The Variables and Slow Transients Survey (VAST) on the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) is designed to detect highly variable and transient radio sources on timescales from 5 s to $\sim\!5$ yr. In this paper, we present the survey description, observation strategy and initial results from the VAST Phase I Pilot Survey. This pilot survey consists of $\sim\!162$ h of observations conducted at a central frequency of 888 MHz between 2019 August and 2020 August, with a typical rms sensitivity of $0.24\ \mathrm{mJy\ beam}^{-1}$ and angular resolution of $12-20$ arcseconds. There are 113 fields, each of which was observed for 12 min integration time, with between 5 and 13 repeats, with cadences between 1 day and 8 months. The total area of the pilot survey footprint is 5 131 square degrees, covering six distinct regions of the sky. An initial search of two of these regions, totalling 1 646 square degrees, revealed 28 highly variable and/or transient sources. Seven of these are known pulsars, including the millisecond pulsar J2039–5617. Another seven are stars, four of which have no previously reported radio detection (SCR J0533–4257, LEHPM 2-783, UCAC3 89–412162 and 2MASS J22414436–6119311). Of the remaining 14 sources, two are active galactic nuclei, six are associated with galaxies and the other six have no multi-wavelength counterparts and are yet to be identified.

The Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey (RACS) is the first large-area survey to be conducted with the full 36-antenna Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope. RACS will provide a shallow model of the ASKAP sky that will aid the calibration of future deep ASKAP surveys. RACS will cover the whole sky visible from the ASKAP site in Western Australia and will cover the full ASKAP band of 700–1800 MHz. The RACS images are generally deeper than the existing NRAO VLA Sky Survey and Sydney University Molonglo Sky Survey radio surveys and have better spatial resolution. All RACS survey products will be public, including radio images (with $\sim$ 15 arcsec resolution) and catalogues of about three million source components with spectral index and polarisation information. In this paper, we present a description of the RACS survey and the first data release of 903 images covering the sky south of declination $+41^\circ$ made over a 288-MHz band centred at 887.5 MHz.

In 2017, transgender woman Danica Roem stunned political observers in Virginia by unseating a long-time anti-LGBTQ legislator from a conservative district in the Virginia House of Delegates.1 She was the first openly transgender person elected and seated to a state legislature. Delegate Roem’s election was historic in LGBTQ political representation, but it also occurred in a period when backlash against the LGBTQ community seemed to be growing (Taylor, Lewis, and Haider-Markel 2018). These two threads led us to ask: How are LGBTQ candidates achieving historic successes even as forces seem mobilized against them?

According to reformers, legislative term limits should increase voter turnout by enhancing electoral competitiveness for legislative seats. However, this claim has been largely untested. The only existing study of the effect of legislative term limits on voter turnout, to date, finds that turnout in California did not increase after the imposition of term limits and may have decreased turnout. Yet, it is unclear whether this result generalizes to other states. This study employs a comparative state analysis of both aggregate turnout and district-level turnout rates in state legislative elections. We find that term limits significantly increase voting rates in state legislative elections.

Does direct democracy strengthen popular control of public policy in the United States? A major challenge in evaluating policy representation is the measurement of state-level public opinion and public policy. Although recent studies of policy responsiveness and congruence have provided improved measures of public opinion using multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) techniques, these analyses are limited by their static nature and cross-sectional design. Issue attitudes, unlike more general political orientations, often vary considerably over time. Unless the dynamics of issue-specific public opinion are appropriately incorporated into the analyses, tests of policy responsiveness and congruence may be misleading. Thus, we assess the degree of policy representation in direct democracy states regarding same-sex relationship recognition policies using dynamic models of policy adoption and congruence that employ dynamic MRP estimates of attitudes toward same-sex marriage. We find that direct democracy institutions increase both policy responsiveness and congruence with issue-specific public opinion.

