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Elected vs. Appointed Judges. Democracy Reform Primer Series, Anthony Fowler, ed. (2024)▼
This primer begins by discussing important tradeoffs between judicial independence and democratic accountability, and the issues with judicial elections that are most prominent in the minds of advocates of reform. Next, the primer examines what the empirical research suggests about the consequences of different modes of judicial selection, drawing distinctions where appropriate between more and less credible evidence. It concludes by noting fundamental limits to what the empirical record can tell us about the merits of different judicial selection methods, and discussing some directions for future study.
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Base Rate Neglect and the Diagnosis of Partisan Gerrymanders (with Sidak Yntiso). Election Law Journal (2024)▼
We discuss conceptual issues arising from base rate neglect in the Efficiency Gap (Stephanopoulos and McGhee, 2015), a popular measure of unfairness in partisan gerrymandering. A measure of vote dilution asymmetry that adjusts for the base rate mitigates these; however, because it prioritizes a potentially unachievable degree of proportionality, its naive application may be impractical or infeasible. A comparison of measures using enacted and simulated plans clarifies the frequency with which the base rate issue may yield erroneous inferences if unaddressed. We show that a generalized version of dilution asymmetry that differentially weights harms associated with partisan gerrymandering permits and may even necessitate departures from pure proportionality. We also show via simulation that maps that approximate proportionality, and thus minimize dilution asymmetry, are feasible more often than previously thought.
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Fire Alarms and Democratic Accountability (with Charles M. Cameron). Accountability Reconsidered: Voters, Interests, and Information in US Policymaking, Charles M. Cameron, Brandice Canes-Wrone, Sanford C. Gordon, and Gregory A. Huber, eds. (2023)▼
Charles Cameron and Sanford Gordon continue the focus on governance by studying the incentives facing elected officials when voters rely on challengers and interest groups---"sentinels”---to sound “fire alarms” about incumbent behavior. The authors find that three factors affect the impact of sentinels: the verifiability of fire alarm information, potentially a critical issue in the age of “fake news”; the incentives of sentinels to withhold information, either to make incumbents look bad or to advance favored policies (implicit collusion); and the ability of incumbents to counter sentinel bias through credit-claiming. Importantly, the presence of sentinels can lead incumbents to reduce the chance of bad news even at the expense of voter welfare, a perverse effect not fully eliminated by incumbent credit-claiming. The authors illustrate these insights with a case study of changes in the politics of criminal justice. Fire alarm oversight of incumbent politicians by third parties sometimes helps voters, but its potentially perverse effects render it a distant second-best to a fully informed electorate. These findings highlight the importance of the media effects examined in Part II for the incentives of elected officials when in office.
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Incentive Effects of Recall Elections: Evidence from Criminal Sentencing in California Courts (with Sidak Yntiso). Journal of Politics (2022)▼
Thirty-nine US states authorize recall elections, but the incentives they create are not well understood. We examine how changes in the perceived threat of recall alter the behavior of one set of officials: judges. In 2016, outrage over the sentence imposed on a Stanford athlete following his sexual assault conviction sparked a drive to recall the presiding judge. Using disposition data from six California counties and arrest records for a subset of defendants, we find a large, discontinuous increase in sentencing severity associated with the recall campaign’s announcement. Additional tests suggest that the observed shift may be attributed to changes in judicial preferences over sentencing and not strategic adjustment by prosecutors. We also demonstrate that the heterogeneous effects of the announcement did not mitigate preexisting racial disparities. Our findings are the first to document the incentive effects of recall and suggest that targeted political campaigns may have far-reaching, unintended consequences.
