Joseph F. Fletcher

Complement Activation and the Resulting Placental Vascular Insufficiency Drives Fetal Growth Restriction Associated with Placental Malaria

Placental malaria (PM) is a major cause of fetal growth restriction, yet the underlying mechanism is unclear. Complement C5a and C5a receptor levels are increased with PM. C5a is implicated in fetal growth restriction in non-infection-based animal models. In a case-control study of 492 pregnant Malawian women, we find that elevated C5a levels are associated with an increased risk of delivering a small-for-gestational-age infant. C5a was significantly increased in PM and was negatively correlated with the angiogenic factor angiopoietin-1 and positively correlated with angiopoietin-2, soluble endoglin, and vascular endothelial growth factor. Genetic or pharmacological blockade of C5a or its receptor in a mouse model of PM resulted in greater fetoplacental vessel development, reduced placental vascular resistance, and improved fetal growth and survival. These data suggest that C5a drives fetal growth restriction in PM through dysregulation of angiogenic factors essential for placental vascular remodeling resulting in placental vascular insufficiency.

The Fallacy of Democratic Elitism: Elite Competition and Commitment to Civil Liberties

Since the seminal studies of Stouffer and McClosky it has become accepted that political elites are markedly more committed to civil liberties and democratic values than is the public at large; so much so that political elites should be recognized, in McCloskys words, as ‘the major repositories of the public conscience and as carriers of the Creed’. The argument of this article is that previous analyses have erred by focusing on the contrast between elites taken as a whole and the mass public. The crucial contrast is not between elites and citizens, but rather between groups of elites that are competing one with another for political power. Drawing on large-scale surveys of two modern democracies, Canada and the United States, this article demonstrates that differences among elites in support for civil liberties eclipse, both in size and political significance, differences between elites and citizens. The fallacy of democratic elitism, as this study shows, is its indifference to which elites prevail in the electoral competition for power.

Two-Timing: Politics and Response Latencies in a Bilingual Survey

Through the recording of response times in a national four-wave bilingual panel survey, this study reports improvements in the prediction of vote choice up to 1 year in advance of a federal election. These results were achieved with conventional computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) software, indicating that the immediate use of response time measures is both practical and attractive for commercial as well as academic survey units. Even so, response latencies were found to be sensitive to political circumstance, such that timings should be analyzed separately for minority and majority populations. Moreover, a broad analytic focus, beyond timing only vote intention and partisan commitment, is recommended because latency data on core questions of identity and allegiance reveal a great deal about the contours of political context.

Emotional Determinants of Support for the Canadian Mission in Afghanistan: A View from the Bridge

In an earlier paper ~Fletcher et al., 2009!, we documented that public support for the Afghanistan mission depends to a substantial degree upon the emotional responses of Canadians. More specifically, we found little support for the mission in the absence of a sense of pride. Due to data limitations, however, we were unable to probe further into the emotional foundations of public support for ~and opposition to! the mission. In particular, survey questions in national polls do not permit investigation of a broad spectrum of public feelings towards the mission in Afghanistan nor exploration of the specific emotions upon which judgments towards war have been shown to turn ~Huddy et al., 2007!. In the present paper, we attempt to bring into focus some of the negative aspects of Canadian emotional responses to the mission through a combination of qualitative field research and experimental analysis. Drawing upon Scott Gartner’s work ~2008a; 2011! on the effect of warbased imagery on support for the use of military force, we examine the inf luence of a particularly potent symbol—that of f lag-draped coffins—on attitudes towards Canada’s Afghan mission. Our findings suggest the distinctiveness of the Canadian case. Both conventional political wisdom and academic work in the American context support the idea of casualty intolerance among publics ~Berinsky, 2009; Gelpi et al., 2009; Larson, 1996; Mueller, 1973!; and in line with this understand-

An Elephant in the Room: Bias in Evaluating a Required Quantitative Methods Course

Undergraduate Political Science programs often require students to take a quantitative research methods course. Such courses are typically among the most poorly rated. This can be due, in part, to the way in which courses are evaluated. Students are generally asked to provide an overall rating, which, in turn, is widely used by students, faculty, and administrators to assess a course. Unfortunately, even questions composed with the best of intentions have the potential to bias the results. In this article, we evaluate the global rating question used at our university and show that it introduces bias into the measure by cuing extraneous considerations. It artificially inflates the number of negative reactions to the course by leading students to think about its required status and their initial level of enthusiasm rather than their level of accomplishment and its value as a learning experience. By locating our results in the course evaluation and framing literature, we suggest an approach to evaluating overall rating questions that can be adapted for use at other institutions.