Browsing by Subject "American politics"

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.

Issue voting, where citizens select candidates based on their own policy preferences, exists as an ideal form of candidate selection in a representative democracy, with politicians being elected because they match the policy preferences of their constituencies. But, in practice, how much of voter decision-making is driven by political issue information? Much of the literature on this topic has narrowly debated whether the mass public uses issues at all, with influential work concluding that citizens seem largely unable or unwilling to do so. If true, this has important implications for our understanding of democratic accountability and the design of institutions. In this dissertation, I argue the debate of how voters decide is a false dichotomy and that pitting issue voting against non-issue voting has limited our understanding of political decision-making. Through a series of original survey experiments and analysis of multiple panel datasets, I show that voters, hindered by the same cognitive and motivational constraints used by critics to argue against the existence of issue voting, can and do use policy information to inform their vote choice. The results of this dissertation imply that the American voter falls between the ideal issue voter from classical theories of voting and the non-issue voter of recent work in political psychology, promoting guarded optimism toward the public’s ability to maintain ideal democratic principles.

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.

For students of color, how do school experiences early in life affect adult political participation later on? Political scientists have long understood that race plays a critical role in political behavior; however, scholars rarely investigate the features of American society that drive racial inequalities in outcomes like voting, volunteering for campaigns, and other forms of political participation. This study explores an important and underexamined source of long-term differences in political behavior: childhood experiences in schools. Using observational analysis of longitudinal datasets, I examine the relationship between public schools and political participation among students of color. My research highlights the important fact that public schools can influence both the resources students of color have later in life and the feelings they have toward government and politics—sometimes in opposing ways that ultimately leave students of color better-resourced but less confident in government and less likely to participate.