Joseph Daniel Ura
Biographic Data
| ID | 4124010 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joseph Daniel Ura |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joseph Daniel |
| FAMILY NAME | Ura |
| SIGNATURE | URA J D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Texas A&M University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4173-9904 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 262 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Policy, Position-Taking, and Congressional Voting under Judicial Review
Judicial review introduces uncertainty for members of Congress about whether and to what extent bills they pass will have enduring policy consequences. We argue that the risk courts will strike down a law influences members’ of Congress strategic calculations about roll call voting, decreasing the relative importance of policy judgments and increasing the relative importance of position-taking considerations. We evaluate some empirical implicatio…
Partisan Polarization Mitigates Economic Voting in US Presidential Elections, 1952–2020: Implications for 2024
Objective Ellis and Ura report that partisan polarization moderates the relationship between economic performance and incumbent party nominees’ two‐party vote share in US presidential elections between 1952 and 2016. We update their model to include the results of the 2020 election and generate forecasts for the 2024 election based on contemporary political‐economic conditions. Methods We re‐estimate Ellis and Ura's polarized times model of incum…
Reevaluating ideological asymmetries in specific support for the Supreme Court
Recent studies show the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center undermined multiple forms of support for the Supreme Court. These findings are in tension with existing work on the ideological structure of specific support of the Supreme Court, which finds more tolerance for ideological disagreement among liberals than among conservatives. In this note, we replicate and extend Haglin et al. (2021), whose analysis ends in…
Greater public confidence in the US Supreme Court predicts more jurisdiction stripping
A growing body of empirical research shows an association between public support for the US Supreme Court and both judicial independence and congressional court curbing activity. At the same time, studies of jurisdiction stripping show Congress’ efforts to limit federal courts’ jurisdiction are principally related to courts’ workloads rather than ideological differences between courts and Congress. Here, the authors connect these streams of inqui…
Polarization and the Decline of Economic Voting in American National Elections
Objective There is substantial evidence that American voters blame or credit the president for the state of the economy when making electoral decisions. However, a variety of findings on economic voting, cognitive biases in information processing, and party polarization indicate that both objective and subjective economic information should become less important to voters as partisan polarization increases. We evaluate whether partisan polarizati…
Ideology and Specific Support for the Supreme Court
We develop and assess an account of ideological asymmetries in public support for the Supreme Court. We find that specific support for the Supreme Court is more strongly negatively related to perceptions that the Court is overly liberal than perceptions that the Court is overly conservative. Our findings provide a more complete theoretical account of dynamics in specific support for the Supreme Court and indicate a mechanism behind the recent dec…
Latinos’ Knowledge of the Supreme Court
There is convincing evidence that Americans have high, stable levels of knowledge about the Supreme Court. Yet, this conclusion masks variance in political knowledge associated with ethnicity. Using data from surveys of Latinos and non-Latinos fielded before and after the Supreme Court’s rulings in Arizona v. United States and National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius , we find Latinos know less about the Court than other Americans.…
A majoritarian basis for judicial countermajoritarianism
Judicial protection of disfavored minorities against oppressive legislation in majoritarian separation-of-power systems raises a puzzle: Why don’t legislative majorities enacting discriminatory legislation curb judicial power when judges use their power to protect minorities and stymie the legislation? We answer this question by showing that judicial protection of disfavored minorities can emerge as an unintended by-product of majoritarian politi…
Courts and Issue Attention in Canada
Objective To inform international discourse about judicial countermajoritarianism, we assess whether decisions enhancing gay rights by Canadian courts increase the media's attention to homosexuality and related topics. Method We first collect a data set of monthly counts of relevant articles published in two prominent Canadian newspapers and then estimate Markov‐switching models to evaluate whether increases in media attention to homosexuality ar…
Peasants and Bankers: Education, Consumer Sentiment, and Presidential Approval
We revisit the debate over the roles of the public's evaluations of experienced (retrospective) and expected (prospective) economic performance for presidential approval. We argue that formal education mediates the relationship between sentiment about the economy and judgments of presidential performance. An analysis of quarterly presidential approval across education cohorts for the period 1978 to 2008 shows that Americans with lower levels of e…
