William T Bianco
Biographic Data
| ID | 1102672 |
|---|---|
| NAME | William T Bianco |
| GIVEN NAMES | William T |
| FAMILY NAME | Bianco |
| SIGNATURE | BIANCO W T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Indiana University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2581-6837 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 403 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Textbooks in Political Science: Advice from Authors
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Writing an American Government Textbook: Lessons Learned
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The Bicameral Roots of Congressional Deadlock: Analyzing Divided Government Through the Lens of Majority Rule
Objective It is widely argued that a primary source of legislative deadlock in America is the combination of a secular increase in polarization, combined with constitutional provisions that divide law‐making power across branches. We argue that polarization affects productivity, but only given a particular pattern of divided government. We distinguish between split branches , where a president from one party faces a Congress controlled by the oth…
Incentivizing Innovation in a Knowledge Society
In Blockchain We Trust: Does Blockchain Itself Generate Trust
Objectives This study considers the affordance of users' perceived technological property of blockchains and investigates how users discover the possible actions that can be performed within blockchain media. With a focus on the role of trust, it analyzes how motivational affordances in blockchain media influence user experience Methods Qualitative methods are used to obtain the depth of understanding and elicit the perspective of blockchain medi…
Legislative Rules in Electoral Authoritarian Regimes: The Case of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council
This article focuses on the manipulation of legislative rules in electoral authoritarian states. Electoral liberalization in authoritarian regimes creates the capacity for opposition forces to win legislative seats, but it does not ensure voice in the policy process. While the literature on institutional authoritarianism points to co-optation, dominant parties, and redistribution as mechanisms to control policy outcomes in authoritarian legislatu…
Knowing What We Are Getting: Evaluating Scientific Research on the International Space Station
The debate over the value of the International Space Station has overlooked a fundamental question: What is the station's contribution to scientific knowledge? We address this question using a multivariate analysis of publication and patent data from station experiments. We find a relatively high probability that ISS experiments with PIs drawn from outside NASA will yield refereed publications and, furthermore, that these experiments have nonnegl…
Waypoints for Evaluating Big Science
As illustrated by the articles in this volume, there are considerable gaps in the measurement of research productivity/innovation for programs enabled by large initial and ongoing infrastructure investments. Such programs include NASA's International Space Station, DOE's National Ignition Facility, NSF's Polar Program, and CERN's Large Hadron Collider. The enormous sums spent on these projects are often justified by predictions about their contri…
Engineering cooperation: How Americans and Russians manage joint operation of the International Space Station
The 1990s agreements that created the International Space Station (ISS) described the effort as a partnership of equals, a joint venture between organizations that remained independent in terms of many procedures, norms, goals, and the assumptions underlying these factors. As a result, successful joint ISS operations required the participants, most notably the American and Russian space programs, to reconcile different procedures, norms, and trai…
American Politics Today
Predicting majority rule: Evaluating the uncovered set and the strong point
This paper compares two solution concepts for majority rule decision-making in multi-dimensional settings: the uncovered set and the strong point. Our goal is to determine which of these solution concepts is the appropriate generalization of the median voter theorem to more complex (and more realistic) multi-dimensional majority-rule settings. By making this comparison, we also contribute to the debate about the degree of sophisticated decision-m…
Party relevance and party survival in new democracies
We argue that the move to free and fair elections is only the first step in a democratic transition. With this change, competition moves into the legislative arena, where interests are defined not in terms of support or opposition to the old regime, but over competing visions of what government should do. Thus, examining legislative behavior and legislative outcomes helps us to understand the long-term political and policy trajectory of democrati…
The Impact of State Legislative Term Limits on the Competitiveness of Congressional Elections
