Models and Methods Commons^™

Knowing When To Trust Others: An Erp Study Of Decision-Making After Receiving Information From Unknown People, Cheryl Boudreau, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Seana Coulson

Faculty Scholarship

To address the neurocognitive mechanisms that underlie choices made after receiving information from an anonymous individual, reaction times (Experiment 1) and event-related brain potentials (Experiment 2) were recorded as participants played 3 variants of the Coin Toss game. In this game, participants guess the outcomes of unseen coin tosses after a person in another room (dubbed “the reporter”) observes the coin toss outcomes and then sends reports (which may or may not be truthful) to participants about whether the coins landed on heads or tails. Participants knew that the reporter's interests either were aligned with their own (Common Interests), opposed …

Mahmood Monshipouri On Political Participation In The Middle East. Edited By Ellen Lust-Okar And Saloua Zerhouni. Boulder, Co: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2008. 286pp., Mahmood Monshipouri

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Political Participation in the Middle East. Edited by Ellen Lust-Okar and Saloua Zerhouni. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2008. 286pp.

Nothing But The Truth? Experiments On Adversarial Competition, Expert Testimony, And Decision Making, Cheryl Boudreau, Mathew D. Mccubbins

Faculty Scholarship

Many scholars debate whether a competition between experts in legal, political, or economic contexts elicits truthful information and, in turn, enables people to make informed decisions. Thus, we analyze experimentally the conditions under which competition between experts induces the experts to make truthful statements and enables jurors listening to these statements to improve their decisions. Our results demonstrate that, contrary to game theoretic predictions and contrary to critics of our adversarial legal system, competition induces enough truth telling to allow jurors to improve their decisions. Then, when we impose additional institutions (such as penalties for lying or the threat of …

For Whom The Tel Tolls: Can State Tax And Expenditure Limits Effectively Reduce Spending?, Thad Kousser, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Ellen Moule

Faculty Scholarship

Can voters stop state governments from spending at high rates through the enactment of tax and expenditure limits (TELs), or do these laws become dead letters? We draw upon the principal-agent literature to theorize that TELs – one of the most frequent uses of the initiative process across the country – may be circumvented by the sorts of elected officials who would inspire their passage.

In order to investigate our claim, we conduct an event study. First, we test for the effectiveness of TELs across states using a differences-in-differences model. Second, we dissect our treatment variable using different legal provisions …

When Voters Make Laws: How Direct Democracy Is Shaping American Cities, Elizabeth Garrett, Mathew D. Mccubbins

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Agenda Power In The Italian Chamber Of Deputies, 1988-2000, Gary W. Cox, William B. Heller, Mathew D. Mccubbins

Faculty Scholarship

We find strong evidence that governing coalitions in Italy exercise significant negative agenda powers. First, governing parties have a roll rate that is nearly zero, and their roll rate is lower than opposition parties’ roll rates, which average about 20% on all final passage votes. Second, we find that, controlling for distance from the floor median, opposition parties have higher roll rates than government parties. These results strongly suggest that governing parties in Italy are able to control the legislative agenda to their benefit. We also document significantly higher opposition roll rates on decree-conversion bills and budget bills that on …

Super Medians, Lee Epstein, Tonja Jacobi

Faculty Articles

It is not surprising that virtually all analyses of the Supreme Court stress the crucial role played by the swing, pivotal, or median Justice: in theory, the median should be quite powerful. In practice, however, some are far stronger than others. Just as there are “super precedents” and “super statutes”—those that are weightier or more entrenched than others—there are “super medians”—Justices so powerful that they are able to exercise significant control over the outcome and content of the Court’s decisions.