Experience counts: The chief justice, management tenure, and strategic behavior on the U.S. Supreme Court
We develop and test a theoretical account of the effect of management tenure on the strategic behavior of the chief justice of the United States. Substantial evidence from literatures on learning models and public management indicate that tenure (length of service) is positively related to management performance in public organizations. This suggests that the chief justice’s tenure in office should be positively related to efficiency in the use o…
Managing the Supreme Court: The Chief Justice, Management, and Consensus
In this article, we draw on a prominent model of public management to develop a preliminary theoretical approach to understanding the role of the chief justice in Supreme Court decision-making. In particular, we argue that the Court may seek legitimacy through greater unanimity and discuss how the leadership of the chief justice can facilitate that effort. We assess a hypothesis derived from this theory, showing greater agreement among the justic…
Judicial Majoritarianism
For decades, constitutional theorists have confronted the normative problems associated with judicial review by an unelected judiciary; yet some political scientists contend that judicial review actually tends to promote majoritarian interests. We evaluate the majoritarian nature of judicial review and test the political foundations that shape this process. To do so, we construct a statute-centered data set of every important federal law enacted …
Desperately Seeking Sonia? Latino Heterogeneity and Geographic Variation in Web Searches for Judge Sonia Sotomayor
Linguistic heritage, cultural similarities, and experiences as ethnic minorities link Latinos in the United States, but distinctions on national origin, nativity, and geographic distribution may yield political differences. Previous investigations of Latino heterogeneity as a catalyst for unity or division are limited to narrow issue domains and the set of elections characterized by within-group diversity. It remains unclear whether Latinos will …
Backlash and Legitimation: Macro Political Responses to Supreme Court Decisions
This article is a first attempt to develop and assess the competing predictions of the thermostatic model of public opinion and legitimation theory for the responses of public mood to Supreme Court decisions. While the thermostatic model predicts a negative relationship between the ideological direction of Supreme Court decisions and changes in public mood, legitimation theory predicts that changes in mood should be positively associated with the…
Public opinion and conflict in the separation of powers: Understanding the Honduran coup of 2009
Formal constitutional systems of separated powers often fail to sustain meaningful systems of checks and balances in presidential-style democracies. What conditions support balance in the separation of powers and what conditions provoke instability and conflict? We draw on Madisonian political theory and research addressing the separation of powers in the United States to develop a game theoretical model of inter-institutional stability and confl…
Partisan Moods: Polarization and the Dynamics of Mass Party Preferences
Inquiry into the origins of partisan polarization has generally treated polarization as a simple, symmetric phenomenon—the degree to which the worldviews of the mass Democratic and Republican parties have or have not diverged from one another. In this article, we disaggregate polarization into its constituent parts, the dynamic preferences of the mass Democratic and Republican Parties. This approach allows for the possibility that intraparty dyna…
The Behavioral Political Economy of Budget Deficits: How Starve the Beast Policies Feed the Machine
The notion of starving the beast has been an important justification for fiscal programs emphasizing revenue reductions since the mid-1970s. While the idea of restraining government spending by limiting government revenues has an intuitive appeal, there is convincing evidence the reducing federal tax rates without coordinated reductions in federal spending actually produces long-term growth in spending. This perverse result is explained by a theo…
An Appeal to the People: Public Opinion and Congressional Support for the Supreme Court
Scholars often assert that public support for judicial authority induces Congress to grant resources and discretion to the Supreme Court. However, the theory of competing public agency embraced by the Constitution suggests that public support for courts cannot, by itself, explain congressional support for judicial authority. Instead, the logic of the separation of powers system indicates that legislative support for the institutional capacity of …
The Supreme Court and Issue Attention: The Case of Homosexuality
Previous studies have shown that a small number of Supreme Court decisions that "rearrange[d] the ... distribution of political benefits" have drawn the media's attention to the underlying issues involved in those cases. This article provides an additional test of that empirical claim, examining the effects of the Supreme Court's gay rights cases on media coverage of homosexuality from 1990 to 2005. The data indicate that Supreme Court decisions …
