We build a simple model to capture the major virtues and drawbacks of making public officials accountable (i.e., subjecting them to reelection): On the one hand, accountablity allows the public to screen and discipline their officials; on the other, it may induce those officials to pander to public opinion and put too little weight on minority welfare. We study when decision-making powers shoul...

The purpose of this review was to examine sport officials’ motivation and passion to become and remain a referee in today’s sport climate. There are endless accounts of misconduct towards officials from participants, coaches, parents and fans. This review examined the research evidence that explained why officials continue to work in their sport and tried to determine what motivations were fact...

In the debate about partisan election administration, little attention has been focused on the views of local election officials. Election officials can be purveyors of partisanship as well as observers of the election administration environment. We use a series of national surveys of local election officials to examine the degree to which local officials of opposing parties have different poli...

We present a flexible framework for implementing reasoning with uncertainty: Semistructured Probabilistic Databases. This framework bridges the gap between the process of obtaining probabilistic information from data and its use in AI applications by providing the facilities to store and query diverse and complex probabilistic data.