Ideology over strategy: Extending voting rights to felons and ex-felons, 1966-1992

The disenfranchisement of felons and ex-felons has long served to restrict the practice of democracy in the United States. In the late 20th century, a number of states allowed increasing numbers of felons and ex-felons to vote. Previous work has noted that Democrats are often associated with extensions of voting rights to felons and ex-felons. If this is the case, what accounts for their support for re-enfranchisement? In this paper I conduct a series of event history analyses of voting rights policy changes at the state level. I argue that Democratic support was not based on expected electoral benefits that might derive from changes in the composition of the electorate. Instead, analyses suggest that would-be reformers—often Democratic, but also Republican—were importantly constrained by the ideological climate among a state's population. Thus, policy liberalism appears to have trumped crass partisan strategizing in encouraging restoration of voting rights to felons and ex-felons. Results also confirm claims that local patterns of racial domination were relevant in decisions to re-enfranchise or not.     

Assessing the temporal stability of the population/environment relationship in comparative perspective: a cross-national panel study of carbon dioxide emissions, 1960–2005

This study examines the temporal stability of the population/environment relationship. We analyze panel data from 1960 to 2005 to determine whether the national-level association between population and carbon dioxide emissions has remained stable, declined, or intensified in recent decades. Results indicate that population size has a large and stable positive association with anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. The findings of temporal stability generally hold for both developed countries and less-developed countries. The authors conclude that population, in tandem with other social drivers, remains an important consideration for research that addresses the human dimensions of global environmental change.     

Accounting for animal density gradients using independent information in distance sampling surveys

Distance sampling is extensively used for estimating animal density or abundance. Conventional methods assume that location of line or point transects is random with respect to the animal population, yet transects are often placed along linear features such as roads, rivers or shorelines that do not randomly sample the study region, resulting in biased estimates of abundance. If it is possible to collect additional data that allow an animal density gradient with respect to the transects to be modelled, we show how to extend the conventional distance sampling likelihood to give asymptotically unbiased estimates of density for the covered area. We illustrate the proposed methods using data for a kangaroo population surveyed by line transects laid along tracks, for which the true density is known from an independent source, and the density gradient with respect to the tracks is estimated from a sample of GPS collared animals. For this example, density of animals increases with distance from the tracks, so that detection probability is overestimated and density underestimated if the non-random location of transects is ignored. When we account for the density gradient, there is no evidence of bias in the abundance estimate. We end with a list of practical recommendations to investigators conducting distance sampling surveys where density gradients could be an issue.     

Is the Gene-Environment Interaction Paradigm Relevant to Genome-Wide Studies? The Case of Education and Body Mass Index

This study uses data from the Framingham Heart Study to examine the relevance of the gene-environment interaction paradigm for genome-wide association studies (GWAS). We use completed college education as our environmental measure and estimate the interactive effect of genotype and education on body mass index (BMI) using 260,402 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Our results highlight the sensitivity of parameter estimates obtained from GWAS models and the difficulty of framing genome-wide results using the existing gene-environment interaction typology. We argue that SNP-environment interactions across the human genome are not likely to provide consistent evidence regarding genetic influences on health that differ by environment. Nevertheless, genome-wide data contain rich information about individual respondents, and we demonstrate the utility of this type of data. We highlight the fact that GWAS is just one use of genome-wide data, and we encourage demographers to develop methods that incorporate this vast amount of information from respondents into their analyses.     

Waiting for News in the Market for Lemons

We study a dynamic setting in which stochastic information (news) about the value of a privately informed seller's asset is gradually revealed to a market of buyers. We construct an equilibrium that involves periods of no trade or market failure. The no‐trade period ends in one of two ways: either enough good news arrives, restoring confidence and markets reopen, or bad news arrives, making buyers more pessimistic and forcing capitulation that is, a partial sell‐off of low‐value assets. Conditions under which the equilibrium is unique are provided. We analyze welfare and efficiency as they depend on the quality of the news. Higher quality news can lead to more inefficient outcomes. Our model encompasses settings with or without a standard static adverse selection problem—in a dynamic setting with sufficiently informative news, reservation values arise endogenously from the option to sell in the future and the two environments have the same equilibrium structure.     

A Cognitive Neuroscience Approach to Studying the Role of Overconfidence in Problem Gambling

Research on the neural correlates of decision making in gambling tasks may be informative for understanding problem gambling. The present study explored confidence and overconfidence using magnetoencephalography (MEG) to measure brain activity during a judgment task. Nineteen undergraduates who self-identified as frequent gamblers (average age 19.7 years; 5 females, 14 males) participated in this study. Participants first completed the DIGS (Winters, Specker & Stinchfield, 2002), a measure of gambling pathology. They then engaged in a behavioral task of confidence assessment, wherein they answered two-alternative trivia questions and estimated the probability that each answer was correct. In a subsequent MEG task, they viewed the questions and a target answer, and indicated with a button press whether the target matched the correct answer. Confidence was directly related to activity in the right prefrontal cortex. Matching and mismatching targets were associated with activity in the medial occipital cortex and left supramarginal gyrus, respectively. An interaction of pathology and match/mismatch was observed in the right inferior occipital-temporal junction region, showing more activity following a mismatch in non-problem gamblers, but not in problem gamblers. Implications of the results for understanding of top–down modulation and attentional systems are discussed in relation to gambling behavior.     

Coal demand,market forces,and U.S. coal mine closures

Economic transitions have the potential to displace workers and cause social unrest. Coal mine closures and the resulting employment losses in rural areas have become salient issues. Using data on coal mine and power plant operation, we model closure as a function of expected profits, which allows us to compare the effects on mine closure of specific demand and supply shocks to expected mine profits. Increasing costs of production have had a large impact on closures, but lower natural gas prices and lower electricity demand have played more recently important roles.     

Emergency risk communication and sensemaking during smoke events: A survey of practitioners

Emergency risk communication (ERC) for smoke emitted from major fires continues to challenge governments. During these events, practitioners (including scientific, communication, and emergency response government staff) are tasked with quickly making sense of the public health risks and the communication options available. Practitioners’ sensemaking—the process of creating meaning from information about an unfolding emergency—is key to effective ERC. This article identifies the factors that ERC practitioners consider the most important to their sensemaking for smoke events. A survey of practitioners (n = 86) was conducted to elicit their views on the level of importance of 22 different factors (individual, organizational, and contextual) on their sensemaking. The results indicate that the majority of the factors tested are very important to practitioners. This finding likely reflects the multidimensional nature of emergency smoke events and provides evidence as to why practitioners are challenged when trying to make sense of emergency situations. Despite multiple factors being considered very important to practitioners, the time-limited nature of emergencies means that practitioners will inevitability be forced to prioritize in their sensemaking efforts. Our results also provide insight into practitioners’ prioritization of different information sources. Specifically, practitioners prioritize their own knowledge and the knowledge of other practitioners. The two most important factors were information from other incident management stakeholders and the practitioners’ past experience. Other information, including community-based and academic knowledge, appear to be of lower priority for practitioners. Based on the study results, recommendations for practice and future research are discussed.