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In New York City, the population of Chinese Americans has grown faster than that of any other minority racial/ethnic group, and now this community constitutes almost half of all Chinese Americans living in the northeastern United States. Nonetheless, scant research attention has been given to Chinese American ethnic enclaves and little is known about the health status of their residents. This study aims to help address this gap in the literature by: (1) improving our understanding of the spatial settlement of Chinese Americans living in New York City from 2000 to 2016; and (2) assessing associations between a New York City resident's likelihood of living in a Chinese American enclave and their access to health care and perceived health status, two measures of community health. In support of this aim, this study establishes a robust criterion for defining ethnic enclaves at the Census tract level in New York City as the communities of interest in this paper. An ethnic enclave is defined as an area at the Census tract level with high dissimilarity and a spatial cluster of Chinese Americans. The spatial findings were that Chinese Americans in New York City were least segregated from other Asian American residents, somewhat segregated from White residents, and most segregated from Black residents. Also, the population density of Chinese Americans increased since 2000, as reflected by their declining exposure index with other Asian Americans. Results from logistic regression indicated that the probability of living in a Chinese American enclave was negatively associated with positive self-perception of general health and positively associated with delays in receiving health care. For Chinese American residents of New York City, living in an ethnic enclave was also associated with both lower socioeconomic status and poorer community health.

Many Chinese Americans experience certain barriers (e.g., low income, English as a second language, lack of insurance, cultural differences, discrimination) when they seek oral healthcare services. These barriers may contribute to health disparities by discouraging use (leading to reduced utilization) of preventive and treatment services. This research adopts a modeling approach to develop theory that accounts for dynamic relationships operating at multiple levels, from individuals to families to communities. A multi-method and multi-level modeling approach allows for the interaction of factors at different levels of aggregation. This research applies spatially explicit agent-based modeling to examine how demographic, socioeconomic, and geographic factors shape access to oral healthcare for low-income Chinese Americans in New York City. The simulation model developed in this research was used to test different intervention scenarios involving community health workers who facilitate care coordination and other health promotion activities. In addition to demographic characteristics and socioeconomic factors, this study also considers geographic factors and spatial behavior, such as distance and activity space. The overarching contribution of this study is to provide a complex systems science framework to better understand access to oral healthcare for urban Chinese Americans, toward adapting it for other racial/ethnic minority groups, by integrating health-seeking behaviors at the individual level, barriers to care at multiple levels, and opportunities for health promotion at the community level.

Background As part of a long-standing line of research regarding how peer density affects health, researchers have sought to understand the multifaceted ways that the density of contemporaries living and interacting in proximity to one another influence social networks and knowledge diffusion, and subsequently health and well-being. This study examined peer density effects on oral health for racial/ethnic minority older adults living in northern Manhattan and the Bronx, New York, NY. Methods Peer age-group density was estimated by smoothing US Census data with 4 kernel bandwidths ranging from 0.25 to 1.50 mile. Logistic regression models were developed using these spatial measures and data from the ElderSmile oral and general health screening program that serves predominantly racial/ethnic minority older adults at community centers in northern Manhattan and the Bronx. The oral health outcomes modeled as dependent variables were ordinal dentition status and binary self-rated oral health. After construction of kernel density surfaces and multiple imputation of missing data, logistic regression analyses were performed to estimate the effects of peer density and other sociodemographic characteristics on the oral health outcomes of dentition status and self-rated oral health. Results Overall, higher peer density was associated with better oral health for older adults when estimated using smaller bandwidths (0.25 and 0.50 mile). That is, statistically significant relationships (p

Objective This article examines the distinction between group-based issue opinion formation (what we term “following the crowd”) and idiosyncratic or nongroup-based formation (what we term “thinking outside of the box”). The argument put forth is that issue saliency can lead citizens to think about issues in nongroup-based terms. Method We use heteroskedastic regression to measure the degree to which group-based variables explain issue opinions. Using group variables (demographics, party identification, etc.) to estimate respondents' issue responses means that nongroup variation is soaked up by the error term. Results We find that citizens who view an issue as highly salient are more likely to “think outside the box,” while citizens who view an issue as less salient are more likely to “follow the crowd” by defaulting to their group memberships and identifications. Conclusion Our results indicate that response variability (less consistency within groups) on issue opinions is not always the result of uncertain citizens, nonattitudes, or measurement error. In some situations, greater response variability can reflect a deliberative and policy-based form of opinion formation.