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Identifying Legitimacy: Experimental Evidence on Compliance With Authority (with Eric S. Dickson and Gregory A. Huber). Science Advances (2022)▼
To what extent do individuals’ perceptions of legitimacy affect their intrinsic motivations to comply with an authority? Answering this question has critical implications for law enforcement but is challenging because actions or institutions that affect intrinsic motivations typically also affect extrinsic, material ones. To disentangle these, we propose an experimental approach that separately identifies the effect of an authority’s costly action to improve enforcement fairness on citizen behavior through both intrinsic and extrinsic channels. In experiment 1, the authority’s simple attempt to institute fairer enforcement increases prosocial behavior by 10 to 12 percentage points via the intrinsic channel. A follow-up experiment demonstrates that this is not motivated by citizen attempts to “pay back” authorities. Our findings provide causally credible evidence that an authority’s actions can directly shape citizens’ behavior by enhancing her legitimacy and have important implications in policy domains where this conflicts with other incentives.
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National Conflict in a Federal System (with Dimitri Landa). Journal of Politics (2021)▼
To explore the effect of federal institutions on national political conflict, we develop a model of two-level governance with interstate preference heterogeneity and cross-state externalities. Our analysis calls into question the conventional interpretation of federalism as a conflict-minimizing institution. We show that polarization over national policy may be higher in federal than unitary systems, even holding policy demand constant. We also show that the incentives for low and high demanders to engage in costly conflict are contingent on the status quo national policy, and we identify conditions under which those incentives and the deadweight cost of political conflict are higher under federalism than unitary governance. The model helps account for a number of empirical regularities in US politics and policy making.
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Stakeholder Participation in Policy Making: Evidence from Medicare Fee Schedule Revisions (with Steven D. Rashin). Journal of Politics (2021)▼
To what extent do the material stakes of specific policies motivate political participation by affected interests? We address this question by examining physician participation in the annual process governing revisions to Medicare fee schedules. This setting permits us to identify the relevant universe of affected actors and to construct a novel measure of the annual financial consequences of proposed policy changes that varies idiosyncratically at the individual level. Employing text analysis to identify who participates in the notice-and-comment process between proposed and final rules, we find that while few providers comment, the odds of participation vary dramatically as a function of a rule’s impact, with anticipated losses motivating comments substantially more than gains. This relationship persists in both individually tailored and mass comments and is largely independent of the behavior of physician specialty societies. Evidence of the effect of these stakes on campaign contribution behavior is more modest.
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Causes, Theories, and the Past in Political Science (with Hannah K. Simpson). Public Choice (2020)▼
A theoretically grounded approach to causal questions illuminates both the utility and limitations of the potential outcomes (PO) framework as a model for historically-focused, quantitative empirical research. While some causal questions are immediately reconcilable with the PO framework, for others, theoretical guidance is valuable in ascertaining relevant comparisons or characterizing the generalizability of findings to different contexts. A third category of important causal relationships feature strategic or information-based interactions, or multiple or unobservable mechanisms, many of which cannot be directly tested using the PO framework. Here, theory is critical in elucidating additional, observable implications that may be tested empirically. In all three categories, historical research promises special benefits: it expands the set of cases on which to test causal claims, may provide counterfactuals not available in contemporary contexts, and can feature institutional transformations that function as plausibly exogenous modifier variables. We clarify this classification of causal questions using examples from our own historical research.
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The Empirical Study of Legitimate Authority Normative Guidance for Positive Analysis (with Gregory A. Huber). NOMOS LXI: Political Legitimacy, Jack Knight and Melissa Schwartzberg, eds. (2019)▼
We employ key concepts in the normative study of legitimate authority to place the empirical analysis of legitimacy on firmer analytical foundations. Our critical review of empirical research on support for courts, regimes generally, and international organizations highlights the slippage between normative and positive approaches, while simultaneously drawing attention to problems of measurement and critical inferential problems rooted in limitations of research design. We then describe a simple theoretical model that formalizes these considerations. The model reveals conditions under which it is possible to isolate the effect of an authority’s legitimacy on citizen behavior net of extrinsic compliance motivations as well as environments in which examination of the antecedents of legitimate authority is most likely to be fruitful.
