Reply Brief for Petitioners
Reply brief written by petitioners Public Patent Foundation and American Civil Liberties Union
Referendum: The 2006 Midterm Congressional Elections
Collectively, the American electorate treated the 2006 midterm congressional elections as a classic referendum on the performance of the president and his party. Most voters held negative views of both George W. Bush and his Republican partisans in Congress, and as a consequence, Demo crats won majority control of both chambers for the first time in twelve years. Table 1 summarizes the results. Democrats picked up thirty seats in the House, fifteen more than necessary to take over, winning a majority one seat larger than that held by the Republicans in the previous Congress. They also gained six Sen ate seats, all taken from Republican incumbents, to win a one-seat majority in the upper house. Remarkably, Democrats lost not a single seat in either body, the first election in U.S. history in which a party retained all of its congressional seats. According to the political science literature, party fortunes in midterm elec tions are broadly shaped by three basic factors: the number of seats the presi dent's party already holds, how well the economy is performing, and how the public views the president's performance in office.1 Although there is no consen sus on the relative importance of each condition or the way they ultimately influence voters' decisions, in combination, they do predict midterm partisan seat swings with considerable accuracy. This was true in 2006 as well; for example, a simple model employing standard measures of these variables predicts a twenty six seat gain for Democrats in the House.2 Because the economy was doing quite well by customary measures, the model attributes the Republican losses to the President's extraordinarily low standing with the public. Bush's 38 per
Efficacy for Dealing With Terrorism Precautionary Behavior: Laying the Groundwork for Communication Effectiveness
In order to formulate effective communication and intervention strategies to respond to the widespread lack of preparedness for public health crises resulting from natural and human-made disasters, researchers have developed models describing the interrelationships between factors associated with emergency preparedness decisions. Empirical research has generally assumed that two key elements of most health behavior theories—self-efficacy and response efficacy—additively influence the decision to prepare, despite compelling theoretical rationale for an interactive relationship. The few studies that have investigated interactions in preparedness outcomes have not tested the Social Cognitive Theory prediction that non-zero levels of both efficacy types are required before individuals will engage in any preparedness behavior. Based on the responses of 3,101 participants in the National Survey of Disaster Experiences and Preparedness, this study tested additive, interactive, and conditional main effect hypotheses about the influence of self-efficacy and response efficacy for dealing with terrorism on preparedness due to terrorism six years after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. A significant self-efficacy × response efficacy interaction effect on preparedness was found, in addition to a significant response efficacy effect when perceived self-efficacy was zero, contrary to the expectation from Social Cognitive Theory. These results offer insights into the cognitive processes underlying individuals’ decisions to prepare for disasters such as terrorist attacks, and highlight the importance of considering more complex theory-based cognitive interaction models in designing effective communication strategies to facilitate individual emergency preparedness.