The Limits of Judicial Desegregation Remedies after Missouri v. Jenkins

How far can federal courts go to remedy unconstitutional segregation?In Missouri v. Jenkins in 1990, the U. S. Supreme Court appearedto add new taxing powers to the existing tools already availableto the judiciary. By a 5–4 vote, the Court affirmed court-orderedtaxation to fund an elaborate and expensive desegregation planfor the Kansas City, Missouri, School District. This articleexamines that decision, how it developed, what it said, howit was received, and, most important, what its long-term significancemay be. We argue that the "new" judicial taxing authority sanctionedin the decision may not prove nearly as important as at firstanticipated In the long run, Missouri v. Jenkins may prove mostsignificant for the questions about desegregation remedies raisedby Justice Anthony Kennedy in a dissenting opinion. Those questionscould presage a more skeptical Court outlook on substantiveschool desegregation remedies, at least where those remediescall for additional public funding, as well as greater Courtdeference to the outcomes of state-local political processes.     

The Bundesrat

Federal systems typically have in their legislative bodies asecond house designed to secure regional participation in nationalaffairs. While the German Bundestrat is not a co-equal branchof the parliament, it is, next to the U.S. Senate, the mostpowerful second (not "upper") house in existence. Unlike theU.S. Senate, its membership represents the cabinets of the elevenLänder, and votes are cast a bloc for each Land. The Bundesrathas an absolute veto over all bills that effect the Länderand a suspensive veto over all other bills. It was not designedas a partisan body, but partisan politics do sometimes enterthe decisionmaking process. The Bundesrat has served traditionallyas an institutional means of securing Land rights from intrusionby the federal government. Today, however, it is confrontedby a new and potentially more dangerous threat to Land autonomy:the growing power of the European Community and the trend towardrelinquishing important aspects of national sovereignty to ECinstitutions.     

Continuity or Change in Interstate Extradition? Assessing Puerto Rico v. Branstad

Interstate extradition law would appear radically altered bythe 1987 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Puerto Rico v. Branstad,overturning a precedent established in Kentucky v. Dennison126 years earlier that extradition could not be legally compelledby the federal government. Dennison, however, is more complexthan is commonly believed, and the demise of one of Dennison'sconclusions does not signal a major overhaul of the SupremeCourt's treatment of extradition. Rather, the Court's decisionshave adhered closely to the original intent of the Constitution'sextradition clause. The part of Dennison overturned was thereforenoteworthy as an exception to the general thrust of the Court'streatment of extradition. How then did Dennison's bar of legallycompelled extradition survive so long when the theory of federalismsupporting the decision had been repudiated long before it wasreversed? This article explores this question and directs attentionto the consequences of Branstad for extradition. Despite theapparent clarity of Branstad, a survey of state extraditionofficers reveals lingering confusion over extradition law.     

Federalism at the American Founding: In Defense of the Diamond Theses

Vincent Ostrom's analysis of The Federalist's understandingof federalism fails to consider the historical and theoreticalcontext of The Federalist's arguments. Ostrom takes certainrhetorical devices of The Federalist too much at face value.He correctly sees that the authors of The Federalist view eighteenth-centuryfederalism as bad government. He incorrectly concludes thatsince it is bad government, that understanding could not havebeen the true meaning of federalism. The Federalist understandseighteenth-century federalism to be "the true meaning" of federalismas established by the political discourse of the times. TheConstitution departs radically from eighteenth-century federalism,but The Federalist seeks to conceal how radical the departureis, in part, by offering a looser definition of federalism thatwill allow the Constitution to be characterized as a federalsystem. A consideration of the writings of the opponents tothe Constitution suggests the limited success of this attemptat redefinition.     

A Robust Transformation Procedure for Interpreting Political Text

Georg Vanberg Department of Political Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3265 e-mail: gvanberg{at}unc.edu (corresponding author) In a recent article in the American Political Science Review,Laver, Benoit, and Garry (2003, "Extracting policy positionsfrom political texts using words as data," 97:311–331)propose a new method for conducting content analysis. TheirWordscores approach, by automating text-coding procedures, representsan advance in content analysis that will potentially have alarge long-term impact on research across the discipline. Toallow substantive interpretation, the scores produced by theWordscores procedure require transformation. In this note, weaddress several shortcomings in the transformation procedureintroduced in the original program. We demonstrate that theoriginal transformation distorts the metric on which contentscores are placed—hindering the ability of scholars tomake meaningful comparisons across texts—and that it isvery sensitive to the texts that are scored—opening upthe possibility that researchers may generate, inadvertentlyor not, results that depend on the texts they choose to includein their analyses. We propose a transformation procedure thatsolves these problems. Authors' note: We would like to thank Ken Benoit, Michael Laver,three anonymous referees, and the editor for comments on earlierversions of this article.     

