A D Martins
Biographic Data
| ID | 168322 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A D Martins |
| GIVEN NAMES | A D |
| FAMILY NAME | Martins |
| SIGNATURE | MARTINS A D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Washington University in St. Louis |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6532-0721 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1054 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
What to Observe When Assuming Selection on Observables
Political scientists regularly rely on a selection-on-observables assumption to identify causal effects of interest. Once a causal effect has been identified in this way, a wide variety of estimators can, in principle, be used to consistently estimate the effect of interest. While these estimators are all justified by appeals to the same causal identification assumptions, they often differ greatly in how they make use of the data at hand. For ins…
CompLaw: A Coding Protocol and Database for the Comparative Study of Judicial Review
A growing theoretical literature identifies how the process of constitutional review shapes judicial decision-making, legislative behavior, and even the constitutionality of legislation and executive actions. However, the empirical interrogation of these theoretical arguments is limited by the absence of a common protocol for coding constitutional review decisions across courts and time. We introduce such a coding protocol and database (CompLaw) …
Oh, Mi: A Note on Empirical Examinations of Judicial Elections
Studies of state judicial selection systems require accurate classification of electoral \nsystems. While agreement exists for most states, Ohio and Michigan are difficult to classify. In this paper, we discuss the different practices and explain how, in the absence of candidates’ party affiliation on the ballot, elections in these states may justifiably be classified as partisan. Replicating the results of an important study on participation in …
Endogenous Jurisprudential Regimes
Jurisprudential regime theory is a legal explanation of decision-making on the U.S. Supreme Court that asserts that a key precedent in an area of law fundamentally restructures the relationship between case characteristics and the outcomes of future cases. In this article, we offer a multivariate multiple change-point probit model that can be used to endogenously test for the existence of jurisprudential regimes. Unlike the previously employed me…
Who Controls the Content of Supreme Court Opinions
Conventional arguments identify either the median justice or the opinion author as the most influential justices in shaping the content of Supreme Court opinions. We develop a model of judicial decision making that suggests that opinions are likely to reflect the views of the median justice in the majority coalition. This result derives from two features of judicial decision making that have received little attention in previous models. The first…
MCMCpack: Markov Chain Monte Carlo in R
We introduce MCMCpack , an R package that contains functions to perform Bayesian inference using posterior simulation for a number of statistical models. In addition to code that can be used to fit commonly used models, MCMCpack also contains some useful utility functions, including some additional density functions and pseudo-random number generators for statistical distributions, a general purpose Metropolis sampling algorithm, and tools for vi…
Untangling the Causal Effects of Sex on Judging
We explore the role of sex in judging by addressing two questions of long‐standing interest to political scientists: whether and in what ways male and female judges decide cases distinctly—“individual effects”—and whether and in what ways serving with a female judge causes males to behave differently—“panel effects.” While we attend to the dominant theoretical accounts of why we might expect to observe either or both effects, we do not use the pr…
The Judicial Common Space
To say that positive political theory (PPT) scholarship on the hierarchy of justice is theory rich and data poor is to make a rather uncontroversial claim. For over a decade now, scholars have offered intriguing theoretical accounts aimed at understanding why lower courts defy (comply with) higher courts. But only rarely do they subject the accounts to rigorous empirical interrogation. The chief obstacle, it seems, is the lack of a reliable and v…
Issues in exploring variation in childhood socioeconomic gradients by age: A response to Case, Paxson, and Vogl
Understanding Health Disparities: The Role of Race and Socioeconomic Status in Children’s Health
Objectives. We sought to determine whether childhood health disparities are best understood as effects of race, socioeconomic status (SES), or synergistic effects of the two. Methods. Data from the National Health Interview Survey 1994 of US children aged 0 to 18 years (n=33911) were used. SES was measured as parental education. Child health measures included overall health, limitations, and chronic and acute childhood conditions. Results. For ov…
Socioeconomic status and health: Do gradients differ within childhood and adolescence
Does Age (Really) Matter? A Response to Manning, Carroll, and Carp
Competing Approaches to Predicting Supreme Court Decision Making
Political scientists and legal academics have long scrutinized the U.S. Supreme Court's work to understand what motivates the justices. Despite significant differences in methodology, both disciplines seek to explain the Court's decisions by focusing on examining past cases. This retrospective orientation is surprising. In other areas of government, for example, presidential elections and congressional decision making, political scientists engage…
