Newswise — ROSEMONT, Ill. The state of Oregon took a significant step towards streamlining anesthesia care for patients with the signing of House Bill 3425 by Governor Tina Kotek on July 18. This landmark legislation repeals redundant provisions and provides clear guidelines for Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists (CRNAs) practicing in the state.
The bill reaffirms the Oregon State Board of Nursing’s authority to establish rules regarding CRNA scope of practice, ensuring safe and effective anesthesia care for patients.
“State nursing boards are uniquely qualified to oversee the practice of nursing,” Oregon Association of Nurse Anesthetists (ORANA) President Andrea Hargis, DNP, CRNA said. “Nursing boards understand the nurse-patient relationship and honor the expert care provided by nurses. We thank Gov. Kotek for preserving this important relationship.”
Oregon opted-out of federal physician supervision requirements for CRNAs in 2003, recognizing their expertise and capabilities. As of 2023, 24 states plus Guam have taken this action in acknowledgment of CRNAs as highly skilled healthcare professionals capable of providing safe and quality care independently.
CRNAs provide all aspects of superior anesthesia throughout Oregon. Nationally, CRNAs safely administer more than 50 million anesthetics to patients each year working in every setting in which anesthesia is delivered. CRNAs are the primary providers of anesthesia care in rural settings, enabling facilities in these medically underserved areas to offer obstetrical, surgical, pain management, and trauma stabilization services. CRNAs have full practice authority in the Army, Navy, and Air Force and are the predominant provider of anesthesia on forward surgical teams and in combat support hospitals.
Seven leading companies building artificial intelligence – including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Chat GPT-maker OpenAI – have agreed to a voluntary pledge to mitigate the risks of AI, according to an announcement by the White House. The companies committed to allowing independent security experts to test their systems before they’re released and to develop systems that will alert the public when content is created by AI, through a method known as “watermarking,” among other pledged steps.
GW faculty experts are available to offer insight, analysis and commentary on responsible and trustworthy AI as well as efforts by lawmakers and the Biden Administration to regulate artificial intelligence.
David Broniatowski, an associate professor of engineering management and systems engineering, is GW’s lead principal investigator of a newly launched, NSF-funded institute called TRAILS that explores trustworthy AI. Broniatowski is leading the institute’s third research arm of evaluating how people make sense of the AI systems that are developed, and the degree to which their levels of reliability, fairness, transparency and accountability will lead to appropriate levels of trust. He can discuss the risks and benefits of AI development and what developing trustworthy AI means and looks like.
Broniatowksi says watermarking is a useful tool, but there is no evidence that it will mitigate risks of AI harms on its own.
Susan Ariel Aaronson, research professor of international affairs, is the director of GW’s Digital Trade and Data Governance Hub and co-PI of the TRAILS Institute. Under the TRAILS research initiative, Aaronson is using her expertise in data-driven change and international data governance to lead one of the institute’s research arms in participatory governance and trust. In all, her research focuses on AI governance, data governance, competitiveness in data-driven services such as XR and AI and digital trade. She can discuss the latest efforts to regulate artificial intelligence.
Newswise — It is widely believed that China’s socialist economy had relatively high rates of extreme poverty, while the capitalist reforms of the 1980s and 1990s delivered rapid progress, with extreme poverty declining from 88% in 1981 to zero by 2018.
This belief has been challenged by a research project carried out by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) in collaboration with Macquarie University in Australia and Maastrich University in the Netherlands. The researchers point out that the data used to make these claims relies on the World Bank’s extreme poverty line of $1.90 per day (2011 PPP). However, the World Bank’s method has come under sustained critique in recent years, as it does not account for the cost of meeting basic needs, which varies across countries and over time, even when measured in PPP terms.
To correct for this, researchers Jason Hickel of ICTA-UAB, Dylan Sullivan of Macquarie University and Michail Moatson of Maastricht University reviewed evidence on the share of the population unable to afford a basic subsistence basket – data which was recently published by the OECD. The researchers show that from 1981 to 1990, when many of China’s socialist provisioning systems were still in place, China’s extreme poverty rate was only around 5.6%, substantially lower than in capitalist economies of comparable size and income at the time: 51 per cent in India, 36.5 percent in Indonesia, and 29.5 per cent in Brazil. This is because China’s system of price controls and subsidies for food and housing kept the cost of basic needs low relative to economy-wide prices, and relative to working-class incomes.
The researchers found that China’s relatively strong performance on basic-needs poverty during the socialist period is consistent with its performance on a range of social indicators, including life expectancy, infant mortality, death rate from malnutrition and poor sanitation, mean years of schooling, and access to electricity.
Moreover, researchers found that extreme poverty in China increased during the capitalist reforms of the 1990s, reaching a peak of 68 per cent in 1995, as the privatisation of China’s public provisioning systems caused the price of essential goods to increase. While access to basic needs recovered during the 2000s, rough estimates for 2018 suggest that the extreme poverty rate remains at roughly the same level as during the 1980s.
The study’s lead author, Sullivan, explained that “this research has important implications for policymakers and the development sector. Our findings suggest that socialist policies of public provisioning, subsidies, and price controls can be effective at reducing or preventing extreme poverty. Meanwhile, market-based policies and privatisation may threaten people’s ability to meet basic needs.”
This research also suggests that rapid economic growth and improvements in aggregate income – as important as these may be in many contexts – cannot be relied upon to reduce extreme poverty. China’s experience during the 1990s suggests that economic growth may occur simultaneously with rising poverty under conditions of privatisation and commodification. According to Hickel, “when it comes to reducing extreme poverty in low-income countries, improving people’s access to public services and social guarantees is at least as important as increasing productive capacity”.
The authors point out that, according to the cost-of-basic-needs data they review, the world’s governments failed to achieve the first Millenium Development Goal – i.e., to reduce by half the share of people in extreme poverty between 1990 and 2015. Moatsos said that “this represents a failure of global economic governance and suggests that new policy approaches are needed in order to eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere”.
Ben Cohen wasn’t talking about ice cream. He was talking about American militarism.
At 72, the co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is bald and bespectacled. He looks fit, cherubic even, but when he got going on what it was like to grow up during the Cold War, his tone became less playful and more assertive — almost defiant.
“I had this image of these two countries facing each other, and each one had this huge pile of shiny, state-of-the-art weapons in front of them,” he said, his arms waving above his head. “And behind them are the people in their countries that are suffering from lack of health care, not enough to eat, not enough housing.”
“It’s just crazy,” he added. “Approaching relationships with other countries based on threats of annihilating them, it’s just a pretty stupid way to go.”
It wasn’t a new subject for the famously socially conscious ice cream mogul; Cohen has been leading a crusade against what he sees as Washington’s bellicosity for decades. It’s just that with the war in Ukraine, his position has taken on a new — morally questionable — relevance.
Cohen, who no longer sits on the board of Ben & Jerry’s, isn’t just one of the most successful marketers of the last century. He’s a leading figure in a small but vocal part of the American left that has stood steadfast in opposition to the United States’ involvement in the war in Ukraine.
When Russian President Vladimir Putin sent tanks rolling on Kyiv, Cohen didn’t focus his ire on the Kremlin; a group he funds published a full-page ad in the New York Times blaming the act of aggression on “deliberate provocations” by the U.S. and NATO.
Following months of Russian missile strikes on residential apartment blocks, and after evidence of street executions by Russian troops in the Ukrainian city of Bucha, he funded a 2022 journalism prize that praised its winner for reporting on “Washington’s true objectives in the Ukraine war, such as urging regime change in Russia.”
In May, Cohen tweeted approvingly of an op-ed by the academic Jeffrey Sachs that argued “the war in Ukraine was provoked” and called for “negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement.”
Ben Cohen outside the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington this month, before getting arrested | Win McNamee/Getty Images
I set up a video call with Cohen not because I can’t sympathize with his mistrust of U.S. adventurism, nor because I couldn’t follow the argument that U.S. foreign policy spurred Russia to attack. I called to try to understand how he has maintained his stance even as the Kremlin abducts children, tortures and kills Ukrainians and sends thousands of Russian troops to their deaths in human wave attacks.
It’s one thing to warn of NATO expansion in peacetime, or to call for a negotiated settlement that leaves Ukrainian citizens safe from further aggression. It’s another to ignore one party’s atrocities and agitate for an outcome that would almost certainly leave millions of people at the mercy of a regime that has demonstrated callousness and cruelty.
Given the scale of Russia’s brutality in Ukraine, I wanted to understand: How does one justify focusing one’s energies on stopping the efforts to bring it to a halt?
Masters of war
Cohen’s political awakening took place against the background of the Cold War and the political upheaval caused by Washington’s involvement in Vietnam.
He was 11 during the Cuban missile crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Part of the reason he enrolled in college was to avoid being drafted and sent to the jungle to fight the Viet Cong.
When I asked how he first became interested in politics, he cited Bob Dylan’s 1963 protest song “Masters of War,” which takes aim at the political leaders and weapons makers who benefit from conflicts and culminates with the singer standing over their graves until he’s sure they’re dead.
“That was kind of a revelation to me,” Cohen said. Behind him, the sun filtered past a cardboard Ben & Jerry’s sign propped against a window. “I hadn’t understood that, you know, there were these masters of war — essentially I guess what we would now call the military-industrial-congressional complex — that profit from war.”
Cohen saw people from his high school get drafted and never come back from a war that “wasn’t justified.” As he graduated in the summer of 1969, around half a million U.S. troops were stationed in ‘Nam. Later that year, hundreds of thousands of protesters marched on Washington, D.C. to demand peace.
It was only much later, while doing “a lot of research” into the “tradeoffs between military spending and spending for human needs,” that Cohen came across a 1953 speech by Dwight D. Eisenhower, which foreshadowed the U.S. president’s 1961 farewell address in which he coined the phrase “military-industrial complex.”
A Republican president who had served as the supreme allied commander in Europe during World War II, Eisenhower warned against tumbling into an arms race. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” he said.
“That is a foundational thing for me, very inspiring for me, and captures the essence of what I believe,” Cohen said.
“If we weren’t wasting all of our money on preparing to kill people, we would actually be able to save and help a lot of people,” he added with a chuckle. “That goes for how we approach the world internationally as well,” he added — including the war in Ukraine.