The Meaning of Federalism in The Federalist: A Critical Examiniation of the Diamond Theses

Language poses a serious problem in political discourse whenterms like federalism come to mean anything, everything, andnothing. An issue of some importance is how "confederation"was conceptualized in The Federalist, how that conceptualizationwas subject to critical analysis, especially in Federalist 15and 16, and how the resolution of that critique contributedto the conceptualization of a federal system of governance.This essay was written in response to a re-reading of MartinDiamon's essay on "The Federalist's View of Federalism." Theposition taken is that the theory of constitutional choice usedto articulate the arguments in The Federalist provides the appropriatelogic for construing the meaning of federalism despite the ambiguitiesof language contained in The Federalist.     

Bias in Conditional and Unconditional Fixed Effects Logit Estimation

Fixed-effects logit models can be useful in panel data analysis,when N units have been observed for T time periods. There aretwo main estimators for such models: unconditional maximum likelihoodand conditional maximum likelihood. Judged on asymptotic properties,the conditional estimator is superior. However, the unconditionalestimator holds several practical advantages, and thereforeI sought to determine whether its use could be justified onthe basis of finite-sample properties. In a series of MonteCarlo experiments for T < 20, I found a negligible amountof bias in both estimators when T 16, suggesting that a researchercan safely use either estimator under such conditions. WhenT < 16, the conditional estimator continued to have a verysmall amount of bias, but the unconditional estimator developedmore bias as T decreased.     

Federalism and the Controversy Over the New Media in West Germany

The possibilities of expanding the television network by meansof cable and satellite service have paved the way for the Länderto determine relevant organizational structures. The newly completedState Media Treaty seems to represent a definite breakthroughin regulatory policy. The legal regulation of the new media—cableand satellite television—faces further complications,however, insofar as nine Land media laws impose different legalrequirements on the new broadcasters. Even so, differences amongthe Länder in the area of cable TV are no longer as greatas they were in the past, and a satellite agreement reachedby the Länder provides for more uniform regulation. Also,the Federal Constitutional Court's 1986 decision emphasizingthe importance of a uniform system of broadcasting and requiringdual private and public broadcasting may have settled the fundamentalpolitical dispute among the Länder over the new media.     

In Defense of Comparative Statics: Specifying Empirical Tests of Models of Strategic Interaction

Christopher Zorn Department of Political Science, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208 e-mail: zorn{at}sc.edu e-mail: ccarrub{at}emory.edu (corresponding author) Beginning in 1999, Curtis Signorino challenged the use of traditionallogits and probits analysis for testing discrete-choice, strategicmodels. Signorino argues that the complex parametric relationshipsgenerated by even the simplest strategic models can lead towildly inaccurate inferences if one applies these traditionalapproaches. In their stead, Signorino proposes generating stochasticformal models, from which one can directly derive a maximumlikelihood estimator. We propose a simpler, alternative methodologyfor theoretically and empirically accounting for strategic behavior.In particular, we propose carefully and correctly deriving one'scomparative statics from one's formal model, whether it is stochasticor deterministic does not particularly matter, and using standardlogit or probit estimation techniques to test the predictions.We demonstrate that this approach performs almost identicallyto Signorino's more complex suggestion. Authors' note: We would like to thank Randy Calvert, Mark Hallerberg,Andrew Martin, Eric Reinhardt, Chris Stanton, and Craig Voldenfor their valuable feedback on this project. All remaining errorsare our own. Replication materials are available at the PoliticalAnalysis Web site.     

The Foreign and European Policy of the German Lander

Although the German federal government is responsible underthe Basic Law for foreign affairs, the Länder may, undercertain circumstances, conclude treaties with the consent ofthe federation. The Länder have also become involved directlyand indirectly in other international activities. European integration,especially through the European Communities (EC), presents theLänder with new challenges. The Länder have soughtmeans to influence the federal government and the EC Commissionand Council of Ministers, in order to protect their sphere ofautonomous decisionmaking, but EC procedures and the realitiesof federal government involvement do not place the Länderin a strong negotiating position.     