This study examines the impact of state legislative term limits on the candidacy decisions of challengers in U.S. House elections. Using data from 1996 to 2006, the authors show that the impact of term limits is mitigated by local political factors, such as an incumbent’s election margin. The larger the incumbent’s previous electoral margin, the lower the likelihood of facing a quality challenger. The authors also identify an unanticipated conseq…
Ministerial Selection and Intraparty Organization in the Contemporary British Parliament
This article promotes a characterization of intraparty politics that explains how rank- and-file party members control the delegation of power to their cabinet ministers and shadow cabinet ministers. Using the uncovered set as a solution concept and a measure of party members' collective preferences, we explore the hypothesis that backbenchers' preferences constrain the ministerial selection process in a manner that mitigates agency problems. Spe…
The Constrained Instability of Majority Rule: Experiments on the Robustness of the Uncovered Set
The uncovered set has frequently been proposed as a solution concept for majority rule settings. This paper tests this proposition using a new technique for estimating uncovered sets and a series of experiments, including five-player computer-mediated experiments and 35-player paper-format experiments. The results support the theoretic appeal of the uncovered set. Outcomes overwhelmingly lie in or near the uncovered set. Furthermore, when prefere…
A Theory Waiting to Be Discovered and Used: A Reanalysis of Canonical Experiments on Majority-Rule Decision Making
The paper offers a reassessment of canonical attempts to address a fundamental question about majority rule: what is the relationship between the preferences held by the participants and the outcomes that emerge from their interactions? Previous work, based on the analysis of abstract spatial models or relying on data from real-world spatial experiments, has yielded a mass of contradictory findings. Our work applies a new technique for estimating…
Uncovering Evidence of Conditional Party Government: Reassessing Majority Party Influence in Congress and State Legislatures
This paper aims at enriching the debate over the measurement of majority party influence in contemporary American legislatures. Our use of a new analytic technique, a grid-search program for characterizing the uncovered set, enables us to begin with a better model of legislative proceedings that abandons the simple one-dimensional spatial models in favor of the more realistic two-dimensional version. Our conclusions are based on the analysis of r…
Last Post for “The Greatest Generation: The Policy Implications of the Decline of Military Experience in the U.S. Congress
This paper characterizes the behavioral and policy implications of the decline in the number of military veterans in the U.S. Congress, from more than 70% of legislators in the early 1970s to less than 30% in the contemporary House and Senate. Many scholars argue that military service shapes information and beliefs, and that this decline has had negative effects on defense policy. The analysis tests these arguments using voting data from the Hous…
The Uncovered Set and the Limits of Legislative Action
We present a simulation technique for sorting out the size, shape, and location of the uncovered set to estimate the set of enactable outcomes in “real-world” social choice situations, such as the contemporary Congress. The uncovered set is a well-known but underexploited solution concept in the literature on spatial voting games and collective choice mechanisms. We explain this solution concept in nontechnical terms, submit some theoretical obse…
What Happens When House Members “Run with Congress”? The Electoral Consequences of Institutional Loyalty
This article characterizes the electoral consequences of messages of institutional loyalty and disloyalty sent by incumbent House members to their constituents. We show that, for the contemporary House, there is variation in these messages—not all incumbents in the contemporary House “run for Congress by running against Congress.” Moreover, we show that these messages can, under the right conditions, have significant electoral consequences, even …
America's Congress: Actions in the Public Sphere, James Madison through Newt Gingrich . David R. Mayhew
Party Campaign Committees and the Distribution of Tally Program Funds
Different Paths to the Same Result: Rational Choice, Political Psychology, and Impression Formation in Campaigns
This paper analyzes impression formation in political campaigns-how citizens assess a candidate's unobserved characteristics as a prelude to their vote decisions. This behavior is modeled using two approaches, one a psychology-based model in which voters behave as motivated tacticians, the other a game-theoretic version where voters are sequentially rational. The aim of the analysis is two-fold: to deepen our understanding of how voters reconcile…
