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The conference paper on use of signing statements by the U.S. Presidents which are official statements issued at the time of a law's enactment is discussed. It refers to the usage of constitutional signing statements as an effective unilateral tool which can be use to combat a hostile Congress functioning in the nation. An overview of the controversies behind amount of scholarship devoted to the rationale behind signing statements is also included.

A conference paper about bad U.S. Presidents with reference to the core responsibilities of American chief executives is presented. It mentions that the presidential rating has started in 1948 by historian Arthur M. Schlesinger who asked respondents to assign presidents to categories from great to failure. It also discusses the attributes that determines Presidents' ranking.

A conference paper about political satire and candidate evaluations in the 2008 U.S. election is presented. It examines general models of candidate evaluation formation and discusses the role of added element of political satire into these existing models. It mentions that this model would explain the failure of American voters to remember specific details about candidates and their campaigns.

A conference paper discussing the ideological connection between members of the U.S. Congress and their constituents is presented. It examines the effect of partisan political polarization on several benefits that result from or coincide with seniority but are independent of ideology. It also discusses data from the U.S. House of Representatives in the 1990s and 2000s and found that partisan political polarization may not factor into members' electoral calculations.

Since the end of the Second World War, two political parties have dominated political activity in the Kurdish territory in Northern Iraq: the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). Recently, a new movement has begun to emerge that presents the first legitimate opposition to these ruling parties. The Change List, a splinter group formed by former PUK members, is mobilizing Kurdish voters on the platform of change. In the KRG's 2009 parliamentary elections, the Kurdistan Region's ruling parties took nearly 60% of the votes, leaving the Change List with a mere 25% of the open parliamentary seats. While still a loss for the new movement, this development illustrated an unprecedented shift away from the nearly seventy years of the patronistic rule that defined Kurdish politics. This paper hypothesizes that voter concerns regarding nepotism, patronism and lack of transparency with the ruling parties drove this ground-breaking development and that socioeconomic changes over the past two decades have allowed for this shift in voter preferences. The emergence of the Gorran-Change List indicates a challenge to the status-quo relationship between the parties and the voters. This study will use a historical-sociological single-case study of security and economic liberalization as possible causal mechanisms influencing the realignment of the party-voter relationship in the Kurdish Regional Government of Northern Iraq. Additionally, this paper will investigate the implications of this shift on the Kurdish nationalist and separatist movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about the adoption of school interventions for youth obesity prevention in the U.S. is presented. It utilizes cross-sectional probit analysis and fifty state data through 2007 to analyze the adoption in different categorical school interventions. The findings reveal that the state government is more likely to adopt the school intervention of setting competitive food nutritional standards.