This article examines how the institutional characteristics of state legislatures and governors affect state policy priorities. We argue that differences in the nature of their respective constituencies lead legislators to press for particularized benefits while governors favor collective goods. Empirical analysis of state-level data from 1982 through 2011 confirms that this is the case. The organizational arrangements of the two branches of government have an impact that is usually greater than that of state public opinion but generally less than that of state interest groups. The results from this analysis are important because they show that institutional structure has systematic effects that are independent of ideology, partisanship, and the other factors that are known to shape state policy making.

Sudden hospital closures displace patients from usual sources of care and force them to access facilities that lack their prior medical records. For patients with complex needs and for nearby hospitals already strained by high volume, disaster-related hospital closures induce a public health emergency. Our objective was to analyze responses of patients from public versus private emergency departments after closure of their usual hospital after Hurricane Sandy. Using a statewide database of emergency visits, we followed patients with an established pattern of accessing 1 of 2 hospitals that closed after Hurricane Sandy: Bellevue Hospital Center and NYU Langone Medical Center. We determined how these patients redistributed for emergency care after the storm. We found that proximity strongly predicted patient redistribution to nearby open hospitals. However, for patients from the closed public hospital, this redistribution was also influenced by hospital ownership, because patients redistributed to other public hospitals at rates higher than expected by proximity alone. This differential response to hospital closures demonstrates significant differences in how public and private patients respond to changes in health care access during disasters. Public health response must consider these differences to meet the needs of all patients affected by disasters and other public health emergencies. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2015;9:256-264).

Although the U.S. judiciary is designed to be an independent and counter-majoritarian arbiter of the law, many states feature electoral institutions that may expose judges to public pressure. Scholars have demonstrated that judicial elections provide a clear link between public opinion and judicial decision making that may undermine the ability of courts to act in counter-majoritarian ways to protect minority rights. We extend this line of inquiry by examining whether direct democracy institutions have a similar effect of enhancing the impact of public opinion on judicial behavior and reducing the likelihood of judges voting in favor of minority rights. Empirical results from an analysis of gay rights cases in the American states from 1981 to 2004 provide evidence that direct democracy, in conjunction with electoral retention methods, significantly increases the effect of public opinion on judicial decisions.

(See the commentary by Pfeiffer and Beldavs, on pages 984–986.)

In “The Dog that Didn't Bark: The Role of Canines in the 2008 Campaign,” Diana Mutz (2010) argues that dog ownership made voters significantly less likely to vote for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election. We examine this claim further. Although President Obama has owned a dog since shortly after his 2008 election, we argue that Bo's presence most likely did little to improve his owner's chances of being reelected in 2012. Rather, the apparent significance of dog ownership uncovered by Mutz is due largely to key variables being omitted from the analysis. Using the same data, we show that Obama didn't so much have trouble with dog owners in 2008 as he had trouble with conservative, rural, Southern whites, who, for reasons we examine, are more likely than other Americans to own dogs. Accordingly, we suspect that Bo failed to boost Obama's vote tally in 2012. While we recognize the tongue-in-jowl tone of portions of Mutz's article, this tale is an important one, and is consistent with recent research linking racial attitudes to levels of support for Barack Obama. We also argue that while scholars are often wise to include control variables such as “South” in studies of political attitudes and behavior, it is important to consider the variety of politically relevant characteristics that such variables may be capturing.

This article sheds new light on policy diffusion by exploring policy complexity in state-level lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) antidiscrimination policies. The multiple component event history approach taken in this research allows for the concurrent study of both policy content and the factors that affect policy adoption. Results reveal that the factors influencing policy adoption vary depending on both the content and scope of the policy in question. In addition to addressing laws that protect gay people from discrimination, this article is one of the first studies in the political science and policy literature to empirically investigate the spread of transgender-inclusive laws. Despite combined advocacy and public conflation of identities, gay and transgender-inclusive laws appear to be influenced by different internal and external factors.