Not by turnout alone: Measuring the sources of electoral change, 2012 to 2016

Changes in partisan outcomes between consecutive elections must come from changes in the composition of the electorate or changes in the vote choices of consistent voters. How much composition versus conversion drives electoral change has critical implications for the policy mandates of election victories and campaigning and governing strategies. Here, we analyze electoral change between the 2012 and 2016 U.S. presidential elections using administrative data. We merge precinct-level election returns, the smallest geography at which vote counts are available, with individual-level turnout records from 37 million registered voters in six key states. We find that both factors were substantively meaningful drivers of electoral change, but the balance varied by state. We estimate that pro-Republican Party (GOP) conversion among two-election voters was particularly important in states including Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania where the pro-GOP swings were largest. Our results suggest conversion remains a crucial component of electoral change.

Leveraging Elsevier’s Creative Commons License Requirement to Undermine Embargo

In the last round of author-sharing policy revisions, Elsevier created a labyrinthine title-by-title embargo structure requiring embargoes from 12 to 48 months for authors sharing via institutional repository (IR), while permitting immediate sharing via an author’s personal website or blog. At the same time, all prepublication versions are to bear a Creative Commons-Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) license. At the time this policy was announced, it was criticized by many in the scholarly communication community as overly complicated and restrictive. However, this CC licensing requirement creates an avenue for subverting an embargo in the IR to achieve quicker and wider open distribution of the author’s accepted manuscript (AAM). To wit, authors may post an appropriately licensed copy on their personal site or blog, at which point the author’s host institution may deposit without an embargo in the IR, not through the license granted in the publication agreement, but through the CC license on the author’s version, which the sharing policy mandates. This article outlines the background and rationale of the issue and discusses the benefits, workflows, and remaining questions.

Exploiting Elsevier's CC License Requirement to Subvert Embargo

In the last round of author sharing policy revisions, Elsevier created a labyrinthine title-by-title embargo structure requiring embargoes from 12-48 months for author sharing via institutional repository (IR), while permitting immediate sharing via author's personal website or blog. At the same time, all pre-publication versions are to bear a Creative Commons-Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) license. At the time this policy was announced, it was rightly criticized by many in the scholarly communication community as overly complicated and unnecessary. However, this CC licensing requirement creates an avenue for subverting the embargo in the IR to achieve quicker open distribution of the author's accepted manuscript. In short, authors may post an appropriately licensed copy on their personal site, at which point we may deposit without embargo in the IR, not through the license granted in the publication agreement, but through the CC license on the author's version, which the sharing policy mandates. This poster outlines this issue, our experimentation with application, and engages viewers in questions regarding its potential risks, benefits, and workflows.For more information, including supplementary notes, see http://hdl.handle.net/1808/24107 .