Two Genes Predict Voter Turnout
Fowler, Baker, and Dawes (2008) recently showed in two independent
studies of twins that voter turnout has very high heritability. Here we
investigate two specific genes that may contribute to this heritability
via their impact on neurochemical processes that influence social
behavior. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent
Health, we show that a polymorphism of the MAOA gene significantly
increases the likelihood of voting. We also find evidence of a
gene-environment interaction between religious attendance and a
polymorphism of the 5HTT gene that significantly increases voter turnout.
These are the first results to ever link specific genes to political
behavior and they suggest that political scientists should take seriously
the claim that at least some variation in political behavior is due to
innate predispositions.
PUBLICATIONS
-
Biology, Politics, and the Emerging Science of Human Nature
Biologists have recently learned a tremendous amount about human brain function and its genetic basis. At the same time political scientists have developed modern survey methods and game theoretic models to study political attitudes and behaviors. Here we argue that biologists and political scientists must work together to advance a new science of human nature. In particular, the study of cooperation by biologists and of participation by political scientists could benefit from cross-fertilization. It is also becoming increasingly clear that biological and genetic variation play an important role in explaining political behavior. Finally, recent work in neuroscience suggests that the human brain is adapted to solve social problems, and that politics is a form of 'playground cognition'. If the need for sophisticated social cognition drove the evolution of the human brain, then a new science of human nature will require comprehending human biology in a sociopolitical context.
James H. Fowler,
Darren Schreiber
Science
(forthcoming)
-
Estimating Peer Effects on Health in Social Networks
We recently showed that obesity can spread socially from person to person in adults (Christakis and Fowler 2007). A natural question to ask is whether or not these results generalize to a population of adolescents. Three separate teams of researchers have analyzed the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) and shown evidence of person-to-peron spread of obesity, but they use different methods and disagree on the interpretation of their results. Here, we conduct our own analysis of the Add Health data, provide additional evidence from the Framingham Heart Study on the social spread of obesity, and use Monte Carlo simulations to test the econometric methods we use to model peer effects. The results show that the existence of peer effects in body mass is robust to several specifications in both adults and in adolescents.
James H. Fowler,
Nicholas A. Christakis
Journal of Health Economics
(forthcoming)
-
Two Genes Predict Voter Turnout
Fowler, Baker, and Dawes (2008) recently showed in two independent
studies of twins that voter turnout has very high heritability. Here we
investigate two specific genes that may contribute to this heritability
via their impact on neurochemical processes that influence social
behavior. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent
Health, we show that a polymorphism of the MAOA gene significantly
increases the likelihood of voting. We also find evidence of a
gene-environment interaction between religious attendance and a
polymorphism of the 5HTT gene that significantly increases voter turnout.
These are the first results to ever link specific genes to political
behavior and they suggest that political scientists should take seriously
the claim that at least some variation in political behavior is due to
innate predispositions.
James H. Fowler,
Christopher T. Dawes
Journal of Politics
70 (3): TBA (July 2008)
(Featured on CNN)
(Front page coverage in the San Diego Union Tribune)
(Featured in New Scientist)
(See the New York Times editorial)
(Presentation Slides)
-
The Colbert Bump in Campaign Donations: More Truthful Than Truthy
Stephen Colbert, the host of Comedy Central's The Colbert
Report, claims that politicians who appear on his show will become
more popular and are more likely to win elections. Although online
discussions cite anecdotal evidence in support of his claim, it has never
been scrutinized scientifically. In this article I use "facts" (sorry,
Stephen) provided by the Federal Election Commission to create a matched
control group of candidates who have never appeared on The Colbert
Report. I then compare the personal campaign donations they receive
to those received by candidates who have appeared on the program's segment
"Better Know a District." The results show that Democratic candidates who
appear on the Report receive a statistically significant "Colbert bump" in
campaign donations, raising 44% more money in a 30-day period after
appearing on the show. However, there is no evidence of a similar boost
for Republicans. These results constitute the first scientific evidence
of Stephen Colbert's influence on political campaigns.
James H. Fowler
PS: Political Science & Politics,
41 (3): 533-539 (July 2008)
(Featured on The Colbert Report, Episode 4028, 3/3/08)
(See the video at Comedy Central)
(See my op-ed on Colbert in the Los Angeles Times)
(Featured in US News and World Report)
(Featured as NPR's Story of the Day)
-
The Collective Dynamics of Smoking in a Large Social Network
Background
The prevalence of smoking has decreased substantially in the United States over the
past 30 years. We examined the extent of the person-to-person spread of smoking
behavior and the extent to which groups of widely connected people quit together.
Methods
We studied a densely interconnected social network of 12,067 people assessed repeatedly from 1971 to 2003 as part of the Framingham Heart Study. We used network analytic methods and longitudinal statistical models.
Results
Discernible clusters of smokers and nonsmokers were present in the network, and
the clusters extended to three degrees of separation. Despite the decrease in smoking in the overall population, the size of the clusters of smokers remained the same
across time, suggesting that whole groups of people were quitting in concert. Smokers were also progressively found in the periphery of the social network. Smoking
cessation by a spouse decreased a person's chances of smoking by 67% (95% confidence interval [CI], 59 to 73). Smoking cessation by a sibling decreased the chances by 25% (95% CI, 14 to 35). Smoking cessation by a friend decreased the chances
by 36% (95% CI, 12 to 55 ). Among persons working in small firms, smoking cessation by a coworker decreased the chances by 34% (95% CI, 5 to 56). Friends with
more education influenced one another more than those with less education. These
effects were not seen among neighbors in the immediate geographic area.
Conclusions
Network phenomena appear to be relevant to smoking cessation. Smoking behavior
spreads through close and distant social ties, groups of interconnected people stop
smoking in concert, and smokers are increasingly marginalized socially. These findings have implications for clinical and public health interventions to reduce and prevent smoking.
The Colbert Bump in Campaign Donations: More Truthful Than Truthy
Stephen Colbert, the host of Comedy Central's The Colbert
Report, claims that politicians who appear on his show will become
more popular and are more likely to win elections. Although online
discussions cite anecdotal evidence in support of his claim, it has never
been scrutinized scientifically. In this article I use "facts" (sorry,
Stephen) provided by the Federal Election Commission to create a matched
control group of candidates who have never appeared on The Colbert
Report. I then compare the personal campaign donations they receive
to those received by candidates who have appeared on the program's segment
"Better Know a District." The results show that Democratic candidates who
appear on the Report receive a statistically significant "Colbert bump" in
campaign donations, raising 44% more money in a 30-day period after
appearing on the show. However, there is no evidence of a similar boost
for Republicans. These results constitute the first scientific evidence
of Stephen Colbert's influence on political campaigns.