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Cross-Ideological Coordination by Private Interests: Evidence From Mortgage Market Regulation Under Dodd-Frank (with Howard Rosenthal). Business and Politics (2019)▼
Rulemaking pursuant to the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act provides a useful setting to assess theories of interest group influence. In the wake of the financial crisis, Congress delegated new rulemaking authority to federal agencies to regulate mortgage markets. A critical aspect of this new regulatory regime engendered significant controversy from affected interests: “credit risk retention” would require sponsors of asset-backed securities to retain a stake in the risk of securitized assets. Contrary to unrefined industry capture-based accounts stressing the disproportionate role of larger, well-established regulated entities in setting policy, we find little evidence of sustained effort by large lenders to dilute regulatory standards via political investments. Rather, a diverse coalition of housing sector, community, and civil rights groups, backed by an ideologically diverse swath of legislators, forced substantial regulatory retrenchment. Our analysis suggests a more nuanced view of private influence, in which coordination plays a more substantial role than political investments alone.
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Association Between Medical Cannabis Laws and Opioid Overdose Mortality Has Reversed Over Time (with Chelsea S, Shover, Corey S. Davis, and Keith Humphreys). PNAS (2019)▼
Medical cannabis has been touted as a solution to the US opioid overdose crisis since Bachhuber et al. [M. A. Bachhuber, B. Saloner, C. O. Cunningham, C. L. Barry, JAMA Intern. Med. 174, 1668–1673] found that from 1999 to 2010 states with medical cannabis laws experienced slower increases in opioid analgesic overdose mortality. That research received substantial attention in the scientific literature and popular press and served as a talking point for the cannabis industry and its advocates, despite caveats from the authors and others to exercise caution when using ecological correlations to draw causal, individual-level conclusions. In this study, we used the same methods to extend Bachhuber et al.’s analysis through 2017. Not only did findings from the original analysis not hold over the longer period, but the association between state medical cannabis laws and opioid overdose mortality reversed direction from −21% to +23% and remained positive after accounting for recreational cannabis laws. We also uncovered no evidence that either broader (recreational) or more restrictive (low-tetrahydrocannabinol) cannabis laws were associated with changes in opioid overdose mortality. We find it unlikely that medical cannabis—used by about 2.5% of the US population—has exerted large conflicting effects on opioid overdose mortality. A more plausible interpretation is that this association is spurious. Moreover, if such relationships do exist, they cannot be rigorously discerned with aggregate data. Research into therapeutic potential of cannabis should continue, but the claim that enacting medical cannabis laws will reduce opioid overdose death should be met with skepticism.
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Polarized Preferences Versus Polarizing Policies (with Dimitri Landa). Public Choice (2018)▼
Much of contemporary political debate in the United States focuses on the issue of polarization: specifically, its causal antecedents and its consequences for policymaking and political conflict. In this article, we argue that partisan preference polarization—conventionally defined as the difference in the favored policy positions of legislators from the two major parties—is not a sufficient statistic for potential political conflict in national politics . Rather, a well-defined measure of potential conflict must take into account (1) the locations of status quo policies and proposed alternatives; and (2) the shape of underlying utility functions. We propose measures of the likely contentiousness of a given status quo policy and of a proposal to move that policy. We then demonstrate the usefulness of these measures using estimates of utility function and final passage vote parameters on enacted legislation from the 111th US Senate (2009–2011).
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The Birth of Pork: Local Appropriations in America’s First Century (with Hannah K. Simpson). American Political Science Review (2018)▼
After describing a newly assembled dataset consisting of almost 9,000 local appropriations made by the U.S. Congress between 1789 and 1882, we test competing accounts of the politics surrounding them before offering a more nuanced, historically contingent view of the emergence of the pork barrel. We demonstrate that for most of this historical period—despite contemporary accusations of crass electoral motives—the pattern of appropriations is largely inconsistent with accounts of distributive politics grounded in a logic of legislative credit-claiming. Instead, support for appropriations in the House mapped cleanly onto the partisan/ideological structure of Congress for most of this period, and only in the 1870s produced the universalistic coalitions commonly associated with pork-barrel spending. We trace this shift to two historical factors: the emergence of a solid Democratic South, and growth in the fraction of appropriations funding recurrent expenditures on extant projects rather than new starts.
