Racial Diversity and Judicial Influence on Appellate Courts

This article evaluates the substantive consequences of judicial diversity on the U.S. Courts of Appeals. Due to the small percentage of racial minorities on the federal bench, the key question in evaluating these consequences is not whether minority judges vote differently from nonminority judges, but whether their presence on appellate courts influences their colleagues and affects case outcomes. Using matching methods, I show that black judges are significantly more likely than nonblack judges to support affirmative action programs. This individual‐level difference translates into a substantial causal effect of adding a black judge to an otherwise all‐nonblack panel. Randomly assigning a black counterjudge—a black judge sitting with two nonblack judges—to a three‐judge panel of the Courts of Appeals nearly ensures that the panel will vote in favor of an affirmative action program. These results have important implications for assessing the relationship between diversity and representation on federal courts.     

Alien Citizens and the Canonical Immigrant: Do Stigmatized Attributes Affect Latina/o Judgment about Discrimination?

Negative elite and news media attention to Latino‐relevant issues, particularly undocumented immigration, has dramatically increased in recent years, potentially stigmatizing attributes of Latinos such as immigration status and language use. Concomitantly, immigration policy changes were leading to widespread arrests and deportation of many Latinos. Herein, we ask two questions: First, to what extent do Latinos perceive and experience discrimination? Second, to what extent do immigration status, generational status, and language use moderate beliefs about discrimination? Using Pew National Survey of Latinos data, we find that Latino beliefs about the problem of discrimination is a decreasing function of “proximity” to the “canonical immigrant”—defined here as first‐generation immigrants who are Spanish‐language dominant. Further, we demonstrate that reported rates of victimization due to discrimination exhibit no clear pattern and are flat over time. We conclude by demonstrating that discrimination beliefs have significant implications for systemic trust, anxiety, and policy preferences.     

Moving up versus moving out: Neighborhood effects in housing mobility programs

Abstract

This article suggests ways to better design, conduct, and interpret evaluations of the effects of housing mobility programs on participants, with emphasis on how to isolate neighborhood effects. It reviews earlier critiques of neighborhood effects research and discusses the key assumptions of housing mobility programs—about the benefits of affluent neighbors, the spatial organization of opportunity for the urban poor, and the meanings of “neighborhood” to residents, researchers, and policy makers.

Studying mobility contexts, especially in suburban areas, offers special challenges to researchers. More research is needed that looks at residents’ social ties and uses mixed‐methods approaches. Ethnographic data, in particular, would enhance the validity of the quantitative data that now dominate studies of neighborhood effects. Adding substantially to what we know about the processes or mechanisms—the “how” of neighborhood effects—mixed‐methods approaches would also make research much more useful to policy makers and program managers.     

Tax decentralization and local government size

This paper investigates the relationship between fiscal federalism and the sizes of local governments. While many empirical studies emphasized that grants encourage the growth of local public spending and local taxes constrain it, they are more silent regarding the effects of different types of tax autonomy. The paper addresses this issue by arguing that tax decentralization as organized on tax bases used only by local governments (tax-separation), rather than on tax-base sharing, would restrain local public expenditures. Using an unbalanced panel of OECD countries, the key finding is that only property taxes—mostly based on a “tax-separation” scheme—seem to favor smaller local governments. Thus, while tax decentralization is a necessary condition for limiting the growth of local governments, it does not appear sufficient, as tax-separation schemes among government levels would in fact be required.     

“Tell It Like It Is”: Decision Making,Groupthink, and Decisiveness among U.S. Federal Subcabinet Executives

