Scholars, pundits, and politicians use opinion surveys to study citizen beliefs about political facts, such as the current unemployment rate, and more conspiratorial beliefs, such as whether Barack Obama was born abroad. Many studies, however, ignore acquiescence-response bias, the tendency for survey respondents to endorse any assertion made in a survey question regardless of content. With new surveys fielding questions asked in recent scholarship, we show that acquiescence bias inflates estimated incidence of conspiratorial beliefs and political misperceptions in the United States and China by up to 50%. Acquiescence bias is disproportionately prevalent among more ideological respondents, inflating correlations between political ideology such as conservatism and endorsement of conspiracies or misperception of facts. We propose and demonstrate two methods to correct for acquiescence bias.

Since 2014, Chinese courts have placed tens of millions of court judgments online. We analyze the promise and pitfalls of using this new data source, highlighting takeaways for readers facing similar issues using other collections of legal texts. Drawing on 1,058,986 documents from Henan Province, we identify problems with missing data and call on scholars to treat variation in court disclosure rates as an urgent research question. We also outline strategies for learning from a corpus that is vast and incomplete. Using a topic model of administrative litigation in Henan, we complicate conventional wisdom that administrative lawsuits are an extension of contentious politics that give Chinese citizens an opportunity to challenge the state. Instead, we find a high prevalence of administrative cases that reflect an underlying dispute between two private parties, suggesting that administrative lawsuits are often an attempt to enlist help from the state in resolving an underlying civil dispute.

Conventional wisdom assumes that increased censorship will strictly decrease access to information. We delineate circumstances when increases in censorship expand access to information for a substantial subset of the population. When governments suddenly impose censorship on previously uncensored information, citizens accustomed to acquiring this information will be incentivized to learn methods of censorship evasion. These evasion tools provide continued access to the newly blocked information—and also extend users’ ability to access information that has long been censored. We illustrate this phenomenon using millions of individual-level actions of social media users in China before and after the block of Instagram. We show that the block inspired millions of Chinese users to acquire virtual private networks, and that these users subsequently joined censored websites like Twitter and Facebook. Despite initially being apolitical, these new users began browsing blocked political pages on Wikipedia, following Chinese political activists on Twitter, and discussing highly politicized topics such as opposition protests in Hong Kong.

Potentially fatal arrhythmias add to the mental health challenges of adolescence. This systematic review sought to summarise current knowledge regarding the mental health of adolescents and pre-adolescents diagnosed with inherited arrhythmia syndromes. Searches combining psychological problems with inherited cardiac arrhythmia diagnoses identified 16 studies with paediatric (<18 years) inherited arrhythmia patients. All studies were cross-sectional; 8/16 required an implantable cardioverter defibrillator. Methods were quantitative (n=11), qualitative (n=4), or mixed (n=1), with 14–100% of participants having an inherited arrhythmia syndrome. Mean/median age in 13/16 studies was 12–16 years. Patients and parents reported lower quality of life, particularly in relation to physical function, social relationships, restriction of peer activities, bodily pain, and mental and emotional health. Self-perceptions and behaviour were similar to healthy populations. Rates of anxiety and depression (15–33% of these patients) were not increased in these studies where patients were assessed 2+ years after diagnosis. Higher mental health risk occurred among patients who have a diagnosed sibling, those with cardiomyopathy, and those who report decreased quality of life. Mental health research among youth with inherited arrhythmias is extremely limited and of low quality. Data, primarily from patients 2–4 years after diagnosis or treatment with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator, indicate that quality of life may be decreased and 15–33% experience mental health issues. Future research is required to examine the mental health and quality of life of paediatric patients with inherited arrhythmia syndromes, whether or not they have an implantable cardioverter defibrillator, from time of diagnosis.

Whether monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twins differ from each other in a variety of phenotypes is important for genetic twin modeling and for inferences made from twin studies in general. We analyzed whether there were differences in individual, maternal and paternal education between MZ and DZ twins in a large pooled dataset. Information was gathered on individual education for 218,362 adult twins from 27 twin cohorts (53% females; 39% MZ twins), and on maternal and paternal education for 147,315 and 143,056 twins respectively, from 28 twin cohorts (52% females; 38% MZ twins). Together, we had information on individual or parental education from 42 twin cohorts representing 19 countries. The original education classifications were transformed to education years and analyzed using linear regression models. Overall, MZ males had 0.26 (95% CI [0.21, 0.31]) years and MZ females 0.17 (95% CI [0.12, 0.21]) years longer education than DZ twins. The zygosity difference became smaller in more recent birth cohorts for both males and females. Parental education was somewhat longer for fathers of DZ twins in cohorts born in 1990–1999 (0.16 years, 95% CI [0.08, 0.25]) and 2000 or later (0.11 years, 95% CI [0.00, 0.22]), compared with fathers of MZ twins. The results show that the years of both individual and parental education are largely similar in MZ and DZ twins. We suggest that the socio-economic differences between MZ and DZ twins are so small that inferences based upon genetic modeling of twin data are not affected.