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The American Jewish Community as Civic and Political Association: Some Foundational Thoughts. Zeramim (2017-2018)
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Common Problems (or, What’s Missing from the Conventional Wisdom on Polarization and Gridlock) (with Dimitri Landa). Journal of Politics (2017)▼
We examine the intuition that in supermajoritarian settings, polarization and policy-making gridlock are fundamentally linked but that a pressing common problem can reduce both. When actors’ individual costs from a policy addressing such a problem differ, their preferences over the appropriate policy respond asymmetrically to increases in the magnitude of the problem. In a broad range of circumstances such increases can give rise to increased polarization but may also simultaneously yield net welfare-enhancing policy adjustments rather than entrenchment of gridlock. The association of polarization and gridlock is contingent on how the problem responds to the policy solution, institutional structure, and the location of the status quo policy when the extent of the problem changes. We illustrate the model’s logic by comparing US national policy making in the Progressive Era and the present.
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Distributive Politics: Federal Outlays (with Woo Chang Kang). Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Robert A. Scott, Stephen M. Kosslyn, and Marliss Buchmann, eds. (2015)▼
We provide an interpretive review of theoretical and empirical research on the distribution of federal outlays in the United States and their political antecedents. We argue that the foundational scholarly research on the subject to date can be classified to a great extent according to the perspectives it takes respecting legislative organization, political parties, and the executive branch. After reviewing theoretical and empirical research in these areas, we discuss some cutting-edge research in this area of research. One of the most exciting trends in the study of distributive politics is a much greater focus on issues of causal identification in empirical tests of theories concerning the allocation of federal resources. Finally, we describe five questions that we believe ought to motivate future research in this area. These questions concern the relationship between entitlement and discretionary spending; how to integrate research on distributive politics with research on political business cycles; how best to measure executive discretion in specific assistance programs; how to understand the relationship between spending in an area and support for that spending; and how to capture the mechanism relating spending and electoral benefits.
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Institutional Sources of Legitimate Authority: An Experimental Investigation (with Eric S. Dickson and Gregory A. Huber). American Journal of Political Science (2015)▼
Unelected officials with coercive powers (e.g., police, prosecutors, bureaucrats) vary markedly in the extent to which citizens view their actions as legitimate. We explore the institutional determinants of legitimate authority in the context of a public goods laboratory experiment. In the experiment, an “authority” can target one “citizen” for punishment following citizen contribution choices. Untargeted citizens can then choose to help or hinder the authority. This latter choice may be interpreted as a behavioral measure of the authority's legitimacy. We find that legitimacy is affected by how authorities are compensated, the transparency with which their decisions are observed, and an interaction between these. When transparency is high, citizens are more willing to assist authorities who receive fixed salaries than those who personally benefit from collected penalties, even when citizens' material incentives are controlled for. Lower transparency reduces support, but only for salaried enforcers.
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Conditional Forbearance as an Alternative to Capture (with Catherine Hafer). Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence and How to Limit It, Carpenter, Daniel P. and David Moss, eds. (2013)
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Politicizing Agency Spending Authority: Lessons from a Bush-era Scandal. American Political Science Review (2011)▼
When can presidents direct bureaucrats to allocate government expenditures for electoral purposes? To address this question, I exploit a scandal concerning the General Services Administration (GSA), an agency that contracts with private vendors to provide supplies and real estate to other agencies. Shortly after Republican losses in 2006, a White House deputy gave a presentation to GSA political appointees identifying potentially vulnerable congressional districts. I find that vendors in prioritized Republican districts experienced unusually large new contract actions from the GSA's Public Buildings Service following the presentation relative to unmentioned districts, a discrepancy that disappeared once the Washington Post broke the story. Contracts supervised by the agency's Federal Acquisition Service, by contrast, were largely unresponsive to the briefing and media scrutiny. My findings suggest that the extent to which executives succeed in politicizing discretionary allocation decisions depends upon key features of the implementing agency's tasks and its informational environment.