Conventional wisdom holds that Justices accumulate power by virtue of their personality, methodological approach, or even background characteristics. But our …

Economic Efficiency Versus Public Choice: The Case Of Property Rights In Road Traffic Management, Jonathan R. Nash

Faculty Articles

This Article argues, using the case of responses to traffic con­gestion, that public choice theory provides a greater explanation for the emergence of property rights than does economic efficiency. The tradi­tional solution to traffic congestion is to provide new roadway capacity, but that is not an efficient response in that it does not lead to internaliza­tion of costs and may actually exacerbate congestion problems by induc­ing travel that would not have taken place but for the new construction. By contrast, congestion charges, which impose tolls designed to internal­ize the costs of driving, offer an efficient way to address the problem …

The New Bureaucracies Of Virtue: Introduction, Marie-Andree Jacob, Annelise Riles

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Dual Path Initiative Framework, Elizabeth Garrett, Mathew D. Mccubbins

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Ideological Drift Among Supreme Court Justices: Who, When, And How Important?, Lee Epstein, Andrew D. Martin, Kevin M. Quinn, Jeffrey A. Segal

Faculty Articles

After reviewing the relevant commentary in Part II, we deploy state-of-the ­art methods to address these questions. The results, as it turns out, could not be clearer: contrary to the received wisdom, virtually every Justice serving since the 1930s has moved to the left or right or, in some cases, has switched directions several times.

Finding that ideological drift is pervasive, in Part IV we develop the implications of our results for two moments in the Justices' career cycle: the events surrounding their appointments to the Court and the doctrine they develop once confirmed. As to the first, we show …

Reviewed Work: Understanding Institutional Diversity By Elinor Ostrom, Jonathan G.S. Koppell

Publications from President Jonathan G.S. Koppell

No abstract provided.

When Does Deliberating Improve Decisionmaking?, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Daniel B. Rodriguez

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Conditions For Judicial Independence, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Roger Noll, Barry R. Weingast

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Agenda Control In The Bundestag, 1980-2002, William M. Chandler, Gary W. Cox, Mathew D. Mccubbins

Faculty Scholarship

We find strong evidence of monopoly legislative agenda control by government parties in the Bundestag. First, the government parties have near-zero roll rates, while the opposition parties are often rolled over half the time. Second, only opposition parties’ (and not government parties’) roll rates increase with the distances of each party from the floor median. Third, almost all policy moves are towards the government coalition (the only exceptions occur during periods of divided government). Fourth, roll rates for government parties sky- rocket when they fall into the opposition and roll rates for opposition parties plummet when they enter government, while …

The Intimacy Discount: Prosecutorial Discretion, Privacy, And Equality In The Statutory Rape Caseload, Kay L. Levine

Faculty Articles

This Article proceeds as follows. It begins in Part I by presenting the structural and case-based factors that scholars have identified as relevant to prosecutorial decision-making in the United States. Part II considers the existing social science research documenting the relationship between intimacy and criminal Justice treatment. Part III explains the empirical study of California prosecutors on which this Article's data and conclusions are based. After introducing California's statutory rape prosecution program in Part IV, the Article describes in Part V how the program's underlying rationale led to the development and deployment of prosecutorial assessments of intimacy and exploitation in …

The Law Is Not The Case: Incorporating Empirical Methods Into The Culture Of Case Analysis, Kay L. Levine

Faculty Articles

While I consider case analysis in the context of cultural defense jurisprudence, this Essay should be regarded as a case study of a more endemic problem in legal scholarship. In tackling such an area, my goal is not to overthrow centuries of legal analysis, but rather to explore how we, as legal scholars, might use social science techniques to more systematically investigate, document, analyze, and predict the state of a particular comer of the legal universe.

