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Over the past three decades, efforts to increase minority incorporation and representation have resulted in a shift away from at-large toward district-based elections in American cities. Observers and academics have blamed this institutional change for encouraging elected official to focus on district priorities while ignoring - and perhaps even sacrificing -- broader municipal needs. Have improved electoral prospects for minority candidates come at the cost of parochialism and logrolling on city councils, as traditional models of urban and distributive politics predict? Using seven years worth of roll call data from the Los Angeles city council, we examine the hypothesis that district elections lead to vote-trading among its members. Overall, our analysis finds little evidence for distributive theories of legislative voting. Instead, the results support a model of conditional defference, suggesting that a district-based electoral system does not always incentivize elected officials to ignore the larger concerns of their polity when creating policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When local governments compete, do their constituents win? Much empirical and theoretical work, inspired by the canonical Tiebout (1956) model, suggests that they do, with jurisdictional competition creating a quasi-market for public goods. In this paper, I consider a case in which special interests, rather than local taxpayers, emerge as the primary winners from jurisdictional competition. My theory predicts that competition among local governments will drive up the wages of highly specialized public-sector employees, a hypothesis for which I find support using a unique survey of employee compensation. I conclude by drawing more general conclusions from the theory, identifying the conditions under which constituents end up as the beneficiaries of jurisdictional competition, and the conditions under which they become its losers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under what conditions can elected officials and powerful interest groups "steal the initiative" by shaping the wording of a ballot measure's official title and summary to favor their preferred policy outcome? We explore this question using a survey experiment based on two actual measures that have appeared on the ballot in several states. We find that the language used to describe a ballot measure does indeed have the potential to influence outcomes in direct democracy elections, including measures dealing with contentious social issues. We also show, however, that the importance of these descriptions is greatly mediated by exposure to basic campaign information. Exposure to endorsements from prominent interest groups greatly attenuates the effect of a ballot measure's description. Our results suggest that, in campaign environments where millions of dollars in advertising and direct appeals from political parties and other elites bombard voters, these descriptions are unlikely to dramatically shift voter sentiment, although the text printed on the ballot does have the potential to alter outcomes in particularly close elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An experimental study and model analysis were performed to assess the effectiveness of commercially available in-room air cleaners in minimizing the impact ofa hazardous aerosol released in a building. Two air cleaners were evaluated: a HEPA-type air cleaner and an electrostatic precipitator The effectiveness of a stand-alone room air cleaner depends on three principal characteristics: single-pass filtration efficiency, airflow rate, and the airflow pattern that the cleaner induces in the room. Accordingly, the air cleaners were first experimentally evaluated for their single-pass filtration efficiencies, which were determined for aerosol particle ranging in diameter from 0.03 to 10 μm under different airflow rates. A series of test chamber experiments was then performed in which concentration decay rates were determined from continuously monitoring aerosol concentration at a particular location in the room. The degree of variability in the cumulative exposure dosages occurring in the room was considered using filter samples taken at several different locations. Additionally, model analyses were performed using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) calculations, which suggested that CFD methodology can offer a viable alternative to field testing. The model was reasonably effective at predicting trends in the relative variability of contaminant concentration in the test chamber, but overestimated the concentration decay rate. Challenges associated with performing CFD calculations for flow configurations encountered under such conditions are discussed. As a general finding of this work, room air cleaners can offer a noticeable threat reduction potential by reducing both the peak concentration of aerosolized pollutant in the room and the overall level of occupants' exposure. Consequently, the room air cleaner can increase the time it takes to reach a particular level of threshold concentration in the room, or even prevent it. However the extent of the threat reduction potential may depend greatly on many factors, including those related to the pathogen aerosolization scenario and room configuration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]