Reliable Source or Ususal Suspects? Cue-taking, Information Transmission, and Legislative Committees
This paper critiques the expectation that informative legislative committees, those that provide policy-relevant information to their parent body, will be "microcosms of their parent chamber" (Krehbiel 1991, 95), with the median committee ideal point close to the floor median and remaining ideal points distributed about the committee median. Drawing on the concept of cue-taking (Matthews and Stimson 1975), I show that a similarity of medians is n…
The Electoral Connection in the Early Congress: The Case of the Compensation Act of 1816
Theory: We extend research on the electoral connection beyond the modem Congress to the Congress of the early 1800s. Our analysis shows evidence of individual accountability in voting on the Compensation Act of 1816 and in decisions to run for reelection in the 1816 election. Hypotheses: An electoral connection should produce a marginality effect in voting on the Compensation Act (vulnerable legislators less likely to vote yea), and surplus retir…
Ministerial Selection and Intraparty Organization in the Contemporary British Parliament
This article promotes a characterization of intraparty politics that explains how rank- and-file party members control the delegation of power to their cabinet ministers and shadow cabinet ministers. Using the uncovered set as a solution concept and a measure of party members' collective preferences, we explore the hypothesis that backbenchers' preferences constrain the ministerial selection process in a manner that mitigates agency problems. Spe…
Strategic Decisions on Candidacy in U. S. Congressional Districts
This paper tests Jacobson and Kernell's strategic decision-making theory by examining individual candidacy decisions in four congressional elections. The partisan balance in a district appears to be an important variable for predicting what type of challenger runs in either an open-seat or an incumbent election. The candidacy decisions of experienced challengers in incumbent elections appear to be influenced by changes in economic conditions, as …
The Electoral Connection in the Early Congress: The Case of the Compensation Act of 1816
Theory: We extend research on the electoral connection beyond the modem Congress to the Congress of the early 1800s. Our analysis shows evidence of individual accountability in voting on the Compensation Act of 1816 and in decisions to run for reelection in the 1816 election. Hypotheses: An electoral connection should produce a marginality effect in voting on the Compensation Act (vulnerable legislators less likely to vote yea), and surplus retir…
Cooperation by Design: Leadership, Structure, and Collective Dilemmas
We return to the analysis of cooperation among interdependent rational individuals. We emphasize the limited impact of iteration (or repeated play) and explore the possibility of an alternative: intervention by rational agents, whom we call leaders. We show that leadership is more significant for initiating cooperation than for sustaining it. In addition, we identify two features of organizations that are critical in determining a leader's abilit…
Partisanship and Group Support Over Time: A Multivariate Analysis
We propose measuring group support for political parties by means of multivariate techniques that have become standard in other areas of political behavior. This approach yields improved insights into the marginal difference made by membership in each group and into the nature of a party's support coalition. As an example of this approach, we analyze the Democratic coalition since 1952. Our results differ from those of previous studies in a numbe…
Uncovering Evidence of Conditional Party Government: Reassessing Majority Party Influence in Congress and State Legislatures
This paper aims at enriching the debate over the measurement of majority party influence in contemporary American legislatures. Our use of a new analytic technique, a grid-search program for characterizing the uncovered set, enables us to begin with a better model of legislative proceedings that abandons the simple one-dimensional spatial models in favor of the more realistic two-dimensional version. Our conclusions are based on the analysis of r…
Last Post for “The Greatest Generation: The Policy Implications of the Decline of Military Experience in the U.S. Congress
This paper characterizes the behavioral and policy implications of the decline in the number of military veterans in the U.S. Congress, from more than 70% of legislators in the early 1970s to less than 30% in the contemporary House and Senate. Many scholars argue that military service shapes information and beliefs, and that this decline has had negative effects on defense policy. The analysis tests these arguments using voting data from the Hous…
A Theory Waiting to Be Discovered and Used: A Reanalysis of Canonical Experiments on Majority-Rule Decision Making
