Forthcoming
How Will They Vote? Predicting The Future Behavior of Supreme Court Nominees, 1937-2006 (with Jee-Kwang Park) Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 2009.
Read Me NSP Scores
Nominate Scaled Perception(NSP) Scores for Supreme Court Nominees 1937-2006 (1st Dimension).xls
Nominate Scaled Perception(NSP) Scores for Supreme Court Nominees 1937-2006 (2nd Dimension).xls
Voting Scores for Supreme Court Justices 1937-2006 (By Issue Area - % of Liberal Votes).xls
Voting Scores for Supreme Court Justices 1937-2006 (By Issue Area - Item Response Scores).xls
Voting Scores for Supreme Court Justices 1937-2006 (By Issue Area - Updated Segal et al 2000 Scores).xls
Previous research suggests the future behavior of nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court is relatively unpredictable, except for civil liberties cases. We devise a new measure of nominees’ political ideology that more efficiently uses pre-confirmation information about the nominees. The measure employs Segal-Cover scores (based on content analysis of contemporary newspaper editorials) but also DW-NOMINATE indicators, and is scaled into the DW-NOMINATE space. The measure predicts confirmed nominees’ overall immediate, short-term, and longer-term voting behavior, as well as voting in issue-specific domains, much better than previous measures. It is particularly successful for nominees confirmed after 1957.
The Presidential Veto in William Howell and George Edwards (eds) The Oxford Handbook of the American Presidency, Oxford University Press 2009.
This essay reviews what political scientists have, and have not, learned about the use of vetoes, the effects of vetoes, and the significance of the veto power. It briefly reviews the micro-politics of the veto: the strategic logic of the veto as applied to individual pieces of legislation or bargaining episodes between the President and Congress. It more fully reviews the macro-politics of the veto: the effect of structural features of the political environment (like unified or divided party control of the government) on aggregate veto use; the effect of vetoes on presidential popularity; the overall effects of the veto power on bill content (including pork barrel legislation), the legislative productivity of Congress, and the stability of public policy. The essay also discusses methodological problems and solutions in studying the veto or other tools of presidential governance. Finally, the essay points to the possibility of theoretically modeling, and empirically studying, integrated presidential strategy.
"Changing Supreme Court Policy Through Appointments: The Impact of a New Justice," University of Minnesota Law Review (Special Edition), forthcoming 2009.
Different theories of decision making on the U.S. Supreme Court make radically different predictions about the impact of a new justice on the Court. We draw out these predictions and, using a new method for locating average opinion locations in a policy space, test the predictions in a case study: the replacement of Justice Potter Stewart by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. We find a direct effect of the new justice: O’Connor’s opinions were more conservative than Stewart’s. In addition, her appearance on the Court induced strong but varying peer effects among the other justices: conservatives wrote somewhat more conservative opinions while liberals wrote somewhat more liberal opinions. These findings appear quite harsh to the Median Voter Model of Supreme Court decision making and diverge in important ways from the predictions of Median Majority and Monopoly Author models. They appear somewhat more friendly to “author influence” theories such as the recent Gravitation Attraction Model. We discuss the implications for the president’s ability to shape the Court’s policy through appointments. In sum, we see those opportunities as substantial.
Recent Publications
Quantitative Political Science in Quantitative Models and Methods: A Tour of the Social Sciences, Andrew Gelman and Jeronimo Cortina (eds), Cambridge University Press, 2009.
This chapter discusses how to formulate simple game theoretic models of politics, derive their empirical implications, test them with quantitative data, and use them to understand real political phenomena. To illustrate, I formulate a new formal model of congressional hearings. I then use the model to explore Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Supreme Court nominees, emphasizing the role of scandals. The chapter is informal in style, based on lectures to graduate students at Columbia and Princeton, and does not require an understanding of advanced methods.
A Primer on the President’s Legislative Program with Jee-Kwang Park, Princeton University, in Presidential Leadership: The Vortex of Power, Bert Rockman and Richard Waterman (eds), Roxbury Press, 2007.
We review what political scientists have learned about the president's legislative program as a tool of presidential governance. We discuss what is known about the volume of proposals (legislative activism), the content of proposals, Congress's response to proposals, and the policy impact of proposals. We also review existing theory or theoretical notions in the literature. We then propose a new game theoretic model of the presidential program, the "burden sharing" model. The model suggests that presidents should become activists when policy windows are open in Congress and simultaneously the public clamors for major new legislation. We test the model empirically, using counts of proposals from 1963 to 1996 and new data on social movement activism. The data afford some support for the model.