Nicholas A. Christakis,
James H. Fowler
New England Journal of Medicine
358 (21): 2249-58 (22 May 2008)
(Supplementary Information)
(See a movie of the network at NEJM)
(Here's the original movie)
(UCSD Press Release)
(Editorial by Steven Schroeder)
(Featured in the New York Times)
(Featured in the Washington Post)
(One of the three lead stories on NPR's Morning Edition)
(Letter from American Lung Association to New York Times)
-
Genetic Variation in Political Participation
The decision to vote has puzzled scholars for decades. Theoretical
models predict little or no variation in participation in large population
elections and empirical models have typically explained only a relatively
small portion of individual-level variance in turnout behavior. However,
these models have not considered the hypothesis that part of the variation
in voting behavior can be attributed to genetic effects. Matching public
voter turnout records in Los Angeles to a twin registry, we study the
heritability of political behavior in monozygotic and dizygotic twins.
The results show that genes account for a significant proportion of the
variation in voter turnout. We also replicate these results with data
from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and show that
they extend to a broad class of acts of political participation. These
are the first findings to suggest that humans exhibit genetic variation in
their tendency to participate in political activities.
James H. Fowler,
Laura A. Baker,
Christopher T. Dawes
American Political Science Review
102 (2): 233-248 (May 2008)
(Featured in Scientific American)
(Front page coverage in the San Diego Union Tribune)
-
On the Evolutionary Origin of Prospect Theory Preferences
Prospect theory scholars have identified important human
decision-making biases, but they have been conspicuously silent on the
question of the origin of these biases. Here we create a model that shows
preferences consistent with prospect theory may have an origin in
evolutionary psychology. Specifically, we derive a model from
risk-sensitive optimal foraging theory to generate an explanation for the
origin and function of context-dependent risk aversion and risk seeking
behavior. Although this model suggests that human cognitive architecture
evolved to solve particular adaptive problems related to finding
sufficient food resources to survive, we argue that this same architecture
persists and is utilized in other survival-related decisions that are
critical to understanding political outcomes. In particular, we identify
important departures from standard results when we incorporate prospect
theory into theories of spatial voting and legislator behavior,
international bargaining and conflict, and economic development and
reform.
Rose McDermott,
James H. Fowler,
Oleg Smirnov
Journal of Politics
70 (2): 335-350 (April 2008)
-
Heritability of Cooperative Behavior in the Trust Game
Although laboratory experiments document cooperative behavior in humans,
little is known about the extent to which individual differences in
cooperativeness result from genetic and environmental variation. In this
article we report the results of two independently conceived and executed
studies of monozygotic and dizygotic twins, one in Sweden, and one in the
United States. The results from these studies suggest that humans are
endowed with genetic variation that influences the decision to
invest--and to reciprocate investment--in the classic trust game. Based
on these findings, we urge social scientists to take seriously the idea
that differences in peer and parental socialization are not the only
forces that influence variation in cooperative behavior.
Heritability of Cooperative Behavior in the Trust Game
Although laboratory experiments document cooperative behavior in humans,
little is known about the extent to which individual differences in
cooperativeness result from genetic and environmental variation. In this
article we report the results of two independently conceived and executed
studies of monozygotic and dizygotic twins, one in Sweden, and one in the
United States. The results from these studies suggest that humans are
endowed with genetic variation that influences the decision to
invest--and to reciprocate investment--in the classic trust game. Based
on these findings, we urge social scientists to take seriously the idea
that differences in peer and parental socialization are not the only
forces that influence variation in cooperative behavior.
David Cesarini,
Christopher T. Dawes,
James H. Fowler,
Magnus Johannesson,
Paul Lichtenstein,
Björn Wallace
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
105 (10): 3721-3726 (11 March 2008)
(Supporting Information)
-
Community Structure in Congressional Cosponsorship Networks
We study the United States Congress by constructing networks
between Members of Congress based on the legislation that they cosponsor.
Using the concept of modularity, we identify the community structure of
Congressmen, as connected via sponsorship/cosponsorship of the same
legislation, to investigate the collaborative communities of legislators
in both chambers of Congress. This analysis yields an explicit and
conceptually clear measure of political polarization, demonstrating a
sharp increase in partisan polarization which preceded and then culminated
in the 104th Congress (1995-1996), when Republicans took control of both
chambers. Although polarization has since waned in the U.S. Senate, it
remains at historically high levels in the House of Representatives.
Yan Zhang, A.J. Friend, Amanda L. Traud, Mason A. Porter,
James H. Fowler,
Peter J. Mucha
Physica A
387 (7): 1705-1712 (March 2008)
-
A Tournament of Party Decision Rules
In the spirit of Axelrod's famous series of tournaments for
strategies in the repeat-play prisoner'ss dilemma, we conducted a
"tournament of party decision rules" in a dynamic agent-based spatial
model of party competition. A call was issued for researchers to submit
rules for selecting party positions in a two-dimensional policy space.
Each submitted rule was pitted against all others in a suite of very
long-running simulations in which all parties falling below a declared
support threshold for two consecutive elections "died" and one new party
was "born" each election at a random spatial location, using a rule
randomly drawn from the set submitted. The policy-selection rule most
successful at winning votes over the very long run was declared the
"winner". The most successful rule was identified unambiguously and
combined a number of striking features. It satisficed rather than
maximized in the short run; it was "parasitic" on choices made by other
successful rules; and it was hard-wired not to attack other agents using
the same rule, which it identified using a "secret handshake". We followed
up the tournament with a second suite of simulations in a more
evolutionary setting in which the selection probability of a rule was a
function of its "fitness", measured in terms of the previous success of
agents using the same rule. In this setting, the rule that won the
original tournament pulled even further ahead of the competition. Treated
as a discovery tool, tournament results raise a series of intriguing
issues for those involved in the modeling of party competition.