The paper offers a reassessment of canonical attempts to address a fundamental question about majority rule: what is the relationship between the preferences held by the participants and the outcomes that emerge from their interactions? Previous work, based on the analysis of abstract spatial models or relying on data from real-world spatial experiments, has yielded a mass of contradictory findings. Our work applies a new technique for estimating…
The Uncovered Set and the Limits of Legislative Action
We present a simulation technique for sorting out the size, shape, and location of the uncovered set to estimate the set of enactable outcomes in “real-world” social choice situations, such as the contemporary Congress. The uncovered set is a well-known but underexploited solution concept in the literature on spatial voting games and collective choice mechanisms. We explain this solution concept in nontechnical terms, submit some theoretical obse…
Crime and Punishment: Are One-Shot, Two-Person Games Enough
George Tsebelis argued in the March 1989 issue of this Review that decision theory is completely appropriate for analyzing games against nature but not appropriate for dissecting games against a rational opponent. Analysts who mistake a rational opponent for nature in constructing models commit what Tsebelis calls "the Robinson Crusoe fallacy." In this controversy, William Bianco and Peter Ordeshook attack components of Tsebelis's argument. Bianc…
The Constrained Instability of Majority Rule: Experiments on the Robustness of the Uncovered Set
The uncovered set has frequently been proposed as a solution concept for majority rule settings. This paper tests this proposition using a new technique for estimating uncovered sets and a series of experiments, including five-player computer-mediated experiments and 35-player paper-format experiments. The results support the theoretic appeal of the uncovered set. Outcomes overwhelmingly lie in or near the uncovered set. Furthermore, when prefere…
What Happens When House Members “Run with Congress”? The Electoral Consequences of Institutional Loyalty
This article characterizes the electoral consequences of messages of institutional loyalty and disloyalty sent by incumbent House members to their constituents. We show that, for the contemporary House, there is variation in these messages—not all incumbents in the contemporary House “run for Congress by running against Congress.” Moreover, we show that these messages can, under the right conditions, have significant electoral consequences, even …
Reliable Source or Ususal Suspects? Cue-taking, Information Transmission, and Legislative Committees
This paper critiques the expectation that informative legislative committees, those that provide policy-relevant information to their parent body, will be "microcosms of their parent chamber" (Krehbiel 1991, 95), with the median committee ideal point close to the floor median and remaining ideal points distributed about the committee median. Drawing on the concept of cue-taking (Matthews and Stimson 1975), I show that a similarity of medians is n…
Different Paths to the Same Result: Rational Choice, Political Psychology, and Impression Formation in Campaigns
This paper analyzes impression formation in political campaigns-how citizens assess a candidate's unobserved characteristics as a prelude to their vote decisions. This behavior is modeled using two approaches, one a psychology-based model in which voters behave as motivated tacticians, the other a game-theoretic version where voters are sequentially rational. The aim of the analysis is two-fold: to deepen our understanding of how voters reconcile…
Party Campaign Committees and the Distribution of Tally Program Funds
Legislative Rules in Electoral Authoritarian Regimes: The Case of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council
This article focuses on the manipulation of legislative rules in electoral authoritarian states. Electoral liberalization in authoritarian regimes creates the capacity for opposition forces to win legislative seats, but it does not ensure voice in the policy process. While the literature on institutional authoritarianism points to co-optation, dominant parties, and redistribution as mechanisms to control policy outcomes in authoritarian legislatu…
Incentivizing Innovation in a Knowledge Society
In Blockchain We Trust: Does Blockchain Itself Generate Trust
Objectives This study considers the affordance of users' perceived technological property of blockchains and investigates how users discover the possible actions that can be performed within blockchain media. With a focus on the role of trust, it analyzes how motivational affordances in blockchain media influence user experience Methods Qualitative methods are used to obtain the depth of understanding and elicit the perspective of blockchain medi…
Knowing What We Are Getting: Evaluating Scientific Research on the International Space Station
