National Tide Research Articles

Gerrymandering on Georgia's Mind: The Effects of Redistricting on Vote Choice in the 2006 Midterm Election*

Objective. We make use of individual‐level survey data from the 2006 midterm election in order to determine the degree to which redistricting affected the vote choice of whites residing in Georgia Congressional Districts 8 and 12.Methods. A multivariate probit model was used to assess the probability of voting for the GOP House candidate among voters represented by the same incumbent before and after redistricting versus voters who had been newly drawn into one of these districts.Results. Despite a national tide that favored the Democratic Party in the 2006 elections, redrawn whites were more likely to vote for the Republican challengers in the districts surveyed.Conclusions. Our findings indicate that redistricting can be used to dampen the incumbency advantage. In addition, the findings of this research also speak to the continuing Republican realignment of white voters in the Deep South and to the recognition that the effects of redistricting are dependent on political context.

Preface

You have accessMoreSectionsView PDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail Cite this article Woodworth Philip L 2006PrefacePhil. Trans. R. Soc. A.364783–784http://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2006.1755SectionYou have accessPreface Philip L Woodworth Philip L Woodworth Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Philip L Woodworth Philip L Woodworth Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Published:21 February 2006https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2006.1755A meeting dedicated to UK Sea Level Science was held on 16–17 February 2004 at the Royal Society. It was supported by the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory (POL) and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), and was attended by many of the UK's sea-level scientists, together with a number of invited experts from abroad.The first aim of the meeting was to launch the UK National Tidal and Sea Level Facility (NTSLF), the work of which at POL and at the British Oceanographic Data Centre is funded in large part by Defra. The NTSLF is responsible for the continuous monitoring of sea-levels around our coasts by the National Tide Gauge Network, for the efficient acquisition, quality control and distribution of data from the network, for the design and operation of a national network for land level monitoring in collaboration with the University of Nottingham, and for the development and maintenance of the storm surge and tide models which are used by the Storm Tide Forecasting Service at the Met Office.A second aim of the meeting was to enjoy a ‘Celebration of UK Sea Level Science’. The UK has a large, extended Sea Level Science community, with wide expertise encompassing themes such as climate change, oceanography, glaciology, geology, geodesy, coastal engineering and the socio-economics of coastal zones. As there had been no major UK meeting for some years which brought together scientists from the many different themes, we took the opportunity of holding one alongside the NTSLF launch.The lead speaker was Prof. John Lawton, Chief Executive of the Natural Environment Research Council, of which POL is a component, who presented an overview of Earth System Science, placing sea-level change in a wider environmental context. He was followed over the next two days by over 35 speakers and poster presenters (see www.pol.ac.uk/ntslf/news002.html for details). Most contributors agreed to provide papers for the present volume.An invited speaker was Dr Christian Le Provost, former Director of the Laboratoire d'Etudes en Géophysique et Océanographie Spatiale (LEGOS), Toulouse, who presented the topic of sea-level observations within operational oceanography. Christian died two weeks after the meeting. He was one of the world's foremost ocean tide modellers and a leader of a number of oceanographic and Earth observation programmes. He had recently become Chairman of the Global Sea Level Observing System (GLOSS). He was also a good friend to his many colleagues in the UK. I am delighted that a paper related to Christian's presentation has been written by his co-workers and is included in this volume.These papers cannot cover the full range of UK Sea Level Science but they do provide a good sampling. It is important to realize that the bulk of them present original research and are not review papers. No doubt their authors would be pleased to provide interested readers with additional references on their areas of work. Previous ArticleNext Article VIEW FULL TEXT DOWNLOAD PDF FiguresRelatedReferencesDetails This Issue15 April 2006Volume 364Issue 1841Theme Issue ‘Sea level science’ compiled by Philip L. Woodworth Article InformationDOI:https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2006.1755Published by:Royal SocietyPrint ISSN:1364-503XOnline ISSN:1471-2962History: Published online21/02/2006Published in print15/04/2006 License:© 2006 The Royal Society Citations and impact

Rocking the House: Competition and Turnout in the 2006 Midterm Election

Despite a national tide for the Democrats in the 2006 midterms that increased the number of competitive congressional races, national voter turnout rose only slightly. Consistent with previous findings, higher turnout in some states reflected increased competition in statewide races for Governor and U.S. Senate. Unexpected surprises, however, lurked among individual congressional races. Voter turnout in highly partisan and closely contested congressional races frequently exceeded turnout for the Senate or Governor's races, suggesting that partisan control over Congress motivated participation. But because there were few competitive races overall, particularly in the three most populous states, national turnout suffered. The 2006 midterm election does not signal a return to voter apathy as much as reflect an ailing electoral system, which requires reforms to increase the number competitive congressional seats to boost overall turnout.

