Reid Krell

Everything You Think You Know About Comparative Politics (May Be) Wrong

noreply@blogger.com (Reid Krell) — Mon, 12 Jan 2015 21:54:00 +0000

Munck, G. and Snyder, R. (2007). “Debating the Direction of Comparative Politics: An Analysis of Leading Journals,” Comparative Political Studies 40(1): 5-31.

Munck and Snyder premise this article on the assumption that comparative politics, as a subfield, is too broad to be amenable to qualitative analysis. In this, they recapitulate the methodological argument within the subfield at a meta-level, as both Blyth and Mahoney note. Arguing that most comparative politics choices, whether theoretical, methodological, or substantive, are appropriately framed as “both-and” choices rather than “either-or” choices, they present data from three leading subfield-specific journals and argue that this data disconfirms the conventional wisdom about methodological evolution in comparative politics. Instead, they argue that comparative politics still tends toward qualitative methods, inductive models, and focuses on the state. They conclude by urging a greater turn toward quantitative and formal approaches, to avoid the small-N and data-mining problems, and greater focus on sub-national actors.

This article draws its data from three leading comparative-specific journals, but because it limits its analysis to descriptive statistics, it lacks an identifiable dependent and independent variable and has no causal explanations. Using the descriptive statistics, Munck and Snyder analyze the subfield to determine if the worrisome criticisms of some scholars have merit, and conclude that their five recommendations for increased methodological sophistication are merited, and no other.

Unfortunately for this review, the most salient critique of Munck and Snyder was quickly snapped up by James Mahoney in the journal pages immediately following their article. By cherry-picking their journal choices, they’ve engaged in precisely the sort of data-mining they criticize; when Mahoney considered the most prestigious discipline-wide journals, he found that the turn from qualitative and inductive research was real. This argument – that the subfield’s most prestigious research is not being published in the subfield-specific journals that Munck and Snyder analyze – is tremendous, and scatters much of their argument. Lake’s suggestion that any conglomeration of people constitutes an institution with behavioral consequences gives this argument additional force: since comparative politics is part of political science, the broader disciplinary expectations shape how comparativists think and train.

Amnesia

noreply@blogger.com (Reid Krell) — Sun, 30 Nov 2014 00:09:00 +0000

Payne, L. (2008), Unsettling Accounts, Durham, NC, Duke University Press.

Payne discusses efforts by perpetrators of violence to avoid consequences via forgetting. Using Paul Benzien of South Africa (the so-called "wet bag torturer") as the examplar, he argues that amnesia eliminates some consequences while imposing others. On the one hand, amnesia may insulate perpetrators from full disclosure requirements from truth and reconciliation commissions, or prevent criminal convictions. But on the other hand, amnesia imposes a stigma of mental illness, and using amnesia to gain amnesty from prosecution without full disclosure can leave a perpetrator with no friends among either former perpetrators or former victims, leaving them as "neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring." Indeed, Payne explains that this is exactly what happened to Benzien. Furthermore, amnesia leaves accused perpetrators without a mechanism to deny the accusations against them, even if they are false, such as happened to Bob Kerrey. Amnesia also opens a rhetorical space for victims to assert memory and to push their own agendas toward perpetrators. Ultimately, Payne concludes that several conditions must exist if amnesia can successfully protect perpetrators: it must be total, not partial; there must be no evidence outside of the perpetrators' own recollections; the human-rights community must be demobilized; and there must be no perpetrator turncoats.

My take: I've been hit with the "can't remember, and so can't contradict" problem before. In litigation, if one side remembers and the other does not, then the one that remembers is the one that wins. In the case of violence, the terrifying thing about amnesia is something Payne touches on - the efforts by perpetrators to continue to dehumanize victims by asserting that their torture and agony was so commonplace and so unremarkable as to leave no impression on the perpetrator's memory.

Litigation as feud

noreply@blogger.com (Reid Krell) — Sat, 29 Nov 2014 02:41:00 +0000

Cohen, D. (1995), Law, Violence, and Community in Classical Athens, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

In this chapter, Cohen argues that as judicial institutions gain the power to regulate violence, that they become the arenas for resolving feuds that would have previously been sources of violence. Thus, the courts become not just the regulatory mechanism whereby violence is channeled and prevented, but in fact become the institution where feuds are played out. Anthropologists treat feuds as games, and as is abundantly clear from the Athenian context, courts and judges themselves can become feud participants. Courts also frequently decide cases based less on the evidence, which is fundamentally regarded as unreliable, and much more on litigant reputation. Because the system relied on private initiative, imposing high costs on plaintiffs did not serve the public interest.

My take: there's a lot in this chapter for my comparative habeas paper.

Happy Thanksgiving

noreply@blogger.com (Reid Krell) — Thu, 27 Nov 2014 22:22:00 +0000

No post today.

Resource Wealth and Political Regimes in Africa

noreply@blogger.com (Reid Krell) — Wed, 26 Nov 2014 21:30:00 +0000

Another exam entry.

Jensen, N. and Wantchekon, L. (2004), “Resource Wealth and Political Regimes in Africa,” Comparative Political Studies 37(7): 816-841.

Question 1: What is the central hypothesis of the article? How strong is the theoretical justification for that hypothesis? Explain.

Jensen and Wantchekon are testing four hypotheses, all based on the relationship between natural resource endowment and regime type and action. First, they examine the relationship between natural resource endowment and likelihood of authoritarian regime type. Second, they test the relationship between natural resource endowment and government spending. Next, they consider the relationship between natural resource endowment and quality of governance. Finally, they examine the likelihood that greater natural resource endowment leads to a breakdown in democracy in the 1990s. They limit their analysis to Africa, which justifies the 1990s as a critical break point. This approach is justified because while their first three hypotheses are all well-supported in the literature, the prior literature was based on a specific, narrow group of states – oil-rich OPEC states. Thus, the variance in type of natural resource endowment throughout Africa allows for more robust testing of the hypotheses. Specifically, qualitative research supports their argument by showing three paths for resource-rich states to develop authoritarian regimes.

Question 2: What dependent variables are used and how are they measured? Are these valid and reliable measures? Why or why not?

Each hypothesis uses different dependent variables (as is appropriate). For the first hypothesis, Jensen and Wantchekon operationalize democracy through the standard derivation of Polity III scores, and then adding 10 to eliminate negative values. For government spending, they use government spending expressed as a percentage of GDP. For governance, they use six aggregate measures of governance developed by the World Bank. For the final hypothesis, they use democracy measures again as with the first hypothesis, but use a later derivative of the Polity dataset (Polity 98). These variables have internal validity throughout: using Polity scores is a standard measure of regime type, and the manipulation they employ renders the data amenable to regression analysis without eliminating any meaning; and using government spending to measure government spending is, well, intuitive. The most interesting variable is the governance measures, which they justify by reference to the literature developing it. Presumably the aggregate data used to generate the measures are internally valid; however, since they are only World Bank working papers, and not subject to formal peer review, I would not object to someone questioning the validity of these measures. For the same reasons, I would regard all of these measures as reliable, since they can presumably be reconstructed; but would not complain if someone else reached a different conclusion, particularly if the World Bank measures had inter-coder issues.

Question 3: What are the primary independent variables and how are they measured? Are these valid and reliable measures? Why or why not?

Jensen and Wantchekon use a constructed variable for their tested independent variable. This variable was assigned an ordinal value based on the percentage of merchandise exports derived from fuel, minerals, and metals. I am concerned about the internal validity of this measure, as it excludes exports based on renewable natural resources such as agricultural products and timber. Jensen and Wantchekon do not justify this exclusion; as it could reduce the values of many cases’ independent variables, the exclusion could lead to Type I error. Because the measure is invalid, its reliability is irrelevant; however, I note in passing that the data is easily recoverable, and the way that they reduce the granularity of the data to allow them to fill in missing data is actually pretty ingenious.

For control variables, they rely exclusively on control variables found in the data sets they use for their panel data, to insure internal validity (since all the data therefore comes from the same source). Log GDP per capita eliminates GDP fluctuations caused by population shifts, and is therefore externally valid, and GDP growth controls for democratization driven by economic growth – the “rising tide lifts all boats” hypothesis. Both measures are easily reconstructed either from existing data sources or by minimal mathematical manipulation, and thus are reliable.

Question 4: Are there any unnecessary control variables in the analyses? What are they and why are they unnecessary?

For their final hypothesis, Jensen and Wantchekon are replicating a test done in 1994 by Bratton and Van de Walle, and thus must use their control variables. So even though they find that none of Bratton and Van de Walle’s control variables significantly account for democratic sustainability between 1994 and 1998, their inclusion is necessary to make it a valid replication. The use of colonial dummies baffles me. It clearly matters, as it is strongly significant at even a higher correlation coefficient than the test IV, but Jensen and Wantchekon say that it “had little effect on our dependence on political regimes.” This statement seems either to be saying something different than its facial content, or to contradict the data altogether. While I can’t say this variable was unnecessary, I would say that without a better explanation than what was offered, that the paper should have been unpublishable.

Question 5: Does the study not control for something that should be controlled for? What is it and why should it be controlled for?

