Publication Type: Poster
Abstract: Over one-fifth of the counties in the United States experienced population decline between 1990 and 2000. Many of the individuals in those counties in 2000, however, would have correctly described the place where they lived as having grown in population size during the 1990s. This apparent contradiction arises from the fact that population patterns are not uniform within a county. Some places within a county may be experiencing net in-migration while others within the same county are marked by net out-migration. Some areas within a county may have younger populations resulting in more births than deaths while other areas with older populations may have an excess of deaths over births. It is an ecological fallacy too-often-made to assume that population changes at the macro-level must necessarily result in similar changes at the micro-level. Indeed, in some counties with declining populations the majority of the residents were living in places that had grown during the decade. This poster presentation will summarize the population changes at the local level that took place in the 677 U.S. counties that lost population during the 1990s. In doing so, it will explain why population experiences at the local level may so often contradict patterns occurring at the regional level.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Despite fast economic growth, plummeting income poverty, rapid fertility decline, and an ambitious primary health care program in the late 1970s, Thailand did only slightly better than the average developing country at reducing premature mortality from 1960 to 1995. This paper attributes Thailand's unimpressive performance at mortality decline partly to high income inequality and to low levels of secondary education, but more significantly to a shortage of health care professionals in the country as a whole and particularly in impoverished rural communities. The high income inequality itself resulted in part from low levels of secondary education, which meant that the benefits of rapid growth went mostly to a small, highly-educated elite. The high share of the population living in rural areas complicated the delivery of health and education services, and the authoritarian character of the political system during most of the period analyzed reduced pressure on the government to deliver better basic social services in rural communities.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Primary elections have been a prominent feature of U.S. politics for the past century. However, surprisingly little is known about how primaries have operated over time. Except for the most recent decades, we do not even know simple facts such as how many primaries were contested, how competitive the constested races were, and how these patterns varied across states, offices, and time. This is mainly because of data availability. To gain greater insight into the functioning of primaries, we have constructed a comprehensive data set of primary election returns. The data set covers all statewide executive and federal offices for all states and almost all years that primaries have been in operation. We find that primaries were an important source of electoral competition during the first 30-40 years following their introduction, both in open-seat contests and in incumbent-challenger races. This is no longer the case, however, except in open-seat contests, where competition remains robust.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Separated not only by thousands of miles but also by several hundred years, Thucydides and Mencius might not, at first glance, appear readily comparable, either stylistically or substantively. Thucydides put forward a famously skeptical and straightforward narrative of the Peloponnesian War, one that emphasized the role played by fear, pride, and Athenian thumos in Athen’s rise as well as its shocking fall from power in the late 4th-century B.C.E. Mencius, revered only behind the Master himself in the Confucian tradition, wrote during China’s Warring States period (mid-3rd century B.C.E.) and dealt largely in what we might call ethical anthropology, or moral psychology, stressing essential human goodness and the importance of self-cultivation, filial piety, and benevolence. The hard-boiled realism of the historian and the often-cryptic utterances of the sage seem, on first glance, widely divergent.
Yet both Thucydides and Mencius offer keen observations of human behavior in times of war and civil strife, and identify war as somehow implicated in a process of moral-political decline in their own times. Each sought to inform his contemporaries of the risks in turning away from their communities’ foundational virtues and values, to cast those contemporaries’ eyes to the past, and to reform their morals by reminding them of the wisdom inherent in the past histories of their own communities.

Publication Type: Proceeding