Maya Sen
Biographic Data
| ID | 3626899 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Maya Sen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Maya |
| FAMILY NAME | Sen |
| SIGNATURE | SEN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 906 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
The “Odd Party Out” Theory of Certiorari
How Judges’ Professional Experience Impacts Case Outcomes: An Examination of Public Defenders and Criminal Sentencing
Do judges’ professional backgrounds affect their rulings? We investigate this question by looking at the impact of judges’ public defender experience on sentencing. Leveraging thousands of sentences, we find that defendants assigned to a former public defender are, on average, less likely to be incarcerated. Their sentences are also sometimes shorter, which we show is partially due to former public defenders being less likely to give extreme puni…
Asking about Complex Policies
As political issues have increased in complexity, public opinion researchers increasingly ask respondents about sophisticated political topics that may require substantive knowledge and analytic skills, raising concerns about survey satisficing. In this note, we examine the correlates of one manifestation of this kind of satisficing—response order effects, or when respondents are more likely to pick the top response options from a list. We do thi…
The Political Consequences of Ethnically Targeted Incarceration: Evidence from Japanese American Internment during World War II
What are the downstream political consequences of state activity explicitly targeting an ethnic minority group? This question is well studied in the comparative context, but less is known about the effects of explicitly racist state activity in liberal democracies such as the United States. We investigate this question by looking at an important event in American history—the incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry during World War II. We fin…
Sensitive Questions, Spillover Effects, and Asking about Citizenship on the US Census
Many topics social scientists study are sensitive in nature. Although we know some people may be reluctant to respond to sensitive questions in surveys, we know less about how such questions could influence responses to other questions appearing later in a survey. In this study, we use the Trump administration’s proposal to include a citizenship question on the 2020 Census to demonstrate how such spillover effects can undermine important survey-b…
Estimating Judicial Ideology
We review the substantial literature on estimating judicial ideology, from the US Supreme Court to the lowest state court. As a way to showcase the strengths and drawbacks of various measures, we further analyze trends in judicial polarization within the US federal courts. Our analysis shows substantial gaps in the ideology of judges appointed by Republican Presidents versus those appointed by Democrats. Similar to trends in Congressional polariz…
Improving Supreme Court Forecasting Using Boosted Decision Trees
Though used frequently in machine learning, boosted decision trees are largely unused in political science, despite many useful properties. We explain how to use one variant of boosted decision trees, AdaBoosted decision trees (ADTs), for social science predictions. We illustrate their use by examining a well-known political prediction problem, predicting U.S. Supreme Court rulings. We find that our ADT approach outperforms existing predictive mo…
Bias and Judging
How do we know whether judges of different backgrounds are biased? We review the substantial political science literature on judicial decision making, paying close attention to how judges' demographics and ideology can influence or structure their decision making. As the research demonstrates, characteristics such as race, ethnicity, and gender can sometimes predict judicial decision making in limited kinds of cases; however, the literature also …
Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics
The lasting effects of slavery on contemporary political attitudes in the American SouthDespite dramatic social transformations in the United States during the last 150 years, the South has remained staunchly conservative. Southerners are more likely to support Republican candidates, gun rights, and the death penalty, and southern whites harbor higher levels of racial resentment than whites in other parts of the country. Why haven't these sentime…
Emotional Arousal Predicts Voting on the U.S. Supreme Court
Do judges telegraph their preferences during oral arguments? Using the U.S. Supreme Court as our example, we demonstrate that Justices implicitly reveal their leanings during oral arguments, even before arguments and deliberations have concluded. Specifically, we extract the emotional content of over 3,000 hours of audio recordings spanning 30 years of oral arguments before the Court. We then use the level of emotional arousal, as measured by voc…
Response to Dion, Sumner, and Mitchell
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Explaining Preferences from Behavior: A Cognitive Dissonance Approach