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Disparities in Emptying Velocity within the Left Atrial Appendage (with Ythan H. Goldberg, Daniel M. Spevack, and Garet M. Gordon). European Journal of Echocardiography (2010)▼
Aims: Pulsed Doppler measurement of left atrial appendage (LAA) emptying velocity, a marker of left atrium contractile function, has been shown to predict success of cardioversion, thrombo-embolic risk, and maintenance of sinus rhythm after cardioversion and pulmonary vein isolation. However, in the published literature, emptying velocity measurement location is not uniform, and no standard currently exists. We assessed the hypothesis that emptying velocity when acquired near the LAA orifice differs from that at the LAA apex. Methods and results: The study group comprised 44 patients (32 in sinus rhythm and 12 in atrial fibrillation) who were able to complete a non-emergent transoesophageal echocardiography. Pulsed Doppler recordings were obtained with the sample volume first positioned 1 cm from the LAA orifice, and then positioned within 1 cm of the LAA apex. At each location, we calculated the average of the peak end-diastolic LAA emptying velocity from five consecutive cardiac cycles. LAA orifice emptying velocity was higher than the apex emptying velocity in all patients. The median velocity at the orifice was 72 cm/s, which was 45% higher than the median velocity at the apex (43 cm/s, P < 0.001). Lower LAA emptying velocity at the orifice was associated with a larger discrepancy between orifice and apex velocities. The ratio of orifice to apex velocity did not vary with orifice velocity. Multivariate analysis demonstrated that clinical patient characteristics were not significant predictors of the discrepancy between orifice and apex velocities. Conclusion: LAA emptying velocity is greater at the LAA orifice compared with the LAA apex. Higher, more easily measured velocity and greater variability observed with orifice measurements make it the location of choice for research and clinical applications.
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Disclosure of the Genetic Risk of Alzheimer's Disease (with Dimitri Landa). New England Journal of Medicine (2010)
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Assessing Partisan Bias in Federal Public Corruption Prosecutions. American Political Science Review (2009)▼
The 2007 U.S. Attorney firing scandal raised the specter of political bias in the prosecution of officials under federal corruption laws. Has prosecutorial discretion been employed to persecute enemies or shield allies? To answer this question, I develop a model of the interaction between officials contemplating corruption and a prosecutor deciding whether to pursue cases against them. Biased prosecutors will be willing to file weaker cases against political opponents than against allies. Consequently, the model anticipates that in the presence of partisan bias, sentences of prosecuted opponents will tend to be lower than those of co-partisans. Employing newly collected data on public corruption prosecutions, I find evidence of partisan bias under both Bush (II) and Clinton Justice Departments. However, additional evidence suggests that these results may understate the extent of bias under Bush, while overstating it under Clinton.
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The Political Economy of Prosecution (with Gregory A. Huber). Annual Review of Law and Social Science (2009)▼
Contemporary advances in the field of political economy, particularly those concerning the subject of delegated authority, can provide a unifying framework for analyzing the behavior and political context of criminal prosecutors in the United States. This perspective, which focuses on the extent of conflict between an official's motives and those of other actors, and the degree to which information is unevenly distributed among those actors, is well suited for studying prosecutors—the vast majority of whom are elected but whose accountability is frequently called into question. We apply this perspective to three areas in the existing literature on prosecutors: plea bargaining, courtroom communities, and public corruption prosecution.
