Browsing by Author "Vanberg, Georg S"

The three papers in this dissertation seek to measure more accurately critical concepts in the field of American political institutions so as to inform and enable theory-building. The first paper addresses committee prestige in the U.S. House of Representatives, arguing that the seniority of members transferring off of standing committees reveals important information about the relative prestige of those committees. In response, I import a measure called PageRank which enables me to exploit information on seniority while measuring committee prestige. I then demonstrate that the prestige of a legislator's committee portfolio predicts the political action committee (PAC) contributions she receives for the next campaign cycle. A second paper tackles the theoretical possibility that majority parties may manipulate their control over committee assignments for partisan goals, countering a vast literature which has generally failed to find evidence of partisan manipulation across stage legislatures. I argue that several theoretical and practical constraints render universal stacking impractical and introduce a new measure of partisan stacking called "seats above expectation" (SAE); I find little evidence of universal partisan (or ideological) stacking in state legislatures. I then argue that majority parties should selectively stack committees under two circumstances: (1) when the operations of committees affect the electoral prospects of all legislators, generating so-called "uniform electoral externalities;" and (2) when committees in a polarized setting are endowed with gatekeeping rights. Leveraging SAE, evidence from the states confirms these selective stacking hypotheses. The final paper examines political polarization, offering a more behavioral conception and a network-based measure, called modularity, applicable to collegial courts and legislatures alike. After demonstrating validity, I then measure polarization at the U.S. Supreme Court and in both houses of Congress using opinion-joining and cosponsorship networks. My primary contributions here are to argue that polarization need not be equated with partisan polarization and to develop a measure which permits such a distinction and decomposition. Indeed, I find that while polarization is tantamount to partisan polarization in the present-day Congress, as recently as four decades ago partisanship accounted for just over half of measured polarization.

Recall election is designed to enhance politicians’ accountability to their constituents, but empirical testing of recall’s success at achieving this goal are few, especially when parties are in the picture. In this paper, I postulate that, when the governing party attempts to pass extreme policies early in the legislative term to prevent them from hurting their members’ chance of reelection, thus resulting in an electoral cycle of legislation. Introduction of credible threat of recall will in turn incentivize the governing party either to refrain from passing extreme policies or to allow its members to cultivate a stronger personal vote to preserve the cycle and the extreme policies it enables. I adopt the difference-in-differences design to estimate the causal effect of a recall reform on the ruling party legislators’ personal vote-seeking behavior, more specifically their defections from the party line in roll call votes. However, as the recall’s incentive effect on defection rate is not identified, more investigation of other forms of legislative behaviors using different research design may be warranted in the future.

This paper examines the trend of variation in development performance within

China's Eastern Zone and the underlying mechanism of the changing trend. Empirical descriptions as well as analyses are provided based on the comparison between data on development performance of regions and provinces and records of policy transformation from 1949 to the end of 20th century. Furthermore, a comparative case study on two of China's leading provinces in the Eastern Zone, Guangdong and Shanghai, is conducted in order to reveal how the interplay of differences in geographical conditions and policy makes contributions to their development disparities in Maoist development period and post-Mao development period. This study finds that development as well as policy advantages are not unevenly shared in China or in China's Eastern Zone. Furthermore, the study reveals that a two-way interaction between policy and certain aspects of geographical conditions exists and it gives rise to development disparities in China's Eastern Zone. According to detailed analysis, there are two main channels through which the interaction functions. On the one hand, geographical conditions act as an important shaping force underlying policy formulation and then a specific set of policy is issued to assist development of a specific province based on the influence of its geographical conditions. On the other hand, the influence of geographical conditions comes to shape development performance directly even at the time when a similar set of policy is carried out by provinces.

Building independent courts is a commitment by political leaders that they are willing to tie their hands, restrain their (often arbitrary) power, and respect judicial decisions even if the courts rule against them. But if political leaders are rational, why do they persist in their respectful behavior towards independent courts even when such courts may prove adverse to themselves? In other words, how can judicial independence be credibly maintained without being eroded by political leaders? In this dissertation, I seek to answer this important but underexplored question in comparative judicial politics by examining the political and economic conditions necessary to maintain judicial independence in autocracies and democracies.

