Working Papers

[5] "Design, Inference and the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism: A Rejoinder." Presented at APSA 2007.

Abstract:

In ``Design, Inference, and the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism," we show that Robert PapeÕs work on suicide terrorism, particularly his 2003 American Political Science Review article, is deeply ßawed. In ``Methods and Findings in the Study of Suicide Terrorism" (2008), Pape claims that our criticisms of his work are incorrect. The bulk of his response, however, ignores the problem we identify in our comment; instead, he largely summarizes arguments from his later work, arguments that are irrelevant to our basic point. And when he eventually addresses the substance of our critique, Pape simply repeats the error that motivated our original comment.

[4] "Congress, Lawmaking, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, 1971-2000." Presented at APSA 2007.

Online Appendix

Abstract:

Lawmaking studies and evaluations of competing accounts of policy change cannot easily assess the nature of policy change. Focusing on activity involving the Fair Labor Standards Act, I investigate how the magnitude of attempted and successful policy change varies between the 92nd Congress (1971-1972) and the 106th Congress (1999-2000). Using a new method of characterizing lawmaking activity I examine whether the incidence and magnitude of policy change is consistent with policy-motivated lawmakers over nearly thirty years (1971-2000). None of the leading accounts of congressional lawmaking receive robust support, and I Þnd suggestive evidence that the political system is unable, or unwilling, to achieve policy change even when change appears possible. In so doing, I illustrate a means of characterizing lawmaking behavior that should prove useful for future inquiries.

[3] "How well can roll calls detect agenda control?" With Will Bullock.

Abstract:

Both negative agenda control Ð the ability to prevent the consideration of status quo policies Ð and positive agenda control Ð the ability to deÞne the set of alternatives being voted upon Ð are prominently featured in debates over the impact of political parties and standing committees on congressional lawmaking. Investigating the empir- ical support for claims about the existence of positive and negative agenda control is theoretically possible because the competing accounts yield predictions about the type of votes that should be observed if each is true. We show that empirical leverage on the question using roll calls is elusive. Using roll calls for understanding issues of agenda control requires exogenous information about the distribution of considered status quo locations. Absent such information, any characterization of the amount of agenda con- trol present in the process that generates the set of observed roll calls is rationalizable. We derive the nature and extent of the empirical indeterminacy, and we demonstrate the implications for attempts to assess agenda setting behavior in the U.S. House and Senate between 1967 and 2000. We examine behavior in the U.S. Congress, but our arguments generalize to any examination of agenda setting behavior using roll calls.

[2] "The Ideology of Federal Executives and their Agencies." Presented at APSA 2007. With Anthony Bertelli, Christian Grose, David Lewis and David Nixon.

UNDER ACTIVE REVISION: Last completed version is posted.

Abstract:

In this paper, we propose a method for measuring administrative agency ideology that will yield estimates that are directly comparable with those of legislative branch. These estimates will provide analytical traction on a host of questions of interest to scholars of American politics. We review existing strategies for measuring agency ideology and propose a new method that builds upon existing work. Specifically, we use the stated preference of federal executives about key votes in Congress to estimate ideal points for these executives on the same space as legislators. We obtain opinions on key votes through a large survey of federal executives to be fielded in the Fall of 2007. We describe the survey, the method, and conduct several preliminary analyses of the selected votes to ensure that they adequately partition the space and provide enough information to distinguish between members.

[1]"An Experimental Investigation of Advertising Persuasiveness: Is Impact in the Eye of the Beholder?" With Andrew Owen.

UNDER ACTIVE REVISION: Updated version to be posted soon.

Abstract:

We examine how candidate produced messages affect individuals' vote intentions and whether ads are more persuasive for some individuals than others using an experimental design of candidate ads shown to a representative sample of 7,400 viewers during the 2000 U.S. Presidential election. We find that an ad's persuasiveness depends on viewer characteristics in ways only sometimes predicted by the predominant reception-acceptance model of attitude change. Consistent with expectations, we show that less politically interested voters with an initial preference for either Bush or Gore are the most responsive to ads by the opposition candidate, and viewers who are highly interested in politics and have a preferred candidate show no evidence of being susceptible to persuasion. Contrary to the expectations of both the reception-acceptance account and the impressions of some campaign consultants, undecided voters are the least responsive to ads and exposure to conflicting ads actually increases their indecision.

[6] "Broken Fire Alarms: Exploring Constituency Knowledge of Roll Calls." Presented at MPSA 2007. With Jeff Tessin.

It is unclear how much you can learn from two datapoints. That said, it is still informative with respect to those two datapoints.

Abstract:

Low levels of constituent knowledge about roll call voting cause some to question the prospects for Congressional accountability. Others suggest that challengers, interest groups, and other third parties educate constituents about disagreements and reduce the need for active monitoring. This paper examines the prospects for such indirect oversight using an original survey of nearly 13,000 respondents. Contrary to accounts of indirect oversight, we find that disagreement between representatives and their constituents has only a small effect on constituent knowledge about prominent votes in the House of Representatives involving the impeachment charges against President Clinton and the granting of Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) to China. We also find no evidence that high-quality candidates are more likely to challenge unresponsive incumbents, or that outside actors publicize highly unresponsive votes in campaign advertising. Despite frequent appeals to the possibility of ``fire alarm'' oversight, we find little evidence of its presence.

[5] "Strategically Speaking: A New Analysis of the President's Going Public." Invited to Revise and Resubmit at Journal of Politics. With David E. Lewis, Stephanie Riegg and Barry Weingast.