James H. Fowler,
Michael Laver
Journal of Conflict Resolution
52 (1): 68-92 (February 2008)
(Online Appendix)
(Click here for more information about the $1000 Tournament of Party Strategies)
-
The Authority of Supreme Court Precedent
We construct the complete network of 30,288 majority opinions
written by the U.S. Supreme Court and the cases they cite from 1754 to
2002 in the United States Reports. Data from this network demonstrates
quantitatively the evolution of the norm of stare decisis in the 19th
Century and a significant deviation from this norm by the activist Warren
court. We further describe a method for creating authority scores using
the network data to identify the most important Court precedents. This
method yields rankings that conform closely to evaluations by legal
experts, and even predicts which cases they will identify as important in
the future. An analysis of these scores over time allows us to test
several hypotheses about the rise and fall of precedent. We show that
reversed cases tend to be much more important than other decisions, and
the cases that overrule them quickly become and remain even more important
as the reversed decisions decline. We also show that the Court is careful
to ground overruling decisions in past precedent, and the care it
exercises is increasing in the importance of the decision that is
overruled. Finally, authority scores corroborate qualitative assessments
of which issues and cases the Court prioritizes and how these change over
time.
James H. Fowler, Sangick Jeon
Social Networks
30 (1): 16-30 (January 2008)
(Featured in The
Economist)
Download Supreme Court data developed for this article here.
The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network Over 32 Years
Background
The prevalence of obesity has increased substantially over the past 30
years. We performed a quantitative analysis of the nature and extent of
the person-to-person spread of obesity as a possible factor contributing
to the obesity epidemic.
Methods
We evaluated a densely interconnected social network of 12,067 people
assessed repeatedly from 1971 to 2003 as part of the Framingham Heart
Study. The body-mass index was available for all subjects. We used
longitudinal statistical models to examine whether weight gain in one
person was associated with weight gain in his or her friends, siblings,
spouse, and neighbors.
Results
Discernible clusters of obese persons were present in the network at
all time points, and the clusters extended to three degrees of separation.
These clusters did not appear to be solely attributable to the selective
formation of social ties among obese persons. A person's chances of
becoming obese increased by 57% (95% confidence interval [CI], 6 to 123)
if he or she had a friend who became obese in a given interval. Among
pairs of adult siblings, if one sibling became obese, the chance that the
other would become obese increased by 40% (95% CI, 21 to 60). If one
spouse became obese, the likelihood that the other spouse would become
obese increased by 37% (95% CI, 7 to 73). These effects were not seen
among neighbors in the immediate geographic location. Persons of the
same sex had relatively greater influence on each other as compared with
those of the opposite sex. The spread of smoking cessation did not account
for the spread of obesity in the network.
Conclusions
Network phenomena appear to be relevant to the biologic and behavioral
trait of obesity, and obesity appears to spread through social ties. These
findings have implications for clinical and public health
interventions.
-
Social Networks in Political Science: Hiring and Placement of PhDs, 1960-2002
Drawing on recent methodological advances, we examine the social
network of political science department placements. This network permits
us to estimate simultaneously 1) how well departments place their own
students and 2) how effective they are in hiring students from other
institutions. Using data collected by Masuoka, Grofman and Feld (2006a,
b) on U.S. Ph.D. granting institutions, we provide visualizations of the
connectivity among 132 departments as a social network graph in which core
and periphery departments can be identified. We also show how this
network has changed over time. The new social network measures conform
closely to qualitative expert rankings and show that a department's
placement record contributes more to its prestige than a department's
ability to hire and retain faculty from core institutions.
James H. Fowler,
Bernard N. Grofman,
Natalie Masuoka
PS: Political Science & Politics
40 (4): 729-739 (October 2007)
-
Does Self-Citation Pay?
Self-citations - those where authors cite their own work -
account for a significant portion of all citations. These self-references
may result from the cumulative nature of individual research, the need for
personal gratification, or the value of self-citation as a rhetorical and
tactical tool in the struggle for visibility and scientific authority. In
this article we examine the incentives that underlie self-citation by
studying how authors' references to their own works affect the citations
they receive from others. We report the results of a macro study of more
than half a million citations to articles by Norwegian scientists that
appeared in the Science Citation Index. We show that the more one cites
oneself the more one is cited by other scholars. Controlling for numerous
sources of variation in cumulative citations from others, our models
suggest that each additional self-citation increases the number of
citations from others by about one after one year, and by about three
after five years. Moreover, there is no significant penalty for the most
frequent self-citers the effect of self-citation remains positive
even for very high rates of self-citation. These results carry important
policy implications for the use of citations to evaluate performance and
distribute resources in science and they represent new information on the
role and impact of self-citations in scientific communication.
James H. Fowler,
Dag W. Aksnes
Scientometrics
72 (3): 427-437 (September 2007)
(Mentioned in Nature News)
-
Beyond the Self: Social Identity, Altruism, and Political Participation
Scholars have recently extended the traditional calculus of
participation model by adding a term for benefits to others. We advance
this work by distinguishing theoretically a concern for others in general
(altruism) from a concern for others in certain groups (social
identification). We posit that both concerns generate increased benefits
from participation. To test these theories, we use allocations in
dictator games towards an unidentified anonymous recipient and two
recipients identified only as a registered Democrat or a registered
Republican. These allocations permit a distinction between altruism and
social identification. The results show that both altruism and social
identification significantly increase political participation. The
results also demonstrate the usefulness of incorporating benefits that
stem from sources beyond material self-interest into rational choice
models of participation.
James H. Fowler,
Cindy D. Kam
Journal of Politics
69 (3): 813-827 (August 2007)
(Web appendix)
-
The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network Over 32 Years
Background
The prevalence of obesity has increased substantially over the past 30
years. We performed a quantitative analysis of the nature and extent of
the person-to-person spread of obesity as a possible factor contributing
to the obesity epidemic.
Methods
We evaluated a densely interconnected social network of 12,067 people
assessed repeatedly from 1971 to 2003 as part of the Framingham Heart
Study. The body-mass index was available for all subjects. We used
longitudinal statistical models to examine whether weight gain in one
person was associated with weight gain in his or her friends, siblings,
spouse, and neighbors.
Results
Discernible clusters of obese persons were present in the network at
all time points, and the clusters extended to three degrees of separation.