The debate over the value of the International Space Station has overlooked a fundamental question: What is the station's contribution to scientific knowledge? We address this question using a multivariate analysis of publication and patent data from station experiments. We find a relatively high probability that ISS experiments with PIs drawn from outside NASA will yield refereed publications and, furthermore, that these experiments have nonnegl…
Waypoints for Evaluating Big Science
As illustrated by the articles in this volume, there are considerable gaps in the measurement of research productivity/innovation for programs enabled by large initial and ongoing infrastructure investments. Such programs include NASA's International Space Station, DOE's National Ignition Facility, NSF's Polar Program, and CERN's Large Hadron Collider. The enormous sums spent on these projects are often justified by predictions about their contri…
Party relevance and party survival in new democracies
We argue that the move to free and fair elections is only the first step in a democratic transition. With this change, competition moves into the legislative arena, where interests are defined not in terms of support or opposition to the old regime, but over competing visions of what government should do. Thus, examining legislative behavior and legislative outcomes helps us to understand the long-term political and policy trajectory of democrati…
The Bicameral Roots of Congressional Deadlock: Analyzing Divided Government Through the Lens of Majority Rule
Objective It is widely argued that a primary source of legislative deadlock in America is the combination of a secular increase in polarization, combined with constitutional provisions that divide law‐making power across branches. We argue that polarization affects productivity, but only given a particular pattern of divided government. We distinguish between split branches , where a president from one party faces a Congress controlled by the oth…
The Impact of State Legislative Term Limits on the Competitiveness of Congressional Elections
This study examines the impact of state legislative term limits on the candidacy decisions of challengers in U.S. House elections. Using data from 1996 to 2006, the authors show that the impact of term limits is mitigated by local political factors, such as an incumbent’s election margin. The larger the incumbent’s previous electoral margin, the lower the likelihood of facing a quality challenger. The authors also identify an unanticipated conseq…
Doing the Politically Right Thing: Results, Behavior, and Vote Trading
The current understanding of vote trading assumes legislators' payoffs vary only with results--the motions enacted or defeated by their votes. This characterization is not supported by evidence from the modern Congress. This paper specifies a model of vote trading in which legislators' payoffs are a function of results and voting behavior. Analysis of this game amends the standard wisdom about voting and vote trading in two areas: the existence o…
Strategic Decisions on Candidacy in U. S. Congressional Districts
This paper tests Jacobson and Kernell's strategic decision-making theory by examining individual candidacy decisions in four congressional elections. The partisan balance in a district appears to be an important variable for predicting what type of challenger runs in either an open-seat or an incumbent election. The candidacy decisions of experienced challengers in incumbent elections appear to be influenced by changes in economic conditions, as …
Partisanship and Group Support Over Time: A Multivariate Analysis
We propose measuring group support for political parties by means of multivariate techniques that have become standard in other areas of political behavior. This approach yields improved insights into the marginal difference made by membership in each group and into the nature of a party's support coalition. As an example of this approach, we analyze the Democratic coalition since 1952. Our results differ from those of previous studies in a numbe…
Doing the Politically Right Thing: Results, Behavior, and Vote Trading
The current understanding of vote trading assumes legislators' payoffs vary only with results--the motions enacted or defeated by their votes. This characterization is not supported by evidence from the modern Congress. This paper specifies a model of vote trading in which legislators' payoffs are a function of results and voting behavior. Analysis of this game amends the standard wisdom about voting and vote trading in two areas: the existence o…
Crime and Punishment: Are One-Shot, Two-Person Games Enough
George Tsebelis argued in the March 1989 issue of this Review that decision theory is completely appropriate for analyzing games against nature but not appropriate for dissecting games against a rational opponent. Analysts who mistake a rational opponent for nature in constructing models commit what Tsebelis calls "the Robinson Crusoe fallacy." In this controversy, William Bianco and Peter Ordeshook attack components of Tsebelis's argument. Bianc…
Cooperation by Design: Leadership, Structure, and Collective Dilemmas