The standard approach in positive political theory posits that action choices are the consequences of preferences. Social psychology—in particular, cognitive dissonance theory—suggests the opposite: preferences may themselves be affected by action choices. We present a framework that applies this idea to three models of political choice: (1) one in which partisanship emerges naturally in a two-party system despite policy being multidimensional, (…
Analyzing Causal Mechanisms in Survey Experiments
Researchers investigating causal mechanisms in survey experiments often rely on nonrandomized quantities to isolate the indirect effect of treatment through these variables. Such an approach, however, requires a “selection-on-observables” assumption, which undermines the advantages of a randomized experiment. In this paper, we show what can be learned about casual mechanisms through experimental design alone. We propose a factorial design that pr…
How Political Signals Affect Public Support for Judicial Nominations: Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment
How do Americans evaluate potential US Supreme Court candidates? Using a novel, two-part conjoint experiment, I show that respondents put high importance on the political leanings of potential Court candidates, a finding in contrast with the scholarly view that the public views the Court as different from other, more political institutions. Indeed, when respondents are given information about a nominee’s partisan leanings, they rely extensively o…
A Common-Space Scaling of the American Judiciary and Legal Profession
We extend the scaling methodology previously used in Bonica (2014) to jointly scale the American federal judiciary and legal profession in a common space with other political actors. The end result is the first dataset of consistently measured ideological scores across all tiers of the federal judiciary and the legal profession, including 840 federal judges and 380,307 attorneys. To illustrate these measures, we present two examples involving the…
How uncertainty about judicial nominees can distort the confirmation process
Why are judicial nominees allowed to refuse to answer questions about important issues that could come before the courts? We address this question by examining the information environment surrounding judicial nominations. Using the Supreme Court as our example, we formulate a model that departs from the existing literature by incorporating the fact that the Senate often does not know what type of candidate the President is trying to appoint. Our …
The Political Legacy of American Slavery
We show that contemporary differences in political attitudes across counties in the American South in part trace their origins to slavery's prevalence more than 150 years ago. Whites who currently live in Southern counties that had high shares of slaves in 1860 are more likely to identify as a Republican, oppose affirmative action, and express racial resentment and colder feelings toward blacks. We show that these results cannot be explained by e…
Race as a Bundle of Sticks: Designs that Estimate Effects of Seemingly Immutable Characteristics
Although understanding the role of race, ethnicity, and identity is central to political science, methodological debates persist about whether it is possible to estimate the effect of something immutable. At the heart of the debate is an older theoretical question: Is race best understood under an essentialist or constructivist framework? In contrast to the “immutable characteristics” or essentialist approach, we argue that race should be operati…
Explaining Causal Findings Without Bias: Detecting and Assessing Direct Effects
Researchers seeking to establish causal relationships frequently control for variables on the purported causal pathway, checking whether the original treatment effect then disappears. Unfortunately, this common approach may lead to biased estimates. In this article, we show that the bias can be avoided by focusing on a quantity of interest called the controlled direct effect. Under certain conditions, the controlled direct effect enables research…
How Ratifying Treaty Rights Could Affect Norms, Laws, and Constitutional Language Comment
»Vielmehr bietet [der Kommentar] auf höchstem Niveau eine substantielle Auseinandersetzung mit den Hintergründen, den Zusammenhängen, der Theorie und der Praxis des Grundgesetzes. Besseres lässt sich von einem Verfassungskommentar nicht sagen.“ Herbert Günther Staaatsanzeiger für das Land Hessen 2018 (50), 1494–1495
Identifying Judicial Empathy: Does Having Daughters Cause Judges to Rule for Women's Issues
In this article, we consider whether personal relationships can affect the way that judges decide cases. To do so, we leverage the natural experiment of a child's gender to identify the effect of having daughters on the votes of judges. Using new data on the family lives of U.S. Courts of Appeals judges, we find that, conditional on the number of children a judge has, judges with daughters consistently vote in a more feminist fashion on gender is…
No! Formal Theory, Causal Inference, and Big Data Are Not Contradictory Trends in Political Science
