Unseparated powers
Flexibility or Stability? Analyzing Proposals to Reform the Separation of Powers
Gleason Judd & Lawrence Rothenberg
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The social welfare effects of legislatures in presidential systems, such as the U.S. Congress, are frequently lamented. In response, there are proposals to reform the separation of powers system by giving presidents control of the legislative agenda and weakening rules such as the filibuster. We provide a game‐theoretic analysis of the policy and social welfare consequences of a more executive‐centric system. Integrating standard assumptions about legislative and executive incentives into a dynamic model of decision making with private investment, we show there are a variety of conditions under which stronger executives do not produce better outcomes. Moreover, we characterize how these conditions depend on factors such as the stability of the policymaking environment or investment fundamentals. Our findings are robust and consistent with empirical observations that U.S. policy outputs are not necessarily worse than those of nations with stronger executives, which more closely approximate prominent proposals by populist‐oriented reformers.
Responding to Racial Resentment: How Racial Resentment Influences Legislative Behavior
Jennifer Garcia & Christopher Stout
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Despite the growing body of scholarship urging congressional scholars to consider the racialization of Congress, little attention has been given to understanding how racial resentment impacts legislative behavior. To fill this gap, we ask if and how racial resentment within a member’s home district influences the positions she takes on racially tinged issues in her press releases. Due to constituent influence, we expect legislators from districts with high levels of racial resentment to issue racially tinged press releases. Through an automated content analysis of more than fifty four thousand press releases from almost four hundred U.S. House members in the 114th Congress (2015–2017), we show that Republicans from districts with high levels of racial resentment are more likely to issue press releases that attack President Barack Obama. In contrast, we find no evidence of racial resentment being positively associated with another prominent Democratic white elected official, Hillary Clinton. Our results suggest that one reason Congress may remain racially conservative even as representatives’ cycle out of office may be attributed to the electoral process.
Gender-Based Differences in Information Use and Processing among State Legislators
Anthony Nownes & Patricia Freeman
Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
Relying on data from a survey of 612 state legislators in the United States, this study asks: Do male and female legislators use and respond to information in different ways? The results show the following: (1) Female legislators attend to more information than male legislators do; (2) Female legislators rely much less on their own thoughts and experiences to guide them than male legislators do; (3) Female legislators are more likely than male legislators are to attend to information from interest groups, research studies, state agencies and departments, and local politicians; (4) Female legislators consider a larger range of argument types when they make legislative decisions than male legislators do; and (5) Female legislators are more likely than male legislators are to seriously consider dense, credible, policy and economic analytical arguments, as well as other-oriented arguments. In all, these results support the selectivity model of information processing, which holds that in contrast to men, women are comprehensive information processers, who instead of zeroing in on one or a few information sources when a choice opportunity presents itself, attempt to assimilate and process all the information available to them.
Do More Professionalized Legislatures Discriminate Less? The Role of Staffers in Constituency Service
Michelangelo Landgrave & Nicholas Weller
University of California Working Paper, May 2019
Abstract:
Research suggests that organizational structure can influence the ability of actors to discriminate. In this research article we examine whether the structure of state legislatures affects observed discrimination in correspondent audit studies. We find that increased legislative professionalization is associated with reduced discrimination against racial minorities. By analyzing thousands of emails collected in a prior study we find that legislative professionalization is related to a higher likelihood that staffers respond to email contacts and staffers are less likely to discriminate against racial minorities across multiple measures of discrimination. Our findings emphasize the importance of substantively-relevant heterogeneity in audit studies and identify a potential mitigator of discrimination – legislative professionalism. Our results also highlight the importance of staffers in representation and the legislative process.
Political Connections and Insider Trading
Thuong Harvison
University of Arizona Working Paper, May 2019
Abstract:
Politically connected insiders, especially senior officers who hold a director position, are more likely to make informed trades than non-politically connected insiders. This effect, however, is limited to insider sales, consistent with insider sales facing higher legal risk. Politically connected insiders are also more likely to execute trades that would normally be more likely to trigger an SEC insider trading investigation: trading closer to the earnings announcements, trading during periods that overlap with traditional blackout periods, and missing SEC timely reporting requirements.
Communicating with Warmth in Distributive Negotiations Is Surprisingly Counterproductive
Martha Jeong et al.
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
When entering into a negotiation, individuals have the choice to enact a variety of communication styles. We test the differential impact of being “warm and friendly” versus “tough and firm” in a distributive negotiation when first offers are held constant and concession patterns are tracked. We train a natural language processing algorithm to precisely quantify the difference between how people enact warm and friendly versus tough and firm communication styles. We find that the two styles differ primarily in length and their expressions of politeness (Study 1). Negotiators with a tough and firm communication style achieved better economic outcomes than negotiators with a warm and friendly communication style in both a field experiment (Study 2) and a laboratory experiment (Study 3). This was driven by the fact that offers delivered in tough and firm language elicited more favorable counteroffers. We further find that the counterparts of warm and friendly versus tough and firm negotiators did not report different levels of satisfaction or enjoyment of their interactions (Study 3). Finally, we document that individuals’ lay beliefs are in direct opposition to our findings: participants believe that authors of warmly worded negotiation offers will be better liked and will achieve better economic outcomes (Study 4).