Ignoramus, Ignorabimus? On Uncertainty in Ecological Inference

Thomas Gschwend Center for Doctoral Studies in Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of Mannheim, D7, 27, 68131 Mannheim, Germany e-mail: gschwend{at}uni-mannheim.de Ron J. Johnston School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1SS, UK e-mail: r.johnston{at}bristol.ac.uk e-mail: elff{at}sowi.uni-mannheim.de (corresponding author) Models of ecological inference (EI) have to rely on crucialassumptions about the individual-level data-generating process,which cannot be tested because of the unavailability of thesedata. However, these assumptions may be violated by the unknowndata and this may lead to serious bias of estimates and predictions.The amount of bias, however, cannot be assessed without informationthat is unavailable in typical applications of EI. We thereforeconstruct a model that at least approximately accounts for theadditional, nonsampling error that may result from possiblebias incurred by an EI procedure, a model that builds on thePrinciple of Maximum Entropy. By means of a systematic simulationexperiment, we examine the performance of prediction intervalsbased on this second-stage Maximum Entropy model. The resultsof this simulation study suggest that these prediction intervalsare at least approximately correct if all possible configurationsof the unknown data are taken into account. Finally, we applyour method to a real-world example, where we actually know thetrue values and are able to assess the performance of our method:the prediction of district-level percentages of split-ticketvoting in the 1996 General Election of New Zealand. It turnsout that in 95.5% of the New Zealand voting districts, the actualpercentage of split-ticket votes lies inside the 95% predictionintervals constructed by our method. Authors' note: We thank three anonymous reviewers for helpfulcomments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper.An appendix giving some technical background information concerningour proposed method, as well as data, R code, and C code toreplicate analyses presented in this paper are available fromthe Political Analysis Web site. Later versions of the codewill be packaged into an R library and made publicly availableon CRAN (http://cran.r-project.org) and on the correspondingauthor's Web site.     

Analysis of Cluster-Randomized Experiments: A Comparison of Alternative Estimation Approaches

Lynn Vavreck UCLA, Department of Political Science, 4289 Bunche Hall Box 951472, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1472 e-mail: lvavreck{at}ucla.edu (corresponding author) Analysts of cluster-randomized field experiments have an arrayof estimation techniques to choose from. Using Monte Carlo simulation,we evaluate the properties of point estimates and standard errors(SEs) generated by ordinary least squares (OLS) as applied toboth individual-level and cluster-level data. We also compareOLS to alternative random effects estimators, such as generalizedleast squares (GLS). Our simulations assess efficiency acrossa variety of scenarios involving varying sample sizes and numbersof clusters. Our results confirm that conventional OLS SEs areseverely biased downward and that, for all estimators, gainsin efficiency come mainly from increasing the number of clusters,not increasing the number of individuals within clusters. Wefind relatively minor differences across alternative estimationapproaches, but GLS seems to enjoy a slight edge in terms ofthe efficiency of its point estimates and the accuracy of itsSEs. We illustrate the application of alternative estimationapproaches using a clustered experiment in which Rock the VoteTV advertisements were used to encourage young voters in 85cable TV markets to vote in the 2004 presidential election. Authors' note: We thank Rock the Vote for permission to usetheir public service announcements in this field experiment.The authors are grateful to Alan Gerber for suggestions throughoutthe design phase of this project. We are also grateful to DanKotin and Margaret Coblentz, who worked with cable operators,distributed the advertisements, and assembled the data. We thankTerence Leong for his programming expertise. Replication materialsare available on the Political Analysis Web site.     

In Search of the Uncovered Set

e-mail: nmiller{at}umbc.edu This paper pursues a number of theoretical explorations andconjectures pertaining to the uncovered set in spatial votinggames. It was stimulated by the article "The Uncovered Set andthe Limits of Legislative Action" by W. T. Bianco, I. Jeliazkov,and I. Sened (2004, Political Analysis 12:256–78) thatemployed a grid-search computational algorithm for estimatingthe size, shape, and location of the uncovered set, and it hasbeen greatly facilitated by access to the CyberSenate spatialvoting software being developed by Joseph Godfrey. I bring tolight theoretical considerations that account for importantfeatures of the Bianco, Jeliazkov, and Sened results (e.g.,the straight-line boundaries of uncovered sets displayed insome of their figures, the "unexpectedly large" uncovered setsdisplayed in other figures, and the apparent sensitivity ofthe location of uncovered sets to small shifts in the relativesizes of party caucuses) and present theoretical insights ofmore general relevance to spatial voting theory.     

A Linear Poisson Autoregressive Model: The Poisson AR(p) Model

Time series of event counts are common in political scienceand other social science applications. Presently, there arefew satisfactory methods for identifying the dynamics in suchdata and accounting for the dynamic processes in event countsregression. We address this issue by building on earlier workfor persistent event counts in the Poisson exponentially weightedmoving-average model (PEWMA) of Brandt et al. (American Journalof Political Science 44(4):823–843, 2000). We developan alternative model for stationary mean reverting data, thePoisson autoregressive model of order p, or PAR(p) model. Issuesof identification and model selection are also considered. Wethen evaluate the properties of this model and present bothMonte Carlo evidence and applications to illustrate.     

