Although many think campaign donations buy influence from legislators, scholars have difficulty determining whether and how much influence contributions have in the legislative process. Many studies seek to identify the influence of donors on roll call votes. After considerable debate most scholars have concluded that donors have little influence on these votes. What voting studies cannot detec...

This article presents an educational design research study that explores the effectiveness of incorporating a deductive approach into consciousness raising activities in English as Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms for non-English major students. The aims to enhance students' grammatical awareness and accuracy through instructional strategy, using translation practices focusing on conscious rul...

Matching and Challenge Gifts to Charity: Evidence from Laboratory and Natural Field Experiments This study designs a natural field experiment linked to a controlled laboratory experiment to examine the effectiveness of matching gifts and challenge gifts, two popular strategies used to secure a portion of the $200 billion annually given to charities. We find evidence that challenge gifts positiv...

Businesses and green activists seek to influence public attention to the social impacts of a sector—they play salience games. An activist allocates funds between campaigning against a polluting industry and other environmental projects. When public attention is scarce, a greater campaign orientation induces industry to invest more heavily in symbolic action that cloaks damage and reduces the ri...

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES The key to HIV/STI control is community-wide intervention (CWI) which depends heavily on continuous monitoring and evaluation. Unfortunately, comprehensive CWI assessment methodology and reports are generally lacking. This study developed, applied, and evaluated a rapid tool for assessing CWI in China. METHODS A total of 120 county level respondents in charge of county-w...

This paper discusses the role of consciousness in the distinctions between reception and perception, between a purely causal and a referential or denotational semantics, and between linguistic ability and linguistic analysis, including representations and rules. The first two topics are treated by designing several thought experiments based on the phenomenon of blindsight. It is argued that rec...

background and purpose: to create a positive attitude towards communication skills training, experimental methods are preferred over theoretical approaches since they encourage the practical use of these skills among different health staff. this study aimed to compare the effects of role play and video feedback on the attitude and knowledge of midwives towards communication training skills. met...

Much charitable giving takes place in the context of existing social groups (workplaces, churches, friends and family). We exploit a real-world setting (online fundraising) to provide the first evidence on how the size of the social group affects donations. We show that the number of Facebook friends of individual charity fundraisers has a negative effect on average donation size. This is consi...

We analyze group-voting on binding minimum contributions to environmental projects and assess how such institutions affect subsequent voluntary donations. Mature tourism destinations such as the island of Majorca (Spain) suffer environmental pressures caused by decades of intense tourism development, reducing the environmental quality and tourism appeal of the island. Financed from the local ta...