Critical Elections and Political Realignments in the USA: 1860–2000
The sequence of US presidential elections from 1964 to 1972 is generally regarded as heralding a fundamental political realignment, during which time civil rights became as important a cleavage as economic rights. In certain respects, this realignment mirrored the transformation of politics that occurred in the period before the Civil War. Formal models of voting (based on assumptions of rational voters, and plurality-maximizing candidates) have …
Bayesian Inference for Heterogeneous Event Counts
This article presents an integrated set of Bayesian tools one can use to model heterogeneous event counts. While models for event count cross sections are now widely used, little has been written about how to model counts when contextual factors introduce heterogeneity. The author begins with a discussion of Bayesian cross-sectional count models and discusses an alternative model for counts with overdispersion. To illustrate the Bayesian framewor…
Dynamic Ideal Point Estimation via Markov Chain Monte Carlo for the U.S. Supreme Court, 1953–1999
At the heart of attitudinal and strategic explanations of judicial behavior is the assumption that justices have policy preferences. In this paper we employ Markov chain Monte Carlo methods to fit a Bayesian measurement model of ideal points for all justices serving on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1953 through 1999. We are particularly interested in determining to what extent ideal points of justices change throughout their tenure on the Court. Th…
Congressional Decision Making and the Separation of Powers
To what extent does the separation of powers affect congressional roll call voting behavior? To answer this question, I offer a strategic model of congressional decision making that asserts members of Congress pursue public policy goals when casting roll call votes. From the equilibrium predictions of a formal model, I generate testable hypotheses by computing the expected net amount of sophisticated (nonsincere) congressional behavior given chan…
Partisanship and Pre-Floor Behavior: The Equal Rights and School Prayer Amendments
Partisanship and Pre-Floor Behavior: The Equal Rights and School Prayer Amendments
We examine the effect of issue preferences and partisanship on prefloor behavior by explaining cosponsorship and discharge petition activity over two proposed constitutional amendments, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in 1970 and the School Prayer Amendment (SPA) in 1971. Previous research has largely focused on the ability of the majority party leadership in the post-Reform House to employ party as a solution to the collective action problem in…
Ideological Divergence and Public Support for the Supreme Court
We examine the degree to which aggregate-level support for the Supreme Court is a function of its divergence from the ideological mood of the country. We first overcome the problem of irregular and infrequent measurement of attitudes toward the Supreme Court by employing an approach developed by Stimson (1991) which allows us to pool seventeen similar survey items administered a total of ninety-three times to produce a single, semi-annual time se…
Voter Choice in Multi-Party Democracies: A Test of Competing Theories and Models
We contrast social-structural theories of voting behavior with spatial theories of voting behavior to explain voter choice in the Netherlands and Great Britain. We hypothesize that voting behavior is best explained by the spatial theory of voting. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation is used to estimate multinomial probit (MNP) and multinomial logit (MNL) models of voter choice, for which we calculate Bayes factors for the purpose of model …
Multiparty electoral competition in the Netherlands and Germany: A model based on multinomial probit
The Public's Conditional Response to Supreme Court Decisions
To investigate the effect of the Supreme Court on public opinion, we offer the conditional response hypothesis based on a theory of Supreme Court legitimacy and a microlevel social-psychological theory of attitude formation. Together these theories predict that the Court may affect public opinion when it initially rules on a salient issue, but that subsequent decisions on the same issue will have little influence on opinion. To test our predictio…
Using Computational Methods to Perform Counterfactual Analyses of Formal Theories
Recently there has been an increase in the number of researchers who use rational choice models to explain single cases and rare events. Because of the small number of cases under study, these researchers must rely either explicitly or implicitly on counterfactual reasoning. This paper argues that computational methods provide a profitable means of carrying out rigorous counterfactual analysis. The authors advocate robustness analysis as one impo…
Dynamic Ideal Point Estimation via Markov Chain Monte Carlo for the U.S. Supreme Court, 1953–1999
At the heart of attitudinal and strategic explanations of judicial behavior is the assumption that justices have policy preferences. In this paper we employ Markov chain Monte Carlo methods to fit a Bayesian measurement model of ideal points for all justices serving on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1953 through 1999. We are particularly interested in determining to what extent ideal points of justices change throughout their tenure on the Court. Th…
Untangling the Causal Effects of Sex on Judging