Pierre Ferrari, a former Ben & Jerry’s board member who was with the company from 1997 to 2020, said Cohen’s view of the world was shaped by the events of his youth.
“We were brought up at a time when the military, the government was just completely out of control,” he said. “We’re both children of the sixties, the Vietnam War and the new futility of war and the way war is used by the military-industrial complex and politics,” Ferrari added, pointing to the peace symbol he wore around his neck.
Jeff Furman, who has known Cohen for nearly 50 years and once served as Ben & Jerry’s in-house legal counsel, acknowledged that his generation’s views on Ukraine were informed by America’s misadventures in Vietnam.
“There’s a history of why this war is happening that’s a little bit more complex than who Putin is,” he said. “When you’ve been misled so many times in the past, you have to take this into consideration when you think about it, and really, really try to know what’s happening.”
Ice-cold activism
Politics has been a part of the Ben & Jerry’s brand since Cohen and his partner Jerry Greenfield started selling ice cream out of an abandoned gas station in 1978.
The company’s look and ethos were pure 1960s; they named one of their early flavors, Cherry Garcia, after the lead guitarist of the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, whose psychedelic riffs formed the soundtrack of the hippy counterculture.
Social justice was one of the duo’s secret ingredients. For the first-year anniversary of the gas station shop’s opening, they gave away free ice cream for a day. On the flyers printed to promote the event was a quote from Cohen: “Business has a responsibility to give back to the community from which it draws its support.”
In 1985, after the company went public, they used some of the shares to endow a foundation working for progressive social change and committed Ben & Jerry’s to spend 7.5 percent of its pretax profits on philanthropy.
In the early years, the company instituted a five-to-one cap on the ratio between the salary of the highest-earning executive and its lowest-paid worker, dropping it only when Cohen was about to step down as CEO in the mid-1990sand they were struggling to find a successor willing to work for what they were offering.
Most companies try to separate politics and business. Cohen and Greenfield cheerfully mixed them up and served them in a tub of creamy deliciousness (the company’s rich, fatty flavors were in part driven by Cohen’s sinus problems, which dulls his taste).
In 1988, Cohen founded 1% for Peace, a nonprofit organization seeking to “redirect one percent of the national defense budget to fund peace-promoting activities and projects.” The project was funded in part through sales of a vanilla and dark-chocolate popsicle they called the Peace Pop.
It was around this time that Cohen opened Ben & Jerry’s in Russia, as “an effort to build a bridge between Communism and capitalism with locally produced Cherry Garcia,” according to a write-up in the New York Times. After years of planning, the outlet opened in the northwestern city of Petrozavodsk in 1992. (The company shut the shop down five years later to prioritize growth in the U.S., and also because of the involvement of local mobsters, said Furman, who was involved in the project.)
Cohen, with co-founder Jerry Greenfield, actress Jane Fonda and other climate activists, in front of the Capitol in 2019 | Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images
Even after Ben & Jerry’s was bought by Unilever in 2000, there were few progressive causes the company wasn’t eager to wade into with a campaign or a fancy new flavor.
The ice cream maker has marketed “Rainforest Crunch” in defense of the Amazon forest, sold “Empower Mint” to combat voter suppression, promoted “Pecan Resist” in opposition to then-U.S. President Donald Trump and launched “Change the Whirled” in partnership with Colin Kaepernick, the American football quarterback whose sports career ended after he started taking a knee during the national anthem in protest of police brutality.
More recently, however, the relationship between Cohen, Greenfield and Unilever has been rockier. In 2021, Ben & Jerry’s announced it would stop doing business in the Palestinian territories. Cohen and Greenfield, who are Jewish, defended the company’s decision in an op-ed in the New York Times.
After the move sparked political backlash, Unilever transferred its license to a local producer, only to be sued by Ben & Jerry’s. In December 2022, Unilever announced in a one-sentence statement that its litigation with its subsidiary “has been resolved.”Ben & Jerry’s ice cream continues to be sold throughout Israel and the West Bank, according to a Unilever spokesperson.
Cohen himself is no stranger to activism: Earlier this month, he was arrested and detained for a few hours for taking part in a sit-in in front of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he was protesting the prosecution of the activist and WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.
Unilever declined to comment on Cohen’s views. “Ben Cohen no longer has an operational role in Ben & Jerry’s, and his comments are made in a personal capacity,” a spokesperson said.
Ben & Jerry’s did not respond to a request for comment.
The world according to Ben
For Cohen, the war in Ukraine wasn’t just a tragedy. It was, in a sense, a vindication. In 1998, a group he created called Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities published a full-page ad in the New York Times titled “Hey, let’s scare the Russians.”
The target of the ad was a proposal to expand NATO “toward Russia’s very borders,” with the inclusion of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. Doing so, the ad asserted, would provide Russians with “the same feeling of peace and security Americans would have if Russia were in a military alliance with Canada and Mexico, armed to the teeth.”
Cohen is by no means alone in this view of recent history. The American scholar John Mearsheimer, a prominent expert in international relations, has argued that the “trouble over Ukraine” started after the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest when the alliance opened the door to membership for Ukraine and Georgia.
In the U.S., this point has been echoed by progressive outlets and thinkers, such as Jeffrey Sachs, the linguist Noam Chomsky, or most recently by the American philosopher, activist and longest-of-long-shots, third-party presidential candidate Cornel West.
“We told them after they disbanded the Warsaw Pact that we could not expand NATO, not one inch. And we did that, we lied,” said Dennis Fritz, a retired U.S. Air Force official and the head of the Eisenhower Media Network — which describes itself as a group of “National Security Veteran experts, who’ve been there, done that and have an independent, alternative story to tell.”
It was Fritz’s organization that argued in a May 2023 ad in the New York Times that although the “immediate cause” of the “disastrous” war in Ukraine was Russia’s invasion, “the plans and actions to expand NATO to Russia’s borders served to provoke Russian fears.”
The ad noted that American foreign policy heavyweights, including Robert Gates and Henry Kissinger, had warned of the dangers of NATO expansion. “Why did the U.S. persist in expanding NATO despite such warnings?” it asked. “Profit from weapons sales was a major factor.”
Cohen andGreenfield announce a new flavor, Justice Remix’d, in 2019 | Win McNamee/Getty Images
When I spoke to Cohen, the group’s primary donor, according to Fritz, he echoed the ad’s key points, saying U.S. arms manufacturers saw NATO’s expansion as a “financial bonanza.”
“In the end, money won,” he said with a resigned tone. “And today, not only are they providing weapons to all the new NATO countries, but they’re providing weapons to Ukraine.”
I told Cohen I could understand his opposition to the war and follow his critique of U.S. foreign policy, but I couldn’t grasp how he could take a position that put him in the same corner as a government that is bombing civilians. He refused to be drawn in.
“I’m not supporting Russia, I’m not supporting Ukraine,” he said. “I’m supporting negotiations to end the war instead of providing more weapons to continue the war.”
The Grayzone
I tried to get a better answer when I spoke to Aaron Maté, the Canadian-born journalist who won the award for “defense reporting and analysis” that Cohen was instrumental in funding.
Named after the late Pierre Sprey, a defense analyst who campaigned against the development of F-35 fighter jets as overly complex and expensive, the award recognized Maté’s “continued work dissecting establishment propaganda on issues such as Russian interference in U.S. politics, or the war in Syria.”
Maté, who was photographed with Cohen’s arm around his shoulders at the awards ceremony in March, writes for the Grayzone, a far-left website that has acquired a reputation for publishing stories backing the narratives of authoritarian regimes like Putin’s Russia or Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. His reports deny the use of chemical weapons against civilians in Syria, and he has briefed the U.N. Security Council at Moscow’s invitation.
When I spoke to Maté, he was friendly but guarded. (The Pierre Sprey award noted that “his empiricist reporting give the lie to the charge of ‘disinformation’ routinely leveled by those whose nostrums he challenges.”)
He was happy however to walk me through his claims that, based on statements by U.S. officials since the start of the war, Washington is using Kyiv to wage a “proxy war” against Moscow. Much of his information, he said, came from Western journalism. “I point out examples where, buried at the bottom of articles, sometimes the truth is admitted,” he explained.
He declined to be described as pro-Putin. “That kind of ‘guilt-by-association’ reasoning is not serious thinking,” he said. “It’s not how adults think about things.” When I asked if he believed that Russia had committed war crimes in Ukraine, he answered: “I’m sure they have. I’ve never heard of a war where war crimes are not committed.”
Still, he said, the U.S. was responsible for “prolonging” the war and “sabotaging the diplomacy that could have ended it.”
‘Come to Ukraine’
The best answer I got to my question came not from Cohen or others in his circle but from a fellow traveler who hasn’t chosen to follow critics of NATO on their latest journey.
A self-described “radical anti-imperialist,” Gilbert Achcar is a professor of development studies and international relations at SOAS University of London. He has described the expansion of NATO in the 1990s as a decision that “laid the ground for a new cold war” pitting the West against Russia and China.
But while he sees the war in Ukraine as the latest chapter in this showdown, he has warned against calls for a rush to the negotiating table. Instead, he has advocated for the complete withdrawal of Russia from Ukraine and “the delivery of defensive weapons to the victims of aggression with no strings attached.”
“To give those who are fighting a just war the means to fight against a much more powerful aggressor is an elementary internationalist duty,” he wrote three days after Russia launched its attack on Kyiv, comparing the invasion to the U.S.’s intervention in Vietnam.
Achcar said he understood the conclusions being drawn by people like Cohen about Washington’s interventions in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But, he said, “it leads a lot of people on the left into … [a] knee-jerk opposition to anything the United States does.”
What they fail to account for, however, is the Ukrainian people.
“In a way, part of the Western left is ethnocentric,” said Achcar, who was born in Senegal and grew up in Lebanon. “They look at the whole world just by their opposition to their own government and therefore forget about other people’s rights.”
Cohen, with late-night TV host Jimmy Fallon in 2011 | Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Ben & Jerry’s
His point was echoed in the last conversation I had when researching this article, with Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the Kyiv School of Economics and a former economy minister.
“It doesn’t really matter who promised what to whom in the 1990s,” Mylovanov said. “What matters is that there was Mariupol and Bucha, where tens of thousands of people were killed.”
Mylovanov taught economics at the University of Pittsburgh until he returned to Ukraine four days before Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“Things like war are difficult to understand unless you experience them,” he said. “This is very easy to get confused when you are sitting, you know, somewhere far from the facts and you have surrounded yourself by an echo chamber of people and sources that you agree with.”