These clusters did not appear to be solely attributable to the selective
formation of social ties among obese persons. A person's chances of
becoming obese increased by 57% (95% confidence interval [CI], 6 to 123)
if he or she had a friend who became obese in a given interval. Among
pairs of adult siblings, if one sibling became obese, the chance that the
other would become obese increased by 40% (95% CI, 21 to 60). If one
spouse became obese, the likelihood that the other spouse would become
obese increased by 37% (95% CI, 7 to 73). These effects were not seen
among neighbors in the immediate geographic location. Persons of the
same sex had relatively greater influence on each other as compared with
those of the opposite sex. The spread of smoking cessation did not account
for the spread of obesity in the network.
Conclusions
Network phenomena appear to be relevant to the biologic and behavioral
trait of obesity, and obesity appears to spread through social ties. These
findings have implications for clinical and public health
interventions.
Nicholas A. Christakis,
James H. Fowler
New England Journal of Medicine
357 (4): 370-379 (26 July 2007)
(Supplementary Information)
(See a movie of the network at NEJM)
(Here's the original movie)
(UCSD Press Release)
(Editorial by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi)
(Correspondence about the article in NEJM, 1 Nov 2007 )
(Front-page, above-the-fold New York Times article -- reached No.2 on most emailed list)
(Also in the New York Times Week in Review)
(Watch a 30 minute TV program about the study on the series Health Matters)
Egalitarian Motives in Humans
Participants in laboratory games are often willing to alter others'
incomes at a cost to themselves and this behaviour has the effect of
promoting cooperation. What motivates this action is unclear:
punishment and reward aimed at promoting cooperation cannot be
distinguished from attempts to produce equality. To understand costly
taking and costly giving, we create an experimental game that isolates
egalitarian motives. The results show that subjects reduce and augment
others' incomes, at a personal cost, even when there is no cooperative
behaviour to be reinforced. Furthermore, the size and frequency of
income alterations are strongly influenced by inequality. Emotions
towards top earners become increasingly negative as inequality increases,
and those who express these emotions spend more to reduce above-average
earners' incomes and to increase below-average earners' incomes. The
results suggest that egalitarian motives affect income altering
behaviours, and may thus be an important factor underlying the evolution
of strong reciprocity and, hence, cooperation in humans
-
Network Analysis and the Law: Measuring the Legal Importance of Supreme Court Precedents
We construct the complete network of 26,681 majority opinions
written by the U.S. Supreme Court and the cases that cite them from 1791
to 2005. We describe a method for using the patterns in citations within
and across cases to create importance scores that identify the most
legally relevant precedents in the network of Supreme Court law at any
given point in time. Our measures are superior to existing network-based
alternatives and, for example, offer information regarding case importance
not evident in simple citation counts. We also demonstrate the validity of
our measures by showing that they are strongly correlated with the future
citation behavior of state courts, the U.S. Courts of Appeals, and the
U.S. Supreme Court. In so doing, we show that network analysis is a viable
way of measuring how central a case is to law at the Court and suggest
that it can be used to measure other legal concepts.
James H. Fowler,
Timothy R. Johnson,
James F. Spriggs II,
Sangick Jeon,
Paul J. Wahlbeck
Political Analysis,
15 (3): 324-346 (July 2007)
-
Egalitarian Motives in Humans
Participants in laboratory games are often willing to alter others'
incomes at a cost to themselves and this behaviour has the effect of
promoting cooperation. What motivates this action is unclear:
punishment and reward aimed at promoting cooperation cannot be
distinguished from attempts to produce equality. To understand costly
taking and costly giving, we create an experimental game that isolates
egalitarian motives. The results show that subjects reduce and augment
others' incomes, at a personal cost, even when there is no cooperative
behaviour to be reinforced. Furthermore, the size and frequency of
income alterations are strongly influenced by inequality. Emotions
towards top earners become increasingly negative as inequality increases,
and those who express these emotions spend more to reduce above-average
earners' incomes and to increase below-average earners' incomes. The
results suggest that egalitarian motives affect income altering
behaviours, and may thus be an important factor underlying the evolution
of strong reciprocity and, hence, cooperation in humans
Christopher T. Dawes,
James H. Fowler,
Tim Johnson,
Richard McElreath,
Oleg Smirnov
Nature
446: 794-796, doi:10.1038/nature05651 (12 April 2007)
(Supplementary Information)
(UCSD Press Release)
(Reuters article picked up by CNN and New York Times)
-
Policy-Motivated Parties in Dynamic Political Competition
We analyze a model of a dynamic political competition between two
policy-motivated parties under uncertainty. The model suggests that
electoral mandates matter: increasing the margin of victory in the
previous election causes both parties to shift towards policies preferred
by the winner, and the loser typically shifts more than the winner. The
model also provides potential answers to a number of empirical puzzles in
the field of electoral politics. In particular, we provide possible
explanations for why close elections may lead to extreme platforms by both
parties,why increased extremism in the platform of one party may lead to
greater moderation in the platform of the other party,and why increasing
polarization of the electorate causes winning candidates to become more
sensitive to mandates. We also show that, contrary to previous findings,
increasing uncertainty sometimes decreases platform divergence. Finally,
we pay special attention to the proper methodology for doing numerical
comparative statics analysis in computational models.
Oleg Smirnov,
James H. Fowler
Journal of Theoretical Politics
19 (1): 9-31 (January 2007)
-
Mandates, Parties, and Voters: How Elections Shape the Future
Most research on two-party elections has considered the outcome as a
single, dichotomous event: either one or the other party wins. In this
book, the authors investigate not just who wins, but by how much, and they
marshal compelling evidence that mandates--in the form of margin of
victory--matter. Using theoretical models, computer simulation, carefully
designed experiments, and empirical data, the authors show that after an
election the policy positions of both parties move in the direction
preferred by the winning party--and they move even more if the victory is
large. (book)
James H. Fowler,
Oleg Smirnov
Temple
University Press (2007)
(Includes the chapters A Dynamic Calculus of Voting and
Party Responsiveness and Mandate Balancing.)
(see the Review in Perspectives by André Blais)
Mandates, Parties, and Voters: How Elections Shape the Future
Most research on two-party elections has considered the outcome as a
single, dichotomous event: either one or the other party wins. In this
book, the authors investigate not just who wins, but by how much, and they
marshal compelling evidence that mandates--in the form of margin of
victory--matter. Using theoretical models, computer simulation, carefully
designed experiments, and empirical data, the authors show that after an
election the policy positions of both parties move in the direction
preferred by the winning party--and they move even more if the victory is
large.