Because African politics can frequently be driven by ethnic divisions, I would like to see that variable accounted for somehow. In particular, I question whether differential resource endowment for different ethnic groups could be driving authoritarian regimes, or whether it merely heightens existing autocratic tendencies that are driven by ethnic divisions.

Question 6: Using only Table 1 of the article, answer the following:

a) What is the likely substantive effect of each independent variable on democracy in column 2, when moving the variable from one value to another (using your choice of values)?

b) Explain why and how the addition of dummy variables for four colonial legacies changes the statistical results from column 1 to column 2. Be as specific as possible in your answer.

a. The relationships between the variables are assumed to be unstandardized. Thus, I will speak in terms of actual values instead of standard deviations. However, I will express the values of changes in terms of standard errors. Thus, for example, for an increase in log GDP per capita of 3.141 (the standard error), I would expect an increase in democracy score of 1.995 (the correlation coefficient). A quick review of the log tables suggests that this is a remarkably difficult achievement, since this would require a GDP growth of 23.127 percent. A log GDP per capita increase of 1 (still substantively unbelievable for a single country to accomplish without an exogenous variable not captured in the data), would result in an increase in democracy score of .635 – or an 11.3% increase in democracy scores for the mean country, ceteris paribus. Wealth thus clearly plays a tremendous role in the health and longevity of democratic institutions. A more reasonable increase in log GDP per capita of .5 would increase democracy scores by .318, a nearly 6% increase.

The same cannot be said for economic growth. It appears that a 28-point increase in GDP growth rates only increases democracy scores by .076. Increasing GDP growth rates by one point thus increases democracy scores by .003 – an increase of less than 1/10 of one percent.

Looking at natural-resource dependence changes the analysis, because unlike the two prior independent variables, Jensen and Wantchekon have converted their measure of resource dependence to an ordinal variable. This means that while we can still talk about the relationship, we can’t give it the kind of mathematical precision that we could before. We can assume with ordinal variables that a one-step change in resource-dependence equals the standard deviation (instead of assuming, as we did with the continuous IVs, that the standard error equaled the standard deviation). Thus, a one-step increase in resource-dependence (which could be a one-percent increase in the share of merchandise exports from the extraction sector) should decrease democracy scores by .364 – or a 6.5% decrease from the mean.

The remaining variables are dummies, and thus are treated differently. It appears that the 1970s were more authoritarian than the other twenty-five years of the study’s period. If a regime was measured during the 1970s, it averaged a 15.8% decrease in democracy scores. The 1980s were the same, but less so, with a 12.4% decrease in democracy scores – but the p-value cautions us that this may be noise. This is probably because of a tremendous increase in democratization in the 1990s. The remaining dummy variables are based on the colonial heritage of the regimes studied. Because there is no reference category, we can assume that these dummy variables do not interact. In summary, being a former British colony would be expected to increase democracy scores by 40.9% over the mean, or 2.305, while being any other nation’s former colony would be expected to decrease democracy scores by anywhere from 27.8% below the mean (-1.566) to 32.4% below the mean (-1.825).

b. The addition of colonial heritage dummies reduces correlation values for log GDP per capita, GDP growth, and resource dependence, while increasing correlation coefficients for decade dummies. This suggests that the philosophy of the “white man’s burden” actually had relatively beneficial effects on a colonized population. Setting aside the question of whether colonialism was an absolute benefit to colonized peoples, it is clear that the British, who saw their institutions and systems as vital to the governance of colonies, tended to create wealthier and more diverse economies that had more robust democracies, while Continental colonizers, who saw the colonies as resource-extraction outposts and nothing more, did not have a lasting effect in creating institutions to provide just and secure government to the colonized after their departure. Perhaps they thought they’d never leave. It also is clear that the effect of colonialism diminishes over time, as other variables come into play to drive democratization and stability.

Question 7: How would you go about either a) extending this study or b) challenging this study with a separate research design? Discuss.

Frankly, given that I’ve demonstrated that the paper should have never been published in its current state, I object to being asked to extend or challenge a paper that should be retracted. However, this is clearly a place for comparative institutional design approaches. It seems clear to me that while resource dependence may have a role to play in democratization, colonial heritage – and thus, institutional design – has a far vaster role to play. It is thus vital to test this by examining the institutional design factors that are the legacy of colonialism, and to test Westminster-descended institutions against those of other types. I would start with a fine-grained comparative approach – paired case studies. I would use a successful Westminster democracy and a successful Continental democracy, and a similar pair of authoritarian regimes. Once that was done, and I had identified what I thought were the salient factors, then a quantitative method could robustly test that model throughout Africa. Controlling for resource dependence as Jensen and Wantchekon measure it would allow me to directly test the different models.

Quality Over Quantity: Amici Influence and Judicial Decision-Making

noreply@blogger.com (Reid Krell) — Tue, 25 Nov 2014 21:30:00 +0000

Another response essay from my research design midterm.

Box-Steffensmeier, J., Christenson, D., and Hitt, M (2013). Quality Over Quantity: Amici Influence and Judicial Decision Making. American Political Science Review 107(3):446-460.

Question 1: This article tests whether amici curiae influence the Supreme Court based on their relative power and influence. It justifies this hypothesis through the literature that explains that repeat advocates succeed more at the Supreme Court,[1]arguing that amici are similar, particularly since the Solicitor General is regarded as having outsize influence as an amicus, rendering the argument for treating amici similarly incoherent. The hypothesis is further justified as a way to test between the legal and attitudinal models of judicial decision making. The literature on the Court’s internal processes is invoked to explain why differential status of amici matters. The authors also argue that quality of briefing matters, but offer no literature to support that insight (which is, frankly, trivial), and don’t test it. In fairness, it’s probably unmeasurable under their research design.

Question 2: The dependent variable is a justice vote. It is measured using the “traditional” U.S. Supreme Court dataset, the “Spaeth” dataset, in a justice-centered data format, which contains (usually) nine entries for each case – one for each justice participating. It is internally valid because the authors want to test how justices are impacted by amici, not how case outcomes are affected by amici. It is reliable because the dataset is publicly available and can be reconstructed by anyone using Spaeth’s codebook.

Question 3: The primary independent variable is “eigenvector centrality”, which uses network theory to evaluate the amicus’ connectedness to other groups that appear before the Court. It is measured by counting links between groups to create a network, and then measuring the centrality of a group’s position in the network. A link is created when two groups cosign an amicusbrief together. When multiple groups sign one brief, bilateral links are created between each of them. When two groups sign multiple briefs, one link is created for each brief they both sign. The centrality is then measured using eigenvalues and eigenvectors. I have to confess that I looked up “eigenvector” and “eigenvalue” in writing this answer, and I still don’t understand how this works. But, I gather that this measure is preferred because it captures a feedback loop of centrality. That is, it captures the fact that central network nodes are connected to other central network nodes, and thus differentiates between nodes that are truly central, nodes that are peripheral to the core, and true periphery nodes. This variable is internally valid because the authors are seeking to measure the power of mutual trust on the reputation of actors with regard to a third party. In short, A and B are signaling that they trust each other – how does this signal effect C’s reaction to A and B’s argument? And to what extent does that signal create feedback loops that resonate through the network? I’m not sure if this variable is reliable, because I can’t figure out how they calculated it. However, presuming that I can, at some point, learn how to do this, I assume that the variable follows from its constituent data. Indeed, since the authors published the data that form their network datasets, I assume that it can be reproduced if necessary.

Question 4: The authors control for four variables: justice ideology, the presence of the solicitor general, the resources of the litigants, and the ideological direction of the lower court’s decision. All of these variables are justified. The last three are justified by reference to the literature which describes them as confounders; justice ideology is justified because the authors argue that it interacts with their network centrality variable to produce effects. The numbers bear them out: judicial ideology is strongly interacted with the presence of a core amicus.

Question 5: This article attempts to present evidence of whether amici affect courts through skillful advocacy or through extralegal mechanisms (such as signaling). The authors’ results suggest that at least some of their influence comes from extralegal mechanisms. However, they acknowledge that their research is limited because it does not analyze the content of briefs. What they are testing (the power of networks to serve as a signal) does not require content analysis, so to that extent, their disclaimer is unnecessary. However, to the extent that they’re interested in the broader questions, I agree that studying brief content and quality matters.

Question 6: I would extend this article through qualitative methods. I would use a most-similar case study method to examine cases where the amici were substantially similar (or if possible, identical) in their network centrality measures, but the results were opposite. I would then analyze the content of the briefing record before the Court in comparison with its opinion in the cases to examine what effect the briefs had on the actual opinion. This is important, because courts plagiarize briefs that they regard as being of a particular quality.

[1]Frustratingly, the authors do not cite my article on this topic, which of course renders their findings unreliable.

Judicial Selection and Death Penalty Decisions

noreply@blogger.com (Reid Krell) — Mon, 24 Nov 2014 21:30:00 +0000

Another response essay from my research design midterm.

Canes-Wrone, B., Clark, T., and Kelly, J (2014). Judicial Selection and Death Penalty Decisions. American Political Science Review, 108(1):23-39.