“In that sense,” he added. “I invite these people to come to Ukraine and judge for themselves what the truth is.”
For most Americans, voting for a member of Congress is one of their simplest civic duties. Every two years, they pick the candidate they like best—usually the same one they chose last time—and whoever gets the most votes will represent them and a few hundred thousand of their neighbors in the House of Representatives. In nearly every case, the winner is a Republican or Democrat, and whichever party captures the most seats secures a governing majority.
That basic process has defined congressional elections for much of the past century. But according to a growing number of political-reform advocates, it has outlasted its effectiveness and could prove ruinous for American democracy if left in place. They blame the current winner-take-all system for driving U.S. politics toward dangerous levels of polarization. Without radical change, they say, the damage could be irreversible. “Our democracy is on a pretty troubling trajectory right now over the next decade or two,” says Lee Drutman, a political scientist and senior fellow at the left-leaning New America Foundation, “and all of the problems that we’re experiencing are only going to get more intense.”
Drutman is a co-founder of Fix Our House, a group that envisions a new configuration for the lower chamber of Congress in which districts would elect several representatives, not just one. Most states would have fewer but larger districts, and unlike America’s current system, a district wouldn’t simply be won by the party with the most votes; instead, its multiple seats would be parceled out according to the percentage of the vote that each party gets. This means that previously niche parties would suddenly have a shot at winning seats. The system is known as proportional representation. If implemented, its backers believe it could help transform America into a multiparty democracy.
Advocates for proportional representation acknowledge that such a radical change is a long shot, at least in the immediate future. Multimember House districts actually have an extensive history in the U.S., but it’s not one remembered fondly. Congress outlawed their use at the federal level during the civil-rights era, after southern states exploited the rules to disenfranchise Black voters. Proponents say they’d ensure that the same thing doesn’t happen again, and they’ve won the support of some civil-rights activists who believe that under the right legal parameters, multimember districts could significantly expand Black representation. Another challenge for the movement is that Israel, a frequently cited example of a multiparty system that uses proportional representation, has recently experienced no less political instability than the U.S.
That such an idea has gained a following is a reflection of just how frustrated election experts have grown with the fractured state of American politics, and how worried some of them are for the future. They believe—or at least hope—that a new season of reform in the U.S. will make possible proposals that were once deemed unachievable.
Supporters of proportional representation—which is used in advanced democracies such as Australia, Israel, and countries throughout Europe—view the system as a prerequisite for breaking the two parties’ stranglehold on American politics. It would foster coalitional, cross-partisan governance, while larger, multimember districts would all but eliminate partisan gerrymandering. “Your enemies are never permanent. And your friends today might be your opponents tomorrow, and maybe your friends the day after,” Grant Tudor, a policy advocate at the nonpartisan group Protect Democracy, explained to me. “So there’s something structural about a multiparty [system] that depresses polarization, depresses the risk of political violence—that depresses extremism.”
Take a medium-size state like Wisconsin as an example. Wisconsin has eight districts that are gerrymandered in such a way that Republicans reliably win six. Under proportional representation, the state would have fewer districts—perhaps only two, say, composed of five and three members. Less reliance on geographic boundaries would make the state harder to gerrymander, and when combined with proportional representation, its elections would likely be far more competitive. The results, therefore, would be more reflective of Wisconsin’s closely divided population.
Larger, ideologically diverse states such as California and New York might elect representatives from the Working Families Party or the Green Party; Texas could send Libertarian members to Washington. In 2020, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told a reporter that “in any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America, we are.” In a multiparty democracy, they wouldn’t have to be.
Voters across the country have shown a willingness in recent years to experiment with new ways of electing their leaders. California and Washington State have scrapped partisan primaries. Maine has adopted ranked-choice voting for federal elections—which allows voters to list candidates in order of preference—as have New York City, San Francisco, and many other municipalities for local offices. Alaska uses a combination of nonpartisan primaries and ranked-choice voting, and Nevada has taken the first step toward approving a similar system.
The changes that Fix Our House has in mind for Congress are far more dramatic. They’re also much harder to carry out. Drutman knows that the U.S. is unlikely to adopt multimember districts particularly soon. But he believes that other election reforms such as nonpartisan primaries and ranked-choice voting simply don’t go far enough. They can’t save American democracy, he told me. “You’re bringing buckets to a flood.”
Election reformers are a polite bunch. When I asked them about ideas other than their own, they were hesitant to be too harsh. That’s partly out of necessity. When your goal is reducing partisanship and polarization in politics, slinging insults doesn’t exactly help the cause. So they applaud almost any proposal as long as it represents an improvement over the status quo, which to them is pretty much anything.
Yet this public bonhomie masks a vigorous competition of ideas—and a jostling for resources—over the best way to create a more representative government. Perhaps the biggest rival to proportional representation is final-four voting, the system that Alaska adopted through a statewide referendum in 2020. Instead of separate party primaries, all candidates run in a first round of balloting. The top four advance to the general election, which is decided through ranked-choice voting. Developers of final-four voting celebrated when, under the new process last year, far-right candidates lost two key races. Moderate Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski staved off a challenge from the right, and moderate Democrat Mary Peltola defeated Sarah Palin, the right-wing former Alaska governor and 2008 GOP vice-presidential nominee, in a race for the House. Peltola became the first Democrat to hold the seat in 50 years.
In November, Nevadans voted to approve a similar system that will go into effect if another statewide referendum passes in 2024. The initiatives in Alaska and Nevada emerged from an idea developed by Katherine Gehl, a Wisconsin businesswoman who has donated millions to centrist causes and helped bankroll the ballot campaigns in both states. Gehl is adamant that combining nonpartisan primaries with ranked-choice voting is a better reform than proportional representation, both on the merits and for the simple reason that her idea has already shown results. “We’re getting as good a grade as we could possibly get at this point,” she told me.
Gehl and Drutman basically agree on the core problem. Because of gerrymandering and the natural clustering of like-minded people, about 90 percent of House elections are noncompetitive come November, according to an analysis by Fix Our House, having already been decided in low-turnout primaries dominated by the parties’ most ideological voters. Very few Americans, then, have a real say in who represents them in the House. Once elected, politicians tend to be more concerned about losing their next primary than losing their next general election. As a result, they legislate according to the wishes of the small sliver of the electorate that put them in office rather than the much broader pool of constituents who make up their district. This reduces the motivation to compromise and deepens polarization.
Gehl argues that to fix the system, a reform needs to both increase the number of people who cast meaningful votes for their representatives and motivate those legislators to deliver results on issues that matter to most people. Proportional representation, she told me, achieves the first goal but not the second. In a multiparty system, Gehl said, many lawmakers would feel just as beholden to a tiny portion of their constituents as do today’s primary-obsessed legislators. “If you just get better representation but you don’t look at why we’re not getting results, people will feel better represented as the Titanic sinks,” she said.
Advocates for Gehl’s system also point out that proportional representation would do nothing to alter incentives to legislate in the U.S. Senate, where hyperpartisanship and filibustering have stymied action on a range of issues. And they question Drutman’s push for more parties at a time when more and more Americans are identifying as political independents. “It’s actually a fanciful and incorrect assessment of American politics to believe that there’s a huge demand for more parties,” says Dmitri Mehlhorn, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute who, along with his business partner, the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, has invested in Gehl’s reform efforts. Her vision, Mehlhorn told me, “is not quite a magic bullet,” but it has more promise than the other reforms.
Drutman doesn’t see it that way. The final-four system might work well for Alaska, he said, but Alaska, with its relatively depolarized politics and unusually large number of independent voters, is not a representative state. Nor is it clear, he noted, that the new system made a decisive difference in Murkowski’s and Peltola’s victories last year. “I think those reforms are pushing up against the limits of what they can achieve,” Drutman said. “Nonpartisan primaries have not really changed anything at all.”
Beyond the friendly rivalry with other reform proposals, advocates for proportional representation must confront the much peskier problem of getting it enacted. In interviews, champions of the idea were excited to inform me that all it takes to allow states to experiment anew with multimember House districts is an act of Congress, not a constitutional amendment—as if approving a major election reform will be a piece of cake for a legislature that regularly struggles to keep the government open.
States have been required to elect only one representative per district since 1967, when Congress banned multimember districts to stop southern states from using a version of the system to ensure that white candidates won House seats. Fix Our House wants Congress to amend the law in a way that allows states to adopt multimember districts without returning to the racist practices of the Jim Crow era. The organization’s allies in the civil-rights community argue that if properly designed, multimember districts would increase representation for communities of color, including in places where they have struggled to win elections because they are dispersed throughout the population rather than concentrated in neighboring areas.
For the moment, the idea has gained little momentum on Capitol Hill. Republican leaders have become reflexively opposed to reform efforts aimed at reducing polarization, seeing them as Trojan horses designed to topple conservatives. Democrats in recent years have prioritized other election-related proposals focused on expanding access to the ballot, tightening campaign-finance rules, and banning partisan gerrymandering.
The closest legislative proposal to what Fix Our House has in mind is the Fair Representation Act, a bill that Democratic Representative Don Beyer of Virginia has introduced several times to combine multimember districts with ranked-choice voting. But Beyer has struggled to win more than a handful of co-sponsors even within his own party.
Most election-reform victories have come through citizen-driven ballot initiatives, which exist only on the state and local levels, as opposed to national legislation that would require support from leaders of the major parties. An idea like proportional representation, Beyer told me, is more popular with whichever party is out of power. “It appeals to Republicans in Massachusetts who’ve never gotten elected, and Democrats in Oklahoma,” he said. “So the appeal is to people on the outside, not the people who are making the laws.”
Adding to the difficulty is the fact that advocates for proportional representation don’t necessarily share the same vision for what a new system would look like. For example, Beyer is reluctant to embrace Drutman’s ultimate goal of multiparty, coalition government in the House, viewing it as a step too far in the U.S. “It’s emphatically not the specific goal,” he said. “Talking European-type coalition governments would be a deal killer here.”
Advocates for proportional representation also disagree on whether it needs to be paired with a perhaps equally ambitious reform: significantly increasing the number of seats in the House. (Drutman has advocated for adding House seats to account for substantial population increases since the number was set at 435 nearly a century ago, but Fix Our House believes that proportional representation would be beneficial even at its current size.)
