Explore the vast range of titles available.

In the three years we have been editing ASR, we have been impressed with the methodological breadth and depth of the submissions to the journal. Among the subset of papers that use primarily quantitative analytic strategies, an equally impressive range of methods and techniques is on display. The field has come a long way since any of the three of us were in graduate school and, indeed, many of the articles we have published in our role as editors represent the forefront of sophistication in techniques as varied as fixed and random effects on the one end to web scraping and text analysis on the other end. In this editorial, we would like to focus on a set of issues that seem to come up repeatedly in the thousands of papers we have read. These are not errors per se, but fall in the category of gaps or lags between previously accepted practices among quantitative scholars in sociology and the state of the art consensus among quantitative methodologists. These issues happen with such frequency that we feel compelled to offer some recommendations for future ASR submissions.

Despite the dearth of research on innovation, the key determinants of innovation performance still need to be clarified. Besides, a comparative analysis of the determinants of innovation performance across countries at different income levels has yet to be found. This study, therefore, aims to bridge this research gap by considering the innovation performance of 63 countries. Participating countries were purposefully selected from the Global Innovation Index (GII) dataset. Multistage and multimodal analyses were conducted, including multiple linear regressions, hierarchical regression, and ANOVA, to examine the variation in innovation performance and pinpoint critical determinants in each category of countries. The result reveals that human capital, research, infrastructure, and business sophistication are the key pillars determining countries’ innovation performance. In a variable-level analysis, innovation linkage and knowledge absorption (both of business sophistication), research and development (R&D), and infrastructure (inculcating both physical and digital) are the best predicting variables. The shortage of human capital to promote R&D is the biggest bottleneck hampering innovation in the lower-middle-income category. Also, both human capital for R&D activities and innovation linkage equally affect the upper-middle-income, and the latter one, innovation linkage, remains the main challenge even for the high-income category. The study implies that innovation performance predicts a country’s economic growth. The level of innovation performance and the determinants of innovation vary per the countries’ income levels. Accordingly, countries and firms in various income categories should prioritize tackling their respective bottlenecks hindering innovation performance in their policy directions. The study claims to have extended the horizon of understanding determinants of innovation across countries and revealed the most crucial factors in each category of countries. Further empirical comparative research can be done by incorporating an informal institution, national culture, as an additional determinant and specifying sectors across income categories.

This study conceptualizes lexical sophistication as a multidimensional phenomenon by reducing numerous lexical features of lexical sophistication into 12 aggregated components (i.e., dimensions) via a principal component analysis approach. These components were then used to predict second language (L2) writing proficiency levels, holistic lexical proficiency scores, and longitudinal lexical growth. The results from regression analyses indicated that 5 lexical components (i.e., bigram and trigram strength of directional association, content word properties, bigram mutual information, bigram and trigram proportions, and word specificity) explained 16.1% and 31.0% of the variance of L2 writing proficiency and lexical proficiency, respectively. Two additional components (i.e., word acquisition properties and content word frequency) explained an additional 8.5% of the variance of L2 writing proficiency. Six lexical components (i.e., bigram and trigram proportions, word acquisition properties, content word frequency, bigram frequency and range, content word properties, and function word frequency and range) showed significant developmental trends in L2 beginning learners over a year-long period. These findings provide information about the multidimensional nature of lexical sophistication by expanding its scope beyond frequency and toward other primary dimensions that include various lexical and phrasal features such as concreteness, orthographic density, hypernymy, and n-gram frequency and association strength. (Verlag).

Harmful lies are nothing new. But the ability to distort reality has taken an exponential leap forward with “deep fake” technology. This capability makes it possible to create audio and video of real people saying and doing things they never said or did. Machine learning techniques are escalating the technology’s sophistication, making deep fakes ever more realistic and increasingly resistant to detection. Deep-fake technology has characteristics that enable rapid and widespread diffusion, putting it into the hands of both sophisticated and unsophisticated actors. While deep-fake technology will bring certain benefits, it also will introduce many harms. The marketplace of ideas already suffers from truth decay as our networked information environment interacts in toxic ways with our cognitive biases. Deep fakes will exacerbate this problem significantly. Individuals and businesses will face novel forms of exploitation, intimidation, and personal sabotage. The risks to our democracy and to national security are profound as well. Our aim is to provide the first in-depth assessment of the causes and consequences of this disruptive technological change, and to explore the existing and potential tools for responding to it. We survey a broad array of responses, including: the role of technological solutions; criminal penalties, civil liability, and regulatory action; military and covert-action responses; economic sanctions; and market developments. We cover the waterfront from immunities to immutable authentication trails, offering recommendations to improve law and policy and anticipating the pitfalls embedded in various solutions.

