Measuring the democracy–repression nexus

A considerable amount of time and intellectual energy has been expended detailing the nature of the relationship between democracy and a state's use of repressive force against its citizens. This article moves the discussion forward both methodologically and substantively. I use a fully Bayesian structural model with latent variables to mitigate the effects of measurement error in both democracy and repression. Further, I estimate two models, one treating democracy as a single overarching concept, similar to the strategy followed by Davenport and Armstrong (2004), Poe and Tate (1994) and one treating democracy as two-dimensional (voice and veto) as suggested by Davenport (2007b). I find that the two models, though closely related offer substantively different predictions. Statistical measures of fit favor the two-dimensional model. Further, I find that the effects of voice and veto are each strongly conditioned by the other.     

Life, Health, and Disability Insurance: Understanding the Relationships

Communitarian values are stronger in health insurance than in life or disability insurance. This correlates with increased tolerance for insurers' use of genetic information in disability insurance underwriting, which, in turn, is relevant to the scope and content of proposals to regulate such use.     

Fiscal consequences of public corruption: Empirical evidence from state bond ratings

Empirical analyses of public corruption focus predominantly on international differences; regional differences in public corruption within a single country receive little attention. We empirically investigate the effect of public corruption in the United States on state bond ratings, which previous research shows are inversely related to net interest costs on public debt. After controlling for various economic influences on bond ratings, we find that more corrupt states have lower bond ratings, which implies that taxpayers in more corrupt states face a negative pecuniary externality by paying a premium for debt.     

The broken bridge of public finance: majority rule,earmarked taxes and social engineering

Public Choice - A theoretically grounded approach to causal questions illuminates both the utility and limitations of the potential outcomes (PO) framework as a model for historically-focused,...     

Network Analysis and the Law: Measuring the Legal Importance of Precedents at the U.S. Supreme Court

Timothy R. Johnson Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, 1414 Social Sciences Building, 267 19th Ave. South, Minneapolis, MN 55455 e-mail: trj{at}umn.edu James F. Spriggs, II Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis, Campus Box 1063, One Brookings Drive, St Louis, MO 63130 e-mail: jspriggs{at}artsci.wustl.edu Sangick Jeon Department of Political Science, Stanford University, 616 Serra Street, Encina Hall West, Room 100, Stanford, CA 94305-6044 e-mail: sjeon{at}stanford.edu Paul J. Wahlbeck Department of Political Science, George Washington University, 1922 F Street, N.W. Suite 401, Washington, DC 20052 e-mail: wahlbeck{at}gwu.edu e-mail: jhfowler{at}ucsd.edu (corresponding author) We construct the complete network of 26,681 majority opinionswritten by the U.S. Supreme Court and the cases that cite themfrom 1791 to 2005. We describe a method for using the patternsin citations within and across cases to create importance scoresthat identify the most legally relevant precedents in the networkof Supreme Court law at any given point in time. Our measuresare superior to existing network-based alternatives and, forexample, offer information regarding case importance not evidentin simple citation counts. We also demonstrate the validityof our measures by showing that they are strongly correlatedwith the future citation behavior of state courts, the U.S.Courts of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court. In so doing,we show that network analysis is a viable way of measuring howcentral a case is to law at the Court and suggest that it canbe used to measure other legal concepts. Authors' note: We appreciate the suggestions of Randy Calvert,Frank Cross, Pauline Kim, Andrew Martin, Richard Pacelle, JimRogers, Margo Schlanger, Amy Steigerwalt, and participants inthe Workshop on Empirical Research in the Law at WashingtonUniversity in St Louis School of Law. We presented former versionsof this article at the 2006 meeting of the Midwest PoliticalScience Association, Chicago, April 20–23; the 2006 meetingof the Southern Political Science Association, Atlanta, GA,January 5–7; and the 2006 Empirical Legal Studies Conference,Austin, TX, October 27–28.     

The impact of changing financial work incentives on the earnings of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) beneficiaries

SSDI beneficiaries lose their entire cash benefit if they perform work that is substantial gainful activity (SGA) after using Social Security work incentive programs. The complete loss of benefits might be a work disincentive for beneficiaries. We report results from a pilot project that replaces the complete loss of benefits with a gradual reduction in benefits of $1 for every $2 earned above an earnings disregard level. Beneficiaries who volunteered to participate in the project were randomly assigned to a group receiving the new program or to a control group. The policy led to a 25 percent increase in the percentage of beneficiaries with earnings above the annualized SGA amount, or $11,760 in 2009 dollars. It did not result in a reduction in benefit payments. © 2011 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.