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Genetic Determinism, Technology Optimism, and Race: Views of the American Public
We begin with a typology of Americans' understanding of the links between genetic inheritance and racial or ethnic groups. The typology has two dimensions: one running from genetic determinism to social construction, and the other from technology optimism to technology pessimism. Construing each dimension as a dichotomy enables four distinct political perspectives on the possibilities for reducing racial inequality in the United States through ge…
Technology Optimism or Pessimism about Genomic Science: Variation among Experts and Scholarly Disciplines
Like lay people, experts vary in their technology optimism or pessimism about scientific endeavors, for reasons that are poorly understood. We explore experts' technology optimism through a focus on genomics; its novelty, life-and-death implications, complex technology, and broad but as yet unknown societal implications make it an excellent subject for studying views about new knowledge. We use interviews with scientific and medical elites to sho…
To Test or Not? Singular or Multiple Heritage: Genomic Ancestry Testing and Americans’ Racial Identity
DNA ancestry testing may seem frivolous, but it points to two crucial questions: First, what is the relationship, if any, between biology and race? Second, how much and why do people prefer clear, singular racial identities over blurred, mixed racial self-understandings, or the reverse? We posit that individuals of different racial or ethnic backgrounds will have different levels of support for this new technology. In particular, despite the hist…
Explaining Causal Findings Without Bias: Detecting and Assessing Direct Effects
Researchers seeking to establish causal relationships frequently control for variables on the purported causal pathway, checking whether the original treatment effect then disappears. Unfortunately, this common approach may lead to biased estimates. In this article, we show that the bias can be avoided by focusing on a quantity of interest called the controlled direct effect. Under certain conditions, the controlled direct effect enables research…
Race as a Bundle of Sticks: Designs that Estimate Effects of Seemingly Immutable Characteristics
Although understanding the role of race, ethnicity, and identity is central to political science, methodological debates persist about whether it is possible to estimate the effect of something immutable. At the heart of the debate is an older theoretical question: Is race best understood under an essentialist or constructivist framework? In contrast to the “immutable characteristics” or essentialist approach, we argue that race should be operati…
The Political Legacy of American Slavery
We show that contemporary differences in political attitudes across counties in the American South in part trace their origins to slavery's prevalence more than 150 years ago. Whites who currently live in Southern counties that had high shares of slaves in 1860 are more likely to identify as a Republican, oppose affirmative action, and express racial resentment and colder feelings toward blacks. We show that these results cannot be explained by e…
How Political Signals Affect Public Support for Judicial Nominations: Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment
How do Americans evaluate potential US Supreme Court candidates? Using a novel, two-part conjoint experiment, I show that respondents put high importance on the political leanings of potential Court candidates, a finding in contrast with the scholarly view that the public views the Court as different from other, more political institutions. Indeed, when respondents are given information about a nominee’s partisan leanings, they rely extensively o…
Identifying Judicial Empathy: Does Having Daughters Cause Judges to Rule for Women's Issues
In this article, we consider whether personal relationships can affect the way that judges decide cases. To do so, we leverage the natural experiment of a child's gender to identify the effect of having daughters on the votes of judges. Using new data on the family lives of U.S. Courts of Appeals judges, we find that, conditional on the number of children a judge has, judges with daughters consistently vote in a more feminist fashion on gender is…
Analyzing Causal Mechanisms in Survey Experiments
Researchers investigating causal mechanisms in survey experiments often rely on nonrandomized quantities to isolate the indirect effect of treatment through these variables. Such an approach, however, requires a “selection-on-observables” assumption, which undermines the advantages of a randomized experiment. In this paper, we show what can be learned about casual mechanisms through experimental design alone. We propose a factorial design that pr…
Bias and Judging
How do we know whether judges of different backgrounds are biased? We review the substantial political science literature on judicial decision making, paying close attention to how judges' demographics and ideology can influence or structure their decision making. As the research demonstrates, characteristics such as race, ethnicity, and gender can sometimes predict judicial decision making in limited kinds of cases; however, the literature also …