This paper proposes a general theory of individual-level heterogeneity in economic voting based on the perspective that the strength of the relationship varies with factors that influence the relevance of the economic evaluation to the vote choice. We posit that the electoral relevance of the economic evaluation increases with the strength of partisanship as well as political sophistication. Given the strong correlation between partisanship and sophistication, this theoretical perspective casts doubt on extant evidence that more sophisticated voters are more likely to hold the incumbent party electorally accountable for macroeconomic performance since this result might be an artifact of failing to control for the economic evaluation being more relevant to the vote choice of stronger partisans. Our statistical investigation of this question finds no significant evidence that sophistication conditions the economic voting relationship once the conditioning effect of partisanship is included in the model. This finding suggests that individual-level heterogeneity in the strength of the economic voting relationship is largely due to stronger partisans voting more consistently with their national economic evaluation than to more sophisticated voters being more policy-oriented by holding the incumbent party more electorally accountable for macroeconomic performance.

In this paper, we investigate partisan rationalization in valence politics by trying to better specify the direct and indirect effects of the economy on government support. To do so, we examine how income levels moderate the influence of objective economic conditions on perceptions of which party is the best manager of the economy during a period of economic crisis, 2004–2010, in the United Kingdom. We find that low-income voters are more responsive in their assessments of the incumbent Labour government based on unemployment, as are high-income voters in terms of inflation. In addition, high-income voters tend to behave in a manner consistent with partisan rationalization, while low-income voters do not. These conclusions offer important implications for the effectiveness of electoral control of government policy, as well as the quality of representation.

Empirical findings concerning economic voting differ according to the level of analysis employed. A widely accepted explanation for the inconsistency between macroand microlevel evidence of economic voting is the high degree of random variation that plagues survey data. According to this explanation, aggregation purges individual-level "noise" from mass opinions on policy issues and outcomes. Building on the research of Bartels (1996), we debate the validity of this explanation by demonstrating that public evaluations of the national economy vary systematically with information, media exposure, political attitudes, personal experiences, and demographic characteristics. Furthermore, we show that these sources of subjective heterogeneity produce systematic biases when national economic evaluations are aggregated. These findings challenge a widely accepted notion that because "error" in individual-level measures (or expressions) of preferences is random, the aggregation of these individual measures ensures that they correctly represent the collective preference. mpirical findings concerning the influence of the economy on political behavior differ depending on the level of analysis employed. Using aggregate-level data, numerous studies have established a statistical relationship between economic conditions and election outcomes or executive popularity (e.g., Kramer 1971; MacKuen, Erikson, and Stimson 1992). On the basis of the macro-level evidence alone one would have little reason to doubt that the economy matters. In contrast, individual-level studies using survey data have produced only mixed evidence that voters consider economic conditions when evaluating the incumbent government and its leaders (e.g., Fiorina 1978, 1981; Kinder and Kiewiet 1979, 1981). Moreover, the strongest survey evidence of economic voting suggests that voters primarily care about national economic conditions not their personal financial situation. This finding contradicts the egocentric theory posited by early macro-level research that national economic indicators matter because they are correlated with personal financial circumstances. The micro-macro dichotomy in economic voting research reflects a similar dichotomy in research on voter sophistication and representation. Aggregate-level studies tend to indicate that voters are reasonably well informed about the economy and make forward-looking, rather sophisticated voting decisions (e.g., Alesina, Londregan, and Rosenthal 1993; Suzuki and Chappell 1996; Palmer and Whitten 1999). These studies infer that mass political decisions conform to rational expectations, or at least limited information rationality (e.g., MacKuen, Erikson, and Stimson 1992). In contrast to this macro-level image of the voter, individual-level survey research has shown that the public in general has low levels of political sophistication, lacking much knowledge of and interest in politics (e.g.

Students of economic voting have recently made substantial progress in their understanding of when the economy is and is not likely to impact election outcomes. Our knowledge of the lower level dynamics that drive these aggregate results remains fairly murky. In this paper we test competing theoretical claims about how individual level orientations toward political economy lead to observed aggregate trends in support for incumbent politicians. We do this with models of support for the Labour Party in the United Kingdom before and during the recent global economic turndown.

