Free press and fair trial: The role of behavioral research

The growth of mass media has complicated the relatioship between the courts and the media. Free press and fair trial rights are kept in balance by the use of judicial restraints and remedies such asvoir dire, change of venue, and gag orders. This balance has shifted back and forth during the past two decades. Current case law and legal codes are inconsistent and provide insufficient guidance to judges in their use of restraints and remedies. Nor is there a body of empirical research on the impact of news coverage and juror behavior capable of informing the courts at this time. In this paper, we review and critically assess the empirical social science literature as it pertains to the legal issues involving free press and fair trial. We argue that carefully conducted empirical research could provide important information to the courts. We suggest research directions and methodological caveats to increase legal relevance and scientific validity.     

Compliance with the law

The effectiveness of law as an instrument of social control depends on the assumptions lawmakers and implementers have about human behavior. The tax laws offer a good example of the difficulties in trying to anticipate what people will do in response to various legal requirements. This paper proposes a new approach to understanding tax compliance drawn from behavioral decision theory. The paper discusses the issue of rationality, explores the strategies people use to make taxpaying decisions, focuses on the distinction between norm-processing and outcome-processing strategies, and presents some implications of this approach for research and for legal policy making.     

Prediction,Proxies, and Power

Many enduring questions in international relations theory focus on power relations, so it is important that scholars have a good measure of relative power. The standard measure of relative military power, the capability ratio, is barely better than random guessing at predicting militarized dispute outcomes. We use machine learning to build a superior proxy, the Dispute Outcome Expectations (DOE) score, from the same underlying data. Our measure is an order of magnitude better than the capability ratio at predicting dispute outcomes. We replicate Reed et al. (2008) and find, contrary to the original conclusions, that the probability of conflict is always highest when the state with the least benefits has a preponderance of power. In replications of 18 other dyadic analyses that use power as a control, we find that replacing the standard measure with DOE scores usually improves both in‐sample and out‐of‐sample goodness of fit.     

Restraining Gulliver: Institutional reform and the strengthening of state capacity and compliance

Governance in the developing world is fraught with problems of corruption, weak institutions, and inadequate expertise among bureaucrats. Failing to enforce laws and regulations is one way in which these problems manifest themselves. In this paper, we evaluate changes across three institutions charged with oversight or administration of labor justice in Mexico. We find that both autonomy from the executive and professionalization are necessary to improve compliance with labor law over time. Our study shows that professionalization can occur in several ways, including through training, merit hiring, and introducing experienced external administrators. The implications of the study are that reforms that increase the independence and legal authority of oversight institutions should be complemented by efforts to strengthen the professionalism of bureaucrats.     

Advancing police use of force research and practice: urgent issues and prospects

Leading police scholars and practitioners were asked to reflect on the most urgent issues that need to be addressed on the topic of use of force. Four themes emerged from their contributions: use of force and de-escalation training needs to improve and be evaluated; new ways of conceptualizing use of force encounters and better use of force response models need to be developed; the inequitable application of force, and how to remediate biases, needs to be more fully understood; and misconceptions about police use of force need to be identified and corrected. The highlighted topics serve as an agenda for future research. Such research should provide greater insight into when, where, and why force is used by police officers, and how it can be applied appropriately. If implemented, the practical recommendations included in the contributions should have a positive impact on police performance, public trust and confidence in the police, and citizen and officer safety.     

Using Bayesian Aldrich‐McKelvey Scaling to Study Citizens' Ideological Preferences and Perceptions

Aldrich‐McKelvey scaling is a powerful method that corrects for differential‐item functioning (DIF) in estimating the positions of political stimuli (e.g., parties and candidates) and survey respondents along a latent policy dimension from issue scale data. DIF arises when respondents interpret issue scales (e.g., the standard liberal‐conservative scale) differently and distort their placements of the stimuli and themselves. We develop a Bayesian implementation of the classical maximum likelihood Aldrich‐McKelvey scaling method that overcomes some important shortcomings in the classical procedure. We then apply this method to study citizens' ideological preferences and perceptions using data from the 2004–2012 American National Election Studies and the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. Our findings indicate that DIF biases self‐placements on the liberal‐conservative scale in a way that understates the extent of polarization in the contemporary American electorate and that citizens have remarkably accurate perceptions of the ideological positions of senators and Senate candidates.