An Appropriate Role for the Leadership: A Quantitative Analysis of the Effects of House Leadership on Open-Seat Races

This paper investigates the effects on open-seat races in the United States House of Representatives. This project focuses on the influence that the House leadership exerts on races. Generally, the leadership influences race through spending by party organizations and leadership visits. During each election cycle, national party organizations spend millions of dollars to get their candidates into office. I have developed a multiple regression model that measures different types of spending from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the Republican National Committee and the effects of these spending types on the election results. Also, the study examines the number of visits by each party’s leadership to each race. I introduced control variables that account for the year, the competitiveness of each race, and the individual candidate fundraising. In terms of statistical significance, the results were mixed showing one type of party spending to be highly influential in the outcome of the race. Competitiveness and individual candidate fundraising also achieved statistical significance. The study also includes a qualitative investigation of leadership visits and individual case studies in order to understand better the way in which the data interact in real campaigns.

Season of Birth Effects in Autism Spectrum Disorders

One factor that is investigated as a possible clue to etiological factors in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) is season of birth. Season of birth effects could be the result of temperature, toxins, dietary changes, viral infections, and cultural or social factors that change seasonally (Bolton, Pickles, Harrington, Macdonald, & Rutter, 1992). A number of studies have looked for season of birth effects in ASD with no conclusive results. The current study analyzed season of birth effects in a sample of 441 children diagnosed with ASD. Analysis was also repeated after excluding prematurely born children from the data. Level of functioning and gender effects were tested by breaking the sample into a number of sub-groups. While there were no season of birth effects in the sample of all children with ASD when compared to children without ASD in either the entire sample or the non-premature sample, there were significant differences in the season of birth of low functioning children with ASD when compared with high functioning children with ASD.