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Enforcement and Compliance in an Uncertain World: An Experimental Investigation (with Eric S. Dickson and Gregory A. Huber). Journal of Politics (2009)▼
Governments are charged with monitoring citizens’ compliance with prescribed behavioral standards and punishing noncompliance. Flaws in information available to enforcing agents, however, may lead to subsequent enforcement errors, eroding government authority and undermining incentives for compliance. We explore these concepts in a laboratory experiment. A “monitor” player makes punishment decisions after receiving noisy signals about other players’ choices to contribute to a public good. We find that the possibility of wrongly accusatory signals has a more deleterious effect on contribution levels than the possibility of wrongly exculpatory signals. We trace this across-treatment difference to a “false positives trap”: when members of a largely compliant population are sometimes incorrectly accused, some will be unjustly punished if enforcement power is employed, but non-compliant individuals will escape punishment if that power is abdicated. Either kind of error discourages compliance. An additional treatment demonstrates that the functioning of a given enforcement institution may vary, depending on its origins. We consider implications of our findings for theories of deterrence, fairness, and institutional legitimacy.
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Do the Advantages of Incumbency Advantage Incumbents? (with Dimitri Landa). Journal of Politics (2009)▼
We develop a model that calls into question some longstanding presumptions about incumbency advantage. Our results show that increases in some of the ostensible benefits of incumbency frequently cited in the empirical and theoretical literature make it difficult for voters to differentiate incumbents of higher and lower quality. While this leads to an improvement in the electoral prospects of lower-quality incumbents, it is harmful to those of higher quality. Whether the net electoral consequence for high-quality incumbents is positive or negative depends on whether the source of incumbency advantage affects candidate entry and exit decisions directly or indirectly, as mediated through voters’ choices. Our findings suggest, further, that fundamental tensions may exist between different sources of incumbency advantage, and point to obstacles to disaggregating the sources of incumbency advantage empirically.
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Voter Responses to Challenger Opportunity Costs (with Gregory A. Huber and Dimitri Landa). Electoral Studies (2009)▼
How do voters evaluate candidates in competitive elections? Gordon et al. [Gordon, S.C., Huber, G.A., Landa, D., 2007. Challenger entry and voter learning. American Political Science Review 101 (May), pp. 303–320.] present a model in which the fact of a serious electoral challenge conveys information about the relative competence of the candidates, over and above that conveyed by observable measures of candidate quality. The model predicts differences in voters' responses to candidates depending on challenger opportunity costs. Taken together, these predictions diverge from those associated with an alternative theoretical account. We take advantage of the variation in challenger opportunity costs afforded by state legislative term limits to evaluate the model's predictions. State legislators frequently challenge sitting members of the U.S. House. Those who are term-limited have less to lose from running, whereas those who are not must often risk their current position in pursuit of higher office. Using data on voter attitudes and knowledge about House elections involving state legislators, we find compelling evidence that voters respond to variation in challenger opportunity costs in a manner consistent with the model's predictions.
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Consumption or Investment? On Motivations for Political Giving (with Catherine Hafer and Dimitri Landa). Journal of Politics (2007)▼
We propose a strategy to distinguish investment and consumption motives for political contributions by examining the behavior of individual corporate executives. If executives expect contributions to yield policies beneficial to company interests, those whose compensation varies directly with corporate earnings should contribute more than those whose compensation comes largely from salary alone. We find a robust relationship between giving and the sensitivity of pay to company performance and show that the intensity of this relationship varies across groups of executives in ways that are consistent with instrumental giving but not with alternative, taste-based, accounts. Together with earlier findings, our results suggest that contributions are often best understood as purchases of “good will” whose returns, while positive in expectation, are contingent and rare.