We return to the analysis of cooperation among interdependent rational individuals. We emphasize the limited impact of iteration (or repeated play) and explore the possibility of an alternative: intervention by rational agents, whom we call leaders. We show that leadership is more significant for initiating cooperation than for sustaining it. In addition, we identify two features of organizations that are critical in determining a leader's abilit…
Trust: Representatives and Constituents
Why do constituents sometimes defer to their representative's judgment, rewarding her for acting as she thinks best, even when she ignores their demands? By making decisions about trust, constituents determine whether their representative is rewarded for implementing their demands or for using her judgment. These decisions shape legislator behavior and, through behavior, policy outcomes. Therefore, any attempt to explain or evaluate representativ…
The Electoral Connection in the Early Congress: The Case of the Compensation Act of 1816
Theory: We extend research on the electoral connection beyond the modem Congress to the Congress of the early 1800s. Our analysis shows evidence of individual accountability in voting on the Compensation Act of 1816 and in decisions to run for reelection in the 1816 election. Hypotheses: An electoral connection should produce a marginality effect in voting on the Compensation Act (vulnerable legislators less likely to vote yea), and surplus retir…
Reliable Source or Ususal Suspects? Cue-taking, Information Transmission, and Legislative Committees
This paper critiques the expectation that informative legislative committees, those that provide policy-relevant information to their parent body, will be "microcosms of their parent chamber" (Krehbiel 1991, 95), with the median committee ideal point close to the floor median and remaining ideal points distributed about the committee median. Drawing on the concept of cue-taking (Matthews and Stimson 1975), I show that a similarity of medians is n…
Different Paths to the Same Result: Rational Choice, Political Psychology, and Impression Formation in Campaigns
This paper analyzes impression formation in political campaigns-how citizens assess a candidate's unobserved characteristics as a prelude to their vote decisions. This behavior is modeled using two approaches, one a psychology-based model in which voters behave as motivated tacticians, the other a game-theoretic version where voters are sequentially rational. The aim of the analysis is two-fold: to deepen our understanding of how voters reconcile…
Party Campaign Committees and the Distribution of Tally Program Funds
America's Congress: Actions in the Public Sphere, James Madison through Newt Gingrich . David R. Mayhew
What Happens When House Members “Run with Congress”? The Electoral Consequences of Institutional Loyalty
This article characterizes the electoral consequences of messages of institutional loyalty and disloyalty sent by incumbent House members to their constituents. We show that, for the contemporary House, there is variation in these messages—not all incumbents in the contemporary House “run for Congress by running against Congress.” Moreover, we show that these messages can, under the right conditions, have significant electoral consequences, even …
The Uncovered Set and the Limits of Legislative Action
We present a simulation technique for sorting out the size, shape, and location of the uncovered set to estimate the set of enactable outcomes in “real-world” social choice situations, such as the contemporary Congress. The uncovered set is a well-known but underexploited solution concept in the literature on spatial voting games and collective choice mechanisms. We explain this solution concept in nontechnical terms, submit some theoretical obse…
Uncovering Evidence of Conditional Party Government: Reassessing Majority Party Influence in Congress and State Legislatures
This paper aims at enriching the debate over the measurement of majority party influence in contemporary American legislatures. Our use of a new analytic technique, a grid-search program for characterizing the uncovered set, enables us to begin with a better model of legislative proceedings that abandons the simple one-dimensional spatial models in favor of the more realistic two-dimensional version. Our conclusions are based on the analysis of r…
Last Post for “The Greatest Generation: The Policy Implications of the Decline of Military Experience in the U.S. Congress
This paper characterizes the behavioral and policy implications of the decline in the number of military veterans in the U.S. Congress, from more than 70% of legislators in the early 1970s to less than 30% in the contemporary House and Senate. Many scholars argue that military service shapes information and beliefs, and that this decline has had negative effects on defense policy. The analysis tests these arguments using voting data from the Hous…
A Theory Waiting to Be Discovered and Used: A Reanalysis of Canonical Experiments on Majority-Rule Decision Making