Splitting the Atom of Sovereignty: Term Limits, Inc.'s Conflicting Views of Popular Autonomy in a Federal Republic

In his concurrence to U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thorton, JusticeAnthony Kennedy described federalism as an attempt to "splitthe atom of sovereignty." As Term Limits demonstrates, the taskis an incredibly difficult one, which deeply rends the Court.One block, currently composed of Justices John Paul Stevens,David Souter, Ruth Baider Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer, viewthe source of constitutional authority as residing in the peopleof the nation as a whole; the other block, made up of ChiefJustice William Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor,Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas, argue that the constitutionalwellspring is the people of each individual state. Justice Kennedy,now occupying the Court's middle ground, stresses the "dualcharacter" of federal government. The debate is much morethanacademic. Depending on how it is played out, the argument mayhave profound implications for the understanding and practiceof U.S. federalism.     

Comparing Legislators and Legislatures: The Dynamics of Legislative Gridlock Reconsidered

Lawrence S. Rothenberg Department of Political Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627 e-mail: lrot{at}mail.rochester.edu (corresponding author) Although political methodologists are well aware of measurementissues and the problems that can be created, such concerns arenot always front and center when we are doing substantive research.Here, we show how choices in measuring legislative preferenceshave influenced our understanding of what determines legislativeoutputs. Specifically, we replicate and extend Binder's highlyinfluential analysis (Binder, Sarah A. 1999. The dynamics oflegislative gridlock, 1947–96. American Political ScienceReview 93:519–33; see also Binder, Sarah A. 2003. Stalemate:Causes and consequences of legislative gridlock. Washington,DC: Brookings Institution) of legislative gridlock, which emphasizeshow partisan, electoral, and institutional characteristics generatemajor legislative initiatives. Binder purports to show thatexamining the proportion, rather than the absolute number, ofkey policy proposals passed leads to the inference that thesefeatures, rather than divided government, are crucial for explaininggridlock. However, we demonstrate that this finding is underminedby flaws in preference measurement. Binder's results are a functionof using W-NOMINATE scores never designed for comparing Senateto House members or for analyzing multiple Congresses jointly.When preferences are more appropriately measured with commonspace scores (Poole, Keith T. 1998. Recovering a basic spacefrom a set of issue scales. American Journal of Political Science42:964–93), there is no evidence that the factors thatshe highlights matter. Authors' note: Thanks to Sarah Binder and Keith Poole for furnishingdata used in our analysis and to Chris Achen and Kevin Clarkefor advice. All errors remain our own. Online appendix is availableon the Political Analysis Web site.     

A Comment on Diagnostic Tools for Counterfactual Inference

Alexander Michaelides London School of Economics, Department of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK e-mail: a.michaelides{at}lse.ac.uk We evaluate two diagnostic tools used to determine if counterfactualanalysis requires extrapolation. Counterfactuals based on extrapolationare model dependent and might not support empirically validinferences. The diagnostics help researchers identify thosecounterfactual "what if" questions that are empirically plausible.We show, through simple Monte Carlo experiments, that thesediagnostics will often detect extrapolation, suggesting thatthere is a risk of biased counterfactual inference when thereis no such risk of extrapolation bias in the data. This is becausethe diagnostics are affected by what we call the n/k problem:as the number of data points relative to the number of explanatoryvariables decreases, the diagnostics are more likely to detectthe risk of extrapolation bias even when such risk does notexist. We conclude that the diagnostics provide too severe atest for many data sets used in political science. Author's note: We thank Komei Fukuda, Don Green, Alan Gerber,and Jasjeet Sekhon for their generous help, Mike Kane for assistancewith R programming, and five anonymous referees for constructivecomments.     

A Tale of Two Disasters

The report to the U.S. president entitled The Federal Responseto Hurricane Katrina concludes that in the event of catastrophicdisasters the traditional intergovernmental response to disastershould give way to a more dominant role of the national government.This article considers whether it is possible to respond effectivelyto disaster in the traditional, intergovernmental mode by comparingthe response to Katrina with the response, which was widelyconsidered to be successful, to another disaster, in Grand Forks,North Dakota. The research suggests that an intergovernmentalresponse can be successful if those who respond to the disasterinteract in a collaborative network. The article considers whethersuch collaborative networks can be created and evaluates someof the recommendations from The Federal Response to HurricaneKatrina as potentially helping to create collaborative networks.     

Financing the German Federal System in the 1980s

Public finance is a crucial issue in any federation. In thesystem of shared public financing in Germany, no unit of governmentis fiscally dependent on the other. The federal and Land governmentsshare the personal income tax, the corporation tax, and thevalue-added sales tax. Because the Bundesrat approves of theshares of these tax yields granted the federal and Land governments,the Länder are deeply involved in the public finance system.Fiscal equalization occurs both vertically and horizontally.The federal government provides the Länder with grants-in-aid,and also shares the financing of a number of "joint tasks."The Länder share their tax yields with their local governments.Fiscal transfers also take place among the richer and poorerLänder and among the municipalities within the boundariesof individual counties. Controversy exists over the shares tobe given the respective governments from the value-added taxand over fiscal equalization between the richer (South) andpoorer (North) Länder.