We explore the role of sex in judging by addressing two questions of long‐standing interest to political scientists: whether and in what ways male and female judges decide cases distinctly—“individual effects”—and whether and in what ways serving with a female judge causes males to behave differently—“panel effects.” While we attend to the dominant theoretical accounts of why we might expect to observe either or both effects, we do not use the pr…
Ideological Divergence and Public Support for the Supreme Court
We examine the degree to which aggregate-level support for the Supreme Court is a function of its divergence from the ideological mood of the country. We first overcome the problem of irregular and infrequent measurement of attitudes toward the Supreme Court by employing an approach developed by Stimson (1991) which allows us to pool seventeen similar survey items administered a total of ninety-three times to produce a single, semi-annual time se…
The Public's Conditional Response to Supreme Court Decisions
To investigate the effect of the Supreme Court on public opinion, we offer the conditional response hypothesis based on a theory of Supreme Court legitimacy and a microlevel social-psychological theory of attitude formation. Together these theories predict that the Court may affect public opinion when it initially rules on a salient issue, but that subsequent decisions on the same issue will have little influence on opinion. To test our predictio…
Voter Choice in Multi-Party Democracies: A Test of Competing Theories and Models
We contrast social-structural theories of voting behavior with spatial theories of voting behavior to explain voter choice in the Netherlands and Great Britain. We hypothesize that voting behavior is best explained by the spatial theory of voting. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation is used to estimate multinomial probit (MNP) and multinomial logit (MNL) models of voter choice, for which we calculate Bayes factors for the purpose of model …
Who Controls the Content of Supreme Court Opinions
Conventional arguments identify either the median justice or the opinion author as the most influential justices in shaping the content of Supreme Court opinions. We develop a model of judicial decision making that suggests that opinions are likely to reflect the views of the median justice in the majority coalition. This result derives from two features of judicial decision making that have received little attention in previous models. The first…
Socioeconomic status and health: Do gradients differ within childhood and adolescence
Multiparty electoral competition in the Netherlands and Germany: A model based on multinomial probit
Understanding Health Disparities: The Role of Race and Socioeconomic Status in Children’s Health
Objectives. We sought to determine whether childhood health disparities are best understood as effects of race, socioeconomic status (SES), or synergistic effects of the two. Methods. Data from the National Health Interview Survey 1994 of US children aged 0 to 18 years (n=33911) were used. SES was measured as parental education. Child health measures included overall health, limitations, and chronic and acute childhood conditions. Results. For ov…
Critical Elections and Political Realignments in the USA: 1860–2000
The sequence of US presidential elections from 1964 to 1972 is generally regarded as heralding a fundamental political realignment, during which time civil rights became as important a cleavage as economic rights. In certain respects, this realignment mirrored the transformation of politics that occurred in the period before the Civil War. Formal models of voting (based on assumptions of rational voters, and plurality-maximizing candidates) have …
Congressional Decision Making and the Separation of Powers
To what extent does the separation of powers affect congressional roll call voting behavior? To answer this question, I offer a strategic model of congressional decision making that asserts members of Congress pursue public policy goals when casting roll call votes. From the equilibrium predictions of a formal model, I generate testable hypotheses by computing the expected net amount of sophisticated (nonsincere) congressional behavior given chan…
Competing Approaches to Predicting Supreme Court Decision Making
Political scientists and legal academics have long scrutinized the U.S. Supreme Court's work to understand what motivates the justices. Despite significant differences in methodology, both disciplines seek to explain the Court's decisions by focusing on examining past cases. This retrospective orientation is surprising. In other areas of government, for example, presidential elections and congressional decision making, political scientists engage…
Oh, Mi: A Note on Empirical Examinations of Judicial Elections
Studies of state judicial selection systems require accurate classification of electoral \nsystems. While agreement exists for most states, Ohio and Michigan are difficult to classify. In this paper, we discuss the different practices and explain how, in the absence of candidates’ party affiliation on the ballot, elections in these states may justifiably be classified as partisan. Replicating the results of an important study on participation in …
Partisanship and Pre-Floor Behavior: The Equal Rights and School Prayer Amendments
We examine the effect of issue preferences and partisanship on prefloor behavior by explaining cosponsorship and discharge petition activity over two proposed constitutional amendments, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in 1970 and the School Prayer Amendment (SPA) in 1971. Previous research has largely focused on the ability of the majority party leadership in the post-Reform House to employ party as a solution to the collective action problem in…
Endogenous Jurisprudential Regimes