The paper offers a reassessment of canonical attempts to address a fundamental question about majority rule: what is the relationship between the preferences held by the participants and the outcomes that emerge from their interactions? Previous work, based on the analysis of abstract spatial models or relying on data from real-world spatial experiments, has yielded a mass of contradictory findings. Our work applies a new technique for estimating…
The Constrained Instability of Majority Rule: Experiments on the Robustness of the Uncovered Set
The uncovered set has frequently been proposed as a solution concept for majority rule settings. This paper tests this proposition using a new technique for estimating uncovered sets and a series of experiments, including five-player computer-mediated experiments and 35-player paper-format experiments. The results support the theoretic appeal of the uncovered set. Outcomes overwhelmingly lie in or near the uncovered set. Furthermore, when prefere…
The Impact of State Legislative Term Limits on the Competitiveness of Congressional Elections
This study examines the impact of state legislative term limits on the candidacy decisions of challengers in U.S. House elections. Using data from 1996 to 2006, the authors show that the impact of term limits is mitigated by local political factors, such as an incumbent’s election margin. The larger the incumbent’s previous electoral margin, the lower the likelihood of facing a quality challenger. The authors also identify an unanticipated conseq…
Ministerial Selection and Intraparty Organization in the Contemporary British Parliament
This article promotes a characterization of intraparty politics that explains how rank- and-file party members control the delegation of power to their cabinet ministers and shadow cabinet ministers. Using the uncovered set as a solution concept and a measure of party members' collective preferences, we explore the hypothesis that backbenchers' preferences constrain the ministerial selection process in a manner that mitigates agency problems. Spe…
Party relevance and party survival in new democracies
We argue that the move to free and fair elections is only the first step in a democratic transition. With this change, competition moves into the legislative arena, where interests are defined not in terms of support or opposition to the old regime, but over competing visions of what government should do. Thus, examining legislative behavior and legislative outcomes helps us to understand the long-term political and policy trajectory of democrati…
Predicting majority rule: Evaluating the uncovered set and the strong point
This paper compares two solution concepts for majority rule decision-making in multi-dimensional settings: the uncovered set and the strong point. Our goal is to determine which of these solution concepts is the appropriate generalization of the median voter theorem to more complex (and more realistic) multi-dimensional majority-rule settings. By making this comparison, we also contribute to the debate about the degree of sophisticated decision-m…
Engineering cooperation: How Americans and Russians manage joint operation of the International Space Station
The 1990s agreements that created the International Space Station (ISS) described the effort as a partnership of equals, a joint venture between organizations that remained independent in terms of many procedures, norms, goals, and the assumptions underlying these factors. As a result, successful joint ISS operations required the participants, most notably the American and Russian space programs, to reconcile different procedures, norms, and trai…
American Politics Today
Knowing What We Are Getting: Evaluating Scientific Research on the International Space Station
The debate over the value of the International Space Station has overlooked a fundamental question: What is the station's contribution to scientific knowledge? We address this question using a multivariate analysis of publication and patent data from station experiments. We find a relatively high probability that ISS experiments with PIs drawn from outside NASA will yield refereed publications and, furthermore, that these experiments have nonnegl…
Waypoints for Evaluating Big Science
As illustrated by the articles in this volume, there are considerable gaps in the measurement of research productivity/innovation for programs enabled by large initial and ongoing infrastructure investments. Such programs include NASA's International Space Station, DOE's National Ignition Facility, NSF's Polar Program, and CERN's Large Hadron Collider. The enormous sums spent on these projects are often justified by predictions about their contri…
Political science (24 works) · Law (19 works) · Computer Science (17 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (17 works) · Law (17 works) · Politics (15 works) · Economics (14 works) · Public Administration (11 works) · Public Administration (9 works) · Business (7 works)