The argument proceeds in two parts. Part II considers empirical approaches to the question raised by Lee: how might we ascertain the relationship between …

Courts, Congress, And Public Policy, Part I: The Fda, The Courts, And The Regulation Of Tobacco, Jeffrey R. Lax, Mathew D. Mccubbins

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Statutory Interpretation And The Intentional(Ist) Stance, Cheryl Boudreau, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Daniel B. Rodriguez

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Canonical Construction And Statutory Revisionism: The Strange Case Of The Appropriations Canon, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Daniel B. Rodriguez

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Lost In Translation: Social Choice Theory Is Misapplied Against Legislative Intent, Arthur Lupia, Mathew D. Mccubbins

Faculty Scholarship

Several prominent scholars use results from social choice theory to conclude that legislative intent is meaningless. We disagree. We support our argument by showing that the conclusions in question are based on misapplications of the theory. Some of the conclusions in question are based on Arrow's famous General Possibility Theorem. We identify a substantial chasm between what Arrow proves and what others claim in his name. Other conclusions come from a failure to realize that applying social choice theory to questions of legislative intent entails accepting assumptions such as "legislators are omniscient" and "legislators have infinite resources for changing law …

Deterrence Versus Brutalization: Capital Punishment's Differing Impacts Among States, Joanna M. Shepherd

Faculty Articles

Recent empirical studies by economists have shown, without exception, that capital punishment deters crime. Using large data sets that combine information from all fifty states over many years, the studies show that, on average, an additional execution deters many murders. The studies have received much publicity, and death penalty advocates often cite them to show that capital punishment is sound policy.

Indeed, deterrence is the central basis that many policymakers and courts cite for capital punishment. For example, President Bush believes that capital punishment deters crime and that deterrence is the only valid reason for capital punishment. Likewise, the Supreme …

The Effects Of Ballot Position On Election Outcomes, Jonathan G.S. Koppell, Jennifer A. Steen

Publications from President Jonathan G.S. Koppell

This article presents evidence of name-order effects in balloting from a study of the 1998 Democratic primary in New York City, in which the order of candidates' names was rotated by precinct. In 71 of 79 individual nominating contests, candidates received a greater proportion of the vote when listed first than when listed in any other position. In seven of those 71 contests, the advantage to first position exceeded the winner's margin of victory, suggesting that ballot position would have determined the election outcomes if one candidate had held the top spot in all precincts.

Agenda Power In Brazil’S Camara Dos Deputados, 1989-98, Octavio Amorim Neto, Gary W. Cox, Mathew D. Mccubbins

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

As A Matter Of Factions: The Budgetary Implications Of Shifting Factional Control In Japan’S Ldp, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Michael F. Thies

Faculty Scholarship

For 38 years, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) maintained single-party control over the Japanese government. This lack of partisan turnover in government has frustrated attempts to explain Japanese government policy changes using political variables. In this paper, we look for intraparty changes that may have led to changes in Japanese budgetary policy. Using a simple model of agenda-setting, we hypothesize that changes in which intraparty factions “control” the LDP affect the party’s decisions over spending priorities systematically. This runs contrary to the received wisdom in the voluminous literature on LDP factions, which asserts that factions, whatever their raison d’être, do …

Rationality And The Foundations Of Positive Political Theory, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Michael F. Thies

Faculty Scholarship

In this paper, we discuss and debunk the four most common critiques of the rational choice research program (which we prefer to call Positive Political Theory) by explaining and advocating its foundations: the rationality assumption, component analysis (abstraction), strategic behavior, and theory building, in turn. We argue that the rationality assumption and component analysis, properly understood, can be seen to underlie all social science, despite the protestations of critics. We then discuss the two ways that PPT most clearly contributes to political science (i.e., what distinguishes it from other research programs), namely the introduction of strategic behavior (people do not …

Book Review. Why Federations Fail: An Inquiry Into The Requisites For Successful Federalism, Robert L. Birmingham

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

4. Nationalism As An Idea, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold L. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section XIII: Political Liberalism and Nationalism, 1815-1871

Nationalism may be described as a state of mind which gives priority to the idea of nationality. Nationality in turn refers to a group of people who pride themselves on their common descent, customs, or traditions. As a rule these people inhabit a well-defined geographic area and are united by a common language. Often they tend to exhibit a collective egoism, convinced that their particular culture and ethnic stock are superior to all others. Some notable exceptions to these generalizations exist, yet even these exceptions are also characterized by what has been called "a living and active corporate will" as …