Two lines of Supreme Court decisions define the extent to which the Constitution protects public employees1 from dismissal for the exercise of their First Amendment rights.2 The first set of cases governs the employees' right to speak on matters of public concern; the second governs their right to political affiliation. However, the Court has not explained the relationship between these two app...

— Across sub-Saharan Africa agricultural subsidy programs have again become a common strategy for combatting rural poverty, increasing agricultural production, and reducing food insecurity. Despite a large literature examining subsidies’ effects on output and welfare, little is known about their political effects. This paper examines Malawi’s Agricultural Input Subsidy Programme, one of the lar...

It is well known that emotions intersect with obvious social categories (e.g., race), influencing both how targets are categorized and the emotions that are read from their faces. Here, we examined the influence of emotional expression on the perception of less obvious group memberships for which, in the absence of obvious and stable physical markers, emotion may serve as a major avenue for gro...

Objective: Determining which subgroups show the most substantial differences on a measure is a common use of surveys. How to accurately and fairly determine which subgrouping is most important has not been addressed adequately in the literature. I show how dominance analysis is a useful way to identify the most important subgroup differences. Because surveys commonly employ complex sampling des...

The basic notion that an individual’s freedom to choose will advance society at large is a cornerstone of political philosophy and of the economic theory of the Western world. Early political philosophers such as John Stuart Mill and legendary economists such as Adam Smith have advocated a utilitarian approach to political and economic life, in which the advancement of one’s own interests also ...

Background Stigmatizing attitudes toward persons with mental disorders is a well-established and global phenomenon often leading to discrimination and social exclusion. Although previous research in the United States showed that conservative ideology has been related to stigmatizing attitudes toward mental disorders, there is reason to believe that this mechanism plays a different role in...