew, Nolan McCarty, Charles R. Shipan, James A. Stimson, and Garry Young.
Objectives. We assess the effects of coaching replacements on college football team performance. Methods. Using data from 1997 to 2010, we use matching techniques to compare the performance of ...football programs that replaced their head coach to those where the coach was retained. The analysis has two major innovations over existing literature. First, we consider how entry conditions moderate the effects of coaching replacements. Second, we examine team performance for several years following the replacement to assess its effects. Results. We find that for particularly poorly performing teams, coach replacements have little effect on team performance as measured against comparable teams that did not replace their coach. However, for teams with middling records—that is, teams where entry conditions for a new coach appear to be more favorable—replacing the head coach appears to result in worse performance over subsequent years than comparable teams who retained their coach. Conclusions. The findings have important implications for our understanding of how entry conditions moderate the effects of leadership succession on team performance, and suggest that the relatively common decision to fire head college football coaches for poor team performance may be ill advised.
The Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes (KDIGO) initiative organized a Controversies Conference on glomerular diseases in November 2017. The conference focused on the 2012 KDIGO guideline with ...the aim of identifying new insights into nomenclature, pathogenesis, diagnostic work-up, and, in particular, therapy of glomerular diseases since the guideline’s publication. It was the consensus of the group that most guideline recommendations, in particular those dealing with therapy, will need to be revisited by the guideline-updating Work Group. This report covers general management of glomerular disease, IgA nephropathy, and membranous nephropathy.
In November 2017, the Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes (KDIGO) initiative brought a diverse panel of experts in glomerular diseases together to discuss the 2012 KDIGO glomerulonephritis ...guideline in the context of new developments and insights that had occurred over the years since its publication. During this KDIGO Controversies Conference on Glomerular Diseases, the group examined data on disease pathogenesis, biomarkers, and treatments to identify areas of consensus and areas of controversy. This report summarizes the discussions on primary podocytopathies, lupus nephritis, anti-neutrophil cytoplasmic antibody–associated nephritis, complement-mediated kidney diseases, and monoclonal gammopathies of renal significance.
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a rapidly emerging imaging modality that can provide non-invasive, cross-sectional, high-resolution images of tissue morphology in situ and in real-time. In the ...present series of studies, we used a high-speed OCT imaging system equipped with a frequency-swept laser light source (1.3 mum wavelength) to study living kidneys in situ. Adult, male Munich-Wistar rats were anesthetized, a laparotomy was performed and the living kidneys were exposed for in situ observation. We observed the kidneys prior to, during and following exposure to renal ischemia induced by clamping the renal artery. The effects of intravenous mannitol infusion (1.0 ml of 25%) prior to and during renal ischemia were also studied. Finally, living kidneys were flushed with a renal preservation solution, excised and observed while being stored at 0-4 degrees C. Three-dimensional OCT data sets enabled visualization of the morphology of the uriniferous tubules and the renal corpuscles. When renal ischemia was induced, OCT revealed dramatic shrinkage of tubular lumens due to swelling of the lining epithelium. Three-dimensional visualization and volumetric rendering software provided an accurate evaluation of volumetric changes in tubular lumens in response to renal ischemia. Observations of kidneys flushed with a renal preservation solution and stored at 0-4 degrees C also revealed progressive and significant loss of tubular integrity over time. Intravenous infusion of mannitol solution resulted in thinning of the tubular walls and an increase in the tubular lumen diameters. Mannitol infusion also prevented the cell swelling that otherwise resulted in shrinkage of proximal tubule lumens during ischemia. We conclude that OCT represents an exciting new approach to visualize, in real-time, pathological changes in the living kidney in a non-invasive fashion. Possible clinical applications are discussed.
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