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Directing Retribution: On the Political Control of Lower Court Judges (with Gregory A. Huber). The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization (2007)▼
The sentencing decisions of trial judges are constrained by statutory limits imposed by legislatures. At the same time, judges in many states face periodic review, often by the electorate. We develop a model in which the effects of these features of a judge's political landscape on judicial behavior interact. The model yields several intriguing results: First, if legislators care about the proportionality of punishment, judicial discretion increases with their punitiveness. Second, voters are limited by two factors in their ability to make inferences about judicial preferences based on observed sentences: the extent to which judges are willing to pander to retain office and the range of judicial discretion mandated by the legislature. Finally, legislators can sometimes manipulate judicial discretion to aid sufficiently like-minded voters in their efforts to replace ideologically dissimilar judges.
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Challenger Entry and Voter Learning (with Gregory A. Huber and Dimitri Landa). American Political Science Review (2007)▼
We develop a model of strategic interaction between voters and potential electoral challengers to sitting incumbents, in which the very fact of a costly challenge conveys relevant information to voters. Given incumbent failure in office, challenger entry is more likely, but the threat of entry by inferior challengers creates an incentive for citizens to become more politically informed. At the same time, challenges to incumbents who perform well can neutralize a voter's positive assessment of incumbent qualifications. How a voter becomes politically informed can in turn deter challengers of different levels of competence from running, depending on the electoral environment. The model permits us to sharpen our understanding of retrospective voting, the incumbency advantage, and the relationship between electoral competition and voter welfare, while pointing to new interpretations of, and future avenues for, empirical research on elections.
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Corporate Influence and the Regulatory Mandate (with Catherine Hafer). Journal of Politics (2007)▼
Industries face collective action and commitment problems when attempting to influence Congress. At the same time, an individual firm's political investments can yield reduced bureaucratic scrutiny by indicating that firm's willingness to contest agency decisions. We develop a model in which the desirability of maintaining a political footprint for this reason enables individual firms to commit to rewarding elected officials who maintain laws benefiting an entire industry. Our “dual forbearance” model anticipates that corporate political investments will be larger on average when statutes are stringent and that even pro-industry legislative coalitions will benefit politically from the existence of a minimal regulatory state.
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The Effect of Electoral Competitiveness on Incumbent Behavior (with Gregory A. Huber). Quarterly Journal of Political Science (2007)▼
What is the marginal effect of competitiveness on the power of electoral incentives? Addressing this question empirically is difficult because challenges to incumbents are endogenous to their behavior in office. To overcome this obstacle, we exploit a unique feature of Kansas courts: 14 districts employ partisan elections to select judges, while 17 employ noncompetitive retention elections. In the latter, therefore, challengers are ruled out.We find judges in partisan systems sentence more severely than those in retention systems. Additional tests attribute this to the incentive effects of potential competition, rather than the selection of more punitive judges in partisan districts.
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Flexing Muscle: Corporate Political Expenditures as Signals to the Bureaucracy (with Catherine Hafer). American Political Science Review (2005)▼
Regulatory agencies impose costs and benefits tailored to individual firms through their discretionary enforcement activities. We propose that corporations use political expenditures in part to “flex their muscles” to regulators and convey their willingness to fight an agency's specific determinations in the political arena. Because the signaling function of political expenditures is strategically complex, we derive a formal model wherein we demonstrate the existence of an equilibrium in which (1) large political donors are less compliant than smaller ones, but the bureaucracy monitors them less, and (2) firms with publicly observable problems reduce their political expenditures. We test the empirical implications of the model using plant-level data from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on the inspection of 63 privately operated nuclear power plants and the political expenditures of their parent companies. We find strong evidence for the first prediction and qualified support for the second.
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Qualitative Leverage and the Epistemology of Expert Opinion (with Alastair Smith). Political Analysis (2005)▼
We discuss the motivation for integrating qualitative information in statistical models of complex, partially observable causal mechanisms and suggest ways to minimize the dangers posed by Braumoeller and Kirpichevsky. We stress the importance of linking our statistical estimators to underlying theories of the data generating process, qualitative or otherwise.
