Decomposing the source of the gender gap in legislative committee service: evidence from US states

Extensive research on gender and politics indicates that women legislators are more likely to serve on committees and sponsor bills related to so-called “women's issues.” However, it remains unclear whether this empirical regularity is driven by district preferences, differences in legislator backgrounds, or because gendered political processes shape and constrain the choices available to women once they are elected. We introduce expansive new data on over 25,000 US state legislators and an empirical strategy to causally isolate the different channels that might explain these gendered differences in legislator behavior. After accounting for district preferences with a difference-in-differences design and for candidate backgrounds via campaign fundraising data, we find that women are still more likely to serve on women's issues committees, although the gender gap in bill sponsorship decreases. These results shed new light on the mechanisms that lead men and women to focus on different policy areas as legislators.

Data mining as a cognitive tool: Capabilities and limits

Due to the large volumes of empirical digitized data, a critical challenge is to identify their hidden and unobvious patterns, enabling to gain new knowledge. To make efficient use of data mining (DM) methods, it is required to know its capabilities and limits of application as a cognitive tool. The paper aims to specify the capabilities and limits of DM methods within the methodology of scientific cognition. This will enhance the efficiency of these DM methods for experts in this field as well as for professionals in other fields who analyze empirical data. It was proposed to supplement the existing classification of cognitive levels by the level of empirical regularity (ER) or provisional hypothesis. If ER is generated using DM software algorithm, it can be called the man-machine hypothesis. Thereby, the place of DM in the classification of the levels of empirical cognition was determined. The paper drawn up the scheme illustrating the relationship between the cognitive levels, which supplements the well-known schemes of their classification, demonstrates maximum capabilities of DM methods, and also shows the possibility of a transition from practice to the scientific method through the generation of ER, and further from ER to hypotheses, and from hypotheses to the scientific method. In terms of the methodology of scientific cognition, the most critical fact was established – the limitation of any DM methods is the level of ER. As a result of applying any software developed based on DM methods, the level of cognition achieved represents the ER level.

The impact of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic on financial markets: a seismologic approach

This work investigates financial volatility cascades generated by SARS-CoV-2 related news using concepts developed in the field of seismology. We analyze the impact of socio-economic and political announcements, as well as of financial stimulus disclosures, on the reference stock markets of the United States, United Kingdom, Spain, France, Germany and Italy. We quantify market efficiency in processing SARS-CoV-2 related news by means of the observed Omori power-law exponents and we relate these empirical regularities to investors’ behavior through the lens of a stylized Agent-Based financial market model. The analysis reveals that financial markets may underreact to the announcements by taking a finite time to re-adjust prices, thus moving against the efficient market hypothesis. We observe that this empirical regularity can be related to the speculative behavior of market participants, whose willingness to switch toward better performing investment strategies, as well as their degree of reactivity to price trend or mispricing, can induce long-lasting volatility cascades.

Pareto ratio and Pareto principle

In the late 19th century, Vilfredo Pareto published the results of his observations of wealth inequality in Italy as a ratio in which the numerator is equal to the share of population ranked in descending order of wealth, and the denominator is the share of wealth of the population. Both the form of presentation of the concentration of inequality in the form of a visual ratio (the Pareto ratio), and an unexpectedly large inequality (80/20), which became known as the Pareto principle. In the 21st century, a new concept was introduced - the generalized Pareto principle, which is understood as any proportion in which the sum of the numerator and denominator is 100%. As a result, an extraordinary situation arose, when the empirical regularity began to be identified with the measure of its measurement. To resolve this confusion, the definition of Pareto ratio is provided in this work, based on a generally accepted concept of "wealthy" element of the system, as also an alternative explanation of the Pareto principle is proposed with the use of isoperimetric inequalities conceptually related with the principle of least action.

Analyzing Failed Institutional Change Attempts

Theoretical advances in the study of institutional change center around a productive paradox. While change agents can take strategic action to change institutions, institutions display a remarkable level of formal stability. From this paradox, we expect that attempts to change institutions are an empirical regularity and that many formal change attempts will fail. This article contributes to historical institutionalism by analyzing the political effects of failed formal institutional change attempts on institutional sequences. Failed institutional change attempts could be mere blips, having little effect on subsequent institutional trajectories, or even inoculate against future attempts. Failed attempts could also lay the ideational groundwork, aid in coalition building, and garner concessions for subsequent institutional change, or convince change agents to alter their strategy. The article suggests analytical strategies to assess the effects of failed institutional change attempts, drawing on examples from comparative politics and two extended case illustrations from Italian party politics and the Affordable Care Act in the United States.