Jurisprudential regime theory is a legal explanation of decision-making on the U.S. Supreme Court that asserts that a key precedent in an area of law fundamentally restructures the relationship between case characteristics and the outcomes of future cases. In this article, we offer a multivariate multiple change-point probit model that can be used to endogenously test for the existence of jurisprudential regimes. Unlike the previously employed me…
Using Computational Methods to Perform Counterfactual Analyses of Formal Theories
Recently there has been an increase in the number of researchers who use rational choice models to explain single cases and rare events. Because of the small number of cases under study, these researchers must rely either explicitly or implicitly on counterfactual reasoning. This paper argues that computational methods provide a profitable means of carrying out rigorous counterfactual analysis. The authors advocate robustness analysis as one impo…
Using Computational Methods to Perform Counterfactual Analyses of Formal Theories
Recently there has been an increase in the number of researchers who use rational choice models to explain single cases and rare events. Because of the small number of cases under study, these researchers must rely either explicitly or implicitly on counterfactual reasoning. This paper argues that computational methods provide a profitable means of carrying out rigorous counterfactual analysis. The authors advocate robustness analysis as one impo…
Multiparty electoral competition in the Netherlands and Germany: A model based on multinomial probit
The Public's Conditional Response to Supreme Court Decisions
To investigate the effect of the Supreme Court on public opinion, we offer the conditional response hypothesis based on a theory of Supreme Court legitimacy and a microlevel social-psychological theory of attitude formation. Together these theories predict that the Court may affect public opinion when it initially rules on a salient issue, but that subsequent decisions on the same issue will have little influence on opinion. To test our predictio…
Voter Choice in Multi-Party Democracies: A Test of Competing Theories and Models
We contrast social-structural theories of voting behavior with spatial theories of voting behavior to explain voter choice in the Netherlands and Great Britain. We hypothesize that voting behavior is best explained by the spatial theory of voting. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation is used to estimate multinomial probit (MNP) and multinomial logit (MNL) models of voter choice, for which we calculate Bayes factors for the purpose of model …
Partisanship and Pre-Floor Behavior: The Equal Rights and School Prayer Amendments
Partisanship and Pre-Floor Behavior: The Equal Rights and School Prayer Amendments
We examine the effect of issue preferences and partisanship on prefloor behavior by explaining cosponsorship and discharge petition activity over two proposed constitutional amendments, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in 1970 and the School Prayer Amendment (SPA) in 1971. Previous research has largely focused on the ability of the majority party leadership in the post-Reform House to employ party as a solution to the collective action problem in…
Ideological Divergence and Public Support for the Supreme Court
We examine the degree to which aggregate-level support for the Supreme Court is a function of its divergence from the ideological mood of the country. We first overcome the problem of irregular and infrequent measurement of attitudes toward the Supreme Court by employing an approach developed by Stimson (1991) which allows us to pool seventeen similar survey items administered a total of ninety-three times to produce a single, semi-annual time se…
Congressional Decision Making and the Separation of Powers
To what extent does the separation of powers affect congressional roll call voting behavior? To answer this question, I offer a strategic model of congressional decision making that asserts members of Congress pursue public policy goals when casting roll call votes. From the equilibrium predictions of a formal model, I generate testable hypotheses by computing the expected net amount of sophisticated (nonsincere) congressional behavior given chan…
Dynamic Ideal Point Estimation via Markov Chain Monte Carlo for the U.S. Supreme Court, 1953–1999
At the heart of attitudinal and strategic explanations of judicial behavior is the assumption that justices have policy preferences. In this paper we employ Markov chain Monte Carlo methods to fit a Bayesian measurement model of ideal points for all justices serving on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1953 through 1999. We are particularly interested in determining to what extent ideal points of justices change throughout their tenure on the Court. Th…
Critical Elections and Political Realignments in the USA: 1860–2000
The sequence of US presidential elections from 1964 to 1972 is generally regarded as heralding a fundamental political realignment, during which time civil rights became as important a cleavage as economic rights. In certain respects, this realignment mirrored the transformation of politics that occurred in the period before the Civil War. Formal models of voting (based on assumptions of rational voters, and plurality-maximizing candidates) have …
Bayesian Inference for Heterogeneous Event Counts
This article presents an integrated set of Bayesian tools one can use to model heterogeneous event counts. While models for event count cross sections are now widely used, little has been written about how to model counts when contextual factors introduce heterogeneity. The author begins with a discussion of Bayesian cross-sectional count models and discusses an alternative model for counts with overdispersion. To illustrate the Bayesian framewor…