Three decades ago, most scholars simply assumed that the Soviet Union would remain stable. This assumption was suddenly proven false. Today, people have even greater confidence in the durability of the world's affluent, consolidated democracies. Most political scientists, however, have steadfastly declined to view these trends as an indication of structural problems in the functioning of liberal democracy, much less as a threat to its very existence. A wide range of leading scholars, including Ronald Inglehart, Pippa Norris, Christian Welzel, and Russell J. Dalton, have generally interpreted these trends as benign indications of the increasing political sophistication of younger generations of \"critical\" citizens who are less willing to defer to traditional elites. Citizens in a number of supposedly consolidated democracies in North America and Western Europe have not only grown more critical of their political leaders. People can have an abstract allegiance to \"democracy\" while simultaneously rejecting many key norms and institutions that have traditionally been regarded as necessary ingredients of democratic governance.

We show that mutual fund investors rely on simple signals and likely do not engage in sophisticated learning about managers’ alpha as widely believed. Simplistic performance chasing best explains aggregate flows to the mutual fund space and flows across funds. These results hold for both actively managed and passive index funds. Empirical patterns commonly interpreted as reflecting learning about managerial skill also appear in falsification tests and are mechanical. Our results are consistent with the view that, on average, households are homo sapiens with limited financial sophistication rather than hyperrational alpha-maximizing agents, as often assumed in the literature.

What are the psychological consequences of the increasingly politicized nature of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States relative to similar Western countries? In a two-wave study completed early (March) and later (December) in the pandemic, we found that polarization was greater in the United States (N = 1,339) than in Canada (N = 644) and the United Kingdom. (N = 1,283). Political conservatism in the United States was strongly associated with engaging in weaker mitigation behaviors, lower COVID-19 risk perceptions, greater misperceptions, and stronger vaccination hesitancy. Although there was some evidence that cognitive sophistication was associated with increased polarization in the United States in December (but not March), cognitive sophistication was nonetheless consistently negatively correlated with misperceptions and vaccination hesitancy across time, countries, and party lines. Furthermore, COVID-19 skepticism in the United States was strongly correlated with distrust in liberal-leaning mainstream news outlets and trust in conservative-leaning news outlets, suggesting that polarization may be driven by differences in information environments.

Political scientists lack domain-specific measures for the purpose of measuring the sophistication of political communication. We systematically review the shortcomings of existing approaches, before developing a new and better method along with software tools to apply it. We use crowdsourcing to perform thousands of pairwise comparisons of text snippets and incorporate these results into a statistical model of sophistication. This includes previously excluded features such as parts of speech and a measure of word rarity derived from dynamic term frequencies in the Google Books. data set. Our technique not only shows which features are appropriate to the political domain and how, but also provides a measure easily applied and rescaled to political texts in a way that facilitates probabilistic comparisons. We reanalyze the State of the Union corpus to demonstrate how conclusions differ when using our improved approach, including the ability to compare complexity as a function of covariates.

Backed by strong empirical results, obtained from several different specification and sensitivity analyses, this paper contends that countries with high-intellectual quotient populations produce and export more sophisticated/complex products. This result is further reinforced by the quality of democracy.

This paper aims to advance our understanding of how children’s use of vocabulary in writing changes as they progress through their school careers. It examines the extent to which a model of lexical sophistication as use of low-frequency, register-appropriate words adequately captures development in vocabulary use across the course of compulsory education in England. We find that the received model needs elaborating in a number of important ways. Specifically: (1) the average frequency of words in the repertoire used by older children is no lower than that of younger children. However, younger children’s writing is characterized by extensive repetition of high frequency verbs and adjectives and of low frequency nouns (the latter being a product of a focus on entities which are rarely discussed in adult writing). The role of repetition in this finding implies that lexical sophistication is inseparable from lexical diversity, a construct which is usually treated as distinct. (2) Younger children’s writing shows a preference for fiction-like vocabulary over academic-like vocabulary. As they mature, children come to make greater use of academic vocabulary in both their literary and non-literary writing, though this increase is greatest in their non-literary writing. Use of fiction vocabulary remains constant across year groups but decreases sharply in non-literary writing, showing an enhanced sense of register appropriateness. This development of register appropriate word use can be captured by relatively simple frequency-based measures that could readily be employed by teachers and researchers to track writers’ development in this aspect of word use.