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AbstractFederalism allows state politicians opportunities to undermine or support for federal policies. As a result, voters often have varied impressions of the same federal programmes. To test how this dynamic affects voting behaviour, I gather data on the severity of the opioid epidemic from 2006–2016. I exploit discontinuities between states that expanded Medicaid and those that did not to gain causal leverage over whether expansion affected the severity of the epidemic and whether these policy effects affected policy feedback. I show that the decision to expand Medicaid reduced the severity of the opioid epidemic. I also show that expanding Medicaid and subsequent reductions in the severity of the opioid epidemic increased support for the Democratic Party. The results imply that the Republican Party performed better in places where voters did not have access to Medicaid expansion and where the epidemic worsened, demonstrating an unintended consequence of federalism on policy feedback.

It is now twenty years since the publication of Jamie O'Neill's At Swim, Two Boys (2001). O'Neill's novel was not the first Irish novel to depict same-sex passion, and not even the first Irish gay novel of the post-decriminalisation period. However, it did attain a wider and higher level of recognition among mainstream Irish, and international, readers. This may have been at least partly due to O'Neill's decision to write a historical romance – a genre which still retains its enduring appeal for readers. By adapting this genre, O'Neill uses fiction to unearth, and imaginatively recreate, an archaeology of same-sex passions between men in revolutionary Ireland. As such, his novel speaks powerfully to a yearning to make the silences of history speak and is motivated by the belief that, as Scott Bravmann puts it in a different context, 'lesbian and gay historical self-representation – queer fictions of the past – help construct, maintain and contest identities – queer fictions of the present.' Revisiting O'Neill's novel now – after two decades of remarkable social change for Ireland's LGBT communities, and after almost a decade of national commemoration of the revolutionary period – is a timely opportunity to reflect on the relationship between history, fiction and how we imagine sexual liberation.

Keywords: Gay Men in Irish Culture; Historical Fiction; Jamie O'Neill; Denis Kehoe; ANU Theatre Company

This is the first comprehensive history of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the central humanitarian assistance organization of American Quakers during the first half of the 20th century. It describes the creation of a "humanitarian marketplace," the development of humanitarian techniques in relation to the media, donors, and recipients, as well as the complex relationship between religious and secular elements.

AbstractThis article presents case studies of pardons in the presidencies of Washington, Adams, and Jefferson. In doing so, the article moves away from the idea in existing scholarship that pardons of the past were largely noble acts of statecraft, untouched by ideological, partisan, or personal political motivations. Instead, it develops an account of how and why these pardons should be understood as both enabling presidents to achieve certain political objectives and, simultaneously, operating in an inherited environment in which presidents used existing resources to legitimate their pardons. In so doing, presidents refashioned those inherited resources and, thereby, created new resources for future presidents. The picture that emerges is of pardons as both sources of political innovation and political constraint.

Research on the welfare state has devoted considerable attention to social policy expansion. However, little is known about why governments expand social policies serving groups with limited power on issues with low visibility. I call these "benevolent policies." This class of social policies improves population well-being but produces minimal political gains for the governments enacting them. Why do governments expand benevolent policies if political incentives for reform are weak? I investigate this question by focusing on government responses to malnutrition. Drawing on nine months of fieldwork, including 71 interviews, I argue that the origins of policy expansion can be found in the government bureaucracy. Bureaucrats with technical expertise—technocrats—can play a defining role, deploying international pressure to court executive support and orchestrate policy change. Their actions help explain the Indonesian government's unexpected expansion of nutrition policies, which serve low-income women and children and address micronutrient malnutrition.