DOWNS AWARD

Vindicating Anthony Downs

P ositive turnout rates in the United States and elsewhere are widely considered “an embarrassing limitation of the economic approach to politics” because, for any one voter, “the costs of casting a ballot in any large election are almost always greater than the potential benefits, which are dependent on the unlikely occurrence of casting the winning or tie vote in an election” ~Knack 1992, 133...

Mdm2: the ups and downs.

Mdm2 was first described 12 years ago. Interest in this oncogene has risen since its identification as a protein that binds and efficiently inactivates the p53 tumor suppressor protein. This interest was further boosted by the discovery that the mdm2 gene is actually a target for direct transcriptional activation by p53, thus defining an autoregulatory feedback loop for the intracellular modula...

Award 2007 Winners Academic Award

Innovation and Benefits A fundamental aspect of chemistry involves creating chemical bonds between carbon atoms. Chemical processes commonly used to make such bonds usually also generate significant amounts of waste. Professor Krische developed a broad new class of chemical reactions that make bonds between carbon atoms using hydrogen and metal catalysts. This new class of reactions can be used...

Downs and Two-party Convergence

We take as our starting point the insights of Downs (1957) into twoparty competition. A careful reading of Downs offers a much more sophisticated and nuanced portrait of the factors affecting party differentiation than the simplistic notion that, in plurality elections, we ought to expect party convergence to the views of the median voter. Later scholars have built on Downsian ideas to see what...

TRANSSENTENTIAL MEDITATIONS Ups and downs in dynamic semantics TRANSSENTENTIAL MEDITATIONS Ups and downs in dynamic semantics