Explaining Preferences from Behavior: A Cognitive Dissonance Approach
The standard approach in positive political theory posits that action choices are the consequences of preferences. Social psychology—in particular, cognitive dissonance theory—suggests the opposite: preferences may themselves be affected by action choices. We present a framework that applies this idea to three models of political choice: (1) one in which partisanship emerges naturally in a two-party system despite policy being multidimensional, (…
Emotional Arousal Predicts Voting on the U.S. Supreme Court
Do judges telegraph their preferences during oral arguments? Using the U.S. Supreme Court as our example, we demonstrate that Justices implicitly reveal their leanings during oral arguments, even before arguments and deliberations have concluded. Specifically, we extract the emotional content of over 3,000 hours of audio recordings spanning 30 years of oral arguments before the Court. We then use the level of emotional arousal, as measured by voc…
A Common-Space Scaling of the American Judiciary and Legal Profession
We extend the scaling methodology previously used in Bonica (2014) to jointly scale the American federal judiciary and legal profession in a common space with other political actors. The end result is the first dataset of consistently measured ideological scores across all tiers of the federal judiciary and the legal profession, including 840 federal judges and 380,307 attorneys. To illustrate these measures, we present two examples involving the…
The Political Consequences of Ethnically Targeted Incarceration: Evidence from Japanese American Internment during World War II
What are the downstream political consequences of state activity explicitly targeting an ethnic minority group? This question is well studied in the comparative context, but less is known about the effects of explicitly racist state activity in liberal democracies such as the United States. We investigate this question by looking at an important event in American history—the incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry during World War II. We fin…
Estimating Judicial Ideology
We review the substantial literature on estimating judicial ideology, from the US Supreme Court to the lowest state court. As a way to showcase the strengths and drawbacks of various measures, we further analyze trends in judicial polarization within the US federal courts. Our analysis shows substantial gaps in the ideology of judges appointed by Republican Presidents versus those appointed by Democrats. Similar to trends in Congressional polariz…
Improving Supreme Court Forecasting Using Boosted Decision Trees
Though used frequently in machine learning, boosted decision trees are largely unused in political science, despite many useful properties. We explain how to use one variant of boosted decision trees, AdaBoosted decision trees (ADTs), for social science predictions. We illustrate their use by examining a well-known political prediction problem, predicting U.S. Supreme Court rulings. We find that our ADT approach outperforms existing predictive mo…
No! Formal Theory, Causal Inference, and Big Data Are Not Contradictory Trends in Political Science
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Genetic Determinism, Technology Optimism, and Race: Views of the American Public
We begin with a typology of Americans' understanding of the links between genetic inheritance and racial or ethnic groups. The typology has two dimensions: one running from genetic determinism to social construction, and the other from technology optimism to technology pessimism. Construing each dimension as a dichotomy enables four distinct political perspectives on the possibilities for reducing racial inequality in the United States through ge…
Technology Optimism or Pessimism about Genomic Science: Variation among Experts and Scholarly Disciplines
Like lay people, experts vary in their technology optimism or pessimism about scientific endeavors, for reasons that are poorly understood. We explore experts' technology optimism through a focus on genomics; its novelty, life-and-death implications, complex technology, and broad but as yet unknown societal implications make it an excellent subject for studying views about new knowledge. We use interviews with scientific and medical elites to sho…
To Test or Not? Singular or Multiple Heritage: Genomic Ancestry Testing and Americans’ Racial Identity
DNA ancestry testing may seem frivolous, but it points to two crucial questions: First, what is the relationship, if any, between biology and race? Second, how much and why do people prefer clear, singular racial identities over blurred, mixed racial self-understandings, or the reverse? We posit that individuals of different racial or ethnic backgrounds will have different levels of support for this new technology. In particular, despite the hist…
How Social Science Research Can Improve Teaching