Despite scant support among politicians, proportional representation has been gaining momentum within the reform community. The groups Protect Democracy and Unite America recently published a report examining the idea, and another advocacy group, FairVote, has begun to reemphasize proportional representation after years of focusing mostly on ranked-choice voting. Last year, voters in Portland, Oregon, approved the use of multimember districts (and ranked-choice voting) for the city council. Multimember districts have also generated discussion among Republican state legislators in Wyoming, one of the nation’s most conservative states, although the idea has yet to move forward there.
Reformers tend to downplay the long odds of their campaigns, but the leaders of Fix Our House are surprisingly candid about their near-term chances of success, or lack thereof. “It’s clear that there’s no path to major structural reform in Congress right now,” a co-founder of the group, Eli Zupnick, told me. He said that Fix Our House wants to “lay the groundwork for this policy to move when the moment is right.” That means promoting the idea to other advocates, lawmakers, and opinion makers so that if there’s, say, a presidential or congressional commission to study different ideas, proportional representation makes it into the conversation.
One of the group’s models is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which began as an idea that Elizabeth Warren, then a Harvard professor, promoted for years before Democrats included it during their package of banking reforms following the 2008 financial crisis. “It’s funny how things can go from off the wall to on the shelf,” Drutman said.
Left unsaid is the fact that it took an economic collapse to muscle the new federal agency into law and that the CFPB remains a target for Republicans more than a decade later. Fix Our House launched about a year after January 6, 2021, when the nation’s polarization triggered a violent attempt to overturn a presidential election. Supporters of proportional representation acknowledged that the moment they are preparing for, when the country is finally ready to overhaul the way it elects its leaders, might not be a happy one. “The most obvious way you get big change,” Beyer told me, grimly, “is catastrophe.”
Ankara hasn’t seen sufficient progress from Sweden to support its application to join NATO, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan warned U.S. President Joe Biden in a phone call Sunday ahead of a summit of NATO leaders this week.
“Erdoğan stated that Sweden has taken some steps in the right direction by making changes in the anti-terrorism legislation,” Turkey’s communications directorate said in a statement following the bilateral call.
But the supporters of “terrorist organizations” — pro-Kurdish groups including the PKK and YPG, which are banned in Turkey — continue to hold demonstrations in Sweden, the statement said. “This nullifies the steps taken,” it said.
The call comes ahead of a two-day summit of NATO leaders in Lithuania that starts on Tuesday. Biden has thrown his support behind a push to get a deal done on Sweden at the meeting in Vilnius.
Erdoğan’s administration has been blocking Sweden’s hopes of joining the defense alliance, accusing Stockholm of backing Kurdish separatism. While it had initially accused Finland of doing the same, Erdoğan later gave the green light on Helsinki’s application and the country became a NATO member in April.
Biden and Erdoğan also discussed the sale of U.S. F-16 fighter jets to Turkey in the call, with the Turkish president “noting that it is not correct to associate” Ankara’s request for F-16 aircraft with Sweden’s NATO membership bid, according to the statement.
On the call, Erdoğan also brought up Turkey’s “desire to revive the EU membership process,” according to the statement. The Turkish president said he would like to see EU member states send a “clear and strong message” in support of its EU bid at the NATO summit in Lithuania.
While Turkey became a candidate for full membership of the EU in 1999, talks have effectively stalled over the past decade. The country has not committed to making the reforms required to meet the criteria set out by Brussels.
Erdoğan and Biden agreed to meet face-to-face in Vilnius and discuss Turkey-U.S. bilateral relations and regional issues in detail, according to the Turkish statement.
Newswise — Survivors of human trafficking and modern slavery are struggling to find places to live with some people becoming homeless and facing risks of re-entering exploitative environments.
This is the harsh reality for people in Australia who have escaped serious exploitation such as forced labour, sex trafficking or forced marriage.
These include their immigration status, with more than half of human trafficking and modern slavery survivors supported by the Red Cross on a temporary visa.
UniSA PhD candidate Kyla Raby says Australia has seen an increase in the number of people formally identified as survivors of human trafficking and slavery during the same period as Australia’s housing crisis has intensified.
A recent article published by The Conversation and co-authored by Raby and UniSA’s Dr Nerida Chazal reflects on the rapidly growing issue, with the number of people living in modern slavery more than doubling in the past four years, rising to an estimated 41,000.
“Access to stable housing has a significant impact on survivors – it’s crucial to their recovery but there is a shortage of available and suitable accommodation” says Raby.
“We know we are in the middle of a severe housing crisis, worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has affected housing affordability and the availability of rental properties and accommodation services.”
Research conducted by the Australian Red Cross in collaboration with UniSA involved a survey of more than 100 accommodation providers across the country operating in homelessness, domestic violence, youth, and refugee settlement sectors, as well as modern slavery case workers supporting survivors.
It found the most significant barriers that survivors face when trying to find accommodation or housing after escaping exploitation are related to their immigration status and their inability to secure an ongoing income through either employment or social benefits.
The wait time for social housing in many states is more than 10 years and there are strict guidelines on who can apply. In New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and the Australia Capital Territory, applicants must be permanent residents or Australian citizens to be eligible, with a few exceptions. Survivors on a temporary visa or those with an irregular immigration status cannot apply.
UniSA’s Dr Nerida Chazal says the government’s Human Trafficking Visa Framework (HTVF) is intended to support survivors who are foreign nationals, but its design is limited.
“Survivors are only eligible for longer term visas and support if they participate in the investigation of a human trafficking or slavery offence,” she says.
“This leaves behind survivors who are unwilling to engage with authorities due to their trauma – leaving them unsupported and vulnerable to homelessness.”
Immigration status was also a barrier for survivors being able to access a stable income to pay for accommodation or housing services.
Three quarters of the surveyed accommodation providers require no proof of immigration status.
However, a survivor’s immigration status may not allow them to legally work in Australia, meaning they can’t demonstrate ongoing income to pay for the accommodation.
Some survivors of modern slavery and workplace exploitation might also not be ready to re-enter the workforce after being forced to work excessive overtime, having restricted freedom, or threats or severe violence made against them.
This can manifest in symptoms of depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder. For many survivors, workplaces are simply not neutral spaces, but reminders of previous mental and physical violence.
Lina Garcia-Daza, Australian Red Cross’ Acting Lead for Trafficking, Forced Marriage, and Forced Labour says it’s a complex issue that requires a holistic approach to supporting survivors in their recovery.
“We need an approach that includes accommodation services, but also ties in other supports tailored to survivors’ needs that help with their recovery,” she says.
“The lack of accommodation for survivors of modern slavery cannot be addressed in a vacuum. Homelessness is the result of multiple variables including lack of income, immigration status, the lack of specialised trauma informed and person centre accommodation services, and limited resources available.
“Ongoing partnerships and collaborative work between the housing, migrant and modern slavery civil society sectors is vital in overcoming identified barriers in accommodating survivors of modern slavery and working towards safe, suitable and sustainable housing.”
Newswise — University of Utah political scientist Baodong Liu served as an expert witness in a consequential voting rights case decided on June 8 by the U.S. Supreme Court. The decision in Allen v. Milligan rejected Alabama’s congressional redistricting map because it disenfranchises African-American voters.
In a surprise 5-4 ruling written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court agreed with Liu’s premise that the new voting districts, redrawn after the 2020 Census, packed a large portion of Alabama’s Black voters into a single district, thus diluting their voice in the six other districts.
Roberts was joined by fellow conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the court’s three liberal justices in upholding a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Central to the case was Alabama’s history of “racially polarized voting,” according to Liu, a professor of political science, as well as of ethnic studies in the U’s School for Social and Cultural Transformation. His analysis found the state’s Black voters tend to overwhelmingly favor Democratic candidates, while White voters lean heavily Republican.
While Alabama’s voting population is nearly 27% Black, just one of its seven congressional seats is held by an African-American, Democrat Terri Sewell. The other six are held by White Republicans.
This is largely the result of a voting-district map that packs many of the state’s Black residents into Sewell’s Birmingham district, while the others are spread out among the other districts in a way that virtually ensures their preferred candidate won’t stand much chance of winning election, according to Liu, who teaches political science in the College of Social and Behavioral Science.
Similar legal challenges are targeting congressional district maps in other Southern states. This week, the Supreme Court affirmed a federal court’s decision that Louisiana’s six-district congressional map is racially gerrymandered to favor White voters.
An immigrant from China, Liu is a U.S. citizen and a Utah voter. What follows is a Q&A with Liu conducted by U science writer Brian Maffly, edited for length and clarity.
What is at stake in the Alabama case?
As a state in the South, Alabama is growing in terms of population. We have the requirement every 10 years to do the census, which gives us the overall look at the balance of power in Congress in terms of which states get more seats, and which states get fewer seats. Southern states tend to get more seats, but if they have more seats, will they get more representation for only the White majority and not minorities.
This case is about the Voting Rights Act, arguably, the most significant and successful civil rights law in U.S. history. It was such a significant law that had never taken place in human history, where the minorities of a nation can have access to not only representation at the highest level, but also state and local governments, all due to the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.
It’s a huge accomplishment in our history. All of us should be very proud of it. However, more recently the political atmosphere has changed. The division has gone deep and the nation has revisited all kinds of laws, the Voting Rights Act being one of those. It’s up to the court to tell us how we should interpret the Voting Rights Act, and more importantly, how should we implement it. This Alabama case put everything at the center. Should we explain the Voting Rights Act in a way that fits our fundamental desire for not only majority rule, but also equality under law for all? This case has everything at stake in terms of not only politically, who gets elected and who represents who, but also how the democracy itself should represent in the future.
The idea of “racially polarized voting” is central to this case. What is it and why does it matter?
The Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Voting Rights Act concerning Section 2 is what we call the Gingles precondition. The Supreme Court’s 1986 Gingles decision made it clear in order to make a Section 2 claim, which is the vote dilution of a state entity against certain minorities, it is based on the tests that the Supreme Court set up. The centerpiece of the Gingles tests is called “racial polarized voting.” What does that mean? On the surface it is very intuitive, meaning different racial groups are polarized in their choices of voting. It’s American voters’ right to choose whoever they want to vote for. However, if racial groups do not agree with each other consistently then it has a profound impact on election outcomes.