Income, Preferences, and the Dynamics of Policy Responsiveness
A variety of measures indicate that income inequality has grown significantly in the United States during the last three decades (APSA 2004; Brandolini and Smeeding 2006). In a flurry of recent research, scholars have attributed this trend to the failure of the national government to represent the preferences of ordinary citizens in general and less wealthy citizens in particular (APSA 2004; Bartels 2004; 2006; Gilens 2005), who participate in po…
The Dynamic Consequences of Nonvoting in American National Elections
A growing body of work examines the consequences of unequal participation in American democracy for electoral outcomes. However, this scholarship has ignored the potential impact of unequal voting for the quality of dynamic representation in the American political system. Using data from the General Social Survey (GSS), we examine the dynamic relationship between the policy preferences of voters and nonvoters in the American electorate. Further, …
Partisan Moods: Polarization and the Dynamics of Mass Party Preferences
Inquiry into the origins of partisan polarization has generally treated polarization as a simple, symmetric phenomenon—the degree to which the worldviews of the mass Democratic and Republican parties have or have not diverged from one another. In this article, we disaggregate polarization into its constituent parts, the dynamic preferences of the mass Democratic and Republican Parties. This approach allows for the possibility that intraparty dyna…
An Appeal to the People: Public Opinion and Congressional Support for the Supreme Court
Scholars often assert that public support for judicial authority induces Congress to grant resources and discretion to the Supreme Court. However, the theory of competing public agency embraced by the Constitution suggests that public support for courts cannot, by itself, explain congressional support for judicial authority. Instead, the logic of the separation of powers system indicates that legislative support for the institutional capacity of …
Income, Preferences, and the Dynamics of Policy Responsiveness
A variety of measures indicate that income inequality has grown significantly in the United States during the last three decades (APSA 2004; Brandolini and Smeeding 2006). In a flurry of recent research, scholars have attributed this trend to the failure of the national government to represent the preferences of ordinary citizens in general and less wealthy citizens in particular (APSA 2004; Bartels 2004; 2006; Gilens 2005), who participate in po…
Backlash and Legitimation: Macro Political Responses to Supreme Court Decisions
This article is a first attempt to develop and assess the competing predictions of the thermostatic model of public opinion and legitimation theory for the responses of public mood to Supreme Court decisions. While the thermostatic model predicts a negative relationship between the ideological direction of Supreme Court decisions and changes in public mood, legitimation theory predicts that changes in mood should be positively associated with the…
Judicial Majoritarianism
For decades, constitutional theorists have confronted the normative problems associated with judicial review by an unelected judiciary; yet some political scientists contend that judicial review actually tends to promote majoritarian interests. We evaluate the majoritarian nature of judicial review and test the political foundations that shape this process. To do so, we construct a statute-centered data set of every important federal law enacted …
Ideology and Specific Support for the Supreme Court
We develop and assess an account of ideological asymmetries in public support for the Supreme Court. We find that specific support for the Supreme Court is more strongly negatively related to perceptions that the Court is overly liberal than perceptions that the Court is overly conservative. Our findings provide a more complete theoretical account of dynamics in specific support for the Supreme Court and indicate a mechanism behind the recent dec…
The Dynamic Consequences of Nonvoting in American National Elections
A growing body of work examines the consequences of unequal participation in American democracy for electoral outcomes. However, this scholarship has ignored the potential impact of unequal voting for the quality of dynamic representation in the American political system. Using data from the General Social Survey (GSS), we examine the dynamic relationship between the policy preferences of voters and nonvoters in the American electorate. Further, …
Public opinion and conflict in the separation of powers: Understanding the Honduran coup of 2009
Formal constitutional systems of separated powers often fail to sustain meaningful systems of checks and balances in presidential-style democracies. What conditions support balance in the separation of powers and what conditions provoke instability and conflict? We draw on Madisonian political theory and research addressing the separation of powers in the United States to develop a game theoretical model of inter-institutional stability and confl…
The Supreme Court and Issue Attention: The Case of Homosexuality