Assessing Howard Dean's Fifty State Strategy and the 2006 Midterm Elections

Throughout the 2006 midterm elections, the press wrote about the conflict over campaign strategy between Howard Dean, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and his counterparts in Congress, Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emmanuel, the heads of the Senate and House campaigns, respectively. Schumer and Emmanuel, as well as other Beltway strategists, disagreed with Dean's "fifty state strategy" to build the party across the nation, arguing that DNC funds should focus on the races targeted by the congressional parties. This essay explains, in part, why Dean's popularity suffers in Washington – even after decisive Democratic victories – and why he continues to have support outside the Beltway. It also provides preliminary evidence that Dean's fifty-state strategy paid off in terms of increasing the Democratic vote share beyond the bounce of a national tide favoring Democrats.

Anthropology at the University of Michigan in the late 1950s.

By 1958, the Anthropology Department at the University of Michigan had emerged as a major center in the discipline. Its excellence derived from a strong faculty, commitment to an integrated view of the field, and broader support from a rising national tide of scholarship. While many new intellectual currents developed, among the strongest was biological-behavioral theory--somewhat ironically flourishing in a biological anthropology program that viewed itself as a nexus of population genetics. The biological anthropology faculty thought like anthropologists. From this environment, Frank Livingstone not only drew intellectual support, but also became a key player in demonstrating the importance of historical and cultural factors to shaping biological patterns. A biocultural perspective is evident in Michigan research to this day.

Social Bases of the Transition to Democracy in Brazil

The election of a civilian president in Brazil in 1985 was a landmark event in the democratic transition begun more than a decade earlier, when President Ernesto Geisel began to relax the repressive measures on which the authoritarian government had relied before then. The military's gradual retreat to the barracks was a response to the erosion of authoritarian legitimation which became evident in the rising levels of public opposition to the regime in the late 1970s.1 Union members, particularly in the Saio Paulo area, staged a wave of illegal strikes to protest government wage policy. As the government accepted IMF recommendations of recession-inducing policies in 1981, business sectors intensified their calls for democratization. Professional groups such as the Lawyers Guild, the National Academy of Science, and the Association of Journalists also played important roles in formulating proposals for an end to political repression and the redemocratization of the political process. Student strikes and the willingness of the Catholic church to give sanctuary to illegally striking workers helped create a charged political atmosphere not unlike that of 1964 in the final months before the coup. The most dramatic protests occurred in 1984, when the authoritarian regime was barely able to face down a national tide of demonstrations involving millions of citizens calling for direct presidential elections. It has been argued forcefully that the authoritarian regime had never been able to develop legitimacy among Brazilians. Support for the regime hinged instead on its economic performance and its ability to suppress political violence. By the early 1980s even this contingent support for the authoritarian regime was slipping away. Although redemocratization was discussed more and more openly, however, it remained unclear exactly what the alternative to rule under military sponsorship was to be. The catch-all phrase used in Brazil for the process of democratization, the abertura democrdtica or democratic opening, obscured exactly what democracy meant to various groups in Brazilian society. This lengthy and ambiguous period of transition to democracy offers an opportunity to examine the process by which dispositions toward democracy take root within civil society. In this article we will show that the mass political culture of Brazil has, during the course of the abertura democrdtica, not only become disaffected from the authoritarian regime, but has also developed two distinct patterns of democratic attachment that presage fundamental conflicts in the functioning of Brazilian democracy. The last decade has not simply seen one more swing of the cycle between authoritarian and democratic regimes. Rather, there is in Brazil an emerging democratic political culture that parallels the experience of Europe, in which advocacy of democratic institutions and of universal suffrage had distinctive class bases before becoming a consensual element of the national political culture. The history of conflict over the establishment of democracy in Europe suggests that the social and ideological bases of democracy were multidimensional. We find the same phenomenon in

Explaining Challenger Quality in Congressional Elections

This study seeks to explain why some incumbents attract politically experienced, well-financed challengers while others do not. Using data from contested House races in 1980, we analyze the effects of four sets of variables including: (1) incumbents' policy and nonpolicy behavior (ideological discrepancy and use of perks for advertising and casework); (2) local partisan conditions (previous vote margin and the normal partisan vote in the district); (3) district diversity; and (4) the national tide. We find that both short-term and long-term partisan forces (previous vote and normal vote), national tides, and policymaking behavior (ideological discrepancy) significantly affect the probability of attracting politically experienced, well-financed challengers. District diversity and incumbents' use of perks available for advertising and casework, on the other hand, are not related to any indicator of challenger quality.

Early Administrative Phases of a State Liquor Store System

New Hampshire is the eleventh state to establish a system of state liquor stores. Other states may try the same solution of their liquor problem when legislatures meet in 1935. What are some of the initial administrative problems encountered in organization and operation of state liquor stores?Before answering this question on the basis of New Hampshire's experience, it will be well to examine the political and legal background of the liquor situation in this state. New Hampshire was one of the so-called “drier” states. It had sampled a modified state prohibition in the latter half of the nineteenth century, liberalized this through licensing in the first part of the present century, and finally returned to prohibition before national prohibition was adopted. The state appeared reasonably well satisfied with prohibition until the national tide turned so strongly against it about 1930.