We marshal discoveries about human behavior and learning from social science research and show how these can be used to improve teaching and learning. The discoveries are easily stated as three social science generalizations: (1) social connections motivate, (2) teaching teaches the teacher, and (3) instant feedback improves learning. We show how to apply these generalizations via innovations in modern information technology inside, outside, and …
How Judges’ Professional Experience Impacts Case Outcomes: An Examination of Public Defenders and Criminal Sentencing
Do judges’ professional backgrounds affect their rulings? We investigate this question by looking at the impact of judges’ public defender experience on sentencing. Leveraging thousands of sentences, we find that defendants assigned to a former public defender are, on average, less likely to be incarcerated. Their sentences are also sometimes shorter, which we show is partially due to former public defenders being less likely to give extreme puni…
Response to Dion, Sumner, and Mitchell
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
How uncertainty about judicial nominees can distort the confirmation process
Why are judicial nominees allowed to refuse to answer questions about important issues that could come before the courts? We address this question by examining the information environment surrounding judicial nominations. Using the Supreme Court as our example, we formulate a model that departs from the existing literature by incorporating the fact that the Senate often does not know what type of candidate the President is trying to appoint. Our …
The “Odd Party Out” Theory of Certiorari
Sensitive Questions, Spillover Effects, and Asking about Citizenship on the US Census
Many topics social scientists study are sensitive in nature. Although we know some people may be reluctant to respond to sensitive questions in surveys, we know less about how such questions could influence responses to other questions appearing later in a survey. In this study, we use the Trump administration’s proposal to include a citizenship question on the 2020 Census to demonstrate how such spillover effects can undermine important survey-b…
A Symposium on “The Troubled Future of Colleges and Universities: Editors' Introduction
The American system of higher education is under attack by political, economic, and educational forces that threaten to undermine its business model, governmental support, and operating mission. The potential changes are considerably more dramatic and disruptive than anything previously experienced. Traditional colleges and universities urgently need a coherent, thought-out response. Their central role in fostering the creation, preservation, and…
The Troubled Future of Colleges and Universities
The American system of higher education appears poised for disruptive change of potentially historic proportions due to massive new political, economic, and educational forces that threaten to undermine its business model, governmental support, and operating mission. These forces include dramatic new types of economic competition, difficulties in growing revenue streams as we had in the past, relative declines in philanthropic and government supp…
How Social Science Research Can Improve Teaching
We marshal discoveries about human behavior and learning from social science research and show how these can be used to improve teaching and learning. The discoveries are easily stated as three social science generalizations: (1) social connections motivate, (2) teaching teaches the teacher, and (3) instant feedback improves learning. We show how to apply these generalizations via innovations in modern information technology inside, outside, and …
A Symposium on “The Troubled Future of Colleges and Universities: Editors' Introduction
The American system of higher education is under attack by political, economic, and educational forces that threaten to undermine its business model, governmental support, and operating mission. The potential changes are considerably more dramatic and disruptive than anything previously experienced. Traditional colleges and universities urgently need a coherent, thought-out response. Their central role in fostering the creation, preservation, and…
The Troubled Future of Colleges and Universities
The American system of higher education appears poised for disruptive change of potentially historic proportions due to massive new political, economic, and educational forces that threaten to undermine its business model, governmental support, and operating mission. These forces include dramatic new types of economic competition, difficulties in growing revenue streams as we had in the past, relative declines in philanthropic and government supp…
How Ratifying Treaty Rights Could Affect Norms, Laws, and Constitutional Language Comment
»Vielmehr bietet [der Kommentar] auf höchstem Niveau eine substantielle Auseinandersetzung mit den Hintergründen, den Zusammenhängen, der Theorie und der Praxis des Grundgesetzes. Besseres lässt sich von einem Verfassungskommentar nicht sagen.“ Herbert Günther Staaatsanzeiger für das Land Hessen 2018 (50), 1494–1495
Identifying Judicial Empathy: Does Having Daughters Cause Judges to Rule for Women's Issues