Question 1: The authors test three hypotheses: first, that partisan state supreme court judges (where “partisan” refers to selection by partisan election) are least likely to uphold death sentences, compared to nonpartisan (self-explanatory) and retention (subject to merit retention election) judges; second, that there is a direct relationship between public support for the death penalty and the likelihood that partisan judges will affirm death sentences; and finally, that there is a direct relationship between public support for the death penalty and the likelihood that a reappointed judge (one who does not face direct election in any way, but is reappointed by directly elected officials) will affirm death sentences. All of the hypotheses are theoretically supported, not only in their assertions, but in their limitations. The first hypothesis is supported by the notion that partisan labels are powerful signals that can override interest group action. Thus, judges who do not benefit from partisan labels may avoid action that would trigger interest group action (such as attack ads for overturning a death sentence). While the authors note that this could create collinearity problems where judicial decisions are driven by support for the death penalty rather than judicial selection systems, they point out that there is no variation in the data as to “whether the death penalty is popular.” They differentiate this from “level of support” to justify the phrasing of their first hypothesis (which asserts a greater likelihood, rather than a direct relationship). As to the second hypothesis, it is supported by literature that suggests that partisan elected officials are likely to be responsive to lopsided public opinion. Because the literature focuses only on partisan officials, the authors limit this hypothesis to partisan selection systems, acknowledging that the predictions could play out differently in nonpartisan contexts. The final hypothesis cites to literature that “indirectly elected” officials behave similarly to directed elected officials “when voters’ policy views are strong.” This is the weakest linkage, as the authors a) assert that reappointment judges are “indirectly elected” without assessing the institutional norms that constrain judges, instead treating them like bureaucrats without civil service protection; and b) they assert without evidence that the death penalty is always salient, when they probably should have included salience as a control variable for this hypothesis. While testing for salience is problematic, the authors should have at least attempted it.

Question 2: The dependent variable is a judicial vote. It is measured as a vote to uphold a death sentence is DV=1, a vote to grant relief is DV=0. “Vote to grant relief” is broadly defined as a vote that supports a “ruling that precludes inposition of a death sentence unless further action is taken by some court.” This measure is internally valid as the hypotheses are testing judicial behavior as measured through votes. It is reliable because judicial votes can be discerned even for per curiam opinions where judge’s positions are not listed, as per curiam opinions are presumably unanimous.

Question 3: The independent variable is judicial selection mechanism. The authors engage in a certain amount of lumping in coding this variable, as reappointment mechanisms vary in their details as to the relative involvements of the executive and legislative branches. All of those systems are lumped together as “reappointment.” They also note, and code separately, those states that changed their selection mechanisms during the period under study, which provide for natural experiments. Finally, they exclude states where supreme court judges are selected in districts, rather than by a state-wide mechanism, and where the selection mechanism is a hybrid of multiple coding options. They code via four dummy variables, where the state is coded as IV=1 for its selection mechanism, and IV=0 for all others. This measure is internally valid because it isolates the effect of the selection system on death penalty votes, although they note that because of the lack of variance in death penalty support, they cannot exclude the possibility that judges are more responsive to a punitive public than otherwise. They also interact their primary IV with the level of support for the death penalty to informally test the second hypothesis for systems other than partisan selection. This measure is reliable because judicial selection mechanisms are readily available for anyone to find.

Question 4: The authors control for four judge-level variables: partisan affiliation, proximity to reselection, proximity to mandatory retirement, and lame-duck status. They control for nine case-specific variables: murder of a police officer, murder in conjunction with rape or robbery, multiple or female victims, the number of grounds presented in the appeal, whether the state supreme court characterizes the appeal as rising under a newly-decided United States Supreme Court decision, the state’s homicide rate, and time (arguing that as states perfect their death penalty processes to survive Eighth Amendment scrutiny, reversals drop). In an appendix, they toy with a method for controlling for race of defendant and victim, but conclude that the method is not sufficiently reliable to include in the main paper, while noting the results. They also control for state-level fixed effects, holding constant “the state’s general propensity to affirm death sentences.” The state-level fixed effects model analyzes only judges in states that changed their selection mechanisms to use the natural experiment method. The authors also use a judge-level fixed effect model to examine the effect of changes in selection mechanisms on individual judges. The fixed-effect models are justified as natural experiments in states that changes their selection mechanism.[1]Two of the judge-specific control variables and eight of the nine case-specific variables are derived from the literature that argues that they affect judicial decision-making, and thus are necessary. The remaining three variables are not supported by the literature. The case-specific variable – whether the United States Supreme Court triggered the appeal – is theoretically unjustified, in that the authors note that such decisions “tend to inspire a wave of successful appeals, as well as some unsuccessful ones.” Because of this case-driven variation in results, this variable, if included, should have only been included as an interaction with other case-specific controls. However, it turns out that this variable is tremendously significant, explaining over one-third of the variation, and statistically significant at the p<.01 level. This suggests that the variable may have initially been included as an interaction variable, and was disaggregated after the authors saw its significance and a post hoc theoretical justification offered, potentially on resubmission. With the judge-level variables, the theory at least justifies their inclusion, as the authors argue that judges who do not face reselection pressures do not suffer from the same public opinion constraints. However, the numbers don’t add up: none of the models show that these variables have any statistical significance, although lame-duck status does explain a high level of variance, suggesting that judges who have been rejected for reselection retaliate against the system that turfed them out.

Question 5: These authors, in describing judge-level control variables, place themselves firmly in the attitudinal school of judicial politics. They really, really want to treat judges as legislators (or at best, as bureaucrats). But the attitudinal model has been, more or less, exploded for twenty years. While strategic approaches to judicial behavior are predicated on the court being treated as a closed system, which renders their theory moot, the new institutionalism explores the role of institutional design and norms on judicial behavior. I would like to have seen this article explore the institutional norms (prior precedent, court composition, panel composition rules, etc.) to determine if those constraints were driving judicial decisions. For example, a Texas judge who believes that ineffective assistance of counsel claims are valid where counsel slept through a trial would be constrained to vote to uphold a death sentence by Texas law which forecloses such claims. This would be true, even if public opinion shifted in favor of recognizing such claims, unless a majority of the court shifted with it. In short, prior precedent forecloses certain votes until public opinion sufficiently interacts with judicial ideology to shift a majority of the court’s votes. But by excluding such factors as the role of stare decisis, the authors ignore the fact that courts are not legislatures.

Question 6: I would use content analysis to challenge this article. I would approach my challenge by studying the opinions that decide death penalty cases, rather than simply votes. This obviates the issue of treating judicial votes as equivalent to legislative votes, and incorporates the power of concurrences – which these authors conflate with majority votes.

[1]This aspect of the response is thus not eligible for grading under the terms of the exam, as the method for these models was experimental. These models will not be discussed further.

Delivering Stability - Primogeniture and Autocratic Survival in European Monarchies 1000-1800

noreply@blogger.com (Reid Krell) — Sun, 23 Nov 2014 21:34:00 +0000

N.B.: This post is one of the responses from my midterm exam in Doug Gibler's research design class.

Kokkonen, A., & Sundell, A. (2014). Delivering Stability—Primogeniture and Autocratic Survival in European Monarchies 1000–1800. American Political Science Review, 108(2), 438-453.

Question 1: The article tests one hypothesis: that autocratic states that use primogeniture succession (that is, succession by the ruler’s oldest son alone) have more stability than autocratic states that use either electoral succession (the elites elect the ruler’s successor), agnatic succession (succession by the ruler’s oldest brother prior to any children), or designated succession. The authors justify their hypothesis theoretically both positively and negatively. Beginning by delineating the succession dilemma, they note that elites have incentives to support the regime so long as a) the regime appears stable and b) the ruler shares rents. However, succession implies a lack of stability where no successor is designated, which creates perverse incentives to “jump the gun” on deposing the ruler. However, designating an older heir (through either agnatic or designated succession) simply concentrates the incentives to trigger a succession crisis into the designated heir, who cannot expect to outlive the ruler naturally. Designating a young heir, such as the ruler’s son, properly aligns elite and heir incentives toward stability, as the heir can afford to be patient, and the elite observe the longer time horizon provided by the prospect of the son’s inheritance. They note that other succession orders presented short-term benefits not necessarily available under primogeniture, which explains variance. Examining similar literature from a non-monarchic perspective, they note that personalist regimes and one-party systems demonstrate similar, albeit not congruent, succession orders. They then examine prior historical studies, which either fail to directly test the hypothesis, or are, in one example, a case study with generalizability issues. They then note that they need to control for the rise of parliaments and state capacity, both of which have a positive, confounding influence on regime stability.

Question 2: The dependent variable is the likelihood of deposition over time. Succession failure is thus the threshold measurement, and is coded as one for monarchs who were murdered, forced to abdicate, or died in a civil war. All other observations were right-censored. Then, the authors use a Cox proportional hazard model to measure the relative probability of deposition with each succession order, and every control variable. This measure is internally valid because of the analysis outlined in Question 1, and is externally valid because the question tested – namely, the role of succession order on autocratic stability – can be generalized to other situations. Indeed, the authors note in their literature review two studies of modern autocracies that suggest similar findings, although they are quick to note that neither one exactly replicates their approach. They also use their same test on the few remaining modern autocratic monarchies. This measure is reliable because, while the authors are not paragons of clarity in explaining their methods, once their approach is parsed, it is easy to replicate; they even promise that the historical sources supporting their coding choices are offered in their Appendix (I couldn’t find the Appendix, so I can’t evaluate that claim directly; presumably the reviewers would not have let something that obvious pass); thus, other scholars can evaluate, not only the models and methods used, but also the coding choices for cases, and can determine if the authors made coding mistakes.

