Draining the swamp
All the President’s Tweets: Effects of Exposure to Trump’s “Fake News” Accusations on Perceptions of Journalists, News Stories, and Issue Evaluation
Daniel Tamul et al.
Mass Communication and Society, forthcoming
Abstract:
The label “fake news” was used in 2016 to describe disinformation messages disseminated during the 2016 US Presidential campaign, particularly such messages on social media sites, but the term was quickly co-opted by President Donald Trump and his administration for use as a general epithet to discredit journalistic coverage critical of the White House. Across two preregistered experimental designs, we empirically examine the effect that President Trump’s tweets containing “fake news” accusations toward journalists have on how audiences perceive news stories. Our first study showed no direct effect of exposure to “fake news” tweets on outcomes. In our second study, we found users who read more fake news tweets rated a story about Hurricane Maria victims and its author as more credible, showed greater transportation into the story, experienced higher levels of meaningful affect, indicated more favorable views toward providing more aid to Puerto Ricans, and had greater intentions to consume more news in the future.
Position Taking on the President’s Agenda
Jason Byers & Laine Shay
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Several political scientists argue that electorally vulnerable legislators should be more likely to cast, rather than skip, legislative roll call votes. However, most empirical studies find limited evidence to support this claim. In this article, we argue that electorally vulnerable members serving in the House of Representatives are more likely to engage in position taking, via casting a roll call vote rather than abstaining, on a certain subset of legislative votes. We suggest that roll call votes that the president has publicly addressed should be especially ripe for legislators to engage in position taking because of the executive branch’s unique influence on electoral politics for legislators. When examining all roll call votes in the 84th through the 112th Congress in the House of Representatives, we find that members who barely won their last election are associated with a higher attendance record on roll calls that the president has revealed his preferences on. We also find that electorally vulnerable members are less likely to abstain on roll call votes that pass or fail by a narrow margin. These findings shed light on legislative-executive relations.
The partisan ties of lobbying firms
Alexander Furnas, Michael Heaney & Timothy LaPiraF
Research & Politics, September 2019
Abstract:
This article examines lobbying firms as intermediaries between organized interests and legislators in the United States. It states a partisan theory of legislative subsidy in which lobbying firms are institutions with relatively stable partisan identities. Firms generate greater revenues when their clients believe that firms’ partisan ties are valued highly by members of Congress. It hypothesizes that firms that have partisan ties to the majority party receive greater revenues than do firms that do not have such ties, as well as that partisan ties with the House majority party lead to greater financial returns than do partisan ties to the Senate majority party. These hypotheses are tested using data available under the Lobbying Disclosure Act from 2008 to 2016. Panel regression analysis indicates that firms receive financial benefits when they have partisan ties with the majority party in the House but not necessarily with the Senate majority party, while controlling for firm-level covariates (number of clients, diversity, and organizational characteristics). A difference-in-differences analysis establishes that Democratically aligned lobbying firms experienced financial losses when the Republican Party reclaimed the House in 2011, but there were no significant differences between Republican and Democratic firms when the Republicans reclaimed the Senate in 2015.
Interest Group and Political Party Influence on Growth in State Spending and Debt
Thomas Holyoke & Jeff Cummins
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Does more lobbying by more interest groups, especially groups representing a state’s largest business sector, lead to greater spending and debt? Or does the blame really rest with state lawmakers and their political parties, which compete to attract and retain the allegiance of these powerful organized interests so they can win control of state government? We test this question with data on annual state budgets from 2006 to 2015, the number of interest groups in each state for those years, the size of the constituencies in different economic and social sectors these groups potentially represent, and the degree of competition between the political parties. Our results reveal that while there is a positive interest group effect on spending, the effect becomes negative as parties compete more for control of the state. As the gatekeepers, lawmakers and their parties, more than interest groups, are ultimately responsible for a state’s fiscal condition.
Deep Determinants of Corruption? A Subnational Analysis of Resource Curse Dynamics in American States
Michael Tyburski, Patrick Egan & Aaron Schneider
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Drawing on comparative resource curse literature and American literature on the determinants of corruption, we argue that the impact of natural resource extraction on corruption outcomes is state-dependent. That is, in environments where corruption is already high, natural resource windfalls allow political actors and economic elites to take advantage of state brokerage, further increasing corruption. However, in previously less-corrupt states, increased natural resource extraction will not induce corruption. We rely on hierarchical linear models to interpret federal corruption convictions data for the fifty American states between 1976 and 2012 and employ generalized method of moments estimators to account for potential endogeneity. The findings are robust to alternative specifications and have implications for the management of new resource extraction opportunities.
Policymaking with Multiple Agencies
Peter Bils
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Authority over related policy issues is often dispersed among multiple government agencies. In this article, I study when Congress should delegate to multiple agencies, and how shared regulatory space complicates agency decision making. To do so, I develop a formal model of decentralized policymaking with two agencies that incorporates information acquisition and information sharing, delineating situations where legislators should and should not prefer multiple agencies. Greater divergence between the agencies' ideal points distorts information sharing and policy choices, but it may increase the amount of information acquisition. Congress achieves better policy outcomes by delegating authority to both agencies if the agencies have strong policy disagreements. If the agencies have similar policy preferences, however, then Congress may want to consolidate authority within one agency because this approach mitigates free‐riding and takes advantage of returns to scale.
