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This chapter offers an explanation for the mixed record of the Supreme Court since the 1960s, and considers the implications of that record for the future. The chapter emphasizes that judicial power is connected to choices made by other political actors. We argue that conventional ways of measuring the impact of Court rulings and the Court's treatment of precedents are misleading. The Court cannot be understood as a counter-majoritarian protector of rights. In both past and future, electoral outcomes determine the policy areas in which the Court will be influential, and also the choices the justices make about how to portray their treatment of law and precedents.

Purpose – For decades, archivists have been appraising, preserving, and providing access to digital records by using archival theories and methods developed for paper records. However, production and consumption of digital records are informed by social and industrial trends and by computer and data methods that show little or no connection to archival methods. The purpose of this chapter is to reexamine the theories and methods that dominate records practices. The authors believe that this situation calls for a formal articulation of a new transdiscipline, which they call computational archival science (CAS).

Design/Methodology/Approach – After making a case for CAS, the authors present motivating case studies: (1) evolutionary prototyping and computational linguistics; (2) graph analytics, digital humanities, and archival representation; (3) computational finding aids; (4) digital curation; (5) public engagement with (archival) content; (6) authenticity; (7) confluences between archival theory and computational methods: cyberinfrastructure and the records continuum; and (8) spatial and temporal analytics.

Findings – Each case study includes suggestions for incorporating CAS into Master of Library Science (MLS) education in order to better address the needs of today’s MLS graduates looking to employ “traditional” archival principles in conjunction with computational methods. A CAS agenda will require transdisciplinary iSchools and extensive hands-on experience working with cyberinfrastructure to implement archival functions.

Originality/Value – We expect that archival practice will benefit from the development of new tools and techniques that support records and archives professionals in managing and preserving records at scale and that, conversely, computational science will benefit from the consideration and application of archival principles.

This study sought to identify the organizational factors associated with team and network effectiveness of the Athena Breast Health Network, a multi-site collaboration between five University of California health systems.

Providers, managers, and support staff completed self-administered surveys over three years. Statistical analyses at the network and medical center levels tested hypotheses regarding the correlates of effective teams and perceived network effectiveness over time.

Perceived team effectiveness was positively correlated with group culture and environments which support collaboration, negatively correlated with hierarchical culture, and negatively associated with professional tenure at year two. As measured by increasing team effectiveness scores over time and Athena’s potential impact on patient care, perceived network effectiveness was positively associated with team effectiveness.

Results do not allow us to conclude that a certain type of culture “causes” team effectiveness or that team effectiveness “causes” greater perceptions of progress over time. Subsequent studies should examine these variables simultaneously. Further research is needed to examine the role of payment incentives, internal reward systems, the use of electronic health records, public disclosure of performance data, and depth of leadership within each organization and within the network overall.

Focusing on group affiliation and participation may improve team member perceptions regarding effectiveness and impact on patient care.

Relatively little is known about the adaptive processes that occur within inter-organizational networks to achieve desired goals, and particularly the roles played by multi-disciplinary inter-professional teams. We studied a network comprising multiple campuses actively involved in better understanding, preventing, and treating a complex disease.

From one angle, abortion law appears to confirm the regime politics account of the Supreme Court; after all, the Reagan/Bush coalition succeeded in significantly curtailing the constitutional protection of abortion rights. From another angle, however, it is puzzling that the Reagan/Bush Court repeatedly refused to overturn Roe v. Wade. We argue that time and again electoral considerations led Republican elites to back away from a forceful assertion of their agenda for constitutional change. As a result, the justices generally acted within the range of possibilities acceptable to the governing regime but still typically had multiple doctrinal options from which to choose.

We study research designs where a binary treatment changes discontinuously at the border between administrative units such as states, counties, or municipalities, creating a treated and a control area. This type of geographically discontinuous treatment assignment can be analyzed in a standard regression discontinuity (RD) framework if the exact geographic location of each unit in the dataset is known. Such data, however, is often unavailable due to privacy considerations or measurement limitations. In the absence of geo-referenced individual-level data, two scenarios can arise depending on what kind of geographic information is available. If researchers have information about each observation’s location within aggregate but small geographic units, a modified RD framework can be applied, where the running variable is treated as discrete instead of continuous. If researchers lack this type of information and instead only have access to the location of units within coarse aggregate geographic units that are too large to be considered in an RD framework, the available coarse geographic information can be used to create a band or buffer around the border, only including in the analysis observations that fall within this band. We characterize each scenario, and also discuss several methodological challenges that are common to all research designs based on geographically discontinuous treatment assignments. We illustrate these issues with an original geographic application that studies the effect of introducing copayments for the use of the Children’s Health Insurance Program in the United States, focusing on the border between Illinois and Wisconsin.

This chapter focusses on the interaction between climate change and tourism. It is divided into three main sections. The first one describes in a useful and understandable way the contribution of touristic activities to climate change on the one hand, and the vulnerability of tourism to direct and indirect impacts of climate change on the other hand. The second one presents in brief the main points of mitigation policies that aim to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions in the tourism sector. Furthermore, it highlights adaptation measures that aim to implement the suitable policies, so that the adverse effects of climate change can be addressed. The third section provides a set of reading comprehension, grammar and vocabulary exercises that aim to practice the skills needed to effectively access a relevant text.

Identification in a regression discontinuity (RD) design hinges on the discontinuity in the probability of treatment when a covariate (assignment variable) exceeds a known threshold. If the assignment variable is measured with error, however, the discontinuity in the relationship between the probability of treatment and the observed mismeasured assignment variable may disappear. Therefore, the presence of measurement error in the assignment variable poses a challenge to treatment effect identification. This chapter provides sufficient conditions to identify the RD treatment effect using the mismeasured assignment variable, the treatment status and the outcome variable. We prove identification separately for discrete and continuous assignment variables and study the properties of various estimation procedures. We illustrate the proposed methods in an empirical application, where we estimate Medicaid takeup and its crowdout effect on private health insurance coverage.

The performance construct may be one of the most elusive in organization theory. Health care organizations are particularly complex owing to their dual lines of accountability, i.e. professional and administrative. This article examines the factors affecting performance indicator development and use at the technical/managerial and institutional levels, including the accreditation process and the relationship between levels. Using institutional and rational/goal theory, the motivations behind performance measurement behavior at different organizational levels was explored. Results show that the institutional level is motivated by legitimacy while the technical/managerial level is motivated by rationality. Tensions exist between the two levels and between indicator development and use.