If this racially polarized voting takes place again and again and again, one has to ask, who will be elected? Intuitively it’s White voters’ choice that will prevail because they are the super majority of the state and they can form a formidable bloc to defeat any minority candidate, which leads to a scenario where White voters dictate the election outcome, a phenomenon of tyranny of majority that our Constitution tries to correct.
How did you become involved in the Alabama case?
I am an immigrant myself. Back in China, I never had a chance to vote for anything. There was no election in China in a substantive way. As a graduate student coming to the U.S. studying American voting, it was always my desire to learn the mysteries surrounding it, but also for the incredible achievement of American democracy. That is, everybody has a right to vote, and collectively they decide based on their individual choices, who should represent them, but also for the most powerful position in human history, that is the U.S. president.
When I was a graduate student in New Orleans, the question was at the mayor level. Was it possible for White voters to cast their vote across racial lines for Black candidates? I wrote a dissertation about the conditions under which White voters were willing to vote for black candidates [for mayor]. For that, I won the American Political Science Association dissertation award. And within just a few years beyond my Ph.D., the whole nation was faced with the choice of Barack Obama [the first African American elected president]. After I became an assistant professor, I was asked by voting groups to help analyze data. So starting from Obama’s election all the way to this current case in Alabama, I’ve been practicing as an expert witness for more than two decades.
What did you document about Alabama’s new congressional districts during your investigation?
What I have done in this case was to collect data in real elections. There are two parts to it. One is what we call “endogenous” elections. Those are the elections that deal directly with the elected offices under dispute in this case, congressional seats. I analyzed those elections from 2008 all the way to 2020. I analyzed seven congressional districts. That’s too few, so I analyzed a second group of elections called “exogenous” elections, which concern statewide offices, such as lieutenant governor and state auditor, to supplement the endogenous elections. In both groups of elections, I found racially polarized voting.
I also compared the enacted plan, passed by the state Legislature and signed by the governor of Alabama, with the plan proposed by the plaintiffs in this case, the Legal Defense Fund and other organizations that provided competing maps. I evaluate which plans would give more equal access to minorities based on empirical data. I’m an empirical scientist, so everything I do is based on data and statistical analysis.
Your take on Chief Justice Roberts’s majority opinion?
In my view, this is one of the best written opinions ever because it shows at the Jurisprudence level, how the court’s majority opinion evaluated not only the claim of Alabama but also the plaintiffs who challenged Alabama’s plan based on court’s interpretation of our Constitution.
It’s not in favor of either the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party. It’s written in a very objective tone. It has no accusation against any party. It is fully based on the facts that both sides presented and explains why the court has gone through vigorous tests in the facts itself. And most importantly the case sends a strong message of why the Voting Rights Act still holds true today in our great democracy. All that is not based on whether the chief justice is a conservative or not. It’s based on his read of our great constitution. For that I am forever grateful as an American.
Newswise — University of Utah political scientist Baodong Liu served as an expert witness in a consequential voting rights case decided on June 8 by the U.S. Supreme Court. The decision in Allen v. Milligan rejected Alabama’s congressional redistricting map because it disenfranchises African-American voters.
In a surprise 5-4 ruling written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court agreed with Liu’s premise that the new voting districts, redrawn after the 2020 Census, packed a large portion of Alabama’s Black voters into a single district, thus diluting their voice in the six other districts.
Roberts was joined by fellow conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the court’s three liberal justices in upholding a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Central to the case was Alabama’s history of “racially polarized voting,” according to Liu, a professor of political science, as well as of ethnic studies in the U’s School for Social and Cultural Transformation. His analysis found the state’s Black voters tend to overwhelmingly favor candidates from their own racial group, while White voters vote as a bloc for White candidates.
While Alabama’s voting population is nearly 27% Black, just one of its seven congressional seats is held by an African-American, Democrat Terri Sewell. The other six are held by White Republicans.
This is largely the result of a voting-district map that packs many of the state’s Black residents into Sewell’s Birmingham district, while the others are spread out among the other districts in a way that virtually ensures their preferred candidate won’t stand much chance of winning election, according to Liu, who teaches political science in the College of Social and Behavioral Science.
Similar legal challenges are targeting congressional district maps in other Southern states. This week, the Supreme Court affirmed a federal court’s decision that Louisiana’s six-district congressional map is racially gerrymandered to favor White voters.
An immigrant from China, Liu is a U.S. citizen and a Utah voter. What follows is a Q&A with Liu conducted by U science writer Brian Maffly, edited for length and clarity.
What is at stake in the Alabama case?
As a state in the South, Alabama is growing in terms of population. We have the requirement every 10 years to do the census, which gives us the overall look at the balance of power in Congress in terms of which states get more seats, and which states get fewer seats. Southern states tend to get more seats, but if they have more seats, will they get more representation for only the White majority and not minorities.
This case is about the Voting Rights Act, arguably, the most significant and successful civil rights law in U.S. history. It was such a significant law that had never taken place in human history, where the minorities of a nation can have access to not only representation at the highest level, but also state and local governments, all due to the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.
It’s a huge accomplishment in our history. All of us should be very proud of it. However, more recently the political atmosphere has changed. The division has gone deep and the nation has revisited all kinds of laws, the Voting Rights Act being one of those. It’s up to the court to tell us how we should interpret the Voting Rights Act, and more importantly, how should we implement it. This Alabama case put everything at the center. Should we explain the Voting Rights Act in a way that fits our fundamental desire for not only majority rule, but also equality under law for all? This case has everything at stake in terms of not only politically, who gets elected and who represents who, but also how the democracy itself should represent in the future.
The idea of “racially polarized voting” is central to this case. What is it and why does it matter?
The Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Voting Rights Act concerning Section 2 is what we call the Gingles precondition. The Supreme Court’s 1986 Gingles decision made it clear in order to make a Section 2 claim, which is the vote dilution of a state entity against certain minorities, it is based on the tests that the Supreme Court set up. The centerpiece of the Gingles tests is called “racial polarized voting.” What does that mean? On the surface it is very intuitive, meaning different racial groups are polarized in their choices of voting. It’s American voters’ right to choose whoever they want to vote for. However, if racial groups do not agree with each other consistently then it has a profound impact on election outcomes.
If this racially polarized voting takes place again and again and again, one has to ask, who will be elected? Intuitively it’s White voters’ choice that will prevail because they are the super majority of the state and they can form a formidable bloc to defeat any minority candidate, which leads to a scenario where White voters dictate the election outcome, a phenomenon of tyranny of majority that our Constitution tries to correct.
How did you become involved in the Alabama case?
I am an immigrant myself. Back in China, I never had a chance to vote for anything. There was no election in China in a substantive way. As a graduate student coming to the U.S. studying American voting, it was always my desire to learn the mysteries surrounding it, but also for the incredible achievement of American democracy. That is, everybody has a right to vote, and collectively they decide based on their individual choices, who should represent them, but also for the most powerful position in human history, that is the U.S. president.
When I was a graduate student in New Orleans, the question was at the mayor level. Was it possible for White voters to cast their vote across racial lines for Black candidates? I wrote a dissertation about the conditions under which White voters were willing to vote for black candidates [for mayor]. For that, I won the American Political Science Association dissertation award. And within just a few years beyond my Ph.D., the whole nation was faced with the choice of Barack Obama [the first African American elected president]. After I became an assistant professor, I was asked by voting groups to help analyze data. So starting from Obama’s election all the way to this current case in Alabama, I’ve been practicing as an expert witness for more than two decades.
What did you document about Alabama’s new congressional districts during your investigation?
What I have done in this case was to collect data in real elections. There are two parts to it. One is what we call “endogenous” elections. Those are the elections that deal directly with the elected offices under dispute in this case, congressional seats. I analyzed those elections from 2008 all the way to 2020. I analyzed seven congressional districts. That’s too few, so I analyzed a second group of elections called “exogenous” elections, which concern statewide offices, such as lieutenant governor and state auditor, to supplement the endogenous elections. In both groups of elections, I found racially polarized voting.
I also compared the enacted plan, passed by the state Legislature and signed by the governor of Alabama, with the plan proposed by the plaintiffs in this case, the Legal Defense Fund and other organizations that provided competing maps. I evaluate which plans would give more equal access to minorities based on empirical data. I’m an empirical scientist, so everything I do is based on data and statistical analysis.
Your take on Chief Justice Roberts’s majority opinion?
In my view, this is one of the best written opinions ever because it shows at the Jurisprudence level, how the court’s majority opinion evaluated not only the claim of Alabama but also the plaintiffs who challenged Alabama’s plan based on court’s interpretation of our Constitution.
It’s not in favor of either the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party. It’s written in a very objective tone. It has no accusation against any party. It is fully based on the facts that both sides presented and explains why the court has gone through vigorous tests in the facts itself. And most importantly the case sends a strong message of why the Voting Rights Act still holds true today in our great democracy. All that is not based on whether the chief justice is a conservative or not. It’s based on his read of our great constitution. For that I am forever grateful as an American.
U.S. President Joe Biden slipped up Tuesday, saying Russian President Vladimir Putin is losing the war in Iraq.
Putin, of course, is actually carrying out a full-scale invasion in Ukraine — not the Middle Eastern country which the U.S. and its allies invaded in 2003.
Answering questions from reporters on Putin, Biden said: “It’s hard to tell but he’s clearly losing the war in Iraq.”
“He’s losing the war at home, and he has become a bit of a pariah around the world,” Biden added. “And it’s not just NATO. It’s not just the European Union. It’s Japan. It’s, you know, 40 nations,” referring to the opposition against Putin.
Biden’s comments come less than a week after Putin saw Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin lead an aborted rebellion against the Russian military establishment. He approached Moscow with a column of tanks before he stood down and was exiled to Belarus.
Biden has a long track record of gaffes and misspeaking. In recent months, he referred to the famous New Zealand All Blacks rugby team as the Black and Tans — confusing the sports champions with an infamous British military unit. He mixed up Rishi Sunak’s job title, addressing the British prime minister as Mr. President.
Newswise — Efforts to tackle major issues facing the UK, including the nation’s health and climate change, are being hampered because politicians often ignore the existing evidence when setting policies, according to Dame Theresa Marteau, a public health expert at the University of Cambridge.
