Step return versus net reward in the voluntary provision of a threshold public good: An adversarial collaboration

This research concerns how costs and benefits affect the voluntary provision of threshold public goods. Cadsby and Maynes (J. Public Econ. 71:53–73, 1999) hypothesized that the difference between the value and cost of such a good, its net reward, influences the likelihood of provision. Croson and Marks (Exp. Econ. 2:239–259, 2000) focused on the ratio of group payoff to total cost, the step return. We find that step return is the best predictor overall, although net reward has some impact, negatively affecting the probability of provision with inexperienced participants and positively affecting it with experienced participants.     

What Triggers Public Opposition to Immigration? Anxiety,Group Cues,and Immigration Threat

We examine whether and how elite discourse shapes mass opinion and action on immigration policy. One popular but untested suspicion is that reactions to news about the costs of immigration depend upon who the immigrants are. We confirm this suspicion in a nationally representative experiment: news about the costs of immigration boosts white opposition far more when Latino immigrants, rather than European immigrants, are featured. We find these group cues influence opinion and political action by triggering emotions—in particular, anxiety—not simply by changing beliefs about the severity of the immigration problem. A second experiment replicates these findings but also confirms their sensitivity to the stereotypic consistency of group cues and their context. While these results echo recent insights about the power of anxiety, they also suggest the public is susceptible to error and manipulation when group cues trigger anxiety independently of the actual threat posed by the group.     

A distributive N-amendment game with endogenous agenda formation

In this paper I analyze a 3-person voting game in which players sequentially choose amendments to a bill and then vote sophisticatedly on the resulting agenda. This game differs from previous work on endogenous agenda formation in that the number of items on the agenda is not fixed. Players keep making proposals until they can do no better. I find that there is a nonempty set of minimax equilibrium outcomes to the game, and that this set contains the simple von Neumann–Morgenstern stable set.     

The Social Dimension of Political Values

Political Behavior - Worries about the instability of political attitudes and lack of ideological constraint among the public are often pacified by the assumption that individuals have stable...     

Climate Policy,Energy Resources and Subnational Policy-Making: Comparative Policy Study of Hawaii and Victoria

Abstract

This paper considers key drivers to climate policy development with an emphasis on the role of a jurisdiction’s underlying energy resource. The states of Hawaii in the United States and Victoria in Australia provide an insightful comparative case study given their differing energy resources: Hawaii has no native fossil fuel resources but abundant renewable energy options while Victoria has an economy traditionally reliant on cheap, plentiful coal. The Advocacy Coalition Framework is applied to analyze why the two states, despite the different incentives provided by their energy resources, developed similar climate policies in the earlier period of policy response to global warming. Analysis finds the stable parameter of energy resources is counterbalanced by other policy drivers including public opinion, leadership and, in particular, features of policy-making particular to the subnational level that provide a different context for climate policy development to that offered at the national level.     

Law School Climates: Job Satisfaction Among Tenured US Law Professors

In this article, we combine quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate why post‐tenure law professors of color and women professors within the US legal academy are differentially dissatisfied with their work lives. Previous social science research has indicated lingering difficulties for professionals from traditionally marginalized groups as they advance to higher levels. Post‐tenure law professors have been understudied relative to similar senior‐level professionals. Mixed methods allow us to isolate institutional structure and implicit cultural bias as key mediators of this dissatisfaction, converging on issues of respect, voice, and collegiality as crucial. We use the example of the legal academy to show how empirical research can shed important light on the realities of legal professionals—here, the faculty who are training the next generation of US attorneys. Following in the new legal realist tradition, we demonstrate the power of mixed empirical methodologies for grasping social realities pertinent to law.