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In this era of hyper-polarization and partisan animosity, do people incorporate the viewpoints of their political opponents? Perhaps not. An important body of research, in fact, finds that the provision of information about opponents’ policy views leads survey respondents to reflexively adopt the opposite position. In this paper, we demonstrate that such findings arise from incomplete experimental designs and a particular measurement strategy. In a series of experiments that vary information about both parties’ positions simultaneously and that solicit continuous, rather than discrete, policy positions, we find that partisans update their beliefs in accordance with the positions of Republican and Democratic leaders alike. Partisans are not perennially determined to disagree. Rather, they are often willing to incorporate opposing viewpoints about a wide range of policy issues.

Moderates are often overlooked in contemporary research on American voters. Many scholars who have examined moderates argue that these individuals are only classified as such due to a lack of political sophistication or conflicted views across issues. We develop a method to distinguish three ways an individual might be classified as moderate: having genuinely moderate views across issues, being inattentive to politics or political surveys, or holding views poorly summarized by a single liberal–conservative dimension. We find that a single ideological dimension accurately describes most, but not all, Americans’ policy views. Using the classifications from our model, we demonstrate that moderates and those whose views are not well explained by a single dimension are especially consequential for electoral selection and accountability. These results suggest a need for renewed attention to the middle of the American political spectrum.

Unifying models have shown that the amount of space used by animals (e.g., activity space, home range) scales allometrically with body mass for terrestrial taxa; however, such relationships are far less clear for marine species. We compiled movement data from 1,596 individuals across 79 taxa collected using a continental passive acoustic telemetry network of acoustic receivers to assess allometric scaling of activity space. We found that ectothermic marine taxa do exhibit allometric scaling for activity space, with an overall scaling exponent of 0.64. However, body mass alone explained only 35% of the variation, with the remaining variation best explained by trophic position for teleosts and latitude for sharks, rays, and marine reptiles. Taxon-specific allometric relationships highlighted weaker scaling exponents among teleost fish species (0.07) than sharks (0.96), rays (0.55), and marine reptiles (0.57). The allometric scaling relationship and scaling exponents for the marine taxonomic groups examined were lower than those reported from studies that had collated both marine and terrestrial species data derived using various tracking methods. We propose that these disparities arise because previous work integrated summarized data across many studies that used differing methods for collecting and quantifying activity space, introducing considerable uncertainty into slope estimates. Our findings highlight the benefit of using large-scale, coordinated animal biotelemetry networks to address cross-taxa evolutionary and ecological questions.

To learn about the effects of corporate campaign contributions, we study the potential influence of the insurance industry in US state politics. The insurance industry is one of the biggest players in state politics, and we have collected new data on objective measures of the industry's performance in each state over time. We exploit within-state changes in campaign finance regulations which can significantly restrict the ability of corporate contributors to give money and potentially influence elected officials. Across a range of outcomes and campaign finance reforms, we find little evidence that the ability to make corporate campaign contributions benefits the insurance industry in a state. Some results suggest that the ability to make campaign contributions may benefit the insurance industry in states with elected insurance commissioners, but overall, campaign contributions appear to have a little distortionary effect even in a setting where we would most expect to find it.

We estimate the effects of shelter-in-place (SIP) orders during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. We do not find detectable effects of these policies on disease spread or deaths. We find small but measurable effects on mobility that dissipate over time. And we find small, delayed effects on unemployment. We conduct additional analyses that separately assess the effects of expanding versus withdrawing SIP orders and test whether there are spillover effects in other states. Our results are consistent with prior studies showing that SIP orders have accounted for a relatively small share of the mobility trends and economic disruptions associated with the pandemic. We reanalyze two prior studies purporting to show that SIP orders caused large reductions in disease prevalence, and show that those results are not reliable. Our results do not imply that social distancing behavior by individuals, as distinct from SIP policy, is ineffective.

A new method finds that leaders are highly consequential in politics and sports but not business., Anecdotal evidence suggests that some leaders are more effective than others but observed differences in outcomes between leaders could be attributable to chance variation. To solve this inferential problem, we develop a quantitative test of leader effects that provides more reliable inferences than previous strategies, and we implement the test in the settings of politics, business, and sports. We find significant effects of political leaders, particularly in nondemocracies. We find little evidence that chief executive officers influence the performance of their firms. In addition, we find clear evidence that sports coaches matter for a wide range of outcomes in football, basketball, baseball, and hockey.