In addition to difficulties gathering and evaluating complete information, cognitive limitations and biases preclude individuals from making fully value‐maximizing choices when making decisions. It has been suggested that, done properly, involving advisors can compensate for individual‐level limitations. However, the “groupthink” tradition has highlighted ways group‐aided decision making can fail to live up to its potential. Out of this literature has emerged a paradigm Janis calls “vigilant problem‐solving.” For this article, we interviewed 20 heads of subcabinet‐level organizations in the U.S. federal government, asking questions about how they made important decisions. Ten were nominated by “good‐government” experts, 10 chosen at random. We wanted to see whether there were differences in how members of those two groups made decisions, specifically, to what extent executives in the two categories used a “vigilant” process. We found, however, that similarities between the two groups overwhelmed differences: As best as we were able to measure, decision making by U.S. subcabinet executives tracks vigilant decision making recommendations fairly closely. The similarity reflects a common style of senior‐level decision making, which we theorize grows out of government bureaucracy's methodical culture. We did, however, develop evidence for a difference between outstanding executives and others on another dimension of decision making style. Outstanding executives valued decision making decisiveness—“bias for action”—more than the comparison group. Perhaps, then, what distinguishes outstanding executives from others is not vigilance but decisiveness. Contrary to the implications of the groupthink literature, the danger in government may be “paralysis by analysis” as much or more than groupthink.     

Addressing the next wave of Internet regulation: Toward a workable principle for nondiscrimination

The ultimate formulation of the Federal Communications Commission's “nondiscrimination on the Internet” principle could have a significant impact on economic welfare and on innovation. In this article, we explain the economics of discrimination as it applies to the Internet, and we offer a new approach for identifying anticompetitive discrimination. Our proposal would require a complaining content provider to prove (i) the broadband service provider has discriminated in favor of some affiliated content provider that is “similarly situated” to the independent content provider; (ii) such disparate treatment is based on affiliation and not on some other consideration; (iii) the independent content provider has been unreasonably restrained in its ability to compete; and (iv) the harm it suffers as a result of the discrimination would likely redound to the harm of broadband users.     

(Un)principled principals, (un)principled agents: The differential effects of managerial civil service reforms on corruption in developing and OECD countries

Do management practices have similar anticorruption effects in OECD and developing countries? Despite prominent cautions against “New Zealand” reforms which enhance managerial discretion in developing countries, scholars have not assessed this question statistically. Our article addresses this gap through a conjoint experiment with 6,500 public servants in three developing countries and one OECD country. Our experiment assesses Weberian relative to managerial approaches to recruitment, job stability, and pay. We argue that in developing countries with institutionalized corruption and weak rule of law—yet not OECD countries without such features—“unprincipled” principals use managerial discretion over hiring, firing, and pay to favor “unprincipled” bureaucratic agents who engage in corruption. Our results support this argument: managerial practices are associated with greater bureaucratic corruption in our surveyed developing countries, yet have little effect in our OECD country. Alleged “best practices” in public management in OECD countries may thus be “worst practices” in developing countries.     

Attribute Affinity: U.S. Natives’ Attitudes Toward Immigrants

Political Behavior - We examine the extent to which relevant social identity traits shared between two individuals—what we term “attribute affinity”—can moderate out-group...     

The architecture of the Electoral College,the House size effect,and the referendum paradox

Using data from U.S. presidential elections, we show how seemingly insignificant changes to what we call the “architecture” of the Electoral College can cause different candidates to be elected President, even when no one changes how they vote. We consider varying the size of the House of Representatives, the method of apportionment, the number of “Senate” electoral votes cast by each state, and the lower bound on the number of “House” electoral votes cast by each state. We consider, in particular, elections with a “referendum paradox”. In these elections, the electoral vote winner is not the popular vote winner. Our work extends Neubauer and Zeitlin (2003) who analyzed the case of the 2000 election. We give an explanation for the effects that we observe in the data.     

“Sexual Assault” and Other Buzz Phrases that Need to Die

Academics nowadays have invented many phrases for which they demand widespread acceptance that do not accurately represent reality, or which make no sense when we consider them closely. Prime among these is the concept of “sexual assault,” which has made its way into state laws and the UCMJ since its coinage in the 1960s and 1970s and is now a mainstay of training on college campuses. This concept is flawed because it includes all sexual actions under the rubric of the noun “assault,” as if we spoke of “driving aggression” rather than “aggressive driving,” to color all driving with the possibility of aggression. It is simply not true that sexuality is nothing but one more form aggression, and that all sex is potentially aggression if it is perceived by one partner as such. Another false coinage we are asked to accept is the notion that men “objectivize” women. In fact few men want to sleep with or get an erotic charge from objects; if anything the issue seems to be focus on physical details. Then there is the widely repeated assertion that “gender is assigned at birth.” Rather than debating whether or not this is so we should ask whether the concept itself makes sense. Assigned? By what entity? Just at birth? These are examples of linguistic over-reach, the attempt to change the world with words rather than letting a change in the way we see the world (Kuhn’s paradigm shift) produce corresponding words in a more gradual way that most of us can accept. Just because we hear these phrases all the time from professional wordsmith academics with axes to grind, we need not feel constrained to accept them if they are not accurate representations of the world.     