Measuring Marginal Crime Concentration: A New Solution to an Old Problem

Objectives: In his 2014 Sutherland address to the American Society of Criminology, David Weisburd demonstrated that the share of crime that is accounted for by the most crime-ridden street segments is notably high and strikingly similar across cities, an empirical regularity referred to as the “law of crime concentration.” In the large literature that has since proliferated, there remains considerable debate as to how crime concentration should be measured empirically. We suggest a measure of crime concentration that is simple, accurate and easily interpreted. Methods: Using data from three of the largest cities in the United States, we compare observed crime concentration to a counterfactual distribution of crimes generated by randomizing crimes to street segments. We show that this method avoids a key pitfall that causes a popular method of measuring crime concentration to considerably overstate the degree of crime concentration in a city. Results: While crime is significantly concentrated in a statistical sense and while some crimes are substantively concentrated among hot spots, the precise relationship is considerably weaker than has been documented in the empirical literature. Conclusions: The method we propose is simple and easily interpretable and compliments recent advances which use the Gini coefficient to measure crime concentration.

Female hunters of the early Americas

Sexual division of labor with females as gatherers and males as hunters is a major empirical regularity of hunter-gatherer ethnography, suggesting an ancestral behavioral pattern. We present an archeological discovery and meta-analysis that challenge the man-the-hunter hypothesis. Excavations at the Andean highland site of Wilamaya Patjxa reveal a 9000-year-old human burial (WMP6) associated with a hunting toolkit of stone projectile points and animal processing tools. Osteological, proteomic, and isotopic analyses indicate that this early hunter was a young adult female who subsisted on terrestrial plants and animals. Analysis of Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene burial practices throughout the Americas situate WMP6 as the earliest and most secure hunter burial in a sample that includes 10 other females in statistical parity with early male hunter burials. The findings are consistent with nongendered labor practices in which early hunter-gatherer females were big-game hunters.

In Defense of Robin Barrow's Concern About Empirical Research in Education

This paper offers a defense of Robin Barrow’s main arguments in Giving Teaching Back to Teachers, including additional material concerning the inability of the aggregate data and statistical methods employed in research in education (and research on teaching) to speak to individual teachers and students or to particular classrooms. This defense and extension of Barrow’s position is applied in a critique ofa proposal made by Lorraine Foreman-Peck in her 2004 debate with Barrow, entitled What Use is Educational Research?, published in 2005 by the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. A central confusion that attends and limits much empirical research in education and social science concerns conflation of two different senses of the concept general, as “common to all” or “on average.” The havoc this confusion plays ought not be ignored or minimized by educational researchers and their advocates who tend to exaggerate the empirical regularity in social scientific data and therefore the generalizability of social science research in education and elsewhere.

Doi Moi and Vietnamese threat perception of Chinese economic growth

A growing body of literature has recently emerged establishing that political socialization influences foreign policy preferences of the public. But the empirical domain of this literature has been confined largely to American foreign policy and whether and how this empirical regularity holds in a non-democratic, non-western setting is unknown. Filling this lacuna, this research note studies the Vietnamese public attitudes toward Chinese economic expansion. I argue that Vietnamese citizens who grew up amid Doi Moi (renovation) had a political socialization experience very different from that of the birth cohorts who immediately preceded them. I demonstrate that the traditional ‘socialist brotherhood’ rhetoric that used to moderate otherwise hostile public opinions about China became insignificant through the course of the reform. This abrupt change led to markedly divergent views between the pre- and post-Doi Moi birth groups on China. Using the data from the latest Pew Global Attitude Survey, I demonstrate that Doi Moi increased the Vietnamese public's negative perception of Chinese economic expansion.

Democratic Breakdown and the Hidden Perils of the Democratic Peace

One empirical regularity in International Relations appears consistent: democracies rarely fight one another. However, this article maintains that the democratic peace comes with hidden costs. Democratic regimes are more pacifistic toward each other, but regimes formed through democratic breakdown are more bellicose than other authoritarian regimes. I argue that autocracies established through democratic breakdown are especially aggressive because they select leaders who tend to be impatient with democratic norms, and these leaders can leverage nationalism and mass mobilization fomented during the democratic era to support international aggression. Additionally, I argue that these factors interact with important institutional features that vary across authoritarian regimes. Post-democratic leaders lacking institutional constraints on their executive authority should be more aggressive than constrained post-democratic leaders and other unconstrained autocrats. Statistical analysis of militarized interstate disputes demonstrates that autocracies are more belligerent following democratic breakdown, especially under institutional conditions favorable to leaders instigating the breakdown. We should therefore be wary of urging democratization based on democratic peace when democracy has a high chance of reverting and focus more effort on ensuring that current democracies do not break down.