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Regression discontinuity design with potentially many covariates
No full textThis article examines high-dimensional covariates in regression discontinuity design (RDD) analysis. We introduce estimation and inference methods for the RDD models that incorporate covariate selection while maintaining stability across various numbers of covariates. The proposed methods combine a localization approach using kernel weights with ℓ1-penalization to handle high-dimensional covariates. We provide both theoretical and numerical evidence demonstrating the efficacy of our methods. Theoretically, we present risk and coverage properties for our point estimation and inference methods. Conditions are given under which the proposed estimator becomes more efficient than the conventional covariate adjusted estimator at the cost of an additional sparsity condition. Numerically, our simulation experiments and empirical examples show the robust behaviors of the proposed methods to the number of covariates in terms of bias and variance for point estimation and coverage probability and interval length for inference
A home away from home' space, ritual and performance at an elite boys' school in England
No full textThis article advances ethnographic understandings of the distinctive micro-practices of the formation of elites taking place within Fortune Park School, a private boys’ school in England. It focuses primarily on two related axes of the elite school environment; the layout, use and presentation of the school’s physical space, and an analysis of school ritual. I argue that the veneer of formality presented by the school is a ‘frontstage’ performance, disguising a network of interactions or ‘backstage’ performances that are characterised by a sense of informality or ease. Therefore, I show that the rituals taking place within the school buildings reflect a constant tension between formal and informal states of being. Learning to navigate this tension becomes part of the everyday experience of a Fortune Park School student, contributing towards the acquisition of valued forms of embodied capital that have been demonstrated as advantageous for those with it in their possession
The effects of COVID-19 infection on opposition to COVID-19 policies: evidence from the U.S. congress
No full textElites’ skepticism of scientific consensus presents a formidable challenge in addressing critical issues like climate change and global pandemics. While extensive research has explored the capacity of events related to these challenges to act as “exogenous shocks,” motivating the general public to reassess their risk perceptions, our understanding of how elites similarly respond to such shocks remains limited. In this article, we investigate whether COVID-19 infections influenced US lawmakers’ support for COVID-19 containment measures, focusing on expressed opposition to COVID-19 policies on social media and in press releases throughout the first two years of the pandemic. Employing a staggered difference-in-differences design and matrix completion methods, our analysis reveals that COVID-19 infections caused a reduction of approximately 30% in legislators’ expressions of opposition to COVID-19 policies on social media. These findings underscore that elites are indeed responsive to policy shocks–even in highly polarized contexts–when they are personally affected by an issue
Crowded‐out? Changes in informal childcare during the expansion of formal services in Germany
No full textInformal childcare care by grandparents, other relatives or friends is an important source of support in many Western countries, including Germany. Yet the role of this type of care is often overlooked in accounts of social policies supporting families with children, which tend to focus on formal childcare. This article examines whether the large formal childcare expansion occurring in Germany in the last two decades has been accompanied by similar or opposite trends in informal childcare usage. It argues that accounting for both formal and informal childcare can offer a more accurate assessment of defamilisation effects of family policies. Drawing on representative data from the German Socio-Economic Panel the analysis identifies long-run developments of childcare arrangements for children aged 1–10 between 1997 and 2020, offering for the first time a comprehensive picture of how families with children of different ages mix informal care and service provision. Results show that on average the expansion of formal childcare was not associated with an equal reduction in informal childcare, lending little support to the crowding-out hypothesis. Further analyses distinguishing between population groups with different propensity to use formal childcare reveal, unexpectedly, remarkable similarities in the use of informal care throughout the period examined. The only exception are families with a migrant background, who tend to use informal childcare less than their counterparts. The general trend is, however, one whereby informal and formal care are increasingly combined
On collective endurance: thinking gender studies in illiberal times – a conversation
No full textIn honor of Frontier’s 50th anniversary, Clare Hemmings and Robyn Wiegman offer a wide-ranging conversation about the institutional and intellectual history of the field now called gender studies. Working in different national contexts—Hemmings in the United Kingdom and Wiegman in the United States—both scholars have devoted their research to deciphering how stories of the field have been told, how these narratives have become part of the field’s reproduction of its own common sense, and how (or when) these narratives have been resisted, rejected, or revised. At the same time, they both have been embedded in the practices they identify and study as insiders, as each served multiple terms as chair/head of their respective departments and programs. Using a discussion format, the scholars reflect on these histories and their successes while also attending to the geopolitical rise of state authoritarianism and nationalism that threatens feminist world making in general and higher education in particular