Locke, Darwin, and the American Science of Modern Virtue

American “progress” has typically been reconstructed in terms of the Lockean understanding of who we are. That “progress” is only ambiguously progress. It highlights the truth about our personal freedom, but at the expense of the truth about who we are as free and relational beings. So our Lockeanism receives and deserves Darwinian criticism—criticism from the point of view of the social animals evolutionary theory says we are. This article is a scientific prelude to our openness to a theory that incorporates what’s true about Locke, what’s true about Darwin, and more.     

Emoticon convergence in Internet chat rooms

The present study examines sex and age differences in the use of emoticons (graphic representations of facial expressions) in Internet chat rooms. Data were collected from four Noesis chat rooms (“18+”, “30-something”, “40-something” and “50+”). Although women were more likely than men to use emoticons, there was no difference between the sexes in the range of emoticons used. The fact that men expressed a similar range of emoticons to women implies a general convergence towards female expression in mixed-sex communication contexts. Chat room users without a profile picture were also more likely to use winking emoticons. This may be because these types of emoticons are more flirtatious in intent, and it is easier for chatters to engage in risky communications when they are less identifiable. Furthermore, age had little bearing on the uptake of emoticons as well as the types of emoticons expressed. We draw upon Communication Accommodation Theory to help explain why emotional expression may converge in the chat room context.     

The Politics of Everyday Coalition-Building

One of the most important challenges of contemporary progressive politics is building social movements for change that take up the ways that that relations of power are shaped by the interaction and intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability and other lines of power. As such, questions related to coalition—political solidarity across difference—are key. How do we build coalitions that take up the complexity of these power relationships? How do we build movements that don't leave people out? In this article, I will distinguish between two approaches to coalition. The first are coalitions grounded in shared or overlapping interests or goals; in such coalitions, groups identify common ground and then work together towards the achievement of mutual goals or interests. The second is grounded in a process of what María Lugones (2003) calls becoming “interdependently resistant” in which people recognize and back up each other’s resistances to multiple relations of power in their everyday lives. This article unpacks the nuts and bolts of building such “everyday coalitions” in our lives.     

Women on the Battleground: Does Gender Condition the Use of Negative Campaigning?

This article presents the findings of an explorative study examining to what extent and under which conditions gender influences the use of negative campaigning in Western Europe. It advances existing research in two ways. First, it is one of the few empirical examinations to date exploring gender differences in negative campaigning outside the US context. Second, it brings to bear novel data on this topic from British, Dutch and German parliamentary election campaigns between 1980 and 2006. In essence, this study explores whether we can find gender effects on the use of negative campaigning in Western Europe. These effects are less likely to be found in these three Western European countries than in the United States, because we expect smaller candidate effects in parliamentary systems than in presidential systems. The analysis suggests that female party leaders are significantly more likely to “go negative”. However, this difference between male and female party leaders is entirely due to the inclusion of Margaret Thatcher in the analysis. Without her, the difference disappears.     

LOCAL GOVERNMENTS AS INNOVATORS*

Abstract: This article opens with a non-Australian example of innovation in local government. Next, attention is devoted to the concept and definition of “innovation”—necessary because the word has been used in many different and often confusing ways. Some illustrations of overseas research work on local government innovation are given. The paper then considers what is currently known about innovative practices in Australian local government management. It concludes by exploring the bases of innovative managerial activity and suggesting ways in which the capacity to innovate might be enhanced.     