In Chapter 2, I build a theory regarding the methods by which autocrats credibly still maintain judicial independence, given the lack of formal institutions capable of constraining their ever-present chance of reneging. I develop a causal mechanism by which a regime’s economic reliance on foreign direct investment (FDI) and autocrats’ concern about their reputation interact to create strong and ongoing incentives to maintain judicial independence as a property rights assurance for foreign investors. Using panel data covering a large sample of authoritarian countries during the post-Cold War period, I find quantitative evidence of my theoretical expectation in Chapter 3, and demonstrate that a regime’s past reliance on FDI is positively and significantly associated with the current level of judicial independence. My empirical analysis further indicates that the theorized effect is restricted to the economic dimension of judicial independence, in both the medium term and the long term, and that the effect is also contingent on the type of authoritarian regime that is present in the country.

In Chapter 4, I present a modified version of the so-called insurance theory and claim that the impact of political competition on judicial independence in democracies fits a slight modification I suggest to this theory. Adopting insights from party politics literature, I argue that, beyond mere electoral closeness, the presence of “robust” political competition is conducive to generating the incumbent’s credible perceptions of threats of the loss of his power and thus this form of competition is more relevant for anchoring the logic of the insurance theory. To illustrate the significance of robust political competition and the conditions thereof, I conduct a qualitative case study of South Korea and the Philippines, which differ in the level of judicial independence despite their similar degree of electoral closeness after democratization. Drawing on each country’s political history, descriptive data, and the specific episodes of judicial independence in both countries, I find that the existence of robust political competition, backed by an institutionalized party system and a stable set of robust actors, has allowed South Korea to develop judicial independence consistent with the insurance logic. By contrast, the absence of robust political competition in the Philippines, which is attributable to a fluidic and clientelistic party system with a lack of robust opposition, has discouraged incumbents from taking advantage of judicial independence as a form of political insurance for themselves.

Circuit splits, arising when U.S. Courts of Appeals create contradictory legal rules, are one of the most important phenomena in American law. Making up a significant proportion of the Supreme Court’s docket, cases involving conflicts among federal appellate courts – or circuit splits – present important legal questions, and their resolution often has a profound impact on future case law. Despite their importance, however, little is known about the conditions under which these conflicts are resolved, or the dynamics underpinning their resolution. This dissertation analyzes intercircuit conflicts as vehicles for Supreme Court policymaking, which Justices use to glean information about the level of resistance that nationally-binding precedent might encounter in the lower courts.

Using an original dataset of conflicts drawn from all petitions for certiorari that came before the Court in its 1986 and 1987 terms, the studies in this dissertation reach several findings that illuminate various aspects of conflict. Taking up the question of why the Court resolves some conflicts, but not others, Chapter 2 reports that the Court is more likely to resolve splits when it has more ideological allies among the lower courts involved in the conflict. Turning to the resolution of conflict cases, Chapter 3 shows that the justices make policy sacrifices at the merits stage, accommodating to the side of the conflict that is ideologically furthest from the median when there appears to be a consensus among lower courts favoring that side. This effect is specific to justices near the Court’s median, for whom the costs of accommodation are lowest, and also to cases in which lower courts have primary control over the implementation of the legal rule in future cases. In an investigation of lower court behavior, Chapter 4 presents evidence that position-taking in a conflict is independent of the prior history of decisions in the split, and that when the Supreme Court alters precedent across more circuits in its resolution of conflict, the amount of resistance to implementation of its opinion increases. Overall, this dissertation provides an account of conflict and a novel source of data that can contribute to debates surrounding federal judicial reform.

This essay adopts a bundle-of-rights approach that allows the examination of the gradual and incremental change in a specific stick: the right to transfer land in China. This study investigates the recent policies on urban redevelopment in Shenzhen – a coastal city was chosen by the central government to explore possible solutions to problems happened in urban renewals. In these policies, institutional evolutions are made on the delineation of land property rights. The Shenzhen government formally grants the land transfer rights to the villagers who initially only have land use rights when they pay a fixed price to the government. The puzzling question is why the government that benefits from the monopoly control over land would be willing to promote policies restraining their own power? In this essay, I design a political model to identify four conditions for the occurrence of the institutional evolution: (1) the resource is scarce, (2) the government and individuals compete for the resource, (3) to enforce or operate the current institutions incurs great costs on the government, impeding it to acquire the resource. (4) the costs of changing institutions are much lower than the costs of operating the current institutions. I assume that when these four conditions were satisfied, the evolution of property rights over the resource would take place. This theory is tested and proved in Shenzhen case.