Mazel tov! Rice will offer a new minor in Jewish s tud ies beg inn ing this fall. The minor, which was approved by the Faculty Sena te last week, is the start of a long-term effort to bring a ful l-f ledged Jewish s tud ies program to Rice. Professor of Judaic Studies Gregory Kaplan, a long with Professor in Biblical Studies Matthais Henze, both members of the Religious Studies Depar tment , sp...

How can the differing levels of voter participation in sub-national parliamentary elections be explained? To answer this question I start from the current literature on cross-national comparative research, and apply explanatory approaches from this literature to the analysis of electoral turnout in sub-national units. I focus on two competing influential assessments in the literature, instituti...

We propose a new game theoretic approach to modeling large elections that overcomes the “paradox of voting” in a costly voting framework, without reliance on the assumption of ad hoc preferences for voting. The key innovation that we propose is the adoption of a “smooth” policy rule under which the degree to which parties favor their own interests is increasing in their margin of victory. In ot...

BACKGROUND The unique biomechanical demands placed on ballet students predispose to injury and pain. The aim of this study was to evaluate the prevalence of lumbosacral pain in ballet school students and to identify possible risk factors for the pain. MATERIAL AND METHODS The study group comprised 71 ballet school students, including 45 females and 26 males, aged 15-18 years (mean 16.5 years)...

One contentious question in contemporary election administration is the impact of voter identification requirements. We study a Virginia law which allows us to isolate the impact of requiring voters to show photo identification. Using novel, precinctlevel data, we find that the percentage of registered voters without a driver’s license and over age 85 are both positively associated with the num...

The combined influence of (1) calving period (early or late) and (2) overwintering contamination by residual infective larvae (high or low) on subsequent exposure of suckler calves to gastrointestinal nematodes was investigated. We found that the effect of calving date was greater than the level of residual contamination. This was because the adult cows produced large quantities of manure conta...

Does party ambivalence, that is, simultaneously evaluating positively more than one political party, decrease turnout? The extant literature on this question is limited to the American case, and findings are rather mixed. Using data from Comparative Study of Electoral Systems project, paper provides a first large-scale comparative analysis ambivalence-turnout nexus in 46 countries. Based two di...