Previous studies have shown that a small number of Supreme Court decisions that "rearrange[d] the ... distribution of political benefits" have drawn the media's attention to the underlying issues involved in those cases. This article provides an additional test of that empirical claim, examining the effects of the Supreme Court's gay rights cases on media coverage of homosexuality from 1990 to 2005. The data indicate that Supreme Court decisions …
Desperately Seeking Sonia? Latino Heterogeneity and Geographic Variation in Web Searches for Judge Sonia Sotomayor
Linguistic heritage, cultural similarities, and experiences as ethnic minorities link Latinos in the United States, but distinctions on national origin, nativity, and geographic distribution may yield political differences. Previous investigations of Latino heterogeneity as a catalyst for unity or division are limited to narrow issue domains and the set of elections characterized by within-group diversity. It remains unclear whether Latinos will …
Polarization and the Decline of Economic Voting in American National Elections
Objective There is substantial evidence that American voters blame or credit the president for the state of the economy when making electoral decisions. However, a variety of findings on economic voting, cognitive biases in information processing, and party polarization indicate that both objective and subjective economic information should become less important to voters as partisan polarization increases. We evaluate whether partisan polarizati…
Greater public confidence in the US Supreme Court predicts more jurisdiction stripping
A growing body of empirical research shows an association between public support for the US Supreme Court and both judicial independence and congressional court curbing activity. At the same time, studies of jurisdiction stripping show Congress’ efforts to limit federal courts’ jurisdiction are principally related to courts’ workloads rather than ideological differences between courts and Congress. Here, the authors connect these streams of inqui…
Peasants and Bankers: Education, Consumer Sentiment, and Presidential Approval
We revisit the debate over the roles of the public's evaluations of experienced (retrospective) and expected (prospective) economic performance for presidential approval. We argue that formal education mediates the relationship between sentiment about the economy and judgments of presidential performance. An analysis of quarterly presidential approval across education cohorts for the period 1978 to 2008 shows that Americans with lower levels of e…
Managing the Supreme Court: The Chief Justice, Management, and Consensus
In this article, we draw on a prominent model of public management to develop a preliminary theoretical approach to understanding the role of the chief justice in Supreme Court decision-making. In particular, we argue that the Court may seek legitimacy through greater unanimity and discuss how the leadership of the chief justice can facilitate that effort. We assess a hypothesis derived from this theory, showing greater agreement among the justic…
A majoritarian basis for judicial countermajoritarianism
Judicial protection of disfavored minorities against oppressive legislation in majoritarian separation-of-power systems raises a puzzle: Why don’t legislative majorities enacting discriminatory legislation curb judicial power when judges use their power to protect minorities and stymie the legislation? We answer this question by showing that judicial protection of disfavored minorities can emerge as an unintended by-product of majoritarian politi…
Latinos’ Knowledge of the Supreme Court
There is convincing evidence that Americans have high, stable levels of knowledge about the Supreme Court. Yet, this conclusion masks variance in political knowledge associated with ethnicity. Using data from surveys of Latinos and non-Latinos fielded before and after the Supreme Court’s rulings in Arizona v. United States and National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius , we find Latinos know less about the Court than other Americans.…
Experience counts: The chief justice, management tenure, and strategic behavior on the U.S. Supreme Court
We develop and test a theoretical account of the effect of management tenure on the strategic behavior of the chief justice of the United States. Substantial evidence from literatures on learning models and public management indicate that tenure (length of service) is positively related to management performance in public organizations. This suggests that the chief justice’s tenure in office should be positively related to efficiency in the use o…
The Dynamic Consequences of Nonvoting in American National Elections
A growing body of work examines the consequences of unequal participation in American democracy for electoral outcomes. However, this scholarship has ignored the potential impact of unequal voting for the quality of dynamic representation in the American political system. Using data from the General Social Survey (GSS), we examine the dynamic relationship between the policy preferences of voters and nonvoters in the American electorate. Further, …
Income, Preferences, and the Dynamics of Policy Responsiveness
A variety of measures indicate that income inequality has grown significantly in the United States during the last three decades (APSA 2004; Brandolini and Smeeding 2006). In a flurry of recent research, scholars have attributed this trend to the failure of the national government to represent the preferences of ordinary citizens in general and less wealthy citizens in particular (APSA 2004; Bartels 2004; 2006; Gilens 2005), who participate in po…
