Sexual Education,Gender Ideology,and Youth Sexual Empowerment

Sexual education plays an essential role in preventing unplanned pregnancy and the transmission of sexually transmitted infections (STIs). School-based sexual education programs, in particular, may be well positioned to address social factors that are empirically linked to negative sexual health outcomes, such as traditional social norms surrounding gender and sexuality. However, youth are seldom granted access to sexual education programs that explicitly address these issues. This study presents findings from a pretest–posttest survey of a sexual education program that did. It was designed for eighth graders (N=95) in the context of a school–community collaboration. The study assessed the links between several components of sexual empowerment, including gender ideology, sexual knowledge, and contraceptive beliefs. Findings link participation in the sexual education program to more progressive attitudes toward girls and women, less agreement with hegemonic masculinity ideology, and increases in sexual health and resource knowledge. Structural equation models suggest that traditional attitudes toward women were significantly related to hegemonic masculinity ideology among both boys and girls, which was in turn negatively related to safer contraceptive beliefs.     

Listen to What I Say,Not How I Vote: Congressional Support for the President in Washington and at Home*

Objectives. Are legislators' party affiliations or is district partisanship the greatest predictor of legislative support of the president? Do members of the U.S. House emphasize different policy positions when casting roll calls than when communicating their positions to constituents? We theorize that party is less important in legislators' district‐oriented behavior than in roll‐call voting. When casting roll calls, legislators are agents facing multiple principals, namely, political party leaders and their district constituencies. When engaging in district‐oriented behavior, the only key principal is the legislator's constituency. Methods. We analyze legislators' positions on roll calls and in platforms. Platforms are examined with a unique data set of franked mass mailings sent by House members. Linear and limited dependent variable models are employed. Results. Our findings show that constituency preferences are a more consistent predictor of legislative support for the president when analyzing legislators' platforms, and that political party has a relatively limited effect. When analyzing roll‐call votes, party is the key predictor. Conclusions. Political parties may be interested in what legislators do as opposed to what they say. The platform findings are in contrast to most recent empirical work examining position taking, though consistent with the canonical works of Mayhew and Fenno. This has implications for theories of parties in Congress that tie party behavior in the legislature to partisanship in the electorate.     

PRICING AUSTRALIAN S&P200 OPTIONS: A BAYESIAN APPROACH BASED ON GENERALIZED DISTRIBUTIONAL FORMS

This paper develops a new class of option price models and applies it to options on the Australian S&P200 Index. The class of models generalizes the traditional Black‐Scholes framework by accommodating time‐varying conditional volatility, skewness and excess kurtosis in the underlying returns process. An important property of these more general pricing models is that the computational requirements are essentially the same as those associated with the Black‐Scholes model, with both methods being based on one‐dimensional integrals. Bayesian inferential methods are used to evaluate a range of models nested in the general framework, using observed market option prices. The evaluation is based on posterior parameter distributions, as well as posterior model probabilities. Various fit and predictive measures, plus implied volatility graphs, are also used to rank the alternative models. The empirical results provide evidence that time‐varying volatility, leptokurtosis and a small degree of negative skewness are priced in Australian stock market options.     

Disentangling Constituency and Legislator Effects in Legislative Representation: Black Legislators or Black Districts?*

Objective. Does the race of a legislator or does the black population of a district best predict legislative roll‐call voting in the interests of African Americans? Due to methodological limitations, no prior study has found that both the race of the legislator and the black district population are significant predictors of congressional roll‐call voting. Drawing on post Shaw v. Reno/Miller v. Johnson congressional districts (with greater data variance), I examine the effect of these two racial representation variables on roll‐call voting in the 104th–106th Congresses. Methods. Linear regression with random effects is employed in two statistical models. Results. Even when the black district population and party are considered, the presence of an African‐American legislator leads to greater substantive representation of black constituents. Conclusion. Districting plans that maximize the election of black legislators and Democrats are the most important for the aggregate enhancement of liberal voting in Congress, while districting plans that maximize black district populations and Democrats are the most important for the aggregate enhancement of civil rights voting records in Congress.