Raising and Razing
Father Founders: Did Child Gender Affect Voting at the Constitutional Convention?
Jeremy Pope & Soren Schmidt
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
How did child gender affect deliberations and voting at the 1787 U.S. Constitutional Convention? Though recent scholarship has found profound and far‐reaching influence of child gender upon the beliefs and behavior of modern parents, there is no reason to believe that this is only an important consideration in the present. Leveraging the natural experiment of child gender, we test whether the gender of a delegate's children influenced his voting. We hypothesize that fathers of sons would favor creating a strong national government because they could more easily envision their sons holding places in the emergent empire (especially younger sons). Using new data on delegates’ children, we find statistically and substantively significant results: having sons indeed predicts delegates’ favoring a stronger, centralized national government (with daughters showing an opposite effect). These differences are sufficiently large to have likely affected the Convention's proceedings and therefore the U.S. Constitution.
Moral-Language Use by U.S. Political Elites
Sze-Yuh Nina Wang & Yoel Inbar
Psychological Science, January 2021, Pages 14-26
Abstract:
We used a distributed-language model to examine the moral language employed by U.S. political elites. In Study 1, we analyzed 687,360 Twitter messages (tweets) posted by accounts belonging to Democratic and Republican members of Congress from 2016 to 2018. In Study 2, we analyzed 2,630,688 speeches given on the floor of the House and Senate from 1981 to 2017. We found that partisan differences in moral-language use shifted over time as the parties gained or lost political power. Overall, lower political power was associated with greater use of moral language for both Democrats and Republicans. On Twitter, Democrats used more moral language in the period after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election. In Congressional transcripts, both Democrats and Republicans used more of most kinds of moral language when they were in the minority.
Thinking about Government Authority: Constitutional Rules and Political Context in Citizens’ Assessments of Judicial, Legislative, and Executive Action
Eileen Braman
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study explores how citizens think about the appropriate exercise of authority across the branches of government. Three similarly designed experiments conducted on national samples reveal that what individuals are told about compliance with decision‐making rules matters across institutions, but so does the political context in which officials are acting. Participants’ policy preferences about the issues that are the subject of government action are particularly important in such assessments. Evidence suggests that feelings about President Trump and participants’ policy views are more important in assessments of the appropriateness of unilateral action than they were during the Obama administration; findings also suggest that what participants are told about President Trump's compliance with rules is less important. This could reflect an erosion in the importance of constitutional norms in citizens’ assessments of executive authority, but other explanations specific to the inquiry are also discussed.
Scandal, Hypocrisy, and Resignation: How Partisanship Shapes Evaluations of Politicians’ Transgressions
Adam Wolsky
Journal of Experimental Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Hypocrisy is a common feature of political scandal. Yet, it is unclear how individuals evaluate hypocritical misconduct differently based on a transgressing politician’s partisan identity. Using survey experiments, this article assesses how exposure to different frames of wrong doing involving actual members of congress spill over on to the evaluation of parties distinctly among co-partisans and out-partisans. I find that Republicans feel more positive towards their party after reading about the resignation of a hypocritical co-partisan politician compared to merely reading about the politician’s hypocrisy. In addition, Republicans feel warmer about their party when reading about a hypocritical versus non-hypocritical out-party transgression. However, Democrats do not change their party evaluations after being exposed to different scandal frames involving co-partisan and out-partisan politicians. This suggests that Republicans and Democrats have different attitudes towards hypocrisy and/or differently apply information about individuals when evaluating parties.
Revealing Issue Salience via Costly Protest: How Legislative Behavior Following Protest Advantages Low-Resource Groups
LaGina Gause
British Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Collective action, particularly by low-resource groups, presents an opportunity for re-election-minded legislators to learn about (and subsequently represent) their constituents’ salient interests. In fact, legislators are more likely to support the preferences of protesters than non-protesters. Legislators are also more likely to support the preferences of racial and ethnic minority, low-income and grassroots protesting groups than they are to represent better-resourced protesters. This argument emerges from a formal theory and is empirically tested using legislative roll-call vote data from the 102nd through the 104th US Congresses and data on civil rights, minority issues and civil liberties issue area protests reported in the New York Times. This counterintuitive result enhances understanding of inequalities in representation. It demonstrates that under certain conditions, political representation favors disadvantaged populations.
