Running the show
Matthew Atkinson, Maria Deam & Joseph Uscinski
PS: Political Science & Politics, October 2014, Pages 819-823
Abstract:
Journalists consider the importance of events and the audience’s interest in them when deciding on which events to report. Events most likely to be reported are those that are both important and can capture the audience’s interest. In turn, the public is most likely to become aware of important news when some aspect of the story piques their interest. We suggest an efficacious means of drawing public attention to important news stories: dogs. Examining the national news agenda of 10 regional newspapers relative to that of the New York Times, we evaluated the effect of having a dog in a news event on the likelihood that the event is reported in regional newspapers. The “dog effect” is approximately equivalent to the effect of whether a story warrants front- or back-page national news coverage in the New York Times. Thus, we conclude that dogs are an important factor in news decisions.
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Congressional Cohorts: The House Republican Class of 2010
Lawrence Evans
The Forum, October 2014, Pages 541–561
Abstract:
As a result of its size and close ties to the Tea Party movement, the freshman cohort of House Republicans elected in 2010 had a significant impact on the chamber. Compared to other Republicans, the districts the freshmen represented did not tilt more toward the GOP or the Tea Party, nor was their roll call ideology during 2011–2012 statistically distinguishable from that of their more senior colleagues. For votes that were Tea Party priorities, however, the effects of freshman status were often large. And the most consequential impact of the class was over party strategy and agenda. The role played by the 2010 House freshmen has implications for how we should think about party influence in Congress.
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Backward Induction in the Wild: Evidence from the U.S. Senate
Jörg Spenkuch
Northwestern University Working Paper, September 2014
Abstract:
Backward induction is a cornerstone of modern game theory. Yet, laboratory experiments consistently show that subjects fail to properly backward induct. Whether these findings generalize to other, real-world settings remains an open question. This paper develops a simple model of sequential voting in the U.S. Senate that allows for a straightforward test of the null hypothesis of myopic play. Exploiting quasi-random variation in the alphabetical composition of the Senate and, therefore, the order in which Senators get to cast their votes, the evidence suggests that agents do rely on backward reasoning. At the same time, Senators' backward induction prowess appears to be quite limited. In particular, there is no evidence of Senators reasoning backwards on the first several hundred roll call votes in which they participate.
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Storable Votes and Judicial Nominations in the U.S. Senate
Alessandra Casella, Sébastien Turban & Gregory Wawro
Columbia University Working Paper, September 2014
Abstract:
We model a procedural reform aimed at restoring a proper role for the minority in the confirmation process of judicial nominations in the U.S. Senate. We propose that nominations to the same level court be collected in periodic lists and voted upon individually with Storable Votes, allowing each senator to allocate freely a fixed number of total votes. Although each nomination is decided by simple majority, storable votes make it possible for the minority to win occasionally, but only when the relative importance its members assign to a nomination is higher than the relative importance assigned by the majority. Numerical simulations, motivated by a game theoretic model, show that under plausible assumptions a minority of 45 senators would be able to block between 20 and 35 percent of nominees. For most parameter values, the possibility of minority victories increases aggregate welfare.
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The Seventeenth Amendment, Senate ideology and the growth of government
Danko Tarabar & Joshua Hall
Applied Economics Letters, forthcoming
Abstract:
The Seventeenth Amendment disturbed the existing electoral system in the United States by requiring direct elections for state Senators. Scholars have argued this made the Senate more populist and contributed to the growth of government in the US post-1913. We employ econometric tools to investigate whether the mean ideology of the Senate and its winning policies experienced a structural change around the time of the enactment. We find no compelling evidence of a structural break at that time but do find some evidence for a change in the mid-to-late 1890s.
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Alexander Alduncin et al.
The Forum, October 2014, Pages 563–577
Abstract:
In the aftermath of the polarization that has taken hold in Congress, some have pointed to the changing social connectedness of Congressional members as a possible cause, effect, or both. In this article, we take an initial look at this element of the story by analyzing one aspect of change over time in what are known as CODELs. We outline our data collection of these foreign trips taken by House members in two distinct periods and show how the use, users, and locations of these trips have changed. Among other changes, we find that more members are traveling than in the past, but that these trips are on average much shorter in duration. As a result, members of Congress are spending less time together during foreign travel, potentially reducing the opportunities for building relationships among them.
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Oliver Latham
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Do media organisations turn on unpopular governments and, if so, why? We model a demand-side and supply-side explanation and derive testable implications that can be used to differentiate between them. We take these predictions to the data by examining whether British newspapers give more coverage to investigations into government MPs when the government is behind in the polls. Instrumenting for poll leads with plausibly-exogenous macroeconomic variables we find that a one standard deviation increase in a government's poll lead leads to a 30 to 60% decline in coverage. We also find suggestive evidence that this effect is demand driven.
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The Effect of the Internet on Newspaper Readability
Abdallah Salami & Robert Seamans
NYU Working Paper, September 2014
Abstract:
How has the Internet affected newspaper content? We build a dataset that matches newspaper readability measures ["the level of education required in order to comprehend a written text"] to Internet penetration at the county-year level from 2000-2008. We document a positive relationship between Internet penetration and newspaper readability. This result appears remarkably robust. The relationship is evident in non-parametric graphs of the raw data, annual cross-sections and panel data models. Our cross section results rely on an instrumental variables approach that uses lightning strikes to instrument for Internet penetration. Thus, contrary to a commonly held belief that the Internet is "dumbing down" content, we find evidence supporting the opposite hypothesis: newspaper content appears to be getting more sophisticated in response to increased Internet penetration.