-
The Southern California Twin Register at the University of Southern California: II
The Southern California Twin Register was initiated in 1984 at the
University of Southern California, and continues to grow. This article
provides an update of the register since it was described in the 2002
special issue of this journal. The register has expanded considerably in
the past 4 years, primarily as a result of recent access to Los Angeles
County birth records and voter registration databases. Currently, this
register contains nearly 5000 twin pairs, the majority of whom are school
age. The potential for further expansion in adult twins using voter
registration records is also described. Using the Los Angeles County voter
registration database, we can identify a large group of individuals with a
high probability of having a twin who also resides in Los Angeles County.
In addition to describing the expansion of register, this article provides
an overview of an ongoing investigation of 605 twin pairs who are
participating in a longitudinal study of behavioral problems during
childhood and adolescence. Characteristics of the twins and their families
are presented, indicating baseline rates of conduct problems, depression
and anxiety disorders, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder
diagnoses which are comparable to nontwins in this age range.
Laura A. Baker,
Mafalda Barton,
Adrian Raine,
James H. Fowler
Twin Research and Human Genetics
9 (6): 1-8 (December 2006)
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Connecting the Congress: A Study of Cosponsorship Networks
Using large-scale network analysis I map the cosponsorship networks
of all 280,000 pieces of legislation proposed in the U.S. House and Senate
from 1973 to 2004. In these networks, a directional link can be drawn from
each cosponsor of a piece of legislation to its sponsor. I use a number of
statistics to describe these networks such as the quantity of legislation
sponsored and cosponsored by each legislator, the number of legislators
cosponsoring each piece of legislation, the total number of legislators
who have cosponsored bills written by a given legislator, and network
measures of closeness, betweenness, and eigenvector centrality. I then
introduce a new measure I call "connectedness" which uses
information about the frequency of cosponsorship and the number of
cosponsors on each bill to make inferences about the social distance
between legislators. Connectedness predicts which members will pass more
amendments on the floor, a measure that is commonly used as a proxy for
legislative influence. It also predicts roll call vote choice even after
controlling for ideology and partisanship.
James H. Fowler
Political Analysis
14 (4): 456-487 (Fall 2006)
(Mentioned in the
Washington Post and
Washington Times)
Download Cosponsorship network data developed for this article here.
-
Legislative Cosponsorship Networks in the U.S. House and Senate
In the US House and Senate, each piece of legislation is
sponsored by a unique legislator. In addition, legislators can publicly
express support for a piece of legislation by cosponsoring it. The network
of sponsors and cosponsors provides information about the underlying
social networks among legislators. I use a number of statistics to
describe the cosponsorship network in order to show that it behaves much
differently than other large social networks that have been recently
studied. In particular, the cosponsorship network is much denser than
other networks and aggregate features of the network appear to be
influenced by institutional arrangements and strategic incentives. I also
demonstrate that a weighted closeness centrality measure that I call
"connectedness" can be used to identify influential legislators.
James H. Fowler
Social Networks
28 (4): 454-465 (October 2006)
(Mentioned in the
Washington Post and
Washington Times)
Download Cosponsorship network data developed for this article here.
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Altruism and Turnout
Scholars have recently reworked the traditional calculus of voting
model by adding a term for benefits to others. Although the probability
that a single vote affects the outcome of an election is quite small, the
number of people who enjoy the benefit when the preferred alternative wins
is large. As a result, people who care about benefits to others and who
think one of the alternatives makes others better offare more likely to
vote.I test the altruism theory ofvoting in the laboratory by using
allocations in a dictator game to reveal the degree to which each subject
is concerned about the well-being of others. The main findings suggest
that variation in concern for the well-being of others in conjunction with
strength of party identification is a significant factor in individual
turnout decisions in real world elections. Partisan altruists are much
more likely to vote than their nonpartisan or egoist peers.
James H. Fowler
Journal of Politics
68 (3): 674-683 (August 2006)
(Web appendix)
(Mentioned in the Chronicle of Higher Education)
Second Order Free-Riding Problem Solved?
Panchanathan and Boyd describe a model of indirect reciprocity in
which mutual aid among cooperators can promote large-scale human
cooperation without succumbing to a second-order free-riding problem
(whereby individuals receive but do not give aid). However, the model does
not include second-order free riders as one of the possible behavioural
types. Here I present a simplified version of their model to demonstrate
how cooperation unravels if second-round defectors enter the population,
and this shows that the free-riding problem remains
unsolved.
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Patience as a Political Virtue: Delayed Gratification and Turnout
A number of scholars have demonstrated that voter turnout is
influenced by the costs of processing information and going to the polls,
and the policy benefits associated with the outcome of the election.
However, no one has yet noted that the costs of voting are paid on or
before Election Day, while policy benefits may not materialize until
several days, months, or even years later. Since the costs of voting must
be borne before the benefits are realized, people who are more patient
should be more willing to vote. We use a "choice game" from experimental
economics to estimate individual discount factors which are used to
measure patience. We then show that patience significantly increases voter
turnout.
James H. Fowler,
Cindy D. Kam
Political Behavior
28 (2): 113-128 (June 2006)
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Habitual Voting and Behavioral Turnout
Bendor, Diermeier, and Ting (2003) develop a behavioral alternative
to rational choice models of turnout. However, the assumption they make
about the way individuals adjust their probability of voting biases their
model towards their main result of significant turnout in large
populations. Moreover, the assumption causes individuals to engage in
casual voting (sometimes people vote and sometimes they abstain). This
result is at odds with a substantial literature that indicates most people
engage in habitual voting (they either always vote or always abstain). I
develop an alternative model to show how feedback in the probability
adjustment mechanism affects the behavioral model. The version of this
model without feedback yields both high turnout and habitual voting.