The Chinese government has long been suspected of hiring as many as 2 million people to surreptitiously insert huge numbers of pseudonymous and other deceptive writings into the stream of real social media posts, as if they were the genuine opinions of ordinary people. Many academics, and most journalists and activists, claim that these so-called 50c party posts vociferously argue for the government’s side in political and policy debates. As we show, this is also true of most posts openly accused on social media of being 50c. Yet almost no systematic empirical evidence exists for this claim or, more importantly, for the Chinese regime’s strategic objective in pursuing this activity. In the first large-scale empirical analysis of this operation, we show how to identify the secretive authors of these posts, the posts written by them, and their content. We estimate that the government fabricates and posts about 448 million social media comments a year. In contrast to prior claims, we show that the Chinese regime’s strategy is to avoid arguing with skeptics of the party and the government, and to not even discuss controversial issues. We show that the goal of this massive secretive operation is instead to distract the public and change the subject, as most of these posts involve cheerleading for China, the revolutionary history of the Communist Party, or other symbols of the regime. We discuss how these results fit with what is known about the Chinese censorship program and suggest how they may change our broader theoretical understanding of “common knowledge” and information control in authoritarian regimes.

Recent advances in research tools for the systematic analysis of textual data are enabling exciting new research throughout the social sciences. For comparative politics, scholars who are often interested in non-English and possibly multilingual textual datasets, these advances may be difficult to access. This article discusses practical issues that arise in the processing, management, translation, and analysis of textual data with a particular focus on how procedures differ across languages. These procedures are combined in two applied examples of automated text analysis using the recently introduced Structural Topic Model. We also show how the model can be used to analyze data that have been translated into a single language via machine translation tools. All the methods we describe here are implemented in open-source software packages available from the authors.

“Robust standard errors” are used in a vast array of scholarship to correct standard errors for model misspecification. However, when misspecification is bad enough to make classical and robust standard errors diverge, assuming that it is nevertheless not so bad as to bias everything else requires considerable optimism. And even if the optimism is warranted, settling for a misspecified model, with or without robust standard errors, will still bias estimators of all but a few quantities of interest. The resulting cavernous gap between theory and practice suggests that considerable gains in applied statistics may be possible. We seek to help researchers realize these gains via a more productive way to understand and use robust standard errors; a new general and easier-to-use “generalized information matrix test” statistic that can formally assess misspecification (based on differences between robust and classical variance estimates); and practical illustrations via simulations and real examples from published research. How robust standard errors are used needs to change, but instead of jettisoning this popular tool we show how to use it to provide effective clues about model misspecification, likely biases, and a guide to considerably more reliable, and defensible, inferences. Accompanying this article is software that implements the methods we describe.

Patients with predominantly unilateral parkinsonian signs may provide a unique opportunity to evaluate the cerebral representation of cognitive functions characteristically affected in idiopathic Parkinson’s disease. Twenty hemiparkinsonian patients (ten left and ten right) and 10 healthy controls, matched for age and education, were studied with neuropsychological tests and positron emission tomography. Both right and left hemiparkinsonians evidenced impairments in visuospatial and verbal episodic memory function, but had no deficits in executive abilities, compared to controls. None of the neuropsychological test scores distinguished right from left hemiparkinsonians. Glucose metabolic profiles were identical for the three groups in all cortical areas assessed; in the subcortex however, lenticular hypermetabolism contralateral to the predominant side of motor involvement was evident in the left hemiparkinsonian group. Correlational analysis revealed that higher glucose metabolic rates in the basal ganglia of these hemiparkinsonians were associated with lower visuospatial test scores. In frontal and parietal cortex, decreasing glucose metabolism was positively associated with neurobehavioral function; in temporal cortex, measures of attention and memory decreased with increasing glucose metabolic rates.

A trend toward greater body size in dizygotic (DZ) than in monozygotic (MZ) twins has been suggested by some but not all studies, and this difference may also vary by age. We analyzed zygosity differences in mean values and variances of height and body mass index (BMI) among male and female twins from infancy to old age. Data were derived from an international database of 54 twin cohorts participating in the COllaborative project of Development of Anthropometrical measures in Twins (CODATwins), and included 842,951 height and BMI measurements from twins aged 1 to 102 years. The results showed that DZ twins were consistently taller than MZ twins, with differences of up to 2.0 cm in childhood and adolescence and up to 0.9 cm in adulthood. Similarly, a greater mean BMI of up to 0.3 kg/m2 in childhood and adolescence and up to 0.2 kg/m2 in adulthood was observed in DZ twins, although the pattern was less consistent. DZ twins presented up to 1.7% greater height and 1.9% greater BMI than MZ twins; these percentage differences were largest in middle and late childhood and decreased with age in both sexes. The variance of height was similar in MZ and DZ twins at most ages. In contrast, the variance of BMI was significantly higher in DZ than in MZ twins, particularly in childhood. In conclusion, DZ twins were generally taller and had greater BMI than MZ twins, but the differences decreased with age in both sexes.

For over 100 years, the genetics of human anthropometric traits has attracted scientific interest. In particular, height and body mass index (BMI, calculated as kg/m2) have been under intensive genetic research. However, it is still largely unknown whether and how heritability estimates vary between human populations. Opportunities to address this question have increased recently because of the establishment of many new twin cohorts and the increasing accumulation of data in established twin cohorts. We started a new research project to analyze systematically (1) the variation of heritability estimates of height, BMI and their trajectories over the life course between birth cohorts, ethnicities and countries, and (2) to study the effects of birth-related factors, education and smoking on these anthropometric traits and whether these effects vary between twin cohorts. We identified 67 twin projects, including both monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twins, using various sources. We asked for individual level data on height and weight including repeated measurements, birth related traits, background variables, education and smoking. By the end of 2014, 48 projects participated. Together, we have 893,458 height and weight measures (52% females) from 434,723 twin individuals, including 201,192 complete twin pairs (40% monozygotic, 40% same-sex dizygotic and 20% opposite-sex dizygotic) representing 22 countries. This project demonstrates that large-scale international twin studies are feasible and can promote the use of existing data for novel research purposes.