Writing in the journal Science and Public Policy, Professor Marteau argues that this ‘evidence-neglect’ is a result of incentive structures that encourage politicians to set ambitious policy goals while simultaneously disincentivising them from implementing the policies needed to achieve them, and of political ideologies and interests that conflict with effective policies.
Two changes could mitigate these factors, she writes: engaging citizens more in policy-making so their interests dominate; and increasing the accountability of politicians through legally binding systems for all stages of policy-making.
Recent UK governments have set ambitious goals to improve the nation’s health and tackle climate change. These include halving childhood obesity by 2030, eradicating smoking by 2030, narrowing the gap in healthy life expectancy by 2030, and achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
But, says Professor Marteau, Director of the Behaviour and Health Research Unit at Cambridge, “None of these ambitions is on course. Of course, scientific evidence is just one of many sources of information for policymakers to consider, but neglecting evidence is a sure-fire route to unsuccessful policymaking.”
According to predictions, childhood obesity is on track to double, not halve, by 2030. Smoking eradication is on track sometime after 2050, not by 2030. By 2030, the gap in healthy life expectancy between local areas where it is highest and lowest will have narrowed, but by 2035 is set to rise by five years. And the UK Sixth Carbon Budget – a key target towards achieving net zero carbon emissions – is likely to be missed by “a huge margin”.
Achieving each of these ambitions requires sustained changes in several sets of behaviour across all socio-economic groups including what we eat, drink, whether we smoke, and how we travel. A wealth of research demonstrates that achieving such change is difficult, requiring many interventions that change the environments or systems that too readily cue, reinforce and maintain unhealthier and unsustainable behaviours.
“There are many possible reasons why these policy ambitions are so far off-track, but chief among them is the neglect of evidence, particularly around achieving sustained changes in behaviour across populations,” said Professor Marteau.
“Put simply, these failures are baked-in, given the policies designed to achieve these ambitions are based on interventions that cannot achieve the change required.”
Part of the problem, she says, lies in the incentive structures for politicians, which favour setting ambitious policy goals whether as part of achieving election promises, attracting positive publicity or both. But they also discourage the policies needed to achieve them.
“Fear of electoral damage plays a role here. Take taxes on tobacco, alcohol, junk food and carbon emissions: these are among the most effective interventions for improving health and the climate, but they are unpopular with the public and so politicians are unwilling to adopt them.”
Such policies may not just be unpopular with the public – they may also run counter to political interests and ideologies. Neoliberalism, for example, emphasises a small role for governments in the economy and public policy more generally, and a larger role for individuals to be personally responsible for behaving in ways to achieve health, wealth and happiness. Such ideologies often portray attempts by the government to intervene as ‘Nanny Statism’.
Certain industries, too, focus on personal responsibility to discourage politicians from adopting effective policies that conflict with their industries’ interests, such as those aimed at reducing consumption of fossil fuels, tobacco, alcohol, meat and junk food. These industries may cast doubt on the effectiveness of policies that would reduce their sales, as well as lobbying governments to persuade them of the business case for the status quo.
Professor Marteau added: “There are no quick or single fixes to overcoming these problems, but there are two changes which could help: engaging citizens more in priority setting and policy design, and increasing the accountability of politicians through introducing legally-binding systems for reporting progress on policy ambitions.”
There are a number of options available to policymakers when it comes to engaging citizens, including: surveys, focus groups, town hall meetings and citizen assemblies, as well as working with civil society organisations. This approach has the potential to reduce the political costs of unpopular policies by exposing citizens to evidence for the effectiveness of policies, which – across many studies – has been shown to increase policy support. Policies designed with citizen engagement also attract more public support, such policies being seen as fairer and more successful as a result.
Introducing legally binding systems for reporting policies and progress on policy ambitions, with plans to get back on track if progress is off course, could be a powerful way to decrease the neglect of evidence which is central to policy success.
An example of this is the UK government’s recent Levelling Up strategy paper, which included plans to introduce a statutory obligation for government to report annually on progress towards meeting the Levelling Up missions. Alongside these plans, it published a set of metrics against which to measure progress against the missions and evaluate the success of the strategy.
“Although these requirements are by no means perfect, the legislation as drafted will at least allow parliament significantly more scrutiny of progress towards a government ambition than is often the case.”
According to Professor Marteau, failure to consider the evidence risks undermining the government’s attempts to take action.
“Laudable policy ambitions to improve a nation’s health and protect life on the planet will remain unfulfilled ambitions unless and until evidence is given a more central role in the policy-making process.”
Reference
Marteau, TM. Evidence-neglect: addressing a barrier to UK health and climate policy ambitions. Science and Public Policy; 20 June 2023; DOI: 10.1093/scipol/scad021
Newswise — The enduring gender disparity in voting preferences between Democrats and Republicans stems, in part, from a greater percentage of female voters being Black and the historical trend of Black voters favoring the Democratic Party, as indicated by a recent study conducted by a group of sociologists.
“The connection between gender and racial disparities in voting has been recognized for some time, but the exact interplay between the two has remained uncertain,” states Paula England, the Dean of Social Science at NYU Abu Dhabi and the primary author of the research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “These discoveries highlight that approximately one-fourth of the gender gap in favoring the Democratic Party can be attributed to the fact that a larger proportion of female voters are Black compared to their male counterparts.”
In every U.S. presidential election since 1980, women have consistently demonstrated a greater tendency to vote for the Democratic candidate compared to men. Importantly, prior studies have revealed that Black men face disproportionately higher rates of mortality, incarceration, and disenfranchisement resulting from criminal convictions. These disparities contribute to a reduced representation of Black men among the voting population, leading to a higher proportion of Black voters being women in relation to other racial groups.
The study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) aimed to enhance our understanding of the relationship between gender, race, and partisan voting disparities. The research team, comprising Michael Hout, a sociology professor at NYU, as well as NYU doctoral students Karyn Vilbig and Kevin Wells, conducted the study in order to shed light on the dynamics between gender and race as contributing factors to differences in voting preferences between political parties.
To accomplish this, the authors of the study analyzed data from the General Social Survey (GSS) spanning the period from the 1980 to the 2016 presidential elections. Additionally, they replicated their analysis using data from the American National Election Surveys to ensure the robustness and consistency of their findings across different datasets. By utilizing these sources, the researchers aimed to provide a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between gender, race, and partisan voting gaps over several decades.
The findings of their analysis revealed that the discrepancy in racial composition between genders accounted for 24% of the gender gap observed in favoring the Democratic Party. In simpler terms, since around 90% of Black voters tend to support Democrats, which is a considerably higher proportion compared to other demographic groups, the fact that a larger percentage of female voters are Black influences women’s voting preferences in favor of the Democratic Party.
According to Paula England, a professor of sociology at NYU and the lead author of the study, while a gender gap in voting exists among White voters as well, approximately 25% of the total gender gap can be attributed solely to the variation in racial composition between male and female voters. This statement highlights the significant impact of racial demographics on the observed gender disparity in voting preferences.
In order to eliminate the influence of another potential factor contributing to the gender gap, the researchers examined the role of income. Specifically, they focused on unmarried voters and investigated whether the higher likelihood of single women being economically disadvantaged compared to single men could explain why women tend to vote more Democratic.
Interestingly, the study revealed that the gender gap in favoring the Democratic Party was particularly pronounced among unmarried individuals. It was observed that unmarried women, despite experiencing a higher poverty rate compared to unmarried men, displayed a stronger tendency to vote Democratic. However, the researchers also noted that although lower-income voters do exhibit a slightly higher inclination towards voting Democratic, the difference in voting preferences between lower-income and more affluent voters was not substantial. These findings suggest that while income disparities may contribute to the gender gap in voting, they do not fully account for the magnitude of the difference observed.
The study’s authors reached the conclusion that no matter how they examined income and accounted for its influence, it had no mitigating effect on the gender gap in voting preferences. They highlighted the importance of the racial makeup of the voting population as a key factor contributing to this gap. These findings imply that although income disparities do contribute to the gap, they are not the exclusive explanation for the observed differences in voting preferences. The racial composition of the population significantly influences voting disparities as well.
The House is on track Wednesday afternoon to begin considering a bipartisan plan to suspend the nation’s debt ceiling and limit spending, with the nation facing the risk of default if the debt ceiling is not raised by June 1st. The two parties remain deeply divided about how to rein in the federal deficit, with Democrats arguing wealthy Americans and businesses should pay more taxes while Republicans want spending cuts.
More contenders enter the Republican presidential nominees’ list with Gov. DeSantis and Sen. Tom Scott declaring their bids to run. Do they have enough support to take on the front-runner, former President Donald Trump?
Below are some of the latest expert pitches posted in the Politics channel.
Yphtach Lelkes, PhD Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg School for Communication
Yphtach (Yph) Lelkes’s interests lie at the intersection of political communication, public opinion, and political psychology.
Jennifer Chudy, PhD Knafel Assistant Professor of Social Sciences; Assistant Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College
Dr. Chudy focuses on White racial attitudes generally and the attitude of racial sympathy – defined as White distress over Black suffering – specifically.
Adam Cayton, PhD Associate Professor, Government Department at the University of West Florida
Dr. Adam Cayton conducts research on representation in Congress, legislative institutions, campaign effects, institutional change, and other topics.
Megan Goldberg, PhD Assistant Professor of American Politics at Cornell College
Her work examines the dynamics of state politics in an increasingly nationalized context, studies how governors and state parties shift their rhetoric and ideologies towards elections, and how often governors use national politics to frame issues.
Neil O’Brian, PhD Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon
Neil can comment on public opinion and political participation in Oregon’s congressional and statewide races as well as national politics. His research agenda and expertise also include the partisan politics of abortion in the United States.
Newswise — ALBANY, N.Y. (May 26, 2023) — New York’s bail reform law had a negligible effect on crime, a study by a recent PhD recipient and a professor in UAlbany’s School of Criminal Justice (SCJ) found.
Bail reform has been a hotly debated issue in New York and throughout the United States, with proponents arguing that a cash bail system is unfair to poorer defendants and opponents arguing that setting bail for those arrested deters crime. In 2019 New York lawmakers passed a law eliminating bail for most misdemeanors and some non-violent felony charges, with the accused allowed to go free until a court hearing or released with conditions such as electronic monitoring. An amendment that went into effect in July 2020 rolled back some aspects of the reform, expanding the list of offenses eligible for cash bail.