James H. Fowler
Journal of Politics
68 (2): 335-344 (May 2006)
(Web appendix)
-
Elections and Markets: The Effect of Partisan Orientation, Policy Risk,
and Mandates on the Economy
Rational partisan theory's exclusive focus on electoral uncertainty
ignores the importance of policy uncertainty for the economy. I develop a
theory of policy risk to account for this uncertainty. Using an innovative
measure of electoral probabilities based on Iowa Electronic Markets
futures data for the United States from 1988 to 2000, I test both
theories. As predicted by rational partisan theory, positive changes in
the probability that the Left wins the Presidency or the Congress lead to
increases in nominal interest rates, implying that expectations of
inflation have increased. As predicted by the policy risk theory, positive
changes in the electoral probability of incumbent governments and divided
governments lead to significant declines in interest rates, implying that
expectations of inflation risk have decreased. And as an extension to both
theories, I find that electoral margins matter for the economy--partisan
and policy risk effects depend not only on which party controls the
government, but how large its margin of victory is.
James H. Fowler
Journal of Politics
68 (1): 89-103 (February 2006)
(Web appendix)
-
Second Order Free Riding Problem Solved?
Panchanathan and Boyd describe a model of indirect reciprocity in
which mutual aid among cooperators can promote large-scale human
cooperation without succumbing to a second-order free-riding problem
(whereby individuals receive but do not give aid). However, the model does
not include second-order free riders as one of the possible behavioural
types. Here I present a simplified version of their model to demonstrate
how cooperation unravels if second-round defectors enter the population,
and this shows that the free-riding problem remains unsolved.
James H. Fowler
Nature
437: doi:10.1038/nature04201 (22 September 2005)
Altruistic Punishment and the Origin of Cooperation
How did human cooperation evolve? Recent evidence shows that many
people are willing to engage in altruistic punishment, voluntarily paying
a cost to punish noncooperators. Although this behavior helps to explain
how cooperation can persist, it creates an important puzzle. If altruistic
punishment provides benefits to nonpunishers and is costly to punishers,
then how could it evolve? Drawing on recent insights from voluntary public
goods games, I present a simple evolutionary model in which altruistic
punishers can enter and will always come to dominate a population of
contributors, defectors, and nonparticipants. The model suggests that the
cycle of strategies in voluntary public goods games does not persist in
the presence of punishment strategies. It also suggests that punishment
can only enforce payoff-improving strategies, contrary to a widely cited
"folk theorem" result that suggests that punishment can allow the
evolution of any strategy.
-
Altruistic Punishment and the Origin of Cooperation
How did human cooperation evolve? Recent evidence shows that many
people are willing to engage in altruistic punishment, voluntarily paying
a cost to punish noncooperators. Although this behavior helps to explain
how cooperation can persist, it creates an important puzzle. If altruistic
punishment provides benefits to nonpunishers and is costly to punishers,
then how could it evolve? Drawing on recent insights from voluntary public
goods games, I present a simple evolutionary model in which altruistic
punishers can enter and will always come to dominate a population of
contributors, defectors, and nonparticipants. The model suggests that the
cycle of strategies in voluntary public goods games does not persist in
the presence of punishment strategies. It also suggests that punishment
can only enforce payoff-improving strategies, contrary to a widely cited
"folk theorem" result that suggests that punishment can allow the
evolution of any strategy.
James H. Fowler
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
102 (19): 7047-7049 (10 May 2005)
(Featured in
U.S. News and World Report)
(For a recent extension of this model to finite populations, see this Science article.)
-
Dynamic Responsiveness in the US Senate
I develop a theory of dynamic responsiveness that suggests that
parties that win elections choose candidates who are more extreme and
parties that lose elections choose candidates who are more moderate.
Moreover, the size of past victories matters. Close elections yield little
change, but landslides yield larger changes in the candidates offered by
both parties. I test this theory by analyzing the relationship between
Republican vote share in U.S. Senate elections and the ideology of
candidates offered in the subsequent election. The results show that
Republican (Democratic) victories in past elections yield candidates who
are more (less) conservative in subsequent elections, and the effect is
proportional to the margin of victory. This suggests that parties or
candidates pay attention to past election returns. One major implication
is that parties may remain polarized in spite of their responsiveness to
the median voter.
James H. Fowler
American Journal of Political Science
49 (2): 299-312 (April 2005)
-
Egalitarian Motive and Altruistic Punishment
Altruistic punishment is a behaviour in which individuals punish
others at a cost to themselves in order to provide a public good. Fehr
and Gachter present experimental evidence suggesting that negative
emotions toward non-cooperators motivate punishment which, in turn,
facilitates high levels of cooperation in humans. Using Fehr and
Gachter's original data, we provide an alternative analysis of the
experiment that suggests egalitarian motives are more important than
motives to punish non-cooperative behaviour--a finding consistent with
evidence that humans may have an evolutionary incentive to punish the
highest earners in order to promote equality, not cooperation.
James H. Fowler,
Tim Johnson,
Oleg Smirnov
Nature
433: doi:10.1038/nature03256 (06 January 2005)
-
Dynamic Parties and Social Turnout: An Agent-Based Model
The authors develop an agent-based model of dynamic parties with
social turnout built upon developments in different fields within social
science. This model yields significant turnout, divergent platforms, and
numerous results consistent with the rational calculus of voting model and
the empirical literature on social turnout. In a simplified version of the
model, the authors show how a local imitation structure inherently yields
dynamics that encourage positive turnout. The model also generates new
hypotheses about the importance of social networks and citizen-party
interactions.
James H. Fowler,
Oleg Smirnov
American Journal of Sociology
110 (4): 1070-1094 (January 2005)
Egalitarian Motive and Altruistic Punishment
Altruistic punishment is a behaviour in which individuals punish
others at a cost to themselves in order to provide a public good. Fehr
and Gachter present experimental evidence suggesting that negative
emotions toward non-cooperators motivate punishment which, in turn,
facilitates high levels of cooperation in humans. Using Fehr and
Gachter's original data, we provide an alternative analysis of the
experiment that suggests egalitarian motives are more important than
motives to punish non-cooperative behaviour--a finding consistent with
evidence that humans may have an evolutionary incentive to punish the
highest earners in order to promote equality, not
cooperation.
-
Turnout in a Small World
This paper investigates between-voter interactions in a social
network model of turnout. It shows that if 1) there is a small
probability that voters imitate the behavior of one of their
acquaintances, and 2) individuals are closely connected to others in a
population (the "small-world" effect), then a single voting decision may
affect dozens of other voters in a "turnout cascade." If people tend to
be ideologically similar to other people they are connected to, then these
turnout cascades will produce net favorable results for their favorite
candidate. By changing more than one vote with one's own turnout
decision, the turnout incentive is thus substantially larger than
previously thought. We analyze conditions that are favorable to turnout
cascades and show that the effect is consistent with real social network
data from Huckfeldt and Sprague's South Bend and Indianapolis-St. Louis
election surveys. We also suggest that turnout cascades may help explain
over-reporting of turnout and the ubiquitous belief in a duty to vote.