Question 3: The primary independent variable is succession order: election, agnatic succession, and primogeniture. This is measured first with elective monarchies as the reference (i.e., IV=0), and agnatic or primogeniture succession as variation (IV=1). Then, the authors separate agnatic and primogeniture succession by testing whether monarchs who were succeeded by sons survived longer than monarchs who were succeeded by brothers or other relations. They acknowledge that this may introduce endogeneity, but provide that it’s the best of a set of all-bad choices. These measures lack internal validity, as acknowledged by the authors. The first, dichotomous measure is internally valid, as the authors argue that agnatic and primogeniture successions may be usefully distinguished from elective monarchies because of the coordination problem. They acknowledge the lack of internal validity on their second measure, but argue that nothing better presents itself due to the paucity of data. They similarly assert that their modern data set presents a pattern so strong as to “inhibit statistical analysis.” I will argue in Question 6 that a modern data set which encompasses both monarchies and personalist regimes (the modern version of monarchy) could successfully test the crown-prince problem, as a modern study will be able to get the data the authors are missing. The measure is reliable for the same reasons explained in Question 2.

Question 4 and 5: The authors explain why they chose the two alternative hypotheses that they control for. Parliaments are controlled for because a prior study supported the notion that parliamentarianism drove political stability regardless of regime type. Since parliamentarianism varies even within autocracies, it is necessary to control for it. They similarly control for state capacity because it varied over time; thus, to control for the ability of the regime to suppress dissent and thus raise the costs of a succession crisis regardless of the succession order, state capacity must be controlled for. The authors then cite two historical studies for the proposition that other than these two variables, that medieval monarchies did not vary in any relevant way. Methodologically, they control for coding issues in a variety of ways. First, because they reconstructed a major dataset rejecting certain coding choices, they run their models using the original dataset in order to check for robustness. Second, they run their models using the original dataset less certain cases involving foreign depositions. Thus, they argue, this test captures only “clear-cut cases of [domestic] elite depositions.” They control for sovereignty unions by counting depositions that lead to divisions, and censoring depositions that lead to death outside of the state where the deposition occurred. They control for the stabilizing effect of designation by testing whether sons or brothers who succeeded lasted longer than other relatives or non-relatives. They also attempt to test the “crown-prince problem” by evaluating a monarch’s survival based on whether they were succeeded by a son or some other relation, acknowledging that this presents methodological problems of its own. Finally, they code de jure succession orders, but re-run the model including de facto primogeniture as a check, and find that it confirms their findings. The authors also include four control variables intended to eliminate non-hypothesis confounders: branch of Christianity, foreign depositions and enemies, and whether the ruler’s predecessor was domestically deposed (to control for civil wars or lengthy instability). I am concerned about the use of religious sectarianism as a control variable, as the authors provide no justification for it – an argument that sectarian depositions are somehow qualitatively different than “pure” political depositions would have been nice, but I don’t think it could have been legitimately made. However, that variable could, arguably, serve as a proxy for the control variables I would have liked to have seen, which is rulers and elites in a state who traveled to the Holy Land as Crusaders. That variable, which may be uncollectable in any reliable way, would capture a) the instability of regimes governed by absentee rulers and b) the increased stability achieved by sending the most violent and ambitious elites to the Holy Land. I don’t like religious sect as the authors code it for that purpose, because the Protestant Reformation was post-Crusades, and thus coding for Protestant rulers accomplishes nothing for my concern; the First Crusade, at least, was called at the request of the Byzantine Emperor, who was Orthodox, which means that distinguishing between Orthodox and Catholic, at least early in the period, does not capture the value of the Crusader variable (by the time of the Fourth Crusade, of course, such a distinction becomes very important); and for the purpose of Crusading, I’m pretty sure religion doesn’t vary.

Question 6: I would extend this study by creating a modern (post-twentieth century) autocratic dataset that would encompass both the monarchies that the authors briefly examined, and personalist regimes such as Cuba, North Korea, and Syria. This would allow me to test the coordination problem and the crown-prince problem. However, it would introduce ambiguity in the succession order coding, as personalist regimes rarely codify a succession order. However, by using the same methods of analysis as the authors, with the exception of right-censoring peaceful transitions and unclear transition, as that would eliminate most cases, given modern censorship by personalist regimes, then the study can be usefully replicated.

Exploring Interest Group Participation in Executive Policymaking

noreply@blogger.com (Reid Krell) — Sat, 22 Nov 2014 21:30:00 +0000

Furlong, S.R. (2005), "Exploring Interest Group Participation in Executive Policymaking," in The Interest-Group Connection: Electioneering, Lobbying, and Policymaking in Washington, eds. Herrnson, P. et al., Washington, CQ Press.

The most common way for interest groups to participate in the executive branch policymaking process is through participation in notice and comment rulemaking. Furlong notes that there are many rulemaking activities that have significantly greater business organization participation than citizen advocacy or public interest group participation. Furlong reviewed the percentage of comments from each type of interest group during the first six months of 1996. Ultimately, membership organizations tend to prefer lobbying the legislative branch, and economic interest groups prefer lobbying in the administrative process.

My take: Furlong needs to explain how he categorized interest groups for his review of notice-and-comment rulemaking; otherwise, his analysis isn't reliable.

Theorizing Athenian Society: The Rule of Law

noreply@blogger.com (Reid Krell) — Fri, 21 Nov 2014 21:30:00 +0000

Cohen, D. (1995). Law, Violence, and Community in Classical Athens, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press (ch. 3).

This chapter summarizes the differing views on the rule of law espoused by Aristotle, Plato, and the radical democrats of Athens, respectively. Aristotle proposed a rule of law predicated on the notion that the law is intended to protect the state from private licentiousness, and demanded that the law use "censorial magistrates" to regulate and govern private conduct. Plato insisted that citizens be propagandized into believing that law was a sovereign and continuing object, above and beyond the constitutive acts that brought it into being - going so far as to demand that citizens be taught to believe that the law is immutable and unchangeable. The radical democrats saw the rule of law as the mechanism whereby private lives were protected from state intervention.

Plato and Aristotle take the position that it is necessary to collapse the private and the public spheres into one, while the radical democrats insist that private life must be free from state intervention, where it does not impinge on another. Plato, in particular, demands that the rule of law include a "collective fiction" (or, as I prefer, a "collective delusion") that the Law is not a creation of man; whereas the radical democrats acknowledged that behind the sovereignty of the Law lay the power of the demos, or the "people out of doors" as Frank calls them.

My take: It appears that all three of the thinkers Cohen explores were carried over into the modern concept of the rule of law. Aristotle wants to tie the rule of law to mechanisms which regulate human excess, whether it be violent, sexual, or ethical - a common goal of lawmakers today, even if they disagree on the proper scope of that regulation or its appropriate mechanisms. Plato wanted to define the law as supreme even above lawmakers, which is consistent with the modern approach to constitutions that defines those constitutive actions as supreme and above the ordinary legislation created by constituted bodies. And the radical democrats focused on two things: first, the power of popular sovereignty, which remains a significant force in modern democratic theory; and second, the importance of protecting certain spheres from state intervention, in which can be seen the beginnings of a groping toward the modern institution of substantive democracy as a balance between the majoritarian impulse and the autocratic impulse - which requires the rule of law and judicial supremacy as the balancing act between them.

The Logic of Violence in Civil War

noreply@blogger.com (Reid Krell) — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 21:30:00 +0000

Kalyvas, S. N. (2006). The Logic of Violence in Civil War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

This week’s reading, Kalyvas’ The Logic of Violence in Civil War, appears to be a comprehensive attempt at theorizing the use of violence in intrastate conflict, including most if not all variables that determine the contours of that violence. Instead, it comes across as a single embedded case study on the contours of violence in the Greek Civil War, with enough anecdotal evidence about other conflicts to sprinkle in a veneer of generalizability. While Kalyvas is an outstanding writer, and has certainly marshaled a vast diversity of sources, the lack of systematic study of anything in the book renders his conclusions suspect.

At every point, I was left wondering whether Kalyvas was cherry-picking his sources to support his analysis. Sometimes he draws on sources discussing the America Civil War, or the French Revolution, or ancient Greek rebellions, or Russian rebellions, or the English Civil War, but the cases he draws on change with every assertion, and somehow, always manage to support the assertion he’s making. This strongly suggests that his research method is deeply flawed, and that he’s engaged in selection bias.

To some extent, this can be regarded as a specious criticism; after all, Kalyvas in this book is not as interested in explaining particular cases of civil war as he is in theorizing about civil war more generally. Evaluating disconfirming cases doesn’t serve the purpose of the book, which is to frame the next generation of civil war research. But if Kalyvas’ theories only apply to certain cases, and then, only apply to those cases within specified circumstances, then what is the point in elucidating the theories to begin with?