Political Action Committee Donations to Incumbent Senators; a Corruption Motive
Brian Flaxman
University of Colorado Working Paper, September 2019
Abstract:
This paper utilizes six-year Senate terms and two-year reporting periods to analyze if Political Action Committees are using their donations to influence the actions of sitting Senators as opposed to simply trying to get those with favorable policy views re-elected. Senators that are early in their careers who will have more influence in the long-term as well as Senators who currently already have influence would be those more likely to be targeted by Political Action Committees for this motive. Using clustered OLS regression with fixed effects and interaction terms, I find that there is in fact a "corruption" motive when it comes to Political Action Committees donating to sitting US Senators.
The Adaptability Paradox: Constitutional Resilience and Principles of Good Government in Twenty-First-Century America
Stephen Skowronek & Karen Orren
Perspectives on Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Faith in the resilience of the US Constitution prompts many observers to discount evidence of a deepening crisis of governance in our day. A long history of success in navigating tough times and adapting to new circumstances instills confidence that the fundamentals of the system are sound and the institutions self-correcting. The aim of this article is to push assessments of this sort beyond the usual nod to great crises surmounted in the past and to identify institutional adaptation as a developmental problem worthy of study in its own right. To that end, we call attention to dynamics of adjustment that have played out over the long haul. Our historical-structural approach points to the “bounded resilience” of previous adaptations and to dynamics of reordering conditioned on the operation of other governance outside the Constitution’s formal written arrangements. We look to the successive overthrow of these other incongruous elements and to the serial incorporation of previously excluded groups to posit increasing stress on constitutional forms and greater reliance on principles for support of new institutional arrangements. Following these developments into the present, we find principles losing traction, now seemingly unable to foster new rules in support of agreeable governing arrangements. Our analysis generates a set of propositions about why the difficulties of our day might be different from those of the past in ways that bear directly on resilience and adaptability going forward.
Can Constituents Nudge Legislators? Evidence from a Bias Reduction Field Experiment
Michelangelo Landgrave
University of California Working Paper, August 2019
Abstract:
Nudges are interventions which alter the presentation of choices to improve decision-making. The nudge literature has thus far focused on improving decision-making among the general public. It is unclear if legislators, which are often modeled as being less immune to the biases which allow nudges to succeed, can be nudged. This manuscript shows that legislators can be nudged by their constituents to improve decision-making and therefore their ability to represent. I show this by fielding a bias reduction field experiment among US state legislative offices. To my knowledge this study is the first to succeed in nudging legislators with a low-cost intervention which ordinary constituents can use. This introduces the possibility for constituents to improve governance by nudging legislators to better decision-making.
The Value of Political Geography: Evidence from the Redistricting of Firms
Joaquin Artes, Brian Richter & Jeffrey Timmons
University of Texas Working Paper, August 2019
Abstract:
We demonstrate that political geography has value to firms. We do so by exploiting shocks to political maps that occur around redistricting cycles in the United States. These keep some firms in Congressional districts that are largely unchanged at one extreme and reassign other firms to entirely new sets of constituents at the other extreme. Our main finding is that firms suffer from being reassigned into districts that are competitive across parties relative to safer districts. The effects are not trivial in magnitude. Moreover, they do not depend on whether firms retain the same politician or actively make campaign contributions.
When Voters Matter: The Limits of Local Government Responsiveness
Michael Sances
Urban Affairs Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
I use over-time variation resulting from geographic sorting to estimate the impact of local preferences on local policy. Building a new panel data set of county-level voting behavior and county-level policy choices, I find a causal impact of changes in preferences on changes in policy. However, this responsiveness is not unlimited. While public safety and infrastructure spending respond, policies more constrained by state laws do not; and while general purpose government spending is responsive, school and special district spending are not. These results corroborate recent evidence of local responsiveness using a more extensive sample, and a research design that rules out many alternative explanations. They also reveal many local policies to be unresponsive due to state-imposed constraints.
From Statehouse to Courthouse: Legislative Professionalism and High Court Auditing Behavior
Miles Armaly
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Method: I use time‐series cross‐sectional analysis to examine over 10,000 cases for 44 state courts from 1998 to 2009.
Results: I find that courts of last resort in states low in legislative professionalism tend to hear a greater number of cases that reference the legislature than states higher in professionalism, even after controlling for confounders such as ideological disagreement and judicial resources.
Discontinuities in the Value of Relational Capital: The Effects on Employee Entrepreneurship and Mobility
Heejung Byun, Joseph Raffiee & Martin Ganco
Organization Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examine how a discontinuous increase in the value of an employee’s relational capital influences the employee’s mobility and entrepreneurship decisions in professional and business service contexts. Drawing on the unfolding model of voluntary turnover, we develop a theory proposing that positive shocks to external relational capital will catalyze employees to consider alternative employment options, thereby increasing the probability of exit. We further maintain that exit decisions in response to such shocks will be driven by a desire to appropriate more value, making these shocks strong predictors of employee entrepreneurship, especially when the employee works in an area that is peripheral to the firm’s core capabilities. Empirically, we construct a unique employee-employer linked database that tracks employment of lobbyists in the United States federal lobbying industry. Leveraging plausibly exogenous shocks to the value of an employee’s relational capital and a novel market-based measure of the employee’s position in the firm’s knowledge space, we report two sets of findings. First, an increase in the value of relational capital has a positive effect on the likelihood of mobility to established firms and employee entrepreneurship, with the effect for the latter stronger than the former. Second, the magnitude of the effect on employee entrepreneurship becomes stronger when the employee is peripheral to the firm’s core knowledge. Together, our results are consistent with a value creation-value appropriation rationale, where sudden increases in the value of an employee’s relational capital drive exit as a means to appropriate a greater portion of value created.