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Since Watergate, more than two hundred fifty members of the House of Representatives have been involved in various scandals. The author finds that roughly 40 percent of incumbents did not \"survive\" their scandal. Incumbents who stood for reelection lost 5 percent of the general election vote share, on average, but the electoral repercussions vary across types of scandals and could be magnified in the presence of a quality challenger. A scandal-tainted incumbent defending his or her seat does not necessarily fare better than an untainted open-seat candidate, a finding that provides a justification for stronger ethics rules.

This paper proposes and tests a new formal model of the competition for capital, using the analogy of a “tournament” as a substitute for the ”race-to-the-bottom” model. Our key insight is that political costs that accompany legislating have both direct and indirect effects on the likelihood and scale of reforms. While countries with higher political costs are less likely themselves to enact reforms, the presence of these costs also reduces competing countries' incentives to reform regardless of their own political costs. Domestic politics therefore mitigates the pressures for downward convergence of tax policy despite increased capital mobility. We examine the capital tax policies in OECD countries during the period from 1980 to 1997 and find that states are sensitive to tax reforms in competitor countries, although their responses to reforms are mediated by their own domestic costs to reform. We define two potential sources of political costs of reform: transaction costs, due to the presence of multiple veto players in the legislative process, and constituency costs, due to ideological opposition to policy changes that benefit capital. Our evidence reveals that a reduction in these costs either domestically or abroad increases the likelihood that a country enacts tax reforms.

In 2010, the Houston police department admitted 20 508 publicly intoxicated individuals into its jail. To address jail overcrowding, the city created a jail diversion policy that allowed law enforcement to admit publicly intoxicated individuals into a new sobering center. By 2017, public intoxication jail admissions had decreased by 95%, freeing valuable resources. A promising public health intervention, sobering centers offer an alternative to incarceration and relieve overuse of emergency services while assisting individuals with substance use issues.

Conventional wisdom views voter choice in House elections as preordained by party identification, incumbency, and perceptions of national conditions. In an analysis of voter behavior in House elections between 1990 and 2000, we find instead that voters are quite heterogeneous. Voters who hold ambivalent partisan attitudes, who typically constitute 30% of the electorate, reduce their reliance on party identification; this effect is entirely independent of the strength of identification. Individuals holding ambivalent partisan attitudes that both lack political knowledge and are presented with little campaign stimulus are more likely to engage in economic voting. Individuals holding ambivalent partisan attitudes that either are knowledgeable about politics or are presented with stimulating campaigns are more likely to engage in ideological voting. Thus, campaign competition and national partisan competition each play a role in assuring that ordinary voters may participate meaningfully in the political process.

Scholars possess little theoretical understanding of how presidents behave during scandals. Existing presidential scholarship has focused on \"offensive\" communication, aimed at achieving legislative or policy goals, whereas the authors' interest is in \"defensive\" communication. Using a game-theoretic signaling model of the president-media relationship, the authors identify conditions affecting White House stonewalling and media feeding frenzies. The president's optimal behavior changes depending on circumstances, particularly the level of presidential involvement in the alleged misdeeds. The authors illustrate this with a case study of the Iran-Contra scandals and an empirical analysis of scandals from the Nixon through the Bush administrations.

Scott Basinger and Brandon Rottinghaus list and classify presidential scandals occurring since 1972. They examine the different types of scandals and analyze news coverage of these scandals and their durations. They conclude that a small, unrepresentative set of scandals accounts for most news coverage, generating the misperception of scandals as drawn-out affairs involving large numbers of officials. Adapted from the source document.

This paper forecasts current senators’ votes on Merrick Garland’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, in the unlikely case that a vote actually takes place. The forecasts are necessarily conditional, awaiting measurement of the nominee’s characteristics. Nonetheless, a model that combines parameters estimated from existing data with values of some measurable characteristics of senators—particularly their party affiliations, party loyalty levels, and ideological positions—is sufficient to identify potential swing voters in the Senate. By accounting for a more nuanced and refined understanding of the confirmation process, our model reveals that if President Obama were to nominate almost any nominee (conservative or liberal) today, that nominee would be rejected if a vote was allowed to take place. So why nominate anyone at all? Obama’s hope for a successful confirmation must come from the stochastic component, that is, from outside the traditional decision-making calculus.

Scholarship on congressional elections typically analyzes either the sum or the division of the major party vote at the district level. Our main innovation is to model the votes received by each candidate as a separate dependent variable, utilizing statistical methods developed to analyze multiparty elections. Because we are dealing with a substantive area in which endogeneity problems are rampant, we synthesize an instrumental variables approach with a \"compositional data\" model. This approach allows one to study the mobilizing and persuasive effects of congressional campaigns at the aggregate level.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a large, infrared space telescope that has recently started its science program which will enable breakthroughs in astrophysics and planetary science. Notably, JWST will provide the very first observations of the earliest luminous objects in the universe and start a new era of exoplanet atmospheric characterization. This transformative science is enabled by a 6.6 m telescope that is passively cooled with a 5 layer sunshield. The primary mirror is comprised of 18 controllable, low areal density hexagonal segments, that were aligned and phased relative to each other in orbit using innovative image-based wave front sensing and control algorithms. This revolutionary telescope took more than two decades to develop with a widely distributed team across engineering disciplines. We present an overview of the telescope requirements, architecture, development, superb on-orbit performance, and lessons learned. JWST successfully demonstrates a segmented aperture space telescope and establishes a path to building even larger space telescopes.

According to strategic-politicians theory, political elites help ensure electoral responsiveness even when the mass public is deficient. Testing this theory requires measuring the effects of candidate experience and campaign spending, but one must confront endogeneity problems, because the theory requires potential candidates and campaign contributors to be responsive to district partisan conditions and national partisan tides. By applying an instrumental-variable method to control for selection bias, we found that challenger experience only matters indirectly, through its effect on campaign expenditures, but partisan context matters both directly and indirectly. We theorize that challenger experience is best understood as an informational shortcut: it signals incumbent vulnerability to potential campaign contributors.