The Supreme Court and Issue Attention: The Case of Homosexuality
Previous studies have shown that a small number of Supreme Court decisions that "rearrange[d] the ... distribution of political benefits" have drawn the media's attention to the underlying issues involved in those cases. This article provides an additional test of that empirical claim, examining the effects of the Supreme Court's gay rights cases on media coverage of homosexuality from 1990 to 2005. The data indicate that Supreme Court decisions …
An Appeal to the People: Public Opinion and Congressional Support for the Supreme Court
Scholars often assert that public support for judicial authority induces Congress to grant resources and discretion to the Supreme Court. However, the theory of competing public agency embraced by the Constitution suggests that public support for courts cannot, by itself, explain congressional support for judicial authority. Instead, the logic of the separation of powers system indicates that legislative support for the institutional capacity of …
The Behavioral Political Economy of Budget Deficits: How Starve the Beast Policies Feed the Machine
The notion of starving the beast has been an important justification for fiscal programs emphasizing revenue reductions since the mid-1970s. While the idea of restraining government spending by limiting government revenues has an intuitive appeal, there is convincing evidence the reducing federal tax rates without coordinated reductions in federal spending actually produces long-term growth in spending. This perverse result is explained by a theo…
Partisan Moods: Polarization and the Dynamics of Mass Party Preferences
Inquiry into the origins of partisan polarization has generally treated polarization as a simple, symmetric phenomenon—the degree to which the worldviews of the mass Democratic and Republican parties have or have not diverged from one another. In this article, we disaggregate polarization into its constituent parts, the dynamic preferences of the mass Democratic and Republican Parties. This approach allows for the possibility that intraparty dyna…
Desperately Seeking Sonia? Latino Heterogeneity and Geographic Variation in Web Searches for Judge Sonia Sotomayor
Linguistic heritage, cultural similarities, and experiences as ethnic minorities link Latinos in the United States, but distinctions on national origin, nativity, and geographic distribution may yield political differences. Previous investigations of Latino heterogeneity as a catalyst for unity or division are limited to narrow issue domains and the set of elections characterized by within-group diversity. It remains unclear whether Latinos will …
Backlash and Legitimation: Macro Political Responses to Supreme Court Decisions
This article is a first attempt to develop and assess the competing predictions of the thermostatic model of public opinion and legitimation theory for the responses of public mood to Supreme Court decisions. While the thermostatic model predicts a negative relationship between the ideological direction of Supreme Court decisions and changes in public mood, legitimation theory predicts that changes in mood should be positively associated with the…
Public opinion and conflict in the separation of powers: Understanding the Honduran coup of 2009
Formal constitutional systems of separated powers often fail to sustain meaningful systems of checks and balances in presidential-style democracies. What conditions support balance in the separation of powers and what conditions provoke instability and conflict? We draw on Madisonian political theory and research addressing the separation of powers in the United States to develop a game theoretical model of inter-institutional stability and confl…
Judicial Majoritarianism
For decades, constitutional theorists have confronted the normative problems associated with judicial review by an unelected judiciary; yet some political scientists contend that judicial review actually tends to promote majoritarian interests. We evaluate the majoritarian nature of judicial review and test the political foundations that shape this process. To do so, we construct a statute-centered data set of every important federal law enacted …
Experience counts: The chief justice, management tenure, and strategic behavior on the U.S. Supreme Court
We develop and test a theoretical account of the effect of management tenure on the strategic behavior of the chief justice of the United States. Substantial evidence from literatures on learning models and public management indicate that tenure (length of service) is positively related to management performance in public organizations. This suggests that the chief justice’s tenure in office should be positively related to efficiency in the use o…
Managing the Supreme Court: The Chief Justice, Management, and Consensus
In this article, we draw on a prominent model of public management to develop a preliminary theoretical approach to understanding the role of the chief justice in Supreme Court decision-making. In particular, we argue that the Court may seek legitimacy through greater unanimity and discuss how the leadership of the chief justice can facilitate that effort. We assess a hypothesis derived from this theory, showing greater agreement among the justic…