Where Are All the Single Ladies? Marital Status and Women's Organizations’ Rule-making Campaigns
Ashley English
Politics & Gender, forthcoming
Abstract:
Leading up to the 2016 election, single women were heralded as the “hot” new constituency. With unmarried women posed to comprise approximately half of the population of adult women and 23% of the electorate (Traister 2016), pundits claimed that the rising number of single women could transform American politics. Building on this recent enthusiasm about single women, this study provides one of the first systematic analyses of how contemporary women's organizations represent single women by analyzing 1,021 comments that women's organizations submitted to rule makers between 2007 and 2013. Using automated text analyses and a series of statistical analyses, it shows that despite the rising numbers of American single women, women's organizations only very rarely explicitly refer to single women during their comment writing campaigns, preferring to highlight the experiences of married mothers instead. Moreover, it shows that the political context unexpectedly has little to no effect on the degree to which women's organizations focus on single women, possibly because they so rarely mention them at all. Altogether, the results suggest that for single women to become politically powerful, they will need more than just large numbers; they may also need niche organizations that can help them organize and articulate their broader policy needs.
Who Leads? Who Follows? Measuring Issue Attention and Agenda Setting by Legislators and the Mass Public Using Social Media Data
Pablo Barberá et al.
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Are legislators responsive to the priorities of the public? Research demonstrates a strong correspondence between the issues about which the public cares and the issues addressed by politicians, but conclusive evidence about who leads whom in setting the political agenda has yet to be uncovered. We answer this question with fine-grained temporal analyses of Twitter messages by legislators and the public during the 113th US Congress. After employing an unsupervised method that classifies tweets sent by legislators and citizens into topics, we use vector autoregression models to explore whose priorities more strongly predict the relationship between citizens and politicians. We find that legislators are more likely to follow, than to lead, discussion of public issues, results that hold even after controlling for the agenda-setting effects of the media. We also find, however, that legislators are more likely to be responsive to their supporters than to the general public.
Biased Policy Professionals
Sheheryar Banuri, Stefan Dercon & Varun Gauri
World Bank Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although the decisions of policy professionals are often more consequential than those of individuals in their private capacity, there is a dearth of studies on the biases of policy professionals: those who prepare and implement policy on behalf of elected politicians. Experiments conducted on a novel subject pool of development policy professionals (public servants of the World Bank and the Department for International Development in the UK) show that policy professionals are indeed subject to decision-making traps, including the effects of framing outcomes as losses or gains, and, most strikingly, confirmation bias driven by ideological predisposition, despite having an explicit mission to promote evidence-informed and impartial decision making. These findings should worry policy professionals and their principals in governments and large organizations, as well as citizens themselves. A further experiment, in which policy professionals engage in discussion, shows that deliberation may be able to mitigate the effects of some of these biases.
Descriptive and Substantive Representation in Congress: Evidence from 80,000 Congressional Inquiries
Kenneth Lowande, Melinda Ritchie & Erinn Lauterbach
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
A vast literature debates the efficacy of descriptive representation in legislatures. Though studies argue it influences how communities are represented through constituency service, they are limited since legislators' service activities are unobserved. Using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, we collected 88,000 records of communication between members of the U.S. Congress and federal agencies during the 108th–113th Congresses. These legislative interventions allow us to examine members' “follow‐through” with policy implementation. We find that women, racial/ethnic minorities, and veterans are more likely to work on behalf of constituents with whom they share identities. Including veterans offers leverage in understanding the role of political cleavages and shared experiences. Our findings suggest that shared experiences operate as a critical mechanism for representation, that a lack of political consensus is not necessary for substantive representation, and that the causal relationships identified by experimental work have observable implications in the daily work of Congress.
Does Public Opinion Constrain Presidential Unilateralism?
Dino Christenson & Douglas Kriner
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Whether presidential unilateralism is normatively advantageous or parlous for American democracy may depend on the extent to which a check remains on its exercise and abuse. Because the formal institutional constraints on unilateral action are weak, an emerging literature argues that the most important checks on unilateralism may be political, with public opinion playing a pivotal role. However, existing scholarship offers little systematic evidence that public opinion constrains unilateral action. To fill this gap, we use vector autoregression with Granger-causality tests to examine the relationship between presidential approval and executive orders. Contra past speculation that presidents increasingly issue executive orders as a last resort when their stock of political capital is low, we find that rising approval ratings increase the frequency of major unilateral action. Low approval ratings, by contrast, limit the exercise of unilateral power.