This article consists of a close examination of one of four Late Archaic-era tumular monuments that were excavated in the mid-1950s in the Northern Necropolis of the Pontic Greek settlement of Istros. The exploration of this monument, Tumulus XVII (circa 550-525 BCE), yielded several features that were immediately compared with heroic cremation burials as described in epic poetry (particularly the funeral of Patroklos in Homer’s Iliad ). Most striking among these features were the remains of three human sacrificial victims. Despite the early connection drawn with Homeric epic, for the next three decades Tumulus XVII was classified as a non-Greek (Thracian) monument, principally due to the presence of human sacrifice. That is, human sacrifice was regarded as too primitive and thus foreign to the more ‘advanced’ Greek culture. For this reason, the evidence from Istros has not figured prominently in synthetic studies of Greek human sacrifice. Yet, the growing body of research into Greek and indigenous settlements and cemeteries in the western Black Sea, along with the more recent discovery of a bound and ritually decapitated man alongside Pyre A at Orthi Petra (circa 700 BCE; Eleutherna, Crete), has occasioned a reconsideration of the original barbarian characterization of Tumulus XVII. The funerary rituals and resulting tumular monument rather appear to have been developed by an elite subset of the Greek colonial community as a means to distinguish and elevate themselves among the ever-growing population of the city. While epic may have lent general inspiration and significance to the particular rituals performed, a more immediate model for the tumular form may have been taken from the ‘heroon’ (late 7 th cent. BCE) in the necropolis of the nearby Greek settlement of Orgame. Although the precise circumstances surrounding the funerary human sacrifices elude us, this short-lived ritual phenomenon seems rather to have been introduced to the region by Greek settlers.

A recent, widely cited study [Healy AJ, Malhotra N, Mo CH (2010) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 107(29):12804-12809] finds that college football games influence voting behavior. Victories within 2 weeks of an election reportedly increase the success of the incumbent party in presidential, senatorial, and gubernatorial elections in the home county of the team. We reassess the evidence and conclude that there is likely no such effect, despite the fact that Healy et al. followed the best practices in social science and used a credible research design. Multiple independent sources of evidence suggest that the original finding was spurious-reflecting bad luck for researchers rather than a shortcoming of American voters. We fail to estimate the same effect when we leverage situations where multiple elections with differing incumbent parties occur in the same county and year. We also find that the purported effect of college football games is stronger in counties where people are less interested in college football, just as strong when the incumbent candidate does not run for reelection, and just as strong in other parts of the state outside the home county of the team. Lastly, we detect no effect of National Football League games on elections, despite their greater popularity. We conclude with recommendations for evaluating surprising research findings and avoiding similar false-positive results.

Journalistic and academic accounts of Congress suggest that important committee positions allow members to procure more federal funds for their constituents, but existing evidence on this topic is limited in scope and has failed to distinguish the effects of committee membership from selection onto committees. We bring together decades of data on federal outlays and congressional committee and subcommittee assignments to provide a comprehensive analysis of committee positions and distributive politics across all policy domains. Using a within-member research design, we find that seats on key committees produce little additional spending. The chairs of the Appropriations subcommittees—the so called “cardinals” of Congress—are an exception to the rule. These leadership positions do generate more funding for constituents, but only from programs under the jurisdiction of their subcommittee. Our results paint a new picture of distributive politics and call for a reexamination of its canonical theories.

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.

In our study (1), we conclude that a published result that college football games influence elections (2) is most likely a false-positive. In a letter to the editor (3), Healy et al., the authors of the original study (2), raise several objections. Healy et al.’s letter (3) suggests that they have partly misread our paper (1) as a criticism of their research design. We grant that their research design and identifying assumptions are sound but worry that their result is a chance false-positive, which can arise even with a perfect research design. We test several additional, independent hypotheses that should hold if college football games do indeed influence elections. We find no support for any of these independent hypotheses, leading us to conclude that the original result is most likely a false-positive.

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 U.S. House of Representatives in recent periods. In this paper, 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 a variety of 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.

ANSI (S3.6‐1996) and ISO (CD 389‐5, 1996) have reported interim high‐frequency (8–16 kHz) reference equivalent threshold sound pressure levels (RETSPLs). Since the interim RETSPLs were derived using very limited data, there is a need to increase the data base for specifying high‐frequency RETSPLs. Thus, this study determined high‐frequency (8–20 kHz) thresholds for 50 young adults having normal low‐frequency (0.25–8 kHz) hearing across four test sessions, separated by at least one day, using Sennheiser HDA 200 and Koss HV/Pro earphones. The mean thresholds increased as frequency increased, especially at 16 kHz and above, and were similar to the ANSI and ISO interim RETSPLs. However, the standard deviations were very high and the range scores were very wide for each earphone at each frequency. This would indicate that specifying high‐frequency RETSPLs may not be feasible due to very high intersubject threshold variability. On the other hand, the intrasubject threshold differences across each possible test ...