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Research Review

Friday, January 26, 2024

Dear Colleagues,

I hope your Spring semester is off to a productive start! Please enjoy the November and December research updates in the newsletter below.

As a friendly reminder, nominations for the Price High Impact Research Award are due by end of day Wednesday January 31st.

Best,

Alice

Vice Dean for Research

Publications:

Jenkins, J. A., Monroe, N. W., & Provins, T. (2023). Toward a theory of minority-party influence in the U.S. congress: Whip counts, amendment votes, and minority leverage in the House. Journal of Public Policy, 43(4), 722–740. Altmetrics.
- Research Topic: The literature on congressional decision-making has largely ignored the influence of the minority party in the legislative process. This follows from the widely held belief that the majority party dominates the agenda-setting process. Though the minority party rarely achieves major policy success in Congress, we argue that the minority has significantly more influence over the legislative agenda than is commonly believed. We posit that, under some conditions, the minority has enough bargaining leverage to get floor votes on their proposals, in the form of both amendments and bills. We test our theoretical expectations with a novel design utilizing whip count data from the House and show that when a whip count on a bill occurs, the likelihood of a minority amendment disappointment and a majority amendment roll increases, respectively.

Sleboda, P., Bruine de Bruin, W., Gutsche, T., & Arvai, J. (2024). Don’t say “vegan” or “plant-based”: Food without meat and dairy is more likely to be chosen when labeled as “healthy” and “sustainable. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 93, 1-9. Altmetrics.
- Research Topic:Eating less meat and dairy is healthy and environmentally sustainable, but food labeled as “vegan” is relatively unpopular. Here, we examined the effect of different labels for promoting choices for food without meat and dairy, among a representative U.S. sample (N = 7341). Participants chose between one gourmet food gift basket without meat and dairy and another with meat and dairy that were available from an actual online store. They were randomly assigned to one of five conditions, in which the gourmet food gift basket without meat and dairy was labeled as “vegan”, “plant-based,” “healthy,” “sustainable,” or “healthy and sustainable.” Ten participants were randomly selected to receive the gourmet food gift basket of their choice.

Zissimopoulos, J. M., Joyce, G. F., & Jacobson, M. (2023). Trends in incident dementia diagnosis before and after Medicare Risk Adjustment. JAMA Network Open, 6(12). Altmetrics.
- Research Topic: Medicare reintroduced risk adjustment for Alzheimer disease and related dementias (ADRD) to its Medicare Advantage (MA) plan payments in 2020, which provides incentive to improve dementia detection and reduce missed diagnoses but also renews concerns about diagnostic upcoding1 for over 30 million MA beneficiaries. We assessed annual trends in incident ADRD diagnosis for all beneficiaries in MA and compared them with trends in traditional Medicare (TM) from 2016 through 2020.

Media Highlights:

Monthly research digests include self-reported media coverage.

Genevieve Giuliano was quoted in the San Diego Union Tribune from her appearance on a state Senate Transportation Subcommittee hearing about the threat of climate change and other challenges to the coastal rail corridor from San Luis Obisbo to San Diego on December 11th.
On November 8th, Julie Marsh joined PBS NewsHour to discuss why school board elections are getting national attention.
Glenn Melnick was quoted in the Los Angeles Times on November 10th about how MLK Community Hospital is heavily reliant on government reimbursements and they are struggling to pay their bills.

Presentations:

Geoff Boeing gave an invited talk at a symposium hosted by the U.S. National Institutes of Health on December 15th titled “Spatial Analytics to Benchmark and Monitor Healthy and Sustainable Cities.”
Wandi Bruine de Bruin presented her paper at the annual meeting of the Society for Risk Analysis in Washington DC in December 2023: “Global public concerns about climate change and severe weather: Evidence from the World Risk Poll.”

Of Note:

Alex Graddy-Reed was invited to serve on a National Academic Review of the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer Programs at NASEM Review Committee which was held on November 13th.
With an award from the IBM Center for the Business of Government, Juliet Musso just completed a research project assessing performance management systems in federal homelessness programs.