Peer effects in affirmative action: Evidence from law student performance

In the Grutter case, Justice O’Connor suggested that universities could justifiably try to enroll a “critical mass” of minority students. Enroll fewer than that “critical mass,” reason some observers, and minority students will feel too marginalized to perform at their highest levels. In this article, we test whether minority students perform better with other students from their ethnic group in a class or school. To do so, we assemble data on the ethnicity and performance of each student in all classes at two law schools - for three years at one, and for 16 years at the other. Although these schools enrolled a smaller fraction of African-Americans than most law schools, they are located in states with a much smaller fraction of African-Americans than in the United States as a whole. There is also a large amount of variation in the percent African-American across classes. At these schools, we find no consistent evidence that having additional students from one's ethnic group raises a student's performance. Instead, we find some evidence that having additional ethnic peers lowers performance - albeit by a very small amount.     

Racial Bias and the American Criminal Justice System: Race and Presentencing Revisited

A controversy within criminology involves the extent to which race affects criminal processing. Investigators on different sides of the issue have relied predominantly on studies of sentencing, leaving largely unexplored the less visible area of presentencing. After a discussion of nine of the most prevalent shortcomings in previous research, this article critically examines the contemporary presentencing literature to ascertain the extent to which a discrimination thesis (DT) receives empirical support. It reviews the findings from 52studies conducted since 1970 that employ multivariate statistical analysis. Special attention is devoted to critiquing the methodological shortcomings of studies that support a nondiscrimination thesis (NDT). The implications of these weaknesses for the race/criminal processing nexus are discussed. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Campaign fund-raising abuses and money laundering in recent U.S. elections: Criminal networks in action

This study describes some of the campaign fundraising abuses perpetuated by Republican and Democratic operatives in connection with recent U.S. elections. Efforts to conceal the source of campaign contributions or to evade contribution and spending limits involved a variety of money laundering techniques including the use of shell companies, straw donors, and the funnelling of money through political action committees and non profit tax-exempt organizations. In addition to the brazen sale of political access, some of the more serious infractions involved the infusion of foreign money into the Republican and Democratic National Committees as well as the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign. The author concludes the crimes that were committed are explained best as organized criminality manifested as complex networks of patron-client relationships.     

Partisan Attachment and Democracy in Mexico: Some Cautionary Observations

Party identification is a central concept in studies of parties and elections. Drawing from an extensive literature linking the concept of party identification to the understanding of Mexico's electoral politics, this article explores how the Mexican experience informs the understanding of party identification in general, especially in emerging democracies. There, voters' attachments to political parties are usually seen both as essential to and a positive sign of democratic development. This study finds evidence consistent with these arguments in the Mexican case but also identifies aspects of Mexican party identification that are not so clearly supportive of democratic politics; that indeed may delay or even undermine democratization. These findings illustrate the relevance of the Mexican experience to the wider literature on parties and elections, particularly the well-documented relationship between party identifications and democratization.     

The Interdependence of U.S. Troop Deployments and Trade in the Developing World

The relationship between political conflict and trade has contributed to a riveting discussion in international relations about whether trade produces conflict, or whether conflict itself reduces trade. Most studies proxy "the flag" using militarized interstate disputes (MIDs). However, extensions of "the flag" might well obtain in environments short of MIDs. A more general way to proxy the flag is troop deployments. The deployment of military troops is an essential element of foreign policy. Using panel data for 126 developing countries from 1965 to 2002 and a two-stage least square approach, this essay investigates the relationship between trade and United States troop deployments. We find that trade and troops have a nonrecursive relationship: trade follows the flag and troops follow trade. Given the increased insecurity in the world today, the results are timely and reinforce previous research about the reciprocal relationship between the flag and trade.