A Checkpoint Effect? Evidence from a Natural Experiment on Travel Restrictions in the West Bank

Does nonviolent repression prompt subject groups to obey or rebel? By what mechanism does it do so? To address these questions, we exploit a natural experiment based on a 2009 policy toward the “easement” of checkpoints—nonviolent impediments to movement—in the West Bank. We sample populations across 17 villages (n = 599), beside one checkpoint slated for easement (treatment) and one that will undergo no change (control), before and after the intervention. We then pursue difference‐in‐difference estimation. This design is experimental, as easement was orthogonal to Palestinian attitudes; for robustness, we test our findings against an independent panel (n = 1,200). We find that easement makes subject populations less likely to support violence; we suggest humiliation as the mechanism bridging nonviolent repression with militancy. This warrants rethinking Israeli security policy, as short‐term concerns over Palestinian mobility may be compromising Israel's long‐term interests. By extension, checkpoint easement may positively affect peace negotiations.     

Learning More from Political Communication Experiments: Pretreatment and Its Effects

Research on political communication effects has enjoyed great progress over the past 25 years. A key ingredient underlying these advances is the increased usage of experiments that demonstrate how communications influence opinions and behaviors. Virtually all of these studies pay scant attention to events that occur prior to the experiment—that is, in “pretreatment events.” In this article, we explore how and when the pretreatment environment affects experimental outcomes. We present two studies—one where we control the pretreatment environment and one where it naturally occurred—to show how pretreatment effects can influence experimental outcomes. We argue that, under certain conditions, attending to pretreatment dynamics leads to novel insights, including a more accurate portrait of the pliability of the mass public and the identification of potentially two groups of citizens—what we call malleability reactive and dogmatic.     

The Limits of Administration: A Response to Christopher Hood

The development of states coincides with the continuous (re)definition of administrative limits, according to Kutsal Yesilkagit, in this response to Christopher Hood. Hood’s thought‐provoking essay suggests putting the concept of administrative limits to greater use as an analytical concept and explores the idea of administrative limits from three basic ways of thinking: cybernetics, economics and cultural theory. This author critically analyzes one of Hood’s main conclusions—that different types of administrative limits may exist, and that “what kinds of limits we find where is likely to remain a central and contested issue in administrative analysis.”     

Integration to What? Marginalization from What?: Keynote Address at 19th Nordiske Sociologkongres, 13–15 June 1997, Copenhagen: “Integration and Marginalization.”

The modern world-system has created considerable confusion about what we can mean by integration and marginalization into our societies/states. One of the principles of most sovereign states in the last two centuries is that they are composed of “citizens.” Once there were citizens, there were non-citizens as well. Citizenship became something very valuable, and consequently not something one was very willing to share with others. Despite the fact that citizenship is a cherished good, which gives rise to “protectionist” sentiment, migration is a constantly recurring phenomenon in the modern world, which leads to the issue of national integration. The world revolution of 1968 put into question, for the first time since the French Revolution, the concept of citizenship. What was different about me world revolution of 1968 was that it was an expression of disillusionment in the possibilities of state-level reformism. The post-1968 movements added something new. They insisted that racism and sexism were not merely matters of individual prejudice and discrimination but that they took on “institutional” forms as well. What these movements seemed to be talking about was not overt juridical discrimination but the covert forms that were hidden within the concept of “citizen” The concept of citizenship is, in its essence, always simultaneously inclusionary and exclusionary. We should begin to conceive whether we can go beyond or dispense with the concept of citizen, and if so, to replace it with what?     

The domestic origins of human rights trials: A case study of the Second Boer War

What explains decisions taken by states around the world to prosecute members of their own armed forces for human rights violations? The dominant trend in existing literature suggests that a “justice cascade” best explains the growing prevalence of human rights trials. However, while norm diffusion offers some explanatory power in the contemporary era, other mechanisms are necessary to explain many early human rights trials. Through an analysis of one of the first recorded instances of what we now term “human rights trials” — the court-martials of six British Empire officers for the murder of POWs, civilians, and a missionary in the Second Boer War — this article identifies other crucial mechanisms driving prosecutions that retain relevance in the contemporary era. I find that signaling to domestic audiences, both at “home” and in recently conquered territories, can be critical motivators in elite or government decisions to pursue human rights trials.