Politicians’ theories of voting behavior
No full textWhile political scientists regularly engage in spirited theoretical debates about elections and voting behavior, few have noticed that elected politicians also have theories of elections and voting. Here, we investigate politicians’ positions on eight central theoretical debates in the area of elections and voting behavior and compare politicians’ theories to those held by ordinary citizens. Using data from face-to-face interviews with nearly one thousand politicians in 11 countries, together with corresponding surveys of more than twelve thousand citizens, we show that politicians overwhelmingly hold thin, minimalist, “democratic realist” theories of voting, while citizens’ theories are more optimistic and policy oriented. Politicians’ theoretical tendencies—along with their theoretical misalignment from citizens—are remarkably consistent across countries. These theories are likely to have important consequences for how politicians campaign, communicate with the public, think about public policy, and represent their constituents
Sectoral interests and regional bloc voting in African countries
No full textThis paper contributes to a new line of research on interest-based and policy determinants of electoral cleavages that are visible at the national level in African presidential contests since the 1990s. Using constituency-level electoral data, we identify persistent patterns of regional clustering in the presidential vote in the last several election rounds in Kenya, Malawi, and Zambia, underscoring both the persistence of these regional clusters over time and, using DHS survey data, that most of the regional electoral blocs are multiethnic. By combining these results with new data from economic geography, we also show that most of the persistent regional voting blocs display a distinct spatial overlap with specialized producer regions, mostly agricultural regions. These novel observations about the persistence of regional electoral blocs, the multiethnicity of regional electoral clusters, and the distinctive economic profiles of the electoral clusters combine to shed new light on long-standing questions in the political economy of African elections. Our analysis suggests that coethnicity alone does not account for the cohesion of most of the persistent electoral blocs and that bloc cohesion can arise from the combination of ethnic and sectoral policy interests
AI-induced dehumanization
No full textRecent technological advancements have empowered nonhuman entities, such as virtual assistants and humanoid robots, to simulate human intelligence and behavior. This paper investigates how autonomous agents influence individuals' perceptions and behaviors toward others, particularly human employees. Our research reveals that the socio-emotional capabilities of autonomous agents lead individuals to attribute a humanlike mind to these nonhuman entities. Perceiving a high level of humanlike mind in the nonhuman, autonomous agents affects perceptions of actual people through an assimilation process. Consequently, we observe “assimilation-induced dehumanization”: the humanness judgment of actual people is assimilated toward the lower humanness judgment of autonomous agents, leading to various forms of mistreatment. We demonstrate that assimilation-induced dehumanization is mitigated when autonomous agents possess capabilities incompatible with humans, leading to a contrast effect (Study 2), and when autonomous agents are perceived as having a high level of cognitive capability only, resulting in a lower level of mind perception of these agents (Study 3). Our findings hold across various types of autonomous agents (embodied: Studies 1–2 and disembodied: Studies 3–5), as well as in real and hypothetical consumer choices
Random Fourier signature features
No full textTensor algebras give rise to one of the most powerful measures of similarity for sequences of arbitrary length called the signature kernel accompanied with attractive theoretical guarantees from stochastic analysis. Previous algorithms to compute the signature kernel scale quadratically in terms of the length and number of the sequences. To mitigate this severe computational bottleneck, we develop a random Fourier feature-based acceleration of the signature kernel acting on the inherently non-Euclidean domain of sequences. We show uniform approximation guarantees for the proposed unbiased estimator of the signature kernel, while keeping its computation linear in the sequence length and number. In addition, combined with recent advances on tensor projections, we derive two even more scalable time series features with favorable concentration properties and computational complexity both in time and memory. Our empirical results show that the reduction in computational cost comes at a negligible price in terms of accuracy on moderate size datasets, and it enables one to scale to large datasets up to a million time series. We release the code publicly available at https://github.com/tgcsaba/ksig
How do you say Brexit in French? Gender, class and exceptionality
No full textThis chapter reads with my short story “Daddy’s Little Girl” to navigate the disbelief I felt when I discovered my dad had voted for the UK to leave the EU in 2016. My reading aims to put his desire for sovereignty in historical and social context, to begin to craft a history of populism that has a turn to the right as available for white class-transitional ambition. But I also want to weave in my own attachments to those same desires, even in their disavowal: to explore the ways my familial status as transcending gendered expectations, as “exceptional”, underwrites that ambition. Drawing on memory work by feminist authors Marianne Hirsch and Annette Kuhn, the chapter foregrounds accountability and contradiction in reading the past and present together, and uses an interdisciplinary mix of creative writing, feminist and queer theory and political history. Throughout, I advocate an ethos of care as central to the ability to do “memory work” that is attentive to the complex location of the author or narrator in the stories they tell of others