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Dynamic Representation in the American States, 1960–2012
Devin Caughey & Chris Warshaw
MIT Working Paper, October 2014
Abstract:
One of the most fundamental assumptions of democratic theory is that the views of citizens should influence government policy decisions. Previous studies have found a strong cross-sectional relationship between public opinion and state policy outputs. But the ultimate metric of responsiveness is the extent to which changes in popular preferences cause changes in public policies. In this paper, we reassess the quality of representation in the American states over the past half century using a large battery of historical evidence and new statistical techniques. We show that changes in the mass public’s policy views are associated with changes in state policy outputs. In addition, we evaluate the influence of institutions, such as direct democracy, term limits, and legislative professionalism. We find that term limits increase responsiveness, but legislative professionalism and direct democracy have no consistent impact on responsiveness. Our findings have large implications for both the study of representation and institutions in the American states.
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Cost-Benefit Analysis and Agency Independence
Michael Livermore
University of Chicago Law Review, Spring 2014, Pages 609-688
Abstract:
The presidential mandate that agency rule makings be subjected to cost-benefit analysis and regulatory review is one of the most controversial developments in administrative law over the past several decades. There is a prevailing view that the role of cost-benefit analysis in the executive branch is to help facilitate control of agencies by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). This Article challenges that view, arguing that cost-benefit analysis in fact helps preserve agency autonomy in the face of oversight. This effect stems from the constraints imposed on reviewers by the regularization of cost-benefit-analysis methodology and the fact that agencies have played a major role in shaping that methodology. The autonomy-preserving effect of cost-benefit analysis has been largely ignored in debates over the institution of regulatory review. Ultimately, cost-benefit analysis has ambiguous effects on agency independence, simultaneously preserving, informing, and constraining agency power.
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Popular Presidents Can Affect Congressional Attention, for a Little While
John Lovett, Shaun Bevan & Frank Baumgartner
Policy Studies Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Does the president have the ability to set the congressional agenda? Agenda setting is a prerequisite for influence, so this is an important element in understanding presidential–legislative relations. We focus on the State of the Union address and show that popular presidents can, indeed, cause Congress to shift attention to those topics most emphasized. The impact is tempered by divided government and time, however. No matter the state of divided government, however, popular presidents can direct congressional attention, at least for a little while. Unpopular presidents, by contrast, are irrelevant.
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Shane Gleason & Christopher Stout
Journal of Black Studies, October 2014, Pages 635-659
Abstract:
Previous studies of descriptive representation have not been able to overcome the classic endogeniety problem. For example, do Black elected officials cause Blacks to be more empowered? Or are Black politicians only elected in contexts where Blacks are already empowered? We address this shortcoming by utilizing genetic matching and the 1996 National Black Election Study. Genetic matching creates a pseudo-experimental environment where Blacks in districts with Black elected officials are matched with similarly situated Blacks in districts without Black representation. This research design allows us to better assess the causality of descriptive representation and changes in political attitudes. This study provides strong evidence that higher levels of efficacy are a result of descriptive representation, rather than the cause of it. Thus, our study demonstrates Black office-holding at the congressional level empowers the Black electorate.
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Changing Deliberative Norms on News Organizations' Facebook Sites
Natalie (Talia) Jomini Stroud et al.
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, forthcoming
Abstract:
Comments posted to news sites do not always live up to the ideals of deliberative theorists. Drawing from theories about deliberation and group norms, this study investigates whether news organizations can affect comment section norms by engaging directly with commenters. We conducted a field study with a local television station in a top-50 Designated Market Area. For 70 political posts made on different days, we randomized whether an unidentified staff member from the station, a recognizable political reporter, or no one engaged with commenters. We assessed if these changes affected whether the comments (n = 2,403) were civil, were relevant, contained genuine questions, and provided evidence. The findings indicate that a news organization can affect the deliberative behavior of commenters.
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Sanford Gordon & Dimitri Landa
NYU Working Paper, September 2014
Abstract:
We explore the consequences for social welfare and the national political conflict of several key institutional features of federalism in the United States: supermajoritarian national institutions and permeable boundaries in the provision of by national and state governments, where the actions by the former can crowd out the latter. States with high demand for public good provision are better positioned to adjust state-level policies to accommodate local demand in the presence of low national provision than corresponding states with low demand in the presence of high national provision. This asymmetry implies that the level of federal provision preferred by moderate-demanders may be socially inefficient, and can exacerbate political polarization when national provision is gridlocked at a high level. Symmetric cross-state negative externalities can reduce conflict at the national level by generating consensus for national action; whereas positive externalities, or asymmetric negative externalities, can increase it. We also explore how, in a dynamic setting, exogenous shocks to demand can create inefficiencies while expanding the "gridlock interval" of national policies; and the limits of Coaseian bargaining over national public goods.
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The impact of government form on e-participation: A study of New Jersey municipalities
Yueping Zheng, Hindy Lauer Schachter & Marc Holzer
Government Information Quarterly, October 2014, Pages 653–659
Abstract:
During the past two decades, governments have started to use information and communication technologies (ICT) to offer a new forum for citizen involvement known as e-participation. The rapid development of e-participation has been attracting attention from many researchers. While a growing body of research has explored various factors impacting e-participation, few studies have examined the influence of government structures on the e-participation opportunities that jurisdictions offer users. To fill the research gap and begin investigating this relationship, we use data from 97 New Jersey municipalities to analyze the impact on e-participation of three local government structures: mayor-council, council-manager, and township. The results show that municipalities with the mayor-council form of government are more likely to have higher levels of e-participation offerings. We argue that the role of an elected executive in this structure facilitates the will to provide greater opportunities for citizens to participate online.