Is Temperature Exogenous? The Impact of Civil Conflict on the Instrumental Climate Record in Sub‐Saharan Africa

Research into the effects of climate on political and economic outcomes assumes that short‐term variation in weather is exogenous to the phenomena being studied. However, weather data are derived from stations operated by national governments, whose political capacity and stability affect the quality and continuity of coverage. We show that civil conflict risk in sub‐Saharan Africa is negatively correlated with the number and density of weather stations contributing to a country's temperature record. This effect is both cross‐sectional—countries with higher average conflict risk tend to have poorer coverage—and cross‐temporal—civil conflict leads to loss of weather stations. Poor coverage induces a small downward bias in one widely used temperature data set, due to its interpolation method, and increases measurement error, potentially attenuating estimates of the temperature–conflict relationship. Combining multiple observational data sets to reduce measurement error almost doubles the estimated effect of temperature anomalies on civil conflict risk.     

The Influence of Public Sentiment on Supreme Court Opinion Clarity

We examine whether public opinion leads Supreme Court justices to alter the content of their opinions. We argue that when justices anticipate public opposition to their decisions, they write clearer opinions. We develop a novel measure of opinion clarity based on multifaceted textual readability scores, which we validate using human raters. We examine an aggregate time series analysis of the influence of public mood on opinion clarity and an individual‐level sample of Supreme Court cases paired with issue‐specific public opinion polls. The empirical results from both models show that justices write clearer opinions when their rulings contradict popular sentiment. These results suggest public opinion influences the Court, and suggest that future scholarship should analyze how public opinion influences the written content of decision makers’ policies.     

Is the Effect of Procedural Justice on Police Legitimacy Invariant? Testing the Generality of Procedural Justice and Competing Antecedents of Legitimacy

Objectives

This study tests the generality of Tyler’s process-based model of policing by examining whether the effect of procedural justice and competing variables (i.e., distributive justice and police effectiveness) on police legitimacy evaluations operate in the same manner across individual and situational differences.

Methods

Data from a random sample of mail survey respondents are used to test the “invariance thesis” (N = 1681). Multiplicative interaction effects between the key antecedents of legitimacy (measured separately for obligation to obey and trust in the police) and various demographic categories, prior experiences, and perceived neighborhood conditions are estimated in a series of multivariate regression equations.

Results

The effect of procedural justice on police legitimacy is largely invariant. However, regression and marginal results show that procedural justice has a larger effect on trust in law enforcement among people with prior victimization experience compared to their counterparts. Additionally, the distributive justice effect on trust in the police is more pronounced for people who have greater fear of crime and perceive higher levels of disorder in their neighborhood.

Conclusion

The results suggest that Tyler’s process-based model is a “general” theory of individual police legitimacy evaluations. The police can enhance their legitimacy by ensuring procedural fairness during citizen interactions. The role of procedural justice also appears to be particularly important when the police interact with crime victims.

     

Parental Depressive Symptoms and Youth Internalizing and Externalizing Problems: The Moderating Role of Interparental Conflict

The current investigation examined if interparental conflict (IPC), including psychological and physical violence, moderated the relationship between parental depressive symptoms and youth internalizing and externalizing problems, respectively, in a sample of youth with a parent with a history of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). One hundred and eighty families with a parent with a history of MDD (M _age = 41.96; 88.9 % mothers) and a youth in the target age range of 9-to-15 years (49.4 % females; M _age = 11.46) participated. Findings indicated that IPC exacerbated the effect of parental depressive symptoms on internalizing, but not externalizing, problems for both males and females. Findings suggest that, in families with a parent who has a history of depression, parental depressive symptoms and IPC together have important implications for youth internalizing problems. Targeting improvement for both parent depressive symptoms and interparental conflict may directly lead to decreases in youth internalizing symptoms in the context of parental depression.     

Citizenship and Surveys: Group Conflict and Nationality-of-Interviewer Effects in Arab Public Opinion Data

Political Behavior - More research than ever before uses public opinion data to investigate society and politics in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Ethnic identities are widely theorized...     

Anatomy of agency capture: An organizational typology for diagnosing and remedying capture

Recent crises and disasters in regulated industries have renewed scholarly attention to regulatory capture. The present research incorporates and builds on these efforts by creating a typology to help researchers and practitioners organize the capture literature. The typology has two dimensions: the degree of coordination within the regulated industry, the agents of capture; and the scope of capture within the agency and elected officials, the targets of capture. I illustrate the utility of the typology by using a case study of banking regulation before the 2008 global financial crisis. The case study uses process‐tracing methodology to weigh evidence about the role and scope of capture in creating the crisis. The contributions of this research are twofold. First, for capture theory, the typology assists in organizing the disparate, multidisciplinary research on capture mechanisms and remedies. Second, for practice, this organization can lead to more accurate diagnoses about the scope of capture and suggest appropriately tailored remedies.     

Decreasing Improper Payments in a Complex Federal Program

Since the early 2000s, the U.S. federal government has placed increasing focus on combating improper payments. Implementing policies to control improper payments is no easy task. Federal programs are often large, complex, riddled with moral hazard concerns, and jointly implemented. In 2011, the U.S. Department of Labor adopted a national strategy to combat improper payments in the Unemployment Insurance program. This article examines the effect that the Department of Labor's strategic initiative had on lowering states’ improper payments. Findings show that two of its tools—mandatory cross matching of employment records between the National Directory of New Hires and State Directories of New Hires and a communication strategy known as messaging—played a statistically significant role in halting the rise of improperly paid unemployment insurance claims. These results suggest that information technology tools and increased communication among stakeholders can be effective in lowering improper payments and improving government performance.     

The likelihood of social choice violations in rank sum scoring: algorithms and evidence from NCAA cross country running

Recent contributions have used combinatorial algorithms to determine the likelihood of particular social choice violations in rank sum scoring. Given the broad importance of rank sum scoring (e.g., in non-parametric statistical testing, sporting competition, and mathematical competition), it is important to establish the level of ambiguity generated by this aggregation rule. Combinatorial likelihoods are naïve, however, in that they assume each possible outcome sequence for an event to be equally likely. We develop a computational algorithm to extend upon previous combinatorial results as to the likelihood of a violation of transitivity or independence in rank sum scoring. We use a similar computational scoring approach to analyze the empirically-observed likelihood of each such violation across fourteen NCAA Cross Country Championships. Within the data, rank sum scoring fails to specify a robust winning team (i.e., one that also rank sum wins against each possible subset of opponents) in 4 of 14 cases. Overall, we find that empirical likelihoods of social choice violations are consistently (significantly) overestimated by combinatorial expectations. In the NCAA data, we find correlated ability (quality) levels within team (group) and discuss this as a cause of lower empirical likelihoods. Combinatorial analysis proves reliable in predicting the order of empirical likelihoods across violation type and event setting.