Peasants and Bankers: Education, Consumer Sentiment, and Presidential Approval
We revisit the debate over the roles of the public's evaluations of experienced (retrospective) and expected (prospective) economic performance for presidential approval. We argue that formal education mediates the relationship between sentiment about the economy and judgments of presidential performance. An analysis of quarterly presidential approval across education cohorts for the period 1978 to 2008 shows that Americans with lower levels of e…
Courts and Issue Attention in Canada
Objective To inform international discourse about judicial countermajoritarianism, we assess whether decisions enhancing gay rights by Canadian courts increase the media's attention to homosexuality and related topics. Method We first collect a data set of monthly counts of relevant articles published in two prominent Canadian newspapers and then estimate Markov‐switching models to evaluate whether increases in media attention to homosexuality ar…
Latinos’ Knowledge of the Supreme Court
There is convincing evidence that Americans have high, stable levels of knowledge about the Supreme Court. Yet, this conclusion masks variance in political knowledge associated with ethnicity. Using data from surveys of Latinos and non-Latinos fielded before and after the Supreme Court’s rulings in Arizona v. United States and National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius , we find Latinos know less about the Court than other Americans.…
A majoritarian basis for judicial countermajoritarianism
Judicial protection of disfavored minorities against oppressive legislation in majoritarian separation-of-power systems raises a puzzle: Why don’t legislative majorities enacting discriminatory legislation curb judicial power when judges use their power to protect minorities and stymie the legislation? We answer this question by showing that judicial protection of disfavored minorities can emerge as an unintended by-product of majoritarian politi…
Polarization and the Decline of Economic Voting in American National Elections
Objective There is substantial evidence that American voters blame or credit the president for the state of the economy when making electoral decisions. However, a variety of findings on economic voting, cognitive biases in information processing, and party polarization indicate that both objective and subjective economic information should become less important to voters as partisan polarization increases. We evaluate whether partisan polarizati…
Ideology and Specific Support for the Supreme Court
We develop and assess an account of ideological asymmetries in public support for the Supreme Court. We find that specific support for the Supreme Court is more strongly negatively related to perceptions that the Court is overly liberal than perceptions that the Court is overly conservative. Our findings provide a more complete theoretical account of dynamics in specific support for the Supreme Court and indicate a mechanism behind the recent dec…
Greater public confidence in the US Supreme Court predicts more jurisdiction stripping
A growing body of empirical research shows an association between public support for the US Supreme Court and both judicial independence and congressional court curbing activity. At the same time, studies of jurisdiction stripping show Congress’ efforts to limit federal courts’ jurisdiction are principally related to courts’ workloads rather than ideological differences between courts and Congress. Here, the authors connect these streams of inqui…
Policy, Position-Taking, and Congressional Voting under Judicial Review
Judicial review introduces uncertainty for members of Congress about whether and to what extent bills they pass will have enduring policy consequences. We argue that the risk courts will strike down a law influences members’ of Congress strategic calculations about roll call voting, decreasing the relative importance of policy judgments and increasing the relative importance of position-taking considerations. We evaluate some empirical implicatio…
Partisan Polarization Mitigates Economic Voting in US Presidential Elections, 1952–2020: Implications for 2024
Objective Ellis and Ura report that partisan polarization moderates the relationship between economic performance and incumbent party nominees’ two‐party vote share in US presidential elections between 1952 and 2016. We update their model to include the results of the 2020 election and generate forecasts for the 2024 election based on contemporary political‐economic conditions. Methods We re‐estimate Ellis and Ura's polarized times model of incum…
Reevaluating ideological asymmetries in specific support for the Supreme Court
Recent studies show the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center undermined multiple forms of support for the Supreme Court. These findings are in tension with existing work on the ideological structure of specific support of the Supreme Court, which finds more tolerance for ideological disagreement among liberals than among conservatives. In this note, we replicate and extend Haglin et al. (2021), whose analysis ends in…
Political science (22 works) · Law (20 works) · Politics (20 works) · Law (17 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (14 works) · Judicial and Constitutional Studies (13 works) · Supreme court (12 works) · Economics (9 works) · Legal and Constitutional Studies (8 works) · Sociology (7 works)