This was a paper I contributed to as a graduate student in 1999 (hence the dated references). It got a revise and resubmit at JoP, but the requested revisions -- an empirical explanation of the possible explanations able to escape the observational equivalence problem -- were too far distant from the work we were, and are, working on individually. Alas, this paper classifies as a "sunk cost."

Abstract:

A new approach to studying the presidency has recently emerged from the formal theory of American politics that is being applied to a variety of presidential activities including vetoes, unilateral action, and appointments. We use the phenomenon of presidential public activities to illustrate the contribution this new approach for our understanding of the presidency. We argue that it is a mistake to undertake an analysis of presidential activities like public speeches without considering both the political environment - specifically the preferences of important congressional actors - and the policy change being pursued (i.e., the location of the status quo policy). Abstracting away from the idiosyncratic features of individual presidents and embedding presidential public activity in the larger separation of powers system illuminates three different logics undergirding public activity, namely changing legislator preferences, claiming credit for the passage of legislation, and making veto threats credible. Examining presidential activity without accounting for the different possible motivations for going public or the fact that presidents are a single actor in the policymaking process operating under both institutional and political constraints risks overestimating presidential influence. We conclude that the new approach to the study of the presidency can illuminate important theoretical insights and improve empirical analysis.

[4] "Same Principals, Same Agents, Different Institutions: Roll Call Voting in the Congresses of Confederation and the U.S. Senate, 1781-1796." Presented at Midwest 2003 and APSA 2003.

There are several clear problems with this paper, but hopefully this false start will prove fruitful to future researchers.

Abstract:

A research issue of considerable importance concerns the extent to which constituents can control the representatives they elect. This paper extends existing lines of inquiry by examining how changes in the institutions governing the relationship between constituents and the legislators they select affects the extent to which constituency preferences are reflected in representative voting behavior. I probe this question using the "natural experiment" that results from the transition from the Confederation Congress to the U.S. Senate. Although both institutions appear to successfully represent states preferences as intended, the weakened mechanisms of control and oversight provided to state legislatures in the Senate relative to the Confederation Congress appear to weaken the incentive for state delegations to vote cohesively.

[3] "Empirical Probability Scales for Verbal Expectations Data." With Chuck Manski.

Abstract:

Survey researchers have long used verbal expressions of likelihood to elicit the expectations that respondents hold for future events. The General Social Survey (GSS) uses this question to elicit expectations of job loss: "Thinking about the next twelve months, how likely do you think it is that you will lose your job or be laid off -- very likely, fairly likely, not too likely or not at all likely?" Recently, surveys have elicited expectations in the form of numerical porbabilities. The Survey of Economic Expectations (SEE) asks: ''What do you think is the percent chance that you will lose your job during the next 12 months?" Whereas verbal questions at most convey ordinal information on expectation, probabilistic questions measure expectations on a well-defined absolute scale. This paper shoes that auxiliary data collection can enable probabilistic re-scaling of verbal expectations data and thereby enhance the value of such data. The idea is to pose corresponding verbal and probabilistic questions to a suitable sample of respondents. The responses may be used to learn the frequency distributions of subjective probabilities reported by persons who give different verbal answers. These frequency distributions may then be used to predict the probability responses of respondents to surveys that now collect only verbal expectations data. Applying the prediction process, we have administered the GSS and SEE questions on job loss to a national sample of Knowledge Network (KN) panelists. The KN data enable us to impute the probabilistic job-loss expectations that GSS respondents would have reported had they been asked. We report the findings.

[2] "Panel Bias from Attrition and Conditioning: A Case Study of the Knowledge Networks Panel." Presented at AAPOR 2000.

Abstract:

With the recent rise of Internet based public opinion studies, panel studies have been utilized with much more frequency. Although the benefits of panel methods are well known (e.g., Sharot 1991), using a panel risks bias in two ways. First, since panels rely on re-interviewing panelists, systematic panel attrition can produce a panel that is unrepresentative of the target population. Second, interviewing and reinterviewing panelists may change the opinions/behaviors of the panelists – creating unrepresentative panelists. To investigate the prevalence and impact of these possible biases, I investigate a panel that is particularly suspect to these sources of bias – the panel of Knowledge Networks. Knowledge Networks’ panelists are not only given an interactive TV appliance and Internet access, but they are also surveyed weekly. In this paper I both examine the extent (and effect) of panel attrition in Knowledge Networks’s panel over a 7 month period, as well as report the results of an experiment designed to isolate the possible opinion/behavior changes introduced by panel participation. I find little evidence of either type of bias in the Knowledge Networks panel.

[1] "An Independent Judiciary? Determining the Influence of Congressional and Presidential Preferences on the Supreme Court's Interpretation of Federal Statutes: 1953-1995." Presented at APSA 1998.

This is my second year paper from Stanford and it has not been revised since (i.e., there are some obvious mistakes). However, as I sometimes see it referenced, I thought it might be useful to have it available (perhaps as an example of what not to do?). Figures 3 and 5 were produced in SigmaPlot -- a program I no longer have access to. The data and code used to generate the results are also missing.

Abstract:

I test the implications of the two main theories of judicial decision making (i.e., the Separation of Powers Model and the Attitudinal Model) by examining the extent to which the Court responds to elected bodies' preferences in its interpretation of federal statutes from 1953-1995. I do so by deriving the models within a game-theoretic framework that precisely identifies the models' predictions, and by developing a method that recovers comparable preferences between the Court and the elected bodies. Even allowing for alternative measurement choices, the paper finds scant evidence supporting the predictions of the Separation of Powers Model.