In this article, we consider whether personal relationships can affect the way that judges decide cases. To do so, we leverage the natural experiment of a child's gender to identify the effect of having daughters on the votes of judges. Using new data on the family lives of U.S. Courts of Appeals judges, we find that, conditional on the number of children a judge has, judges with daughters consistently vote in a more feminist fashion on gender is…
No! Formal Theory, Causal Inference, and Big Data Are Not Contradictory Trends in Political Science
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Genetic Determinism, Technology Optimism, and Race: Views of the American Public
We begin with a typology of Americans' understanding of the links between genetic inheritance and racial or ethnic groups. The typology has two dimensions: one running from genetic determinism to social construction, and the other from technology optimism to technology pessimism. Construing each dimension as a dichotomy enables four distinct political perspectives on the possibilities for reducing racial inequality in the United States through ge…
Technology Optimism or Pessimism about Genomic Science: Variation among Experts and Scholarly Disciplines
Like lay people, experts vary in their technology optimism or pessimism about scientific endeavors, for reasons that are poorly understood. We explore experts' technology optimism through a focus on genomics; its novelty, life-and-death implications, complex technology, and broad but as yet unknown societal implications make it an excellent subject for studying views about new knowledge. We use interviews with scientific and medical elites to sho…
To Test or Not? Singular or Multiple Heritage: Genomic Ancestry Testing and Americans’ Racial Identity
DNA ancestry testing may seem frivolous, but it points to two crucial questions: First, what is the relationship, if any, between biology and race? Second, how much and why do people prefer clear, singular racial identities over blurred, mixed racial self-understandings, or the reverse? We posit that individuals of different racial or ethnic backgrounds will have different levels of support for this new technology. In particular, despite the hist…
The Political Legacy of American Slavery
We show that contemporary differences in political attitudes across counties in the American South in part trace their origins to slavery's prevalence more than 150 years ago. Whites who currently live in Southern counties that had high shares of slaves in 1860 are more likely to identify as a Republican, oppose affirmative action, and express racial resentment and colder feelings toward blacks. We show that these results cannot be explained by e…
Race as a Bundle of Sticks: Designs that Estimate Effects of Seemingly Immutable Characteristics
Although understanding the role of race, ethnicity, and identity is central to political science, methodological debates persist about whether it is possible to estimate the effect of something immutable. At the heart of the debate is an older theoretical question: Is race best understood under an essentialist or constructivist framework? In contrast to the “immutable characteristics” or essentialist approach, we argue that race should be operati…
Explaining Causal Findings Without Bias: Detecting and Assessing Direct Effects
Researchers seeking to establish causal relationships frequently control for variables on the purported causal pathway, checking whether the original treatment effect then disappears. Unfortunately, this common approach may lead to biased estimates. In this article, we show that the bias can be avoided by focusing on a quantity of interest called the controlled direct effect. Under certain conditions, the controlled direct effect enables research…
How Political Signals Affect Public Support for Judicial Nominations: Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment
How do Americans evaluate potential US Supreme Court candidates? Using a novel, two-part conjoint experiment, I show that respondents put high importance on the political leanings of potential Court candidates, a finding in contrast with the scholarly view that the public views the Court as different from other, more political institutions. Indeed, when respondents are given information about a nominee’s partisan leanings, they rely extensively o…
A Common-Space Scaling of the American Judiciary and Legal Profession
We extend the scaling methodology previously used in Bonica (2014) to jointly scale the American federal judiciary and legal profession in a common space with other political actors. The end result is the first dataset of consistently measured ideological scores across all tiers of the federal judiciary and the legal profession, including 840 federal judges and 380,307 attorneys. To illustrate these measures, we present two examples involving the…
How uncertainty about judicial nominees can distort the confirmation process