James H. Fowler
in Alan Zuckerman, ed.,
Social Logic of Politics, Temple University Press, 269-287
(2005)
-
The United States and South Korean Democratization
In 1987 South Korea initiated a successful transition to democracy, while previous
attempts in 1979 and 1980 failed. This paper distinguishes two cycles of liberalization in
South Korea and then develops a conceptual understanding that is used to test two common
schools of thought. One school asserts that the United States had little impact on
democratization in Korea and that domestic factors explain the delayed transition. The
other school implies that the U.S. could have improved prospects for democratization by not
approving Chun Doo Hwan's request to use Combined Forces Command troops to repress
demonstrations in 1980. Finding both sets of explanations unsatisfactory, this paper draws
on recently declassified documents and interviews with State Department officials to advance
the hypothesis that it was U.S. public pressure which played a critical role in determining
the timing of South Korea's transition to democracy. Finally, the use of public pressure
is found to have been greatly affected by unrelated foreign policy crises in Iran and the
Philippines, illuminating the process whereby conflicts in other countries that had no
direct bearing on South Korea ultimately affected the outcome of its own domestic political
process.
James H. Fowler
Political Science Quarterly
114 (2): 265-288 (Summer 1999)
(Also appears in Demetrios Caraley, ed.
The New American Interventionism, New York: Columbia University
Press (2000))
WORKING PAPERS
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Friendships Moderate an Association Between the DRD4 Gene and Political Ideology
Studies of identical and fraternal twins suggest that political ideology has a heritable component (Alford, Funk, and Hibbing 2005; Hatemi et al. 2007), but no specific gene associated with political ideology has so far been identified. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we investigate the moderating influence of friendships on the contribution of the 7R allele of the DRD4 gene to liberal political ideology. The number of self-nominated friendships in adolescence moderates the influence of the gene on political ideology; the more friends nominated, the stronger the liberal ideological identification of the respondent in early adulthood. This is the first study to elaborate a specific gene-environment interaction that contributes to ideological self-identification.
Jaime Settle,
Christopher T. Dawes,
Nicholas A. Christakis,
James H. Fowler
-
A Model of Genetic Variation in Human Social Networks
Social networks influence the evolution of cooperation and they exhibit strikingly systematic patterns across a wide range of human contexts. Both of these facts suggest that variation in the topological attributes of human social networks might have a genetic basis. While genetic variation accounts for a significant portion of the variation in many complex social behaviors, the heritability of egocentric social network attributes is unknown. Here we show that three of these attributes (in-degree, transitivity, and centrality) are heritable. We then develop a 'mirror network' method to test extant network models and show that none accounts for observed genetic variation in human social networks. We propose an alternative 'attract and introduce' model that generates significant heritability as well as other important network features, and we show that this model with two simple forms of heterogeneity is well suited to the modeling of real social networks in humans. These results suggest that natural selection may have played a role in the evolution of social networks. They also suggest that modeling intrinsic variation in network attributes may be important for understanding the way genes affect human behaviors and the way these behaviors spread from person to person.
James H. Fowler,
Christopher T. Dawes,
Nicholas A. Christakis
-
Partisanship, Voting, and the Dopamine D2 Receptor Gene
Previous studies have found that both political orientations
(Alford, Funk and Hibbing 2005) and voting behavior (Fowler, Baker and Dawes
2007, Fowler and Dawes 2007) are significantly heritable. In this article we
study genetic variation in another important political behavior: partisan
attachment. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we
show that individuals with the A1 allele of the D2 dopamine receptor gene
are significantly less likely to identify as a partisan than those with
the A2 allele. Further, we find that this gene's association with
partisanship also mediates an indirect association between the A1 allele
and voter abstention. These results are the first to identify a specific
gene that may be responsible for the tendency to join political groups,
and they may help to explain correlation in parent and child partisanship
and the persistence of partisan behavior over time.
Christopher T. Dawes,
James H. Fowler
(Front page coverage in the San Diego Union Tribune)
(See the New York Times editorial)
-
The Dynamic Spread of Happiness in a Large Social Network
The study of happiness is receiving increasing attention in
economics, psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology, and a
broad range of stimuli to human happiness and unhappiness have been
explored, including lottery wins, income, job loss, socioeconomic
inequality, divorce, commuting time, illness, bereavement, and genes.
However, these studies have not addressed a key stimulus to human
happiness: the happiness of others. Past work has shown that people
imitate facial expressions , and that one person’s mood might
fleetingly determine the mood of others. However, whether happiness
spreads broadly and more permanently across social networks is unknown.
Here, we measure the happiness of 5,019 individuals over 18 years in the
Framingham Heart Study Social Network (FHS-Net) to examine how network
characteristics affect a person’s happiness and how happiness spreads
between friends, spouses, siblings, and neighbors. Clusters of happy and
unhappy people are visible in the network, and the effect of one
person’s happiness appears to extend up to three degrees of separation
(to one’s friends’ friends’ friends). Moreover, network
characteristics predict which individuals will be happy in the future,
particularly those who are surrounded by many happy people and those who
are highly central in their local networks. We also find that the spread
of happiness decays with both physical distance and time. Finally,
longitudinal statistical models suggest that happiness clusters result
from the spread of happiness and not just a tendency for people to
associate with those who exhibit similar emotional states.
James H. Fowler,
Nicholas A. Christakis
-
The Heritability of Partisan Attachment
One of the strongest regularities in the empirical political
science literature is the well-known correlation in parent and
child partisan behavior. Until recently this phenomenon was
thought to result solely from parental socialization, but new
evidence on genetic sources of behavior suggests it might also
be due to heritability. In this article we hypothesize that
genes contribute to variation in a general tendency toward
strength of partisanship. Using data collected at the Twins
Days Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio in 2006 and 2007, we compare
the similarity of partisan strength in identical twins (who
share all of their genes) to the similarity of partisan
strength in non-identical twins (who share only half). The
results show that heritability accounts for almost half of the
variance in strength of partisan attachment, and they suggest
that we should pay closer attention to the role of biology in
the expression of important political behaviors.