Ultimately, this is a broader problem with the discipline that I have noticed in my readings this semester across several classes. When authors are writing articles, they are careful about their claims, meticulous in their evidence gathering and research methods, and quick to offer and explain away alternative hypotheses. When they write books (thus far in the reading, except for Scott Straus), they get more sloppy. This suggests two things: first, that peer review works, mostly. If it didn’t, then we would not see the difference in research quality between articles, where peer review is required, and books, where it is not.

Second, it suggests that book editors need more help. Unfortunately, our reliance on market-driven mechanisms for book publication means that most political science books have to be at least stylistically written for a general audience. Unapproachable books (also known as “most rigorous scholarship”) simply don’t sell. Publishers who put out a lot of books that don’t sell don’t stay in business for very long. And since most political science books don’t sell like gangbusters, the staff that put them together are undermanned and overworked, leading to sloppy scholarship from authors not being fact-checked.

Religious Influences in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election

noreply@blogger.com (Reid Krell) — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 21:30:00 +0000

Guth, J., et al. (2006). "Religious Influences in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election," Presidential Studies Quarterly 36(2): 223-242.

Religious identity is considered to come in two different flavors in American politics: ascriptive (assigned from birth as part of personal identity) and prescriptive (determined in its details via interaction with other areas of life, such as politics. The key difference between these two approaches is which direction the causal arrow points. Those who see religion as ascriptive see it as shaping attitudes; those who see is as prescriptive see attitudes as determining religion. Guth and his coauthors see both perspectives as key to understanding the role religion plays in presidential elections. However, they see the religious aspects of current survey data as limiting, in that it assumes that one and only one of the perspectives fits the actual world (which one depends on the survey writer). Using the Pew Survey on Religion and Politics, which has the benefit of capturing data that describes both axes of religious identity, they analyze the political preferences of various religious groups, including noting the breakdown of differences between "traditionalist" and "modernist" voters in certain groups. They then examine how the two major parties' political coalitions are built out of these religious groups, using a) the size of the group's voting-age population; b) its turnout rate; and c) the proportion of their vote they give to each party. Ultimately, their findings more or less confirm the conventional wisdom, and demonstrate that both theories have salience in determining presidential politics.

My take: I more or less knew this long before reading this paper, but it's nice to have confirmation that religious identities continue to play a role in presidential politics.

The Legal-Institutional Framework for Interest Group Participation in Federal Administrative Policymaking

noreply@blogger.com (Reid Krell) — Tue, 18 Nov 2014 21:30:00 +0000

Piotrowski, S. J. and Rosenbloom, D.H. (2005). "The Legal-Institutional Framework for Interest Group Participation in Federal Administrative Policymaking,"in The Interest-Group Connection: Electioneering, Lobbying, and Policymaking in Washington (Herrnson, P.S., et al., eds.), pp. 258-281, Washington, CW Press.

The authors are engaged in two projects in this chapter: first, describing the basics of the laws and institutions that govern lobbying of the administrative state; and second, discussing some of the research that shows how administrators themselves view interest group participation in the process. Some quotes I'll want to pull out for my own paper: the discussion of the failed Walter-Logan Act of 1940 (by way of comparison to the APA, p. 260). "Under the APA, participation in rulemaking is predominantly (or largely) by trade and professional associations, public interest groups, and corporations." (p. 261). "Public interest groups can try to represent broad swathes of the public effectively. . . ." (p. 275, citing Shaiko 1999). "Administrators themselves may even be representative of the public at large." (p. 275, citing Krislov and Rosenbloom 1981). "Greater ease in bringing legal challenges to agency rules tends to work to the advantage of interest groups even though these may not be 'repeat players.'" (p. 264, citing Golden 1998).

Two major models of interest group influence: subsystems model (iron triangles) and issue or policy networks model. Iron triangles appear to be fading in influence. Golden 1998 describes networks in her finding that iron triangles are slowly disappearing (see p. 277; see also Furlong 1997 and Kerwin 1999). The more flexible issue network appears to be growing. And in survey data, administrators appear more worried about interest groups than any other influencer except courts (Furlong 1998).

My take: Assuming that issue networks are more salient than iron triangles, particularly in abstruse but contested policy areas like the persuader rule, then we will expect to see the mechanisms Golden describes in the persuader rule context.

Multivariate Regression: The Basics

noreply@blogger.com (Reid Krell) — Mon, 17 Nov 2014 21:30:00 +0000

Kellstedt & Whitten, Chapter 10

Multivariate regression is what's required to get your theory over the fourth "causal hurdle" - i.e., that there's no other variable that is actually causing the relationship you see between your IV and DV.

The proofs make it clear that this is necessary, because they demonstrate that the error terms for every independent variable include the variance explained by the other IVs, if you attempt to use the bivariate regression equation to derive your regression line. In short, your regression line is going to overdetermine the relationship if you fail to control for other independent variables. I don't think this chapter is talking about confounding variables yet - it's just talking about adding additional IVs to your model.

The only times when you can skip multivariate regression is when there is no variance between the additional IV and the DV, and when the two IVs are perfectly non-correlated. In the first case, the proposed IV of course has no effect; and in the second, while both IVs have an effect on the DV, none of your IV's effect is being masked by the other IV's effect.

The chapter also talks about measuring substantive significance, first by introducing standardized coefficients (which is just a way of converting your coefficients from actual quantities to pieces of a standard deviation; sort of like going from utils to dollars in your utility functions); then by basically arguing that there's no good way to know what constitutes substantive significance, except that without statistical significance, it doesn't exist. I feel like Potter Stewart.

Complaint Filed: Bracy v. Delta Technical College, LLC

noreply@blogger.com (Reid Krell) — Sun, 16 Nov 2014 21:30:00 +0000

I have filed a complaint on behalf of the plaintiff in the following case:

Bracy v. Delta Technical College, LLC, et al., Cause No. 3:14-cv-00238-MPM-SAA (N.D. Miss).

Claims asserted

Discrimination in access to public accommodations in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act
Discrimination in access to federally-funded programs in violation of the Rehabilitation Act of 1975
Retaliation for protected activity under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehab Act
Conspiracy to deprive of civil rights under 42 U.S.C. 1985
The following claims under Mississippi common law:

Promissory estoppel
Intentional infliction of emotional distress
Negligent supervision
Negligent retention
Unjust enrichment

The Unfolding Story of the Second Demographic Transition

noreply@blogger.com (Reid Krell) — Sat, 15 Nov 2014 21:30:00 +0000

Lesthaeghe, R. (2010). "The Unfolding Story of the Second Demographic Transition," Population and Development Review 36(2): 211-251.

This piece represents the author's response to critics of a theoretical innovation he developed, with a coauthor, in 1986. The innovation is that of the "second demographic transition," which argues that we are seeing a "sustained sub-replacement fertility, a multitude of living arrangements other than marriage, the disconnection between marriage and procreation, and no stationary population." This theory is rooted in three theoretical insights: first, the notion that people are now choosing to assume the role of parent, rather than having it thrust upon them; second, that small birth cohorts tend to have larger families as they experience greater economic opportunity than larger cohorts, and thus get married and start families sooner; and finally, that increased economic opportunity in the form of development increases the importance of Maslowian values higher up the pyramid, culminating in self-actualization, whether as a parent or else-wise. He reviews the evidence for a distinction between the two transitions: differential marriage and remarriage patterns; increased age at first parenthood; and differential societal constraints (specifically the difference between material needs and "higher-order" Maslowian needs). And while the second demographic transition would have been impossible without the first, the author argues that they are distinct and indeed antagonistic. He then argues that the transition is not geographically delimited, but can be found throughout Europe. We'll set aside the question of whether a phenomenon that can be described as "found throughout Europe" is not geographically delimited. He then argues that cases which appear to be disconfirming, by disaggregating the phenomena he predicts, are in fact confirming cases. This argument depends on his assertion that the second demographic transition is context-dependent. The author then considers whether there is data to support the spreading of the second demographic transition beyond the West (ah, there's the issue of geographic delimitation dealt with).

My take: First, if you assert that your soi-disant "universal theory" is, in fact, context-dependent, then what you have is not a universal theory. It is a Lakatos-degenerate theory that should be abandoned. In particular, if you think Cahn and Carbone's approach has explanatory power, then you have a serious problem with Lesthaeghe's approach. In addition, if your theory explains, using different causal mechanisms, both negative and positive cases, then it's not falsifiable - again, not science.

Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture (Response Paper)

noreply@blogger.com (Reid Krell) — Fri, 14 Nov 2014 21:30:00 +0000

Cahn, N. and Carbone, J. (2009). Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture; Oxford, Oxford University Press.

In the introduction and first two chapters of Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture, Cahn and Carbone argue that state-level differences in family outcomes, including teenage pregnancy and birth, age of first marriage and divorce rates, abortion rates, and workplace effects on family life, are all the product of a similar cultural divide in American families. This divide, which they identify with the red/blue dichotomy familiar to those who watch the election returns, boils down to a difference value-preference ordering. “Red families”, in their analysis, prefer traditionalism as a source of societal order; “blue families” prefer individual choice to ensure appropriate sorting. Both approaches, as they explain, have negative societal externalities as they are currently framed and executed in American politics.