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Accountability and Coercion: Is Justice Blind when It Runs for Office? (with Gregory A. Huber). American Journal of Political Science (2004)▼
Through their power to sentence, trial judges exercise enormous authority in the criminal justice system. In 39 American states, these judges stand periodically for reelection. Do elections degrade their impartiality? We develop a dynamic theory of sentencing and electoral control. Judges discount the future value of retaining office relative to implementing preferred sentences. Voters are largely uninformed about judicial behavior, so even the outcome of a single publicized case can be decisive in their evaluations. Further, voters are more likely to perceive instances of underpunishment than overpunishment. Our theory predicts that elected judges will consequently become more punitive as standing for reelection approaches. Using sentencing data from 22,095 Pennsylvania criminal cases in the 1990s, we find strong evidence for this effect. Additional tests confirm the validity of our theory over alternatives. For the cases we examine, we attribute at least 1,818 to 2,705 years of incarceration to the electoral dynamic.
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Quantitative Leverage Through Qualitative Knowledge: Augmenting the Statistical Analysis of Complex Causes (with Alastair Smith). Political Analysis (2004)▼
Social scientific theories frequently posit that multiple causal mechanisms may produce the same outcome. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to observe which mechanism was responsible. For example, IMF scholars conjecture that nations enter IMF agreements both out of economic need and for discretionary domestic political reasons. Typically, though, all we observe is the fact of agreement, not its cause. Partial observability probit models (Poirier 1980, Journal of Econometrics 12:209–217; Braumoeller 2003, Political Analysis 11:209–233) provide one method for the statistical analysis of such phenomena. Unfortunately, they are often plagued by identification and labeling difficulties. Sometimes, however, qualitative studies of particular cases enlighten us about causes when quantitative studies cannot. We propose exploiting this information to lend additional structure to the partial observability approach. Monte Carlo simulation reveals that by anchoring “discernible” causes for a handful of cases about which we possess qualitative information, we obtain greater efficiency. More important, our method proves reliable at recovering unbiased parameter estimates when the partial observability model fails. The paper concludes with an analysis of the determinants of IMF agreements.
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Citizen Oversight and the Electoral Incentives of Criminal Prosecutors (with Gregory A. Huber). American Journal of Political Science (2002)▼
Popular wisdom suggests that only by securing convictions can elected prosecutors cultivate the perception that they are tough on crime. This article considers why voters might use conviction rates to evaluate prosecutors and whether justice is subverted as a consequence. Citizens lack information about individual cases and prosecutor behavior. We model voter oversight of prosecutors in light of these difficulties. Voters use the promise of reelection given observed outputs to induce prosecutors to reduce uncertainty through investigation and subsequently to punish the guilty and free the innocent. The model demonstrates that an optimal voter strategy is always to reelect prosecutors who obtain convictions. Most importantly, even voters who most fear wrongful convictions should reward success at trial. Voter attitudes and beliefs instead influence rewards for cases concluded out of court, including plea bargains. Finally, we derive sanctions necessary to prevent prosecutors from suppressing evidence when doing so is politically tempting.
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Stochastic Dependence in Competing Risks. American Journal of Political Science (2002)▼
The term "Competing Risks" describes duration models in which spells may terminate via multiple outcomes: the term of a cabinet, for example, may end with or without an election; wars persist until the loss or victory of the aggressor. Analysts typically assume stochastic independence among risks, the duration modeling equivalent of independence of irrelevant alternatives. However, many political examples violate this assumption. I review competing risks as a latent variables approach. After discussing methods for modeling dependence that place restrictions on the nature of association, I introduce a parametric generalized dependent risks model in which inter-risk correlation may be estimated and its significance tested. The method employs risk-specific random effects drawn from a multivariate normal distribution. Estimation is conducted using numerical methods and/or Bayesian simulation. Monte Carlo simulation reveals desirable large sample properties of the estimator. Finally, I examine two applications using data on cabinet survival and legislative position taking.
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