US on Benjamin Lauderdale

Republican-Majority Appellate Panels Increase Execution Rates for Capital Defendants

Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We use the quasi-random assignment of cases to three-judge panels on the US Courts of Appeals to assess the consistency of adjudication of death penalty appeals. We find clear evidence that panels apply different standards depending on whether a majority of the panel was appointed by Democratic or Republican presidents. Unlike previous work on panel effects in the US Courts of Appeals, we show that these effects persist to the end of the process of adjudication. Since the the early 1980s, the probability of ultimate execution has been increased for inmates when their first Court of Appeals case was assigned to a panel with a majority of Republican appointees.

Model-Based Pre-Election Polling for National and Sub-National Outcomes in the US and UK

Tue, 15 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We describe a strategy for applying multilevel regression and post-stratication (MRP) methods to pre-election polling. Using a combination of contemporaneous polling, census data, past election polling, past election results, as well as other sources of information, we are able to construct probabilistic, internally consistent estimates of national vote and the sub-national electoral districts that determine seats or electoral votes in many electoral systems. We report on the performance of three applications of the general framework conducted and publicly released in advance of the 2016 UK Referendum on EU Membership, the 2016 US Presidential Election, and the 2017 UK General Election.

Decomposing Public Opinion Variation into Ideology, Idiosyncrasy and Instability

Thu, 01 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We propose a method for decomposing variation in the issue preferences that US citizens express on surveys into three sources of variability that correspond to major threads in public opinion research. We find that, averaging across a set of high profile US political issues, a single ideological dimension accounts for about 1/7 of opinion variation, individuals’ idiosyncratic preferences account for about 3/7, and response instability for the remaining 3/7. These shares vary substantially across issue types and the average share attributable to ideology doubles when a second ideological dimension is permitted. We also find that (unidimensional) ideology accounts for almost twice as much response variation (and response instability is substantially lower) among respondents with high, rather than low, political knowledge. Our estimation strategy is based on an ordinal probit model with random effects, and is applicable to other data sets that include repeated measurements of ordinal issue position data.

Legislator Characteristics, Constituency Characteristics, and Roll Call Voting

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Which matters more when legislators make decisions, their own characteristics or those of the people they represent? This paper uses comprehensive data on the personal attributes of both members of Congress and their constituents to com- pare the relative influence of eight legislator and constituency characteristics–party, race, gender, age, income, education, religion, and occupation–on roll call voting in the 109th and 110th Congresses. Our findings suggest that who governs matters considerably more than the literatures on representation and legislative decision-making have previously acknowledged: the effects of legislators’ own backgrounds are not limited to the handful of issue areas and personal characteristics that previous studies have examined. These findings strongly support recent calls for renewed attention to the “personal roots” of elite decision-making.

Recovering Vote by Race in Primary Elections: Does Local Ecological Inference Provide Accurate Estimates of Voting Behavior Without Polling Data?

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Scholars know far less about voting behavior in primary elections than in general elec- tions, yet in the many parts of the country where one party dominates, it is primary elections that determine who holds office. Because of the absence of the party cue, the roles of race, income and education in voting behavior are potentially more varied and consequential in the context of primaries. For example, elections contested by multiple black candidates–typically in majority-black electorates–can show striking patterns of racial voting despite the apparent lack of any overt cue from the race of the candidate. Unfortunately, studying primary elections is difficult because polling is sparse and of low quality. In this paper, we begin an assessment of whether the use of a local ecologi- cal inference method based on geographically-weighted kernel regressions can facilitate systematic study of these unpolled elections. Our local ecological inference technique weakens the assumptions made by standard ecological inference methods in an intuitive way that is appropriate to political geography. We demonstrate the relative robustness of our local ecological estimates of support by race in a difficult case where the correct answer is known and standard ecological inference methods give spectacularly wrong estimates: the state-level vote by race for Barack Obama and John McCain in the 2008 presidential election. We then apply these methods to a pilot study of the 2000 Illinois 1st Congressional District primary between Barack Obama and Bobby Rush.

Latent Versus Self-Reported Ideology

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Spatial voting axes are seldom directly measurable. In general, political scientists employ latent variable models that aim to infer the presence and characteristics of axes from their impact on measurable quantities such as voting behavior. Ideology in the electorate is a rare case where researchers regularly attempt to measure a spatial quantity directly, typically by asking people to rank themselves on ordinal scales from liberal to conservative. These self-reported ideology scores have been widely used as a nationally comparable measure of ideological position, but whether different citizens are using consistent criteria for assessing and reporting their ideology is largely unknown. To better understand the relationship between issue positions and ideology in the electorate, I develop a item-response model for self-reported ideology as a function of issue positions. I find that political information is required for voters to self-report ideology consistently with their issue positions. Groups which are less attuned to the terminology of the national political discourse tend to self-report ideology in ways that are less informative about their issue positions on the primary political axis defined by that discourse.