Why are judicial nominees allowed to refuse to answer questions about important issues that could come before the courts? We address this question by examining the information environment surrounding judicial nominations. Using the Supreme Court as our example, we formulate a model that departs from the existing literature by incorporating the fact that the Senate often does not know what type of candidate the President is trying to appoint. Our …
Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics
The lasting effects of slavery on contemporary political attitudes in the American SouthDespite dramatic social transformations in the United States during the last 150 years, the South has remained staunchly conservative. Southerners are more likely to support Republican candidates, gun rights, and the death penalty, and southern whites harbor higher levels of racial resentment than whites in other parts of the country. Why haven't these sentime…
Emotional Arousal Predicts Voting on the U.S. Supreme Court
Do judges telegraph their preferences during oral arguments? Using the U.S. Supreme Court as our example, we demonstrate that Justices implicitly reveal their leanings during oral arguments, even before arguments and deliberations have concluded. Specifically, we extract the emotional content of over 3,000 hours of audio recordings spanning 30 years of oral arguments before the Court. We then use the level of emotional arousal, as measured by voc…
Response to Dion, Sumner, and Mitchell
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Explaining Preferences from Behavior: A Cognitive Dissonance Approach
The standard approach in positive political theory posits that action choices are the consequences of preferences. Social psychology—in particular, cognitive dissonance theory—suggests the opposite: preferences may themselves be affected by action choices. We present a framework that applies this idea to three models of political choice: (1) one in which partisanship emerges naturally in a two-party system despite policy being multidimensional, (…
Analyzing Causal Mechanisms in Survey Experiments
Researchers investigating causal mechanisms in survey experiments often rely on nonrandomized quantities to isolate the indirect effect of treatment through these variables. Such an approach, however, requires a “selection-on-observables” assumption, which undermines the advantages of a randomized experiment. In this paper, we show what can be learned about casual mechanisms through experimental design alone. We propose a factorial design that pr…
Improving Supreme Court Forecasting Using Boosted Decision Trees
Though used frequently in machine learning, boosted decision trees are largely unused in political science, despite many useful properties. We explain how to use one variant of boosted decision trees, AdaBoosted decision trees (ADTs), for social science predictions. We illustrate their use by examining a well-known political prediction problem, predicting U.S. Supreme Court rulings. We find that our ADT approach outperforms existing predictive mo…
Bias and Judging
How do we know whether judges of different backgrounds are biased? We review the substantial political science literature on judicial decision making, paying close attention to how judges' demographics and ideology can influence or structure their decision making. As the research demonstrates, characteristics such as race, ethnicity, and gender can sometimes predict judicial decision making in limited kinds of cases; however, the literature also …
Estimating Judicial Ideology
We review the substantial literature on estimating judicial ideology, from the US Supreme Court to the lowest state court. As a way to showcase the strengths and drawbacks of various measures, we further analyze trends in judicial polarization within the US federal courts. Our analysis shows substantial gaps in the ideology of judges appointed by Republican Presidents versus those appointed by Democrats. Similar to trends in Congressional polariz…
The Political Consequences of Ethnically Targeted Incarceration: Evidence from Japanese American Internment during World War II
What are the downstream political consequences of state activity explicitly targeting an ethnic minority group? This question is well studied in the comparative context, but less is known about the effects of explicitly racist state activity in liberal democracies such as the United States. We investigate this question by looking at an important event in American history—the incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry during World War II. We fin…
Sensitive Questions, Spillover Effects, and Asking about Citizenship on the US Census
Many topics social scientists study are sensitive in nature. Although we know some people may be reluctant to respond to sensitive questions in surveys, we know less about how such questions could influence responses to other questions appearing later in a survey. In this study, we use the Trump administration’s proposal to include a citizenship question on the 2020 Census to demonstrate how such spillover effects can undermine important survey-b…
Political science (25 works) · Law (24 works) · Law (18 works) · Politics (18 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Judicial and Constitutional Studies (10 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Economics (9 works)