Does Age (Really) Matter? A Response to Manning, Carroll, and Carp
Competing Approaches to Predicting Supreme Court Decision Making
Political scientists and legal academics have long scrutinized the U.S. Supreme Court's work to understand what motivates the justices. Despite significant differences in methodology, both disciplines seek to explain the Court's decisions by focusing on examining past cases. This retrospective orientation is surprising. In other areas of government, for example, presidential elections and congressional decision making, political scientists engage…
Understanding Health Disparities: The Role of Race and Socioeconomic Status in Children’s Health
Objectives. We sought to determine whether childhood health disparities are best understood as effects of race, socioeconomic status (SES), or synergistic effects of the two. Methods. Data from the National Health Interview Survey 1994 of US children aged 0 to 18 years (n=33911) were used. SES was measured as parental education. Child health measures included overall health, limitations, and chronic and acute childhood conditions. Results. For ov…
Socioeconomic status and health: Do gradients differ within childhood and adolescence
The Judicial Common Space
To say that positive political theory (PPT) scholarship on the hierarchy of justice is theory rich and data poor is to make a rather uncontroversial claim. For over a decade now, scholars have offered intriguing theoretical accounts aimed at understanding why lower courts defy (comply with) higher courts. But only rarely do they subject the accounts to rigorous empirical interrogation. The chief obstacle, it seems, is the lack of a reliable and v…
Issues in exploring variation in childhood socioeconomic gradients by age: A response to Case, Paxson, and Vogl
Untangling the Causal Effects of Sex on Judging
We explore the role of sex in judging by addressing two questions of long‐standing interest to political scientists: whether and in what ways male and female judges decide cases distinctly—“individual effects”—and whether and in what ways serving with a female judge causes males to behave differently—“panel effects.” While we attend to the dominant theoretical accounts of why we might expect to observe either or both effects, we do not use the pr…
MCMCpack: Markov Chain Monte Carlo in R
We introduce MCMCpack , an R package that contains functions to perform Bayesian inference using posterior simulation for a number of statistical models. In addition to code that can be used to fit commonly used models, MCMCpack also contains some useful utility functions, including some additional density functions and pseudo-random number generators for statistical distributions, a general purpose Metropolis sampling algorithm, and tools for vi…
Endogenous Jurisprudential Regimes
Jurisprudential regime theory is a legal explanation of decision-making on the U.S. Supreme Court that asserts that a key precedent in an area of law fundamentally restructures the relationship between case characteristics and the outcomes of future cases. In this article, we offer a multivariate multiple change-point probit model that can be used to endogenously test for the existence of jurisprudential regimes. Unlike the previously employed me…
Who Controls the Content of Supreme Court Opinions
Conventional arguments identify either the median justice or the opinion author as the most influential justices in shaping the content of Supreme Court opinions. We develop a model of judicial decision making that suggests that opinions are likely to reflect the views of the median justice in the majority coalition. This result derives from two features of judicial decision making that have received little attention in previous models. The first…
Oh, Mi: A Note on Empirical Examinations of Judicial Elections
Studies of state judicial selection systems require accurate classification of electoral \nsystems. While agreement exists for most states, Ohio and Michigan are difficult to classify. In this paper, we discuss the different practices and explain how, in the absence of candidates’ party affiliation on the ballot, elections in these states may justifiably be classified as partisan. Replicating the results of an important study on participation in …
CompLaw: A Coding Protocol and Database for the Comparative Study of Judicial Review
A growing theoretical literature identifies how the process of constitutional review shapes judicial decision-making, legislative behavior, and even the constitutionality of legislation and executive actions. However, the empirical interrogation of these theoretical arguments is limited by the absence of a common protocol for coding constitutional review decisions across courts and time. We introduce such a coding protocol and database (CompLaw) …
What to Observe When Assuming Selection on Observables
Political scientists regularly rely on a selection-on-observables assumption to identify causal effects of interest. Once a causal effect has been identified in this way, a wide variety of estimators can, in principle, be used to consistently estimate the effect of interest. While these estimators are all justified by appeals to the same causal identification assumptions, they often differ greatly in how they make use of the data at hand. For ins…
Political science (17 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Politics (11 works) · Judicial and Constitutional Studies (10 works) · Economics (8 works) · Econometrics (7 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (7 works) · Supreme court (7 works)