Jaime Settle,
Christopher T. Dawes,
James H. Fowler
(Front page coverage in the San Diego Union Tribune)
-
The Behavioral Logic of Collective Action: Partisans Cooperate and
Punish More Than Non-Partisans
Why do individuals engage in personally costly, partisan activities
that benefit others? If individuals act according to rational
self-interest, then partisan activity occurs only when the benefits of
that activity exceed its costs. However, laboratory experiments suggest
that many people are willing to contribute to public goods and to punish
those who do not contribute--even when these activities are personally
costly and when members of the experimental group are completely
anonymous. We hypothesize that these individuals, called strong
reciprocators, underlie the capacity of political parties to organize
competition for scarce resources and the production of public goods. To
test this hypothesis, we conducted an experiment that includes a random
income game with costly income alteration and a standard public goods game
with costly punishment. These games allow us to gauge participants'
willingness to contribute to public goods and to engage in the costly
punishment of free-riders. The results show that partisans are more likely
than nonpartisans to contribute to public goods and to engage in costly
punishment. Thus, inherent tastes for cooperation and sanctioning help
resolve the paradox of party participation.
Oleg Smirnov,
Christopher T. Dawes,
James H. Fowler,
Tim Johnson,
Richard McElreath
-
The Role of Egalitarian Motives in Altruistic Punishment
We conduct experiments in which subjects participate in both a game
that measures preferences for income equality and a public goods game
involving costly punishment. The results indicate that individuals who
care about equality are those who are most willing to punish free-riders
in public goods games.
Tim Johnson,
Christopher T. Dawes,
James H. Fowler,
Richard McElreath,
Oleg Smirnov
-
Social Preferences and Political Participation
Models of political participation have begun to incorporate actors
who possess "social preferences". However, these models have failed to
take into account the potentially incongruent political goals of different
social preference types. These goals are likely to play an important role
in shaping political behavior. To examine the effect of distinct social
preferences on political activity we conducted an experiment in which
participants played five rounds of a modified dictator game (Andreoni and
Miller 2002). We used the decisions in these games to determine their
preference type and mapped these types to reported political activity. Our
results show that sub jects who were most interested in increasing total
welfare in the dictator game were more likely to participate in politics
than subjects with selfish preferences, whereas sub jects most interested
in reducing the difference between their own well-being and the well-being
of others were no more likely to participate.
Christopher T. Dawes,
James H. Fowler
-
When It's Not All About Me: Altruism, Participation, and Political Context
Altruism refers to a willingness to pay a personal cost to make
others better off. Past research has established a link between altruism
and political participation, primarily among college students. We show
that dictator game behavior predicts support for humanitarian norms and
donations to Hurricane Katrina victims, suggesting that dictator game
allocations are valid measures of altruism. Moreover, we show that this
measure of altruism predicts participation in politics, suggesting that
past results with students can be generalized to a broader population.
Finally, consistent with the argument that altruists only participate when
they think doing so will make everyone better off, we show that there is
no relationship between altruism and voter turnout in an election where
the outcome is distributive and where it is not clear that either
political outcome will produce a net societal gain.
Cindy D. Kam,
Skyler J. Cranmer,
James H. Fowler
-
Legislative Success in a Small World: Social Network Analysis and the Dynamics of Congressional Legislation
We examine the social network structure of Congress from
1973-2004. We treat two Members of Congresas directly linked if they
have cosponsored a bill together. We then construct explicit networks for
each year using data from all forms of legislation, including resolutions,
public and private bills, and amendments. We show that Congress
exemplifies the characteristics of a "small world" network and that
the varying small world properties during this time period are strongly
related to the number of important bills passed.
Wendy K. Tam Cho,
James H. Fowler
-
Co-Sponsorship Networks of Minority-Supported Legislation in the House
Works that measure the substantive representation of minority
interests based solely on roll call data have been criticized for ignoring
more behind-the-scenes activities that legislators might perform on behalf
of their constituents. We thus focus in this paper on cosponsorship as a
proxy for the degree to which members maneuver to create coalitions that
will advance the substantive policy goals of the minority community. We
find, consistent with previous work, that minority legislators tend to
provide more of these types of activities than do other types of
legislators, but maximizing cosponsorship benefits for bills that pass
Congress involves creating districts of about 45% black voting age
population.
David Epstein,
James H. Fowler,
Sharyn O'Halloran
-
Parties and Agenda-Setting in the Senate, 1973-1998
We analyze the influence of party and preferences on Senate
agenda-setting. We find a significant majority party advantage in getting
bills reported from committee, but otherwise little variation within
parties based on preferences. In addition, our results suggest that
Senate committees are more likely to report bills written by committee
leaders and senior members, or bills with cosponsors. This suggests that
Senate agenda-setters are sensitive to cues that bills are high-quality
and relatively easy to pass.
Gregory Koger,
James H. Fowler
(Online Appendix)
SOFTWARE AND DATA
All of my available data is now catalogued in the
Dataverse. Click
here for easy
online access to all my
data and software.
TEACHING
University of California, San Diego
EITM Summer Institute, UCLA
University of California, Davis
Harvard University
- Math (P)refresher for Political Scientists (Lecturer)
- Strategy of International Politics (Head TF)
- Thinking about Politics: A Rational Choice Approach (TF)
- Sophomore Tutorial: Constitutional Democracy in America (TF)
- The Modern World Economy, 1873-2000 (TF)
- Growth and Development in Historical Perspective (TF)
Yale University
- Strategy, Technology, and War (TF)
- The United Nations and World Order (TF)
United States Peace Corps,
Latacunga,
Ecuador
- Health Promotion Educator (1992-1994). Educated 25 community health promoters. Taught health lessons to adults and children in 40+ indigenous communities. Designed and budgeted gravity flow water systems for 10,000 people in 30+ communities. Supervised construction of 900+ latrines for 5,000 people in 9 rural communities. Learned fluent Spanish and rudimentary Quichua.
- English conversation (1993-1994).
Universidad Técnica de Ambato and
Instituto Técnico Superior del Ejército.
Last Updated 1 July 2008
Copyright © 1998-2008
James Fowler
and Harla Yesner, All Rights Reserved.
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