Justice-level heterogeneity in certiorari voting: US Supreme Court October terms 1939, 1968, and 1982

Although the literature on US Supreme Court agenda-setting is sizable, justice-vote-level multivariate analyses of certiorari are almost exclusively limited to samples of discussed cases from 1986 to 1993. Moreover, these studies have done very little to explore justice-level heterogeneity on certiorari. Here, we address these lacunae by analyzing the predictors of individual justices’ cert votes on all paid cases from the 1939, 1968, and 1982 terms. We find substantial justice-level heterogeneity in the weight that justices place on the standard set of forces shaping the cert vote. We also show that some of this heterogeneity is associated with justices’ experience and ideological extremism, largely in theoretically predicted ways. In closing, we sound a note of caution on drawing conclusions about effects of justice attributes, when the number of justices is relatively small.

Economic interventions, economic perceptions and political support during the Eurozone crisis

What is the effect of external economic intervention on political support and economic evaluations? We argue that economic interventions systematically worsen support for governing institutions and much of this is mediated through updating economic perceptions, at least during the Eurozone crisis. We evidence this with two analyses. First, we provide the first quasi-experimental evidence to show that intervention worsened both political support and economic evaluations. Second, we conduct a mediation analysis using Eurobarometer data to quantify how much of the effect of intervention is mediated by economic evaluations. This has broader implications for understanding how citizens react to international integration, international cues, and the process of forming judgements of political support.

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.

Do constituents know (or care) about the lawmaking effectiveness of their representatives?

Substantial evidence exists that members of the US Congress vary in their lawmaking effectiveness. Less known, however, is whether constituents are sufficiently informed and inclined to hold their representatives accountable, based on their effectiveness. We conduct two separate survey experiments, informing some constituents about lawmakers' effectiveness and comparing their responses to those with the baseline level of information. We find that voters demonstrate little knowledge of their elected officials' lawmaking effectiveness. When presented with objective and credible information about lawmaking effectiveness, however, respondents express greater approval of more effective lawmakers. Effects are strongest among ideological moderates, but are even pronounced among partisans, who approve of effective representatives of the opposing party, and disapprove of ineffective representatives from their own party.

Driving turnout: the effect of car ownership on electoral participation

Inequalities in voter participation between groups of the population pose a problem for democratic representation. We use administrative data on 6.7 million registered voters to show that a previously-ignored characteristic of voters—access to a personal automobile—creates large disparities in in-person voting rates. Lack of access to a car depresses election day voter turnout by substantively large amounts across a variety of fixed-effects models that account for other environmental and voter characteristics. Car access creates the largest hindrance to voting for those people who live farther from the polls. These effects do not appear for absentee voting, suggesting a simple policy solution to solve large disparities in political participation. This study contributes to the theoretic understanding of political participation as well as the impact of potential policy reforms to solve participatory gaps.

Hot topics: Denial-of-Service attacks on news websites in autocracies

Most authoritarian countries censor the press. As a response, many opposition and independent news outlets have found refuge on the Internet. Despite the global character of the Internet, news outlets are vulnerable to censorship in cyberspace. This study investigates Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks on news websites in Venezuela and details how news reporting is related to DoS attacks in an attempt to censor content. For this empirical test, I monitored 19 Venezuelan news websites from November 2017 until June 2018 and continuously retrieved their content and status codes to infer DoS attacks. Statistical analyses show that news content correlates to DoS attacks. In the Venezuelan context, these news topics appear to be not only on protest and repression but also on opposition actors or other topics that question the legitimacy of the regime. By establishing these relationships, this study deepens our understanding of how modern technologies are used as censorship tools.

The effects of state coercion on voting outcome in protest movements: a causal forest approach

In this research note, we examine how Hong Kong voters respond to police violence in the recent social movement. We use causal forests, a machine learning algorithm, to estimate the impact of tear gas usage specific to each constituency. Based on the 2019 District Council Election outcome, we find that there is heterogeneity in the effect of state coercion on the vote share of pro-democracy candidates, depending on many socioeconomic characteristics of the constituency. The results imply that economic concerns still matter in the struggle to obtain democracy: citizens who sense economic insecurity in social unrest show less disapproval of state violence.