This paper investigates whether affect toward the two major parties has shifted in a negative or neutral direction over the past half‐century based on several systematic tests that structure citizens by their type of party affect: whether they feel positively about both parties (optimists), negatively about both (pessimists), neutral toward both (indifferent), or positive toward one party and negative toward the other (partisans). Using ANES data from 1952 to 2004, with feeling thermometers and likes/dislikes about the parties as measures of party affect, we conduct several tests and find that changes in mean party affect toward the parties, as well as changes in the distribution of individuals across different types of party affect, support the negativity theory. Additionally, our results indicate that the role of the parties in the political environment has changed, with citizens structuring their affect toward the parties differently.

The polarization of the political and social environment over the past four decades has provided citizens with clearer cues about how their core political predispositions (e.g., group interests, core values, and party identification) relate to their issue opinions. A robust and ongoing scholarly debate has involved the different ways in which the more polarized environment affects mass opinion. Using heteroskedastic regression, this paper examines the effect of the increasingly polarized environment on the variability of citizens’ policy opinions. We find that citizens today base their policy preferences more closely upon their core political predispositions than in the past. In addition, the predicted error variances also allow us to directly compare two types of mass polarization—issue distance versus issue consistency—to determine the independent effects each has on changes in the distribution of mass opinion.

This article examines the differences in the distributional effects of economic growth. While all incumbents are incentivized to create economic growth in order to win reelection, they use a diverse variety of policies to achieve this growth. These policy choices are often congruent with the demands of the core constituent groups of the respective parties. This suggests that economic growth is not equally shared by all, but that some groups are more or less benefited from the sets of policies chosen by the incumbent parties to stimulate growth. We test this proposition by investigating the effects of economic growth on stock market performance and unemployment. Our results show that economic growth under Republican presidents has a stronger effect on stimulating stock market performance, while economic growth under Democratic presidents has a stronger effect on reducing unemployment. Overall, these results highlight the partisan differences in macroeconomic policy and illustrate one of the causal mechanisms behind the substantial and rising economic inequality in the USA.

We argue that survey responses to economic evaluation questions exhibit instability and can be affected by fairly trivial changes in questionnaire wording. Our analyses make three empirical contributions to this area of survey research. First, we demonstrate that within the course of the interview there is considerable instability in economic evaluations. Second, one source of this instability is cues regarding economic performance, such as those provided by the media. We find that respondents can be persuaded to change their economic evaluations if they receive contradictory cues. Finally, we demonstrate that question placement can affect economic evaluations. More specifically, we demonstrate that proximity to political questions can contaminate economic evaluations. If economic evaluations closely follow political preference questions, respondents have a tendency to give economic responses that are “consistent” with their political responses. Our empirical analysis is based on economic evaluations of respondents to the Hungarian Markets and Democracy Survey administered during December 1997.

Empirical research in comparative politics has largely demonstrated that favorable economic conditions improve the electoral fortunes of incumbent government parties. Thus, in parliamentary democracies in which the government can choose when to call an election there is an incentive for government parties to act strategically by calling early elections when economic conditions are favorable. Alesina, Cohen and Roubini, however, cast doubt on this proposition, finding only weak evidence of a relationship between economic factors and election timing. In this paper, we reconsider the relationship between economic conditions and endogenous election dates using new data, controlling for political factors, and applying more appropriate econometric techniques. From analyses of twelve parliamentary democracies, we find that macroeconomic performance and political context exert significant influence on election timing. All other factors being equal, better performances in terms of economic growth, inflation, and unemployment will make a government more likely to call an early election. Controlling for government ideology, we find that right-wing governments are more sensitive to inflation performance while left-wing governments are more sensitive to the level of unemployment.

Research on the presence of consumer racial discrimination in the baseball labor and memorabilia markets has produced contradictory empirical results. While studies of baseball salaries find no evidence of discrimination, Nardinelli and Simon (1990) and Andersen and La Croix (1991) use data from the baseball card market to show that the price that consumers pay for a card depends on the player’s race. In this paper, we reconsider the evidence of consumer discrimination in the baseball card market. Our study improves on previous research by applying more appropriate econometric methods and using a data set in which card supply is constant and incentives for speculative demand are weaker. In contradiction to the aforementioned studies, we find little evidence of racial discrimination. This result proves robust across variable specifications and econometric models.