The authors provide a wealth of descriptive data in their demographic chapter, but don’t engage in any sort of rigorous analysis. In particular, I am deeply concerned about their facile equivalencies between the election returns and their family-law results. The stasis of most family law, at least at the level where Cahn and Carbone are interested, means that most of the consequences of law on marriages and divorces are the relics of prior political regimes. While they argue that the red/blue divide began appearing as recently as the 1960s, they do not, and I think cannot, adequately explain how the “red family” approach appears in states that are “blue” at the time. In other words, how, if there is such a strong cultural correlation between Republican support and family law consequences, are four of the five lowest teenage birth-rate states in 1988 Bush states?

More methodological sophistication was called for here. Even a simple OLS regression would have given us significantly more information about the scope, scale, and size of the problem that Cahn and Carbone want to solve. But because they refuse to even give us the complete statistics (unless there are appendices to the book), it’s impossible to evaluate their analysis more rigorously. Instead, they give us the five highest and lowest measures for each of their issue areas, arguing that these “delimit the scope of the issue.” Except that instead of delimiting the scope, these data points simply become disconnected from any reality except where the authors have elected to attach them. There’s no there, there, at least with the data we’re given this week.

Cahn and Carbone want, as they put it, to “change the subject.” Instead of “sex ed,” they want “marriage ed.” Instead of abortion, they want contraception. Instead of “family values” or “traditional roles”, they want to create a workplace that is conducive to family life. They claim that this is an approach that takes the benefits of both cultural approaches, with none (or very few) of the negative externalities. But their argument presupposes that both sides are equally willing to view the other side as arguing in good faith, and thus, willing to compromise. The evidence gathered since the book came out suggests that this supposition is naïve.

First, a caveat: in American politics, we all-too-frequently conflate between voters for a particular party and policymakers from that party. But the elections literature seems to strongly suggest the truth of Jim’s description of average Americans in Blazing Saddles: “You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons.” Or, as Ben Casselman put it on election night a little less offensively, “The American people seem to want a higher minimum wage, legal pot, easier abortion access, and GOP representation. Go figure.” By this, I mean to suggest that the electorate doesn’t make decisions based on the consideration of policy matters the way that Cahn and Carbone want them to – or if they do, the relationship of their policy views to reality is coincidental at best.

Thus, the “red family” and “blue family” divide appears more to deal with how policymakers want to believe that their constituents see the world, rather than representing any sort of systematic divide in the American worldview. That doesn’t make Cahn and Carbone’s analysis non-salient; in some respects, it makes it more salient. A policymaker who honestly believes in this divide will act in furtherance of it; and the continued growth of gerrymandered “safe districts”, which Cahn and Carbone mention briefly, means that this official may be able to maintain their tenure for decades, enshrining the red/blue family law divide into law despite the fact that the divide is irrelevant to most Americans.

But the basic problem with Cahn and Carbone lies in their assumption that their two paradigms are reconcilable. Starting from a theoretical approach, Cahn and Carbone don’t explain why “red family” paradigms would ever want to compromise. If, as they point out, the “red family” is predicated on a view of moral decay, of feeling under siege by modernity, and of seeing doom and despair on the horizon for those who don’t share their worldview, then why would mere externalities like teenage pregnancy, divorce, and economic suffering induce them to compromise? After all, the moral decay of the Republic, as “red families” see it, is an instrumental problem; it is to be prevented, not to avoid its negative consequences, but because it is a bad thing per se.

The flip side of this argument is that some “red family” adherents may actually prefer the negative externalities of their policy preferences; there is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that some political entrepreneurs on the right may prefer this, including the treatment of Sandra Fluke, and of the PPACA’s mandate for contraception coverage. The left could not understand why employers with a “Christian worldview” would prefer a female workforce incapable of obtaining contraception: after all, the coverage had to be provided by the insurer, not the employer; the insurer could not add a surcharge or rider for the coverage; and the alternative – a female workforce that misses a significant amount of work due to pregnancy or other health issues – was a significant externality that the employer would bear with the worker.

But this presupposes that for these employers, that contraception itself was not the evil they sought to eliminate. Once that idea is advanced, then there are two consequences relevant to my argument: first, the employers’ approach in the contraception mandate cases begins to make sense; and second, Cahn and Carbone’s argument and prescription is completely exploded.

If the employers, and “Christian worldview”[1]thought leaders, were opposing contraception itself, and not the question of whether they should have to provide health insurance to their employees that provides contraception coverage, then it doesn’t matter whether it costs them anything, or whether they are, themselves, required to provide it or an intermediary is the one burdened – the evil, in their eyes, was that it was provided at all. And if given a choice between suffering for good, and ease for evil, then two thousand years of martyrdom point these Christians in one, and only one, direction. And this paradigm is all too common among the noisiest of “red family” adherents – that suffering is a sign of virtue. In short, negative externalities are proof that the system is working as intended.

Cahn and Carbone don’t, and can’t, resolve this paradox. And if the “red families” are, as PPACA demonstrates, just as opposed to contraception as abortion, then their soi-disant “sky blue nursery” is nothing more than a pipe dream. This means that the “blue families”, which is a paradigm that at least acknowledges that other paradigms may be appropriate for their adherents, have no reason to paint the wedding chapel pink, as they describe. This means that two of their supposed prescriptions for healing the divide they identify cannot work.

This leaves their prescription for change in the workplace. Frankly, this was the only part of the excerpt that made some sense to me, but again, it leaves out an essential element of the analysis. Cahn and Carbone assume that familial interests are the only ones acting in their preferred policy areas, but when they begin to reach prescriptions that affect American workplaces, then they have a new player to fight with – the employer. And the anecdotal data strongly suggests that employers will suffer no change to their prerogatives in commanding and controlling workers’ lives without a struggle, where advocates for workers and families are likely to be in the same situation they’ve been in for the last fifty years – outmanned, outgunned, and outspent.

[1]I know that lumping Christian leadership in this way is spectacularly dumb, and in fact, largely isomorphic with what I’m complaining about from Cahn and Carbone; when I talk about the “Christian worldview”, let’s take it as said that I’m talking about the loudest parts of the conservative Christian movement, and the slivers of that movement that are as extreme or more so than their leaders, and set aside the rest of the movement that would probably follow more moderate leadership.

The Law of Public Employment

noreply@blogger.com (Reid Krell) — Thu, 13 Nov 2014 21:30:00 +0000

Based on Cann, Chapter 7, and my own knowledge.

BIG PICTURE ISSUE 1: bright-line rules v. balancing tests. Bright lines provide clear guidance to lower courts, administrators engaged in risk management (litigation avoidance) and lawyers. Balancing tests invest more discretion in administrators to innovate, but also give judges and lawyers more veto points in the administrative process. You can fight over which you think is normatively better; I don't really have a strong opinion.

BIG PICTURE ISSUE 2: sovereign immunity and ex parte Young. Basically, the state cannot be sued without its permission, which Congress can grant for the state (and that's an interesting federalism theory issue). The work-around for this is that you sue the office-holder personally. This creates a remedies issue, as the liability for some of these claims can be quite large, and liability can accrue even when you act in good faith. Almost every public employer will indemnify officials who are sued under the ex parte Young doctrine. My advice: don't work for a tiny town, because they're likely to leave you to twist (and they're also likely to have bad advice as to what they can and can't do).

So, the basic issues in considering the law of public employment are "who can sue you, as an administrator, and why?" and "who can you sue, as an employee, and why?" So, taking these in reverse order:

Employment litigation by public employees: This falls into three categories: procedural due process, substantive due process, and equal protection. Due process claims arise when a life, liberty, or property interest is implicated; no one can argue with any seriousness that these claims implicate the interest to life, so you're left with liberty interests and property interests.

Property interests create procedural due process claims. These are the easiest to prove, if you can get to trial; but they're difficult to get to trial. Why? Because very few public employees have a property interest in their job, particularly now as the state dismantles civil service protections and public-employee collective bargaining; because it's not terribly difficult for the public employer to provide appropriate due process if you do have a property interest. Frankly, my experience in litigating these types of claims is that the usual fight is over whether the employee had a property interest in their job. So these cases resolve after summary judgment, usually; if the employee is found to have a property interest in their job, the case settles for a fairly significant amount; if not, then they settle for what I call "shut-up money." So procedural due process claims are more interesting from the litigation avoidance perspective.

How can you tell if the employee has a property right in their job, and thus is entitled to procedural due process? 1) Do they have a contract of employment? If not, then they have no property right. Be careful that the employee handbook doesn't accidentally create a contract (also consider the possibility of promissory estoppel). 2) If they have a contract (either individual or through collective bargaining), then look at the terms of the contract. Does it limit termination to "for just cause or financial exigency?" Then there is a property right. Does it provide for an internal grievance procedure or arbitration? That may, sometimes, be interpreted as creating an expectation sufficient to create a property right. Does it contain some sort of clause allowing management to exercise the prerogatives of management, including hiring and firing? Then probably not creating a property right. Is it for a fixed period of time? Then definitely there is a property right, although it may be less protective than "just cause" provisions.