Bargaining and Opinion Assignment on the U.S. Supreme Court (with Jeffrey R. Lax, Columbia University) Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization. 23(2):276-302, 2007.
We formulate a new game-theoretic model of bargaining on the U.S. Supreme Court. In the model, a degree of monopoly power over policy endogenously accrues to the assigned writer despite an "open rule" permitting other justices to make counteroffers. We assume justices are motivated ultimately by a concern for judicial policy, but that the policy impact of an opinion depends partly on its persuasiveness, clarity, and craftsmanship -- its legal quality. The effort-cost of producing a high quality opinion creates a wedge that the assignee can exploit to move an opinion from the median without provoking a winning counter-offer. We use this bargaining model as the foundation for a formal analysis of opinion assignment. Both the bargaining and opinion assignment models display rich and tractable comparative statics, allowing them to explain well-known empirical regularities as well as generate new propositions, within a unified and internally consistent framework.
Appeals Mechanisms, Litigant Selection, and the Structure of Judicial Hierarchies, with Lewis Kornhauser, Institutional Games and the U.S. Supreme Court, edited by Jon Bond, Roy Flemming, and James Rogers, University of Virginia Press, 2006.
Congress and the Macropolitics of Telecommunications Policy, with Grace Roegner Freedman, The Macropolitics of Congress, Scott Adler and John Lapinski (eds), Princeton University Press, 2006.
The Political Economy of the U.S. Presidency, The Handbook of Political Economy, Barry Weingast and Donald Wittman editors, Oxford University Press, 2006.
Decision Rules in a Judicial Hierarchy with Lewis A. Kornhauser, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, 161(2), 264-292, 2005.
In this paper, we extend the analysis of the consequences of litigant selection on the structure of judicial hierarchies to environments in which litigants may have asymmetric information about the merits of the case. In a prior paper, we constructed a simple model in which, after trial, litigants were fully informed about the merits of the case; we showed that under reasonable circumstances, the optimal judicial hierarchy had three tiers: a trial court, an intermediate appellate court and a supreme court. In this essay we weaken the assumption that the trial reveals to both litigants the appropriate decision in the case even when the court remains ignorant. A three-tiered hierarchy will now reduce errors to zero only under more restrictive conditions. More specifically, we identify three classes of equilibria in a three-tiered hierarchy in which the error rate is zero. The logic of these equilibria differs from the logic of the complete revelation equilibrium. Here, in order to achieve equilibrium, at least one of the inferior courts must not decide cases on the basis of its prior beliefs. Rather, in the absence of an informative signal, an inferior court should decide against the informed litigant in order to exploit that litigant's knowledge. The optimal decisional rule with potentially uninformed litigants thus differs from that when, after trial, both litigants are fully informed.
Working Papers
Modeling Collegial Courts (3): Adjudication Equilibria, with Lewis Kornhauser. (May 6, 2009)
We present a formal game theoretic model of adjudication by a collegial court. The model incorporates dispute resolution as well as judicial policy making and indicates the relationship between the two. It explicitly addresses joins, concurrences and dissents, and assumes “judicial” rather than legislative or electoral objectives by the actors. The model makes clear predictions about the plurality opinion’s location in “policy” space; the case’s disposition; and the size and composition of the disposition-, join-, and concurrence-coalitions. These elements of adjudication equilibrium vary with the identity of the opinion writer and with the location of the case. In general, the opinion is not located at the ideal policy of the median judge. The model suggests new directions for empirical work on judicial politics.
Strategic Defiance and Compliance in the U.S. Courts of Appeals (with Chad Westerland, Jeffrey Segal, Lee Epstein, and Scott Comparato) 2007.
Why do lower courts treat Supreme Court precedents favorably or unfavorably? To address this question, we outline two distinct theoretical frameworks. The first, based on the theory of teams, assumes a shared conception of the judicial role, and emphasizes judicial learning by circuit judges. The second, drawing inspiration from principal-agent theory, assumes pervasive value conflicts among judges, and emphasizes power and control. We use the frameworks to structure an empirical analysis of a random sample of 500 Supreme Court cases, yielding over 10,000 subsequent treatments in the U.S. Courts of Appeals. We find support for both the team-theoretic and agency-theoretic perspectives. The results have important implications for understanding legal change, political control of the judiciary, and strategic litigation.