The present paper replicates and extends Powell and Whitten's study of comparative economic voting (Powell, G. Bingham and Whitten, Guy D. (1993) A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting: Taking Account of the Political Context. American Journal of Political Science 37, 391–414). We extend Powell and Whitten's research in three ways. First, we have developed a theoretically more appealing method for dividing our cases according to the clarity of government responsibility. Second, we consider whether the electoral effect of economic growth varies with government composition, with large coalitions focusing on the consensual goal of improving economic growth. Third, 40 new cases have been added to the original 102 analyzed by Powell and Whitten. Using a more appropriate methodology and an expanded data set, we find strong confirmation of the results presented in Powell and Whitten's study. We also find evidence that supports our theory about coalition governments and economic growth.

This article investigates whether the opportunity for presidential appointment influences the congressional career. We discover that more than 16% of the House members who retired or suffered electoral defeat from 1961 to 1992 received a federal appointment. The likelihood of appointment rises to 28% if only departing representatives from the president's party are considered. For members of the president's party, legislative loyalty and losing a Senate bid significantly increase the probability of appointment. We also find evidence of a cabinet norm in the appointment process since more than half of the appointed representatives had congressional committee experience within the policy jurisdiction of their federal appointment. Our results have implications for research on progressive ambition, voluntary retirement, and the federal bureaucracy.

While there is strong evidence that a libertarian-authoritarian dimension exists in Great Britain, there is only weak evidence that it contributed to the Conservative Party's electoral victories in 1979, 1983, and 1987. The present paper addresses this empirical divergence by presenting new evidence. Using a multivariate statistical analysis of British respondents in the 1979–1987 Eurobarometers, the paper estimates the impacts of political values and class-based demographic characteristics on individual-level support for the Conservative and Labour parties. The multivariate model is estimated separately for each year in order to compare the explanatory variables' effects over time. The paper's findings demonstrate that authoritarian and libertarian values significantly influenced party support, with the strongest effects occurring in 1983 and 1984. In addition, they show that class-based support was negatively correlated with value-based support during 1979–1987.

Much of the research on the European Community focuses on elites and institutions and as a result downplays the importance of the mass public in determining the direction of European integration. A common justification for this viewpoint is that members of the public provide a stable reservoir of strong support for European integration. Recent political events, however, raise doubts about this depiction of a ‘passive public’. Consequently, there is a need for a fuller understanding of European attitudes. We specify a number of hypotheses dealing with the effects of international trade interests, security concerns, and demographic characteristics on cross-national and cross-sectional variations in public support for European integration. Using Eurobarometer surveys and OECD data on EC trade from 1973–1989, we investigate these hypotheses in a pooled cross-sectional model. Our statistical results reveal that an individual's level of support is positively related to her nation's security and trade interests in EC membership and her personal potential to benefit from liberalized markets for goods, labour, and money.

Biodegradable polymeric microspheres have been prepared by spray drying, precipitation, rotary evaporation and press grinding methods. Erosion of microspheres of poly(lactide), poly(3-hydroxybutyrate), copolymers of lactide and glycolide, and copolymers of 3-hydroxybutyrate and 3-hydroxyvalerate at 85 degrees C and 37 degrees C have been studied using ion chromatography, nuclear magnetic resonance, residual mass measurements, viscometry and gel permeation chromatography. Such studies demonstrated that these polyester matrices degraded via (1) random chain scission and (2) release of soluble monomeric and oligomeric products. Protein release from microspheres prepared by these methods indicated that most of the protein is released before the polymer matrix loses weight.

To explore systematic differences in economic reasoning and what might account for them, we investigate how sociocultural conditions affect transitions to market economies in the West African country of Benin. We probe the importance of several factors: basic economic norms, utility maximization behavior, individual-level personal capital, and individual-level social capital. The evidence, based on experiments embedded in an opinion survey, indicates that Beninese citizens widely share commitments to the basic foundations of economic interaction, e.g., property rights. The nature of social capital varies across cultural and political contexts and accounts for cross-contextual variation in the costs associated with cooperative behavior and in utility maximization behavior.