The SCJ study, “Does Bail Reform Increase Crime in New York State: Evidence from Interrupted Time-Series and Synthetic Control Methods,” was published earlier this month in Justice Quarterly. Led by Sishi Wu, who received her PhD from SCJ in April, it’s the first study to evaluate the effects of New York’s bail reform law on the entire state and “the first attempt to disentangle the effects of bail reform and national historic events” such as the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Wu and co-author David McDowall, a distinguished teaching professor at SCJ.
Their study found that murder, larceny and auto theft increased after bail reform, but that bail reform itself did not contribute to that increase.
“We used data from the New York State index crimes, consisting of monthly crime counts for seven offenses: murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny and motor vehicle theft,” Wu said. “Monthly crime data from other states were also collected from the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting program to create a control group to compare with New York.”
Jail population dropped in the state from 2019 to 2020 — one of the goals of bail reform. During the same period, violent crime rose by 1% in the state and murders increased by nearly 47%, from 570 in 2019 to 836 in 2020. However, this increase could be attributed to the pandemic, which caused disruptions ranging from a lack of work and income to a lack of social services.
To account for the pandemic, the authors compared New York crime data with a control group constructed of other states similarly affected by the pandemic that did not reform their bail laws. That comparison showed “NYS experienced 0.02 more murder, 6.16 more larcenies, and 1.16 more motor vehicle thefts per 100,000 people per month than its control series after the bail reform” – not a statistically significant increase, the study found.
“Using findings such as ours, legislators and stakeholders can better address public safety concerns when continuing the implementation of bail reform,” McDowall said.
LONDON — Donald Trump and Boris Johnson discussed “the situation in Ukraine and the vital importance of Ukrainian victory” this week, according to a spokesperson for the former British prime minister.
Johnson, ousted from office last year, has been touring America to try and drum up support among top Republicans for Ukraine in the wake of Russia’s invasion.
Pro-Ukraine think tankers this week hosted the ex-British leader for a private lunch in Texas, where he told a gathering of politicians, donors and captains of industry that America must stay the course in its support for the country.
Talking to the Republican frontrunner appears to have been next on the list.
The New York Times first reported that Trump — who has faced scrutiny over whether he supports Russia or Ukraine in the conflict and has promised to resolve the war in 24 hours — was planning to host Johnson for dinner. Trump told CNN earlier this month: “I want everybody to stop dying. They’re dying. Russians and Ukrainians. I want them to stop dying,”
The meeting took place Thursday, and a spokesperson for Johnson disclosed that Ukraine talks had been on the menu.
“Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP met President Donald J Trump to discuss the situation in Ukraine and the vital importance of Ukrainian victory,” the spokesperson said.
Trump and Johnson had a complex relationship when both men were in office. The former U.S. president described Johnson as a “friend,” and once branded him “Britain Trump” — but the two appeared to have diverged politically in recent years.
Trump told GB News last month that he believed Johnson’s government had taken a “far left” tilt, hitting out at his support for wind farms and other eco policies.
“They really weren’t staying Conservative,” he said of Johnson’s ill-fated administration.
HIROSHIMA, Japan — China on Saturday faced a strong pushback from the Group of Seven countries over its stances on Russia, Taiwan, trade bullying, economic monopoly and domestic interference, with the G7 leaders’ statement reflecting a broad convergence of the U.S., Europe and Japan on a need to change tack.
Issued around the time of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s arrival in Hiroshima, where the summit is taking place, the statement by leaders of the G7 wealthy democracies asked Beijing to do more to stop Russia’s war on Ukraine.
“We call on China to press Russia to stop its military aggression, and immediately, completely and unconditionally withdraw its troops from Ukraine,” the leaders said in the statement. “We encourage China to support a comprehensive, just and lasting peace based on territorial integrity and the principles and purposes of the U.N. Charter, including through its direct dialogue with Ukraine.”
Crucially, the U.S. and Europe — the two main constituents of the G7 — came round to a common set of language on China. For France and Germany, in particular, their focus on a conciliatory attitude to China was reflected in the final statement, which began the China section by stating “We stand prepared to build constructive and stable relations with China.”
The G7’s repeated emphasis of “de-risking, not decoupling” is a nod to the EU approach to China, as European member countries are wary of completely cutting off business ties with Beijing.
The language on Taiwan remained the same compared with recent statements. “We reaffirm the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait as indispensable to security and prosperity in the international community,” the statement said, adding there’s “no change in the basic positions” in terms of the one China policies.
Domestic interference
Apart from Russia, another new element this year is the mention of domestic interference — which human rights groups say is a reflection of the growing concern about China’s “overseas police stations” in other countries. “We call on China … not to conduct interference activities aimed at undermining the security and safety of our communities, the integrity of our democratic institutions and our economic prosperity,” the leaders said in their statement, citing the Vienna Convention which regulates diplomatic affairs.
On global economics, both sides of the Atlantic and Japan now see the need to fundamentally change the overall dynamic of economic globalization, placing security at the front of policy considerations.
“Our policy approaches are not designed to harm China nor do we seek to thwart China’s economic progress and development. A growing China that plays by international rules would be of global interest,” the G7 leaders said in the statement.
“We are not decoupling or turning inwards. At the same time, we recognize that economic resilience requires de-risking and diversifying. We will take steps, individually and collectively, to invest in our own economic vibrancy. We will reduce excessive dependencies in our critical supply chains,” they said.
One central theme is economic coercion, where China has punished a wide range of countries — from Japan and Australia to Lithuania and South Korea — over the decade when political disagreements arose.
The G7 countries launched a new “coordination platform on economic coercion” to “increase our collective assessment, preparedness, deterrence and response to economic coercion,” according to the statement. They also plan to coordinate with other partners to further the work on this.
For France, the focus on a conciliatory attitude to China was reflected in the final statement, which began by stating “We stand prepared to build constructive and stable relations with China” | Pool phot by Stefan Rousseau/Getty Images
The joint call for diverse sources of critical minerals, while stopping short of naming China, is widely seen as targeted against the Asian superpower that controls, for instance, 70 percent of global rare earths output. The G7 countries “support open, fair, transparent, secure, diverse, sustainable, traceable, rules and market-based trade in critical minerals” and “oppose market-distorting practices and monopolistic policies on critical minerals,” according to the statement.
They also vow to deliver the goal of mobilizing up to $600 billion in financing for quality infrastructure through the Partnership for Global Infrastructure Investment, a rival to China’s Belt and Road initiative. “We will mobilize the private sector for accelerated action to this end,” they said.
In a bilateral in Hiroshima, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and French President Emmanuel Macron “welcomed the strong unity of purpose at the G7 on … our collective approach to the economic threat posed by China,” a spokesperson for Sunak’s office said.
Title 42, the United States pandemic rule that had been used to immediately deport hundreds of thousands of migrants who crossed the border illegally over the last three years, has expired. Those migrants will have the opportunity to apply for asylum. President Biden’s new rules to replace Title 42 are facing legal challenges. The US Homeland Security Department announced a rule to make it extremely difficult for anyone who travels through another country, like Mexico, to qualify for asylum. Border crossings have already risen sharply, as many migrants attempted to cross before the measure expired on Thursday night. Some have said they worry about tighter controls and uncertainty ahead. Immigration is once again a major focus of the media as we examine the humanitarian, political, and public health issues migrants must face.
Below are some of the latest headlines in the Immigration channel on Newswise.
Newswise — The problem of gun violence in America can at times seem utterly intractable.
The horrific frequency of mass shootings (almost 300 in the first six months of 2022, according to the Gun Violence Archive), the tragic daily toll of firearm-related deaths (124 per day on average, according to the CDC), and the inability of politicians to implement effective gun control measures have had devastating personal consequences for individuals and families and pose a significant public health challenge for the nation.
The CDC reports that firearm-related injuries rank among the five leading causes of death for people ages 1 to 44 and are now the leading cause of death for children and adolescents, killing more people ages 1 to 19 than car accidents, drug overdoses, or cancer.
But for epidemiologist and gun violence expert Charles Branas, PhD, the Gelman Professor of Epidemiology and chair of the Department of Epidemiology in the Mailman School of Public Health, the scope and recalcitrance of the problem only heighten the urgency of answering one basic question: “What do you do about it?”
Toward that end, in 2020 Dr. Branas helped launch the Columbia Scientific Union for the Reduction of Gun Violence, or SURGE, a coalition of faculty, students, and alumni from across the university dedicated to finding creative scientific solutions to gun violence.
The need for such interventions is especially pressing given the difficulty of enacting gun control at the state and national levels, despite research by Dr. Branas and others showing that stricter gun control laws do in fact reduce gun violence. (The bipartisan gun safety legislation passed by Congress in June supports some existing evidence-based measures, but in limited fashion.)
Efforts to find solutions have been hindered by a lack of government funding for scientific research into gun violence. Federal funding dried up in 1996 after Congress passed the Dickey Amendment, which barred the CDC, and later the NIH, from spending money to promote gun control and dissuaded many young scientists from pursuing careers in gun violence research.
Recently, however, SURGE and other groups persuaded Congress to renew federal funding. And Dr. Branas hopes that fresh grants from the CDC and the NIH, coupled with opportunities for networking and collaboration provided by SURGE, will encourage a new generation of researchers to develop innovative, evidence-based interventions to prevent gun violence.
Dr. Branas sees signs that this is already happening.
Junior faculty, including Ashley Blanchard, MD, a pediatric emergency physician at VP&S, are investigating novel interventions with the support of fellow SURGE members. And the coalition is helping senior faculty like Dr. Branas and Paul Appelbaum, MD, the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Psychiatry, Medicine and Law, engage with like-minded colleagues from a variety of disciplines. Other SURGE members are from Columbia’s schools of law, nursing, and social work and from Teachers College and Barnard College.
“I remember walking into the room during our first meeting and just being in awe that there was this larger campus consortium of people interested in doing this type of work,” says Dr. Blanchard, assistant professor of pediatrics (in emergency medicine). “As a junior investigator, I can’t navigate the path to a firearm-related research career without having that mentorship. Having that room, and those groups of people, has really been incredible.”
DEEP ROOTS
If SURGE represents a new path to novel solutions to gun violence, it builds on decades of work by VP&S physicians. SURGE member Danielle Laraque-Arena, MD, a pediatrician and professor of clinical epidemiology and pediatrics at the Mailman School and VP&S, helped pioneer place-based gun violence interventions while working at Harlem Hospital from 1986 to 2000, a period that coincided with a national spike in gun violence.