Endogenous Cost Lobbying: Theory and Evidence (with John M. deFigueiredo) 2006.
Special interests attempt to influence lawmakers through campaign contributions and through informational lobbying. Both avenues have been explored extensively in theoretical models but only the former has received much empirical scrutiny. We provide the first empirical tests of a major class of models of costly legislative lobbying, the Potters-van Winden-Grossman-Helpman (PWGH) signaling model. Using data derived from over 50,000 observations of annual lobbying expenditures by special interest groups in the American states, we find that, as predicted, special interest groups increase lobbying expenditures when the legislature is controlled by "enemies" rather than "friends." In addition, lobbying expenditures vary across states with different budgeting institutions in ways predicted by the model. Overall, the results provide substantial support for the PWGH class of lobbying models.
Modeling Law: Theoretical Implications of Empirical Methods (with Lewis A. Kornhauser) 2005.
We examine a long-standing research program in empirical Political Science, fact-pattern analysis (FPA). We connect FPA to definitions of legal rules in jurisprudence and positive political theory. Foundationally, theoretical treatments view rules as functions partitioning case spaces into equivalence classes. Connecting FPA to formal theory has two advantages: first, many elements of the traditional understanding of legal rules become interpretable in terms of FPA, and vice versa. Second, the methodological issues in empirical FPA become much clearer. In particular, the similarity between FPA and related work in artifical intelligence, expert systems, and machine learning becomes obvious. On this basis, following Kastellec 2005, we critique logit, probit, and disciminant analysis-based FPA as less likely to uncover interpretable legal rules than other techniques developed to induce decision trees from data. As noted by Kastellec, classification and regression trees (CART) appear particularly promising in the legal context. We note the possibility of applying CART-based FPA to many areas of the law, with potentially significant applications in legal education and legal practice. We then examine recent attempts to use FPA to uncover changes in “legal regimes.” We suggest that CART could be employed more successfully in this task. We then examine attempts to use FPA in the long-standing “law vs. preferences” debate in Political Science. In our view, this debate as presently framed is unlikely to be productive. We illustrate our points with estimations using simulated data.
Bargaining with Mr. Hobbes: Choosing a Sovereign (with Brian Barry, Columbia University) 2004.
"The Samizdat Corner"
Strategic Endorsements (with Joon Pyo Jung, Young-Nam University, Tae-Ku, South Korea) 1994.
We model low-information reasoning in political settings. We examine the situation in which a decision maker faces a hidden offer from a monopoly agenda setter, with interested third parties offering costless signals in the form of endorsements. Strategies and outcomes depend on the location of proposer, endorsers, choosers, and status quo, as well as uncertainty about preferences. Broadly speaking, though, the presence of an endorser often allows the proposer and the chooser to strike efficient bargains they could not otherwise reach. Surprisingly, the chooser is often better off relying on endorsements than becoming fully informed. These findings help explain why decision makers often rely on endorsements and why, perhaps, the institutions of take-it-or-leave-it bargaining is common in politics. They also suggest that the presence or absence of appropriately located cue-givers can affect how well democratic institutions operate.
New Avenues for Modeling Judicial Politics 1994. Figures
Sequential Veto Bargaining (with Susan Elmes) 1994.
We study lawmaking by a legislature and an executive, which we model as a process of sequential bargaining under incomplete information. The model provides an explanantion for well-known patterns in the use of the veto. It also provides an explanation for previously unexplained patterns and generates new hypotheses about presidential-congressional relations. The model allows us to evaluate the institutional stakes in veto bargaining in the American system of separated powers and in other systems of presidential government. This class of bargaining problem appears to be new in the literature and would seem to have a wider application in political settings.
Ephemera
The Greatest Hits of Judicial Politics
This is an idiosyncratic view and doesn’t pretend to be anything else. Nor is it encyclopedic. Hence, I apologize to anyone who might feel slighted by the omission of their work, outraged by the neglect of work they believe important, or infuriated by the inclusion of work they find misguided. No slights were intended and oversights abound.