Biodegradable microspheres of poly(L-lactide) and copolymers of lactide and glycolide have been prepared by spray drying. Degradation studies of these microspheres using residual mass measurements, viscometry and gel permeation chromatography indicated the entire mass of polyester matrices was maintained for 10, 30 days and 6–10 months for 50:50 and 85:15 copolymers and poly(L-lactide), respectively. The continuous drop in polymer intrinsic viscosity and molecular weight during hydrolysis suggested that matrix degradation began as soon as these microspheres were placed in the buffer and that their degradation proceeded through random-chain scission. Protein release, using bovine serum albumin micro-spheres, showed that release from 50:50 copolymer was independent of polymer molecular weight over a range from 31,000 to 93,000. The release was, however, dependent on the polymer composition and BSA loading in the microspheres. A burst-effect was found in the release study for microspheres prepared from copolymers. The identity and integrity of the released protein was confirmed by sodium dodecyl sulfate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis on the release products of polymeric microspheres containing BSA, FPL-R and EcoBacR-Plus vaccines. These results suggested that the release BSA (or vaccine) from polymeric microspheres could be sustained for up to one month.

As the research methodology more closely approximates the causal process being analyzed, the inferences and predictions derived from that methodology will better represent actual behavior. Statistical models were specified on the basis of accepted theories of voting behavior and political cleavages in the Netherlands and Great Britain. We hypothesize that multinomial models provide a more accurate characterization of voting behavior in countries with more than two political parties competing for votes. Binomial logit, multinomial logit, and nested multinomial logit models of voting behavior are estimated on Dutch and British National Election Study data. Compared to binomial methods, we find that multinomial models of voting behavior produce results that are more congruent with accepted theories of Dutch and British politics.

The premise of this chapter is that human engagement of city dwellers in acts of urban greening, or environmental stewardship, collectively constitutes a social movement for greater access to the natural environment. The power of urban greening as a social movement is particularly salient for disadvantaged communities in promoting greater resilience, health, and well-being. Grounded in the geographies of urban greening associated with Buffalo and New York City, we consider how some civic environmental stewardship programs positively impact youth. More specifically, we contend that such programs provide vulnerable populations such as adolescents with opportunities for social interaction that include intergenerational bridges and mentoring relationships that confer the psychological resilience needed to sustain such local activism. We develop a systems perspective illustrating how participants in successful civic environmental stewardship programs develop an enhanced sense of control and belonging to a community. The connections that individual residents feel to their surrounding community manifest in a heightened concern for others and increased activism promoting public access to green space.

Social networks play a mediating role in the dissemination of information and beliefs in which trust increases the likelihood that a person relies on a particular source (Huckfeldt and Sprague 1987; Krueger et al. 2017). Trust is often grounded in group identity, where people are more likely to receive information and accept beliefs disseminated by sources aligned with their identity group(s) than from sources aligned with groups that are in conflict with their identity group(s). Group attachment acts as an information filter, in that the beliefs of group members are shaped by an accepted information environment that is biased toward the beliefs of sources aligned with the person’s identity group(s). Extant research has found the impact of trust increases with the number and variety of identity groups, that is, group heterogeneity, the average density and closeness of social links within identity groups, that is, intra-group cohesion, and the level of grievance between identity groups, that is, inter-group resentment (Fearon and Laitin 1996; Habyarimana et al. 2007). Insufficient attention, however, has been paid to how these causal factors interact within a single theoretical framework. This chapter contributes to social network theory by developing and experimenting with an agent-based model to simulate the dynamic interaction of group heterogeneity, intra-group cohesion and inter-group resentment in shaping the dissemination of beliefs within a society. The model developed for this study simulates an information environment overlaid on an urban landscape in which particular identity group sources disseminate subjective beliefs that conflict with information disseminated by neutral or authoritative (government or scientific) sources. Whether an agent receives and accepts a message will depend on its trust in the source, which is specified as a function of group identity, and the extent to which messages received are in conflict with its current opinion, which is a function of past accepted messages. While this specification is consistent with leading theories of information processing in belief formation (Zaller 1992), it more explicitly incorporates the role of confirmation bias. The model is applied to develop theoretical expectations for the substantive context of the dissemination of information and beliefs about oral health care in low-income, Chinese American communities in New York City, in order to inform a pilot study offering oral-health outreach services to underserved adults in need of dental homes (Northridge et al. 2018).