Employers can avoid these types of claims by providing procedural due process to all employees, regardless of their status - but that can be burdensome, even if it's not difficult. After all, what does due process require? Prior to termination, the employee must be given a hearing, which need not be particularly onerous, but can be as elaborate as the employer wants. The employee must receive "sufficient" notice, which means who knows what; an explanation of the evidence against them; and an opportunity to present their side of the story. Sometimes this actually demonstrates a mistake, and the termination is not done. More usually, it's basically just a hoop the employer has to jump through before you're gone. Post-termination, you have to get a more extensive hearing, although what that hearing has to entail is not always clear. It seems like it needs to be more formal; you and the employer have to be on equal footing (i.e., if you don't have a lawyer, they shouldn't use one either); and the decisionmaker needs to be neutral. This last can be problematic in getting rid of top administrators like school superintendents, where the decisionmaker (the school board) is usually also the supervisor who wanted to fire the administrator to begin with. Ask me about Pine Bluff, Arkansas to talk about that. For adverse employment actions short of termination, we see a balancing test that asks the court to weigh the private interest in continuing the status quo ante against the public interest in the new status quo.

Liberty interests create substantive due process claims. Here's the problem: should the government be held to the same standard for substantive due process claims when it acts like an employer as it is held to when it acts like a sovereign? The Court says no. What's the argument for that approach? Just as there is no constitutional right to expectation in employment, employers generally have the right to police your speech and action within the course and scope of your employment. It does not make sense to the Court that the employer suddenly loses this right just because the employer is a government agency. Thus, your public employer has the right to control how you act and speak on the job. Thus, the question becomes when you are "on the job" for the purposes of speech, right? This gets into the Pickering/Connick/Garcetti test (or the National Treasury Employees test, but that one's is more about issues of pay-for-play in government). Briefly: you are protected from adverse employment actions based on your exercise of constitutional rights when you a) act on a matter of public concern; b) as a citizen; and c) not as a requirement of your public employment. See my GMUCRLJ article for 14K words more on that.

Discrimination claims: Cann is not quite right when he talks about this issue. He says that public employers are covered by Title VII and FMLA, which is true, and he does not mention ADEA and ADA, which is because the Court held that Congress had not abrogated sovereign immunity in those statutes. BUT, there is a work-around. Using the ex parte Young doctrine and suing under 42 U.S.C. 1983, you may be able to argue age discrimination or disability discrimination even without the abrogation of sovereign immunity. There are circuit splits on both issues, and the Supreme Court granted certiorari, then dismissed it as improvidently granted post-oral argument on the ADEA issue last year. Other employment statutes you need to be aware of as an administrator, both as a potential plaintiff, and as a supervisor who may violate one of them: FLSA (all employers covered); USERRA (no solid answer on state employers, but federal covered); GINA (same scope as Title VII). Ask me after class if you're interested in cutting-edge theories of liability that may apply to you in your public employment.

N.B.: ALL of these types of claims are subject to additional penalties for retaliation.

Suits against administrators by constituents: These basically boil down into procedural due process claims (which are analyzed similarly to the PDP claims by employees, but can also, particular in the prison context, implicate liberty interests); substantive due process claims (which are analyzed very differently to SDP claims by employees, and are beyond the scope of this presentation); and equal protection claims (which are analyzed according to the classification being alleged, and that is also beyond the scope of this presentation). All three of these claims, and any other claims that are not specifically authorized by legislation, are brought under 42 U.S.C. 1983 under ex parte Young. If there are types of claims specifically authorized by legislation, then that statute will explain both how they are brought and what remedies are available.

State law: Varies from state to state. Good luck.

Bivariate Regression Models

noreply@blogger.com (Reid Krell) — Wed, 12 Nov 2014 21:30:00 +0000

Kellstedt & Whitten, Chapter 9

Creating goodness-of-fit models relies on minimizing stochastic components for each case. Remember that in order to do goodness of fit, you have to eliminate negative signs, so that every stochastic component contributes to the goodness of fit, instead of cancelling each other out.

Remember: alpha = the y-intercept, and beta = the slope.

Correlation coefficients: used when both dv and iv are continuous.

When Stata says "constant," this means the y-intercept. When it says "coefficient", this means the parameter estimate, which for the dv, is the slope of the regression line. The standard error in these models is based on squaring each case's error term, finding the mean of the squares, and then taking the square root of that mean. It's called, somewhat reasonably, the "root mean-squared error."

Can also use r-squared as a goodness-of-fit measure. Divides the sum of stochastic components (squared to eliminate negative signs) by the sum of the differences between each case's DV value and mean DV value (squared to eliminate negative signs). What makes a good root MSE or r-squared depends on what the DV is, and what your theory says about it.

Why is the denominator in the unseen variance equation n-2? What does the 2 do that n-1 doesn't do?

Confidence intervals are determined by multiplying the appropriate t-statistic by the standard error for both beta and alpha.

Basic OLS assumptions: population stochastic component is normally distributed, has a mean equal to zero, and has the same variance for each case in the population. No covariance between stochastic terms of unique cases. No error in iv measurement. Model includes all necessary variables and no superfluity; model is linear and parametric (every increase in X produces the same effect in Y). DV must vary. Case count must exceed test parameters.

Why must case count exceed test parameters?

Collective Insurgent Action and Civil War in El Salvador

noreply@blogger.com (Reid Krell) — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 21:30:00 +0000

Wood, E.J. (2003). Collective Insurgent Action and Civil War in El Salvador, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

This week, we read Elizabeth Jean Wood’s Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador, and I was repeatedly struck by the rhetorical parallels in how Wood describes the insurgent actions, both mobilizing and violent, and how della Porta described the clandestine political organizations she studied. It made me wonder how della Porta’s model fits Wood’s analysis.

It appears that it’s not a terrible fit, at least in analyzing the onset of violence. In considering della Porta’s factors that lead toward the onset of clandestine political violence, one, enhanced policing, is unquestionably present in Usulutan. There are also some cases where activation of militant networks is present, such as when Wood discusses the areas where FMLN members had recruitment quotas out of their extended families. The question of competitive escalation is difficult to assess, but it appears that it could, potentially, have been present. Wood acknowledges that the internal divisions between FMLN factions were controlled for in her research design, at least in part out of her legitimate concerns for her own safety. The fact that it was known that different FMLN factions were divided in their approaches to violence (e.g., the increased early militancy of ERP in comparison to other insurgent groups) suggests that competitive escalation is at least plausible as a mechanism for the onset of violence.

The four mechanisms della Porta identifies as important for the maintenance of clandestine political violence are less present. Action militarization is explicitly disconfirmed in Wood’s study, as the ERP, in particular dialed back their levels of violence after mistakenly murdering one of their own under baseless accusations of spying. The remaining maintenance mechanisms are absent because the violence did not remain clandestine. Organizational compartmentalization did not arise because campesinos, in particular, sloshed back and forth between urban safe havens, the contested rural departments, and FMLN-controlled areas, depending on where safety was most likely to be found. Thus, the cutting off from out-group ties that drives organizational compartmentalization was not present. Ideological encapsulation may have been partially present, but Wood’s interviews suggests that the war was not terribly ideological, except in the broadest sense, in that insurgents wanted average Salvadoreans to be treated with human dignity, and the government believed they were being so treated. Militant enclosure may have been present in FMLN-controlled areas, where the insurgents may have had better capacity to control information, but in the contested regions Wood studied, FMLN and the government had to wage war not only for territory, but for the “hearts and minds” of the campesinos.

Because of the lack of clandestinity in the El Salvador civil war, I’m not sure that there’s a lot of utility in exploring the mechanisms della Porta identifies as driving exit. Briefly, all of them appear to be present at some point in the process, but because the insurgents were not clandestine, they don’t appear to have driven the insurgent movement away from violence. Instead, other factors that allowed the insurgency to more or less claim some sort of victory were the most important factors in ending the civil war.

My take: Della Porta’s model is predicated on the assumption that the radical group lacks the resources to step into the open and challenge the government for sovereignty, which does not describe FMLN. Thus, my initial instinct, that della Porta’s model can be used to explain, at least in part, the El Salvador civil war, appears limited to the onset of violence, while guerrilla groups were building their base of support. Once FMLN and its constituent factions were able to create a situation of “dual sovereignty,” they were no longer engaged in clandestine political violence, and della Porta’s model no longer applied.

Why Have Women Become Left-Wing? The Political Gender Gap and the Decline of Marriage"

noreply@blogger.com (Reid Krell) — Mon, 10 Nov 2014 21:30:00 +0000

Edlund, L. and Pande, R. (2002). "Why Have Women Become Left-Wing? The Political Gender Gap and the Decline of Marriage", Quarterly Journal of Economics 117(3): 917-962.

This article demonstrates a particular possible basis for the gender gap in American voting: the decline of marriage. The authors find a relationship between marriage and the Democratic vote for both genders: being married makes women less Democratic and men more so, while being unmarried has the opposite relationship. They claim that this relationship remains robust even after controlling for labor force participation, "women's issues" (abortion in this study), and social and religious values. The study is predicated on some pretty rough stereotypes: that women are more discriminating in partner selection and that women have default property rights in children, which leads men to contract for parental rights and sex in the form of marriage. They use an economic model to explain the income dynamics in the choice to marry or not marry, demonstrating that the existence of the gender gap is determined by the number of men for whom nonmarriage increases their income sufficiently to make them oppose redistribution versus the number of women for whom nonmarriage decreases their income sufficiently to make them support redistribution. They argue that the sequence of allegiance shifts shown by Reagan Democrats and Clinton Moms demonstrates their model's empirical significance. They also test the robustness of their results by checking the correlation of Democratic affiliation with preferring redistributive policies. Finally, they check for race as a confounder and for various statistical artifacts. They conclude by cross-checking using a different set of survey data.

