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In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked serious concern within qualitative research communities and raised fundamental questions about the meaning, value, costs, and intellectual relevance of transparency for qualitative inquiry. In this Perspectives Reflection, we crystallize the central findings of a three-year deliberative process—the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations (QTD)—involving hundreds of political scientists in a broad discussion of these issues. Following an overview of the process and the key insights that emerged, we present summaries of the QTD Working Groups’ final reports. Drawing on a series of public, online conversations that unfolded at www.qualtd.net, the reports unpack transparency’s promise, practicalities, risks, and limitations in relation to different qualitative methodologies, forms of evidence, and research contexts. Taken as a whole, these reports—the full versions of which can be found in the Supplementary Materials—offer practical guidance to scholars designing and implementing qualitative research, and to editors, reviewers, and funders seeking to develop criteria of evaluation that are appropriate—as understood by relevant research communities—to the forms of inquiry being assessed. We dedicate this Reflection to the memory of our coauthor and QTD working group leader Kendra Koivu.1
This concluding chapter summarizes our findings and presents the major conclusions of our work. We then discuss a number of democratic tradeoffs related to ballot design.
This chapter provides and overview of the book and uses the case of the 2013 election reform bill in North Carolina to illustrate the key arguments of the manuscript. Partisan majorities in states often change laws regarding the ballot format to help them remain in power. This chapter also describes the basic ballot types used in the U.S. and summarizes the findings of each chapter.
This chapter provides empirical analysis of ballot rolloff from 1940-2000. This era featured less partisan conflict than did the eras that came before and after this time period. One result of this is that ballot law changes were less partisan in nature and tended to work to benefit incument politicians. Our data demonstrate that ballot type faciltated growth in the incumbency advantage and produced lawmakers that were more effective at shepherding bills through the legislative process.
This chapter examines ballot formats in the United States from 1888 to 1940. Following the adoption of the Australian secret ballot states still had to decide the particular design of the new secret ballot. We show in this chapter that the decisions had enormous consequences for voter turnout and ballot roll-off at the state level. We provide detailed case studies of California, New York, and Maryland as well as an empirical analysis of voter turnout and ballot roll-off during this period.
This chapter provides detailed case studies of recent ballot reform efforts in Michigan and North Carolina. These states have detailed data on the level of straight ticket voting by county. These data are used to demonstrate how county characteristics such as race, ethnicity, and poverty interact with straight ticket voting and ballot rolloff. We find a strong connection between straight-ticket voting, minority populations, and ballot rolloff. This chapter concludes with analysis of recent changes in Iowa and West Virginia. The findings for Iowa suggest that the effects of ballot design changes are muted in areas that have lower proportions of non-white residents and that are less densely populated.
This chapter demonstrates how ballot formats can nudge voters. Applying concepts from behavioral economics, we argue that the structure in which choices are presented can nudge voters toward certain decisions. We then apply this theoretical structure to the major types of ballots used in the United States and develop expectations as to how various ballot formats will affect election outcomes.
Optical tracking systems typically trade off between astrometric precision and field of view. In this work, we showcase a networked approach to optical tracking using very wide field-of-view imagers that have relatively low astrometric precision on the scheduled OSIRIS-REx slingshot manoeuvre around Earth on 22 Sep 2017. As part of a trajectory designed to get OSIRIS-REx to NEO 101955 Bennu, this flyby event was viewed from 13 remote sensors spread across Australia and New Zealand to promote triangulatable observations. Each observatory in this portable network was constructed to be as lightweight and portable as possible, with hardware based off the successful design of the Desert Fireball Network. Over a 4-h collection window, we gathered 15 439 images of the night sky in the predicted direction of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. Using a specially developed streak detection and orbit determination data pipeline, we detected 2 090 line-of-sight observations. Our fitted orbit was determined to be within about 10 km of orbital telemetry along the observed 109 262 km length of OSIRIS-REx trajectory, and thus demonstrating the impressive capability of a networked approach to Space Surveillance and Tracking.
US federalism grants state legislators the authority to design many aspects of election administration, including ballot features that mediate how citizens understand and engage with the choices available to them when casting their votes. Seemingly innocuous features in the physical design of ballots, such as the option to cast a straight ticket with a single checkmark, can have significant aggregate effects. Drawing on theoretical insights from behavioral economics and extensive data on state ballot laws from 1888 to the present, as well as in-depth case studies, this book shows how strategic politicians use ballot design to influence voting and elections, drawing comparisons across different periods in American history with varying levels of partisanship and contention. Engstrom and Roberts demonstrate the sweeping impact of ballot design on voting, elections, and democratic representation.
This chapter comprises the following sections: names, taxonomy, subspecies and distribution, descriptive notes, habitat, movements and home range, activity patterns, feeding ecology, reproduction and growth, behavior, parasites and diseases, status in the wild, and status in captivity.
Gravitational waves from coalescing neutron stars encode information about nuclear matter at extreme densities, inaccessible by laboratory experiments. The late inspiral is influenced by the presence of tides, which depend on the neutron star equation of state. Neutron star mergers are expected to often produce rapidly rotating remnant neutron stars that emit gravitational waves. These will provide clues to the extremely hot post-merger environment. This signature of nuclear matter in gravitational waves contains most information in the 2–4 kHz frequency band, which is outside of the most sensitive band of current detectors. We present the design concept and science case for a Neutron Star Extreme Matter Observatory (NEMO): a gravitational-wave interferometer optimised to study nuclear physics with merging neutron stars. The concept uses high-circulating laser power, quantum squeezing, and a detector topology specifically designed to achieve the high-frequency sensitivity necessary to probe nuclear matter using gravitational waves. Above 1 kHz, the proposed strain sensitivity is comparable to full third-generation detectors at a fraction of the cost. Such sensitivity changes expected event rates for detection of post-merger remnants from approximately one per few decades with two A+ detectors to a few per year and potentially allow for the first gravitational-wave observations of supernovae, isolated neutron stars, and other exotica.