The presence of an African-American candidate on the ballot running for President in 2008 raises the possibility that the election outcome might have been influenced by anti-African-American racism among voters. This paper uses data from the Associated Press-Yahoo! News-Stanford University survey to explore this possibility, using measures of both explicit racism (symbolic racism) and implicit racism (the Affect Misattribution Procedure). The parameters of multinomial logistic regression equations were estimated to test the hypotheses that racism might have behaved differently on election day than they would have had racism been eliminated. The findings suggest that racism's impact on the election outcome could have been substantial, by causing (1) people

Background By 2030, the number of US adults age ≥65 will exceed 70 million. Their quality of life has been declared a national priority by the US government. Objective Assess effects of an eHealth intervention for older adults on quality of life, independence, and related outcomes. Design Multi-site, 2-arm (1:1), non-blinded randomized clinical trial. Recruitment November 2013 to May 2015; data collection through November 2016. Setting Three Wisconsin communities (urban, suburban, and rural). Participants Purposive community-based sample, 390 adults age ≥65 with health challenges. Exclusions: long-term care, inability to get out of bed/chair unassisted. Intervention Access (vs. no access) to interactive website (ElderTree) designed to improve quality of life, social connection, and independence. Measures Primary outcome: quality of life (PROMIS Global Health). Secondary: independence (Instrumental Activities of Daily Living); social support (MOS Social Support); depression (Patient Health Questionnaire-8); falls prevention (Falls Behavioral Scale). Moderation: healthcare use (Medical Services Utilization). Both groups completed all measures at baseline, 6, and 12 months. Results Three hundred ten participants (79%) completed the 12-month survey. There were no main effects of ElderTree over time. Moderation analyses indicated that among participants with high primary care use, ElderTree (vs. control) led to better trajectories for mental quality of life (OR=0.32, 95% CI 0.10–0.54, P=0.005), social support received (OR=0.17, 95% CI 0.05–0.29, P=0.007), social support provided (OR=0.29, 95% CI 0.13–0.45, P<0.001), and depression (OR= −0.20, 95% CI −0.39 to −0.01, P=0.034). Supplemental analyses suggested ElderTree may be more effective among people with multiple (vs. 0 or 1) chronic conditions. Limitations Once randomized, participants were not blind to the condition; self-reports may be subject to memory bias. Conclusion Interventions like ET may help improve quality of life and socio-emotional outcomes among older adults with more illness burden. Our next study focuses on this population. Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov; registration ID number: NCT02128789

Over the last decade the scholarship on judicial politics has increasingly emphasized the strategic aspects of decision making in the United States Supreme Court. This scholarship, however, has struggled with two significant limitations—the restriction to unidimensional policy spaces and the assumption of binary comparisons of alternatives. These two assumptions have the advantage of implying stable, predictable outcomes, but lack a sound theoretical foundation and assume away potentially important aspects of strategic behavior on the Court. In this article, we identify institutional features of the Court that, under certain conditions, allow us to relax these two assumptions without sacrificing stable, predictable policy outcomes. In particular, we formalize the “part-by-part” opinion voting used by the justices, a feature that, together with separable preferences over policy issues, implies stable policy outcomes around the issue-by-issue median of the justices.

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