During that time, Dr. Laraque-Arena and Barbara Barlow, MD, then chief of pediatric surgery at Harlem Hospital, partnered with city agencies and community members to reduce injury rates among children and adolescents in central Harlem.
Data collected through the Northern Manhattan Injury Surveillance System, a population-based survey developed by the Mailman School to tally severe injuries, indicated that adolescents represented 89% of gun-related deaths. Many of the deaths involved unintentional firearm injuries or individuals caught in crossfire, and the vast majority of fatalities occurred before hospitalization, which suggested that only prevention could significantly reduce firearm fatalities among young people in the area.
Dr. Laraque-Arena and her colleagues focused on implementing programs designed to create safe spaces and activities for children and adolescents, including several locations that involved rehabilitating and greening public spaces such as parks and playgrounds. The goal was to reduce the risk of intentional and unintentional injuries alike; an analysis showed that such broad-based, environment-oriented projects did significantly reduce firearm injuries.
Decades later, Dr. Branas tested the power of place-based interventions through citywide experiments conducted in Philadelphia, Detroit, and New Orleans. Among other things, he and his colleagues showed that rehabilitating abandoned buildings and vacant lots, which function as storage lockers for illegal firearms, can reduce gun violence by as much as 39%.
Dr. Branas is in talks with the parks department and other city agencies to bring similar programs to New York City. Together with SURGE member Sonali Rajan, PhD, an associate professor of health education at Teachers College, Dr. Branas leads a nationwide case-control study of firearm violence prevention tactics and policies in K-12 schools. The study, which is funded by the NIH, will examine 650 schools, comparing the safety measures (metal detectors, active shooter drills, armed school personnel) in place at schools that have experienced shootings with those that have not.
RIGOROUS SCIENTIFIC APPROACH
Dr. Appelbaum, who has for many years explored the relationship among mental health, gun violence, and gun policy, and Dr. Blanchard bring a similarly rigorous scientific approach to understanding—and preventing—gun violence.
In a series of studies examining the relationships among gun ownership, gun violence, and mental illness, Dr. Appelbaum has debunked the notion, often floated by politicians in the wake of mass shootings, that such events can be prevented by addressing serious mental illness.
“As human beings, we have a natural inclination when we see an act that is incomprehensible to assume that the person who did it must be, in lay terms, crazy,” Dr. Appelbaum says. The data suggest that most of those who commit these acts are not mentally ill. “They’re angry, they’re isolated, they’re frustrated, but they are not suffering from psychosis or other severe mental disorders.”
Dr. Appelbaum points out that the situation is different for suicide. Depression, substance use, and other mental disorders are strong risk factors for self-harm. As a result, efforts to identify and treat people suffering from such disorders can indeed prevent suicides if done effectively.
Nonetheless, he says, the most effective way to prevent gun violence, whether directed at others or at oneself, is to limit access to firearms.
REDUCING ACCESS
Measures aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of high-risk groups include red flag laws that allow the authorities to temporarily confiscate firearms from individuals who represent a threat to themselves or others; safe storage options, such as gun safes and trigger locks; and child access prevention laws that penalize adults for failing to store firearms safely and allowing children access to them.
Such measures have been shown to reduce firearm injuries and deaths and could play a particularly important role in preventing suicides. Studies show that most people who attempt suicide do so on impulse, moving from decision to action in less than an hour.
“There’s good evidence to show that especially in adolescents, the transition from contemplating suicide to action is very short-lived and transient and therefore utilizes whatever means are easily available,” Dr. Blanchard says.
The extraordinary lethality of guns means that someone who decides to commit suicide and has access to a firearm is much more likely to succeed than someone who does not. Research indicates that acts of suicide involving a firearm are fatal 90% of the time, compared with 13.5% for self-poisoning.
“The gun doesn’t give you a second chance,” says Dr. Laraque-Arena.
As a result, taking firearms out of the equation immediately reduces the likelihood that a suicide attempt will succeed. In keeping with that logic, Dr. Blanchard is conducting a pilot feasibility study of a tablet-based tool called Lock and Protect intended to increase safe storage or removal of guns and other lethal means by parents whose adolescents are at increased risk of suicide.
The tool is being studied in the pediatric emergency department at NewYork-Presbyterian’s Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital, where Dr. Blanchard and her colleagues often see patients who engage in predictors of suicide such as suicidal ideation and self-harm. The primary goal of the study, which involves experts from the departments of emergency medicine and psychiatry and the Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research’s Implementation Science Initiative, is to determine the feasibility of implementing the tool and expanding a trial for a larger emergency department population.
Patients and their parents enroll in the study together. The tool evaluates suicide risk using questionnaires such as the Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale and guides parents through the process of identifying the lethal means in their homes (guns, medications, ligatures) and understanding how they can best keep their children safe.
The tool was designed to take into consideration factors such as the cost of safe storage and the values of parents, including those who feel strongly about gun ownership. At tool completion, a safety plan is provided to parents to implement at home. Dr. Blanchard and her team follow up with parents at two weeks and with patients and parents at four weeks, with the long-term objective of understanding if the tool helps change home storage of guns and other lethal means.
Lock and Protect is precisely the kind of innovative gun violence intervention that Dr. Branas hoped SURGE would produce, and he is certain that more will be developed as the coalition continues to grow.
“We are two years into this,” he says. “We’ve done quite a bit, but we’re still building.”
[ad_2]
Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons
As the nation prepares for a showdown between President Biden and House Republican leadership over the impending default date of the federal debt ceiling, a House Republicans’ proposal to avoid the country’s first default could raise the federal debt limit but would undermine President Biden’s climate law— the Inflation Reduction Act.
Joshua Basseches, a climate change policy and politics expert at Tulane’s School of Liberal Arts, believes a big part of the Republican’s proposed solution is to speed up the permitting process for fossil fuel projects and control the energy supply.
“When you step back and look at the big picture, this is an effort to undermine the goals of the Inflation Reduction Act. This is a way to keep the fossil fuel industry afloat. But even if the Republicans were to get this through, which I don’t think they will in its current form, it would not undo all the positives from the Inflation Reduction Act.”
“The bill also contains the full text of the energy package the GOP passed in March, which would expand domestic energy production by allowing more oil, gas and mineral exploration on public lands and make dramatic changes to the National Environmental Policy Act by speeding up permitting for energy projects.”
Basseches can speak on the following:
-The potential effects of the GOPs debt-limit plan on the clean energy transition
-Permitting reform, its opportunities and pitfalls
-The Inflation Reduction Act’s impact on electric vehicles, clean electricity and ongoing state-level climate policy efforts
Newswise — [KAMPALA] Uganda’s anti-homosexuality bill, if signed into law, could lead to the withdrawal of foreign aid and threaten goals to end HIV/AIDS by 2030, advocates warn.
Uganda’s parliament passed the revised Anti-Homosexuality Act (AHA), which criminalises homosexual conduct, with minimal amendments this week (2 May).
The legislation was first passed at the end of March but revised in April after President Yoweri Museveni returned it to parliament for amendments.
“If it becomes law, it will increase stigma and discrimination against LGBTQ people and men who have sex with men, further limiting prevention and treatment services.” – Richard Lusimbo, director-general, Uganda Key Populations Consortium
The bill includes a punishment of life imprisonment for same-sex sexual conduct and up to ten years behind bars for attempted same-sex sexual acts. It also imposes the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality” and criminalises the “promotion” of homosexuality, which many people fear will encourage homophobia.
UNAIDS had warned that passing the bill into law would jeopardise progress in the fight against HIV/AIDS and undermine fundamental human rights including the right to health and the right to life.
“Uganda’s new Anti-Homosexuality bill is an outrage,” said Winnie Byanyima, executive director of UNAIDS.
“Access to timely and quality health care is a human right – sexual orientation should not determine one’s rights.”
Anne Githuku-Shongwe, director of the UNAIDS support team for eastern and southern Africa, said Uganda had made “excellent progress” in tackling the AIDS pandemic. “This new bill, if passed into law, would undercut that progress,” she warned.
Human rights ‘disaster’
According to a study published in The Lancet, HIV prevalence is significantly higher among men who have sex with men (MSM) and in African countries with laws that criminalise same sex relationships.
“If it becomes law, it will increase stigma and discrimination against LGBTQ [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer] people and men who have sex with men, further limiting prevention and treatment services,” said Richard Lusimbo, director-general of Uganda Key Populations Consortium, a human rights organisation.
Lusimbo explained that the bill, if passed into law, would be a disaster to the human rights of LGBTQ people, to public health and the fight against HIV/AIDS.
The US government has threatened to withdraw funding for Uganda through its President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) if the law is passed.
“At this time, we are reviewing the possibility that the AHA, if signed, might prevent us from providing lifesaving prevention, care and treatment services equitably to all Ugandans receiving PEPFAR support,” said a US State Department spokesperson.
PEPFAR’s annual HIV/AIDS response investment in Uganda is about US$400 million.
Despite the pressure from the US and other governments, there is speculation that President Museveni will most likely sign the bill into law. However, the power of ascension of a bill does not lay primarily with the president.
The Ugandan parliament can also pass the bill into law if the president does not assent to or veto a bill after it is passed by parliament within 30 days or if the bill is returned to parliament twice.
In his speech on April 22, at conference themed ‘Protecting African culture and family values’, President Museveni thanked members of the Ugandan parliament for passing the bill.
“It is good that you rejected the pressure from the imperialists,” he said, reflecting his support for what has been described by activists and advocates as a draconian law.
The bill is setting the pace for other African nations as countries like Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana and others indicate readiness to introduce similar bills in solidarity with Uganda.
Charles Brown, executive director of Preventive Care International (PCI), a Ugandan non-governmental organisation that focuses on HIV, says the bill is harsh and not well thought through. He fears it will further entrench inaccessibility of health services for people in same sex relationships.
“Already, the landlady of one of my offices in western Uganda called me saying that she was told that our organisation promotes homosexuality and she is scared of being arrested,” Brown told SciDev.Net, fearing eviction.
“We hope that the president doesn’t sign it into law,” he added.
This piece was produced by SciDev.Net’s Sub-Saharan Africa English desk.