My take: Let's start with the notion that children are property, and that the only thing women receive in marriage is resources, and the only thing men get is access to their kids and sex. This is a remarkably gender-essentialist approach to marriage, which has been steadily rejected by society. Tellingly, the authors immediately back off this conception, noting that "it is ill-suited to explain out-of-wedlock fertility, a family form that involves children, possibly cohabitation, but not marriage; or polygamy, a family form that involves marriage and children, but not necessarily cohabitation." I'm also concerned about how they operationalize their income control variable, as it presumes an income division that, while probably empirically correct, isn't explained in their literature review, nor argued for by their theory. I'm also concerned about their statement that "relative to the base year, there is no gender gap except in 1972 until 1980." This could equally as easily be described as "we found an effect that began in 1972, but noise drowned it out in 1976." But that isn't science, so I can't complaint too loudly.

Theorizing Athenian Society: The Problem of Stability

noreply@blogger.com (Reid Krell) — Sun, 09 Nov 2014 21:30:00 +0000

Cohen, D. (1995). "Theorizing Athenian Society: The Problem of Stability," in Law, Violence, and Community in Classical Athens, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The author writes this chapter backwards, to increase its rhetorical impact. First, he looks at the consequences of an unstable polis, or what the Greeks called "stasis." Pointing out that cases of institutional abuse drove a situation where participants no longer trusted in institutions to protect them, but rather acted out in violence to protect themselves or even in vengeance, he then demonstrates that ancient Greeks saw numerous instances of judicial institutions being subverted for private aims. He then considers Bourdieu's proposition that conflict, when strictly regulated, serves as a bulwark for social order. Rejecting this as having no salience when the society comes under external pressure which leaves the rules without force, whether that pressure comes from war (as Thucydides found in Corcyra) or something natural like plague (as he found in Athens), Thucydides concludes that the generalization of conflict can lead to the dissolution of the social order. Social disintegration is remarkably likely to arise when groups of people have no greater motivation for their actions then hurting someone or some group on the other side. Finally, the author examines Aristotle for the proposition that institutions must appear to favor (or at least not repress) an out-group in order to preserve stability. He concludes by reviewing several cases of factionalism in ancient Greece that featured examples of institutional subversion for personal feuding purposes.

My take: this is not really political science, since it doesn't explore negative cases. This is a chapter that begs for a most-similar or most-different case study approach, but does not get it. Instead, we see no variation in the independent variable (use of institutions for furtherance of feud) and no variation in the dependent variable (stasis or factionalism). There's some interesting theorizing, particularly in the notion that institutional respectability helps to ensure social order, but it's in the realm of "trivial insight with interesting implications."

Family Life and American Politics: The "Marriage Gap" Reconsidered

noreply@blogger.com (Reid Krell) — Sat, 08 Nov 2014 21:30:00 +0000

Plutzer, E. and McBurnett, M. (1991). "Family Life and American Politics: The 'Marriage Gap' Reconsidered," Public Opinion Quarterly 55(1): 113-127

This article had its genesis in two articles which examined the same data for the same question and reached mutually exclusive results. Both source articles, the Weisberg discussed here, and another article from the same year by Kingston and Finkel, used NES data from 1984 to test the existence of a "marriage gap" - i.e., the hypothesis that married people vote more Republican than unmarried people. Kingston and Finkel found it, while Weisberg failed. The authors here argue that Kingston and Finkel's more nuanced approach to "unmarried" brought out the effect, and test that hypothesis. They note that the prior authors used OLS regression, while they use logistic regression. This raises the question of whether Kingston and Finkel's and Weisberg's results should be thrown out for using the wrong kind of regression. Ultimately, these authors, using a nested logistic regression model, and testing multiple elections, find that the discrepancy in earlier results is an artifact of the particular elections analyzed by those authors. They then engage in some more statistical skullduggery and conclude that the effect is possible, but that it exists only for some set of thus far non-specified conditions.

My take: The only elections where significant family effects were found were 1972 and 1984. I'm left wondering if there's an artifact of the landslide quality of those elections. In other words, as Weisberg notes, since unmarried people constitute a lot less of the electorate than married people, both because they are fewer in number and because they turn out at lower rates, could the family effects be driven in those two elections not by any actual voting gap in the different groups, but rather in the fact that in both elections, the Democratic candidate was pummeled? Could McGovern and Mondale have lost because of low turnout among "unmarrieds"? We don't know - the authors don't test this question.

Making the Connection: Organized Interests, Political Representation, and the Changing Rules of the Game in Washington Politics

noreply@blogger.com (Reid Krell) — Fri, 07 Nov 2014 21:30:00 +0000

Shaiko, R. (2005). Making the Connection: Organized Interests, Political Representation, and the Changing Rules of the Game in Washington Politics. In The Interest Group Connection: Electioneering, Lobbying, and Policymaking in Washington (2nd ed., pp. 1-24). Washington: CQ Press.

The author is opening the second edition of this book by describing the changing policy and regulatory context that drove the development of the second edition. While, as he describes it, the Republican Revolution of 1994 created relatively minor changes to the Congressional framework, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 dramatically changed how the government interacted with organized interests. By 2003, the dynamics of the relationships between all three branches had significantly changed.

Looking at the forms of organized interest representation, the author notes that they tend to fall into two forms: political campaigning and lobbying. There are certain types of groups (notably, 501(c)(3) charitable organizations) that are barred from significantly engaging in campaigning, and whose lobbying is limited to certain types of research, education, and outreach. Meanwhile, those who engage in those two behaviors significantly follow one of several paths. The electioneering path can involve the types of research and outreach engaged in by charitable organizations; direct electioneering through the formation of a PAC; and issue advocacy (what was called then "soft money"). In lobbying, organizations can either directly represent themselves, or hire a surrogate (a lobbying firm).

It is important to remember that interest group activity does not take place in a vaccuum; context matters, as the author shows with the case of Microsoft. By comparing the environmental movement to the gay rights movement, the author also shows how the increased organizing tools offered by new technologies and cultural ties can improve interest groups' ability to leverage their assets.

The author now moves into discussing what he calls "the changing rules of the game," or the effect of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. A number of aspects of this law have since been struck down, which renders this section of the chapter less salient. He then explores lobbying disclosures, noting the "grassroots lobbying" loophole (i.e., that issue advocacy that calls on the public to contact officials is not treated as lobbying for purposes of disclosure) remains.

Finally, two truisms are offered: first, that there are no permanent friends or permanent enemies, only permanent interests; and second, that nothing happening is usually a winning proposition for most organized interests.

My take: A lot has changed in the ten years since this book came out. The Court struck down a lot of the BCRA provisions designed to help disaggregate money in elections, which means that organized interests become more important in electoral contexts. However, my interest (as of this writing) lies with the role organized interests play in the administrative process. Shaiko doesn't have as much to say about that in this chapter, although he presents a helpful synopsis of the administrative chapters. But the most important take-away from this chapter has to be the two truisms at the end - that today's political opponent is tomorrow's ally; and that for most organized interests, nothing is the highest-preference result they can hope for.

The Demographics of a New Voting Gap: Marital Differences in American Voting

noreply@blogger.com (Reid Krell) — Thu, 06 Nov 2014 21:30:00 +0000

Weisberg, H. (1987). "The Demographics of a New Voting Gap: Marital Differences in American Voting," Public Opinion Quarterly 51(3): 335-343.

This piece has its genesis in an odd cross-tabulation from the 1984 presidential election: Reagan won 63% of the vote of married people, and only 51% of the vote of unmarried people. Given that Reagan nationwide won 59% of the vote, these differences are startling and gave the author pause. The author justifies his interest by pointing out that while the "marriage gap" is smaller than the partisan break based on race, income, and religion, it recovers its salience because the number of unmarried people exceeds the number of black, poor, or Jewish. The cleavage retains its salience even when cross-tabulated by gender, with Republicans performing better among married women than unmarried men. It also has salience for turnout. In explaining the growth of the unmarried voter population, the author advances: the extension of the franchise to 18- to 20-year-olds, the increasing incidence of divorce, and in increase in unmarried cohabitation. The author then uses a path analysis to disaggregate the question of whether demographics drives the marriage gap, finding that the collinearity between racial marriage rates and racial voting behavior renders the marriage gap "partially spurious". Once the author throws out African-Americans by noting that the marriage gap does not appear in their voting behavior, he narrows down to his real interest: the marriage gap in white voters. After controlling for family income, the marriage gap disappears, leading the author to conclude that the marriage gap is driven mostly by the better income prospects for a two-income family.

My Take: This appears to be the opposite conclusion reached by Gerson in this piece. Part of the explanation can be derived from the different methods: Weisberg does nothing but crunch the numbers on national surveys, while Gerson conducted interviews. However, that doesn't seem like enough; Weisberg is literally saying that working married women vote Republican, an outcome that Gerson claims is unlikely. In short, Weisberg's data doesn't tell a coherent story with Gerson's theory, which means that we need either a) more data or b) different theories.