Incongruent Voting or Symbolic Representation? Asymmetrical Representation in Congress, 2008-2014
Adam Cayton & Ryan Dawkins
Perspectives on Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
The electoral connection incentivizes representatives to take positions that please most of their constituents. However, on votes for which we have data, lawmakers vote against majority opinion in their district on one out of every three high-profile roll calls in the U.S. House. This rate of “incongruent voting” is much higher for Republican lawmakers, but they do not appear to be punished for it at higher rates than Democrats on Election Day. Why? Research in political psychology shows that citizens hold both policy-specific and identity-based symbolic preferences, that these preferences are weakly correlated, and that incongruous symbolic identity and policy preferences are more common among Republican voters than Democrats. While previous work on representation has treated this fact as a nuisance, we argue that it reflects two real dimensions of political ideology that voters use to evaluate lawmakers. Using four years of CCES data, district-level measures of opinion, and the roll-call record, we find that both dimensions of ideology matter for how lawmakers cast roll calls, and that the operational-symbolic disconnect in public opinion leads to different kinds of representation for each party.
Senators vs Santa’s Reindeer: 2020 Stock Picking Roundup
William Belmont et al.
Dartmouth College Working Paper, December 2020
Abstract:
Given the concerns over informed stock trading by U.S. senators and congresspeople at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, we examine these legislators’ short term stock trading results during 2020. We find little evidence for market timing or stock selection ability. Both Senators’ and House Members’ stock selections underperform the S&P at the one month horizon and underperform a size-industry adjusted benchmark at the 3 and 6 month time frames. Returns to legislators’ purchases contrast with returns to the top stock picks from U.S. brokerage houses and stocks chosen by Santa’s Reindeer (Santa’s Village Jefferson NH). As a group the Reindeer outperform the S&P by 4.89 percent in a single month, or over 70 percent on an annualized basis. However reindeer exhibit herding behavior and a preference for momentum stocks.
Divided government, delegation, and civil service reform
Elliott Ash, Massimo Morelli & Matia Vannoni
Political Science Research and Methods, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper sheds new light on the drivers of civil service reform in US states. We first demonstrate theoretically that divided government is a key trigger of civil service reform, providing nuanced predictions for specific configurations of divided government. We then show empirical evidence for these predictions using data from the second half of the 20th century: states tended to introduce these reforms under divided government, and in particular when legislative chambers (rather than legislature and governor) were divided.
EU accession: A boon or bane for corruption?
Vincenzo Alfano, Salvatore Capasso & Rajeev Goel
Journal of Economics and Finance, January 2021, Pages 1-21
Abstract:
The formation and expansion of the European Union (EU) have attracted much attention. However, the impact on corruption in a nation after joining the Union has not been formally studied. Any nation that joins the European Union potentially faces two different and opposite effects on corruption. On the one hand, there are reasons to believe that corruption is going to decrease because of EU initiatives to fight corruption; on the other hand, there are reasons to imagine that corruption may increase due to the increase in bureaucracy and new regulations. Hence, the overall effect on corruption is not entirely clear. This work focuses on the last three rounds of EU entry and empirically studies the effects of joining the EU on corruption. Placing the analysis in the broader literature on the cross-national determinants of corruption, the results suggest that entry into the EU increases corruption. Another insight is that this corruption increase does not hold for nations that are potential EU entrants or that are in the negotiation stage.
Instant Credibility: The Conditional Role of Professional Background in Policymaking Success
Todd Makse
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
For legislators without legislative experience, credibility can be vital to achieving legislative success, and expertise from one’s professional background is a highly plausible source of such credibility. For example, when legislating in policy areas directly related to one’s previous occupation, a legislator’s colleagues may perceive policy instruments as more informed by expertise rather than ideological preferences. In this paper, I focus on several questions related to the linkage between professional background and legislative success, and specifically, the ability to guide authored bills through the legislative process. First, does a match between a legislator’s professional background and the topic of legislation make that legislation more likely to advance in the legislative process? Second, if so, does the importance of professional background dissipate as length of legislative service increases? Third, does the relevance of professional background systematically differ across types of legislators and legislatures? I find strong evidence that having a relevant professional background does lead to legislative success for new members, but that this pattern persists later in the legislative career too. Moreover, I find that these patterns are especially strong for minority party legislators and in legislatures with higher levels of membership turnover.