Mitchell S Sanders
Biographic Data
| ID | 4180207 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mitchell S Sanders |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mitchell S |
| FAMILY NAME | Sanders |
| SIGNATURE | SANDERS M S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Florida State University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 344 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Who will defend democracy? Evaluating tradeoffs in candidate support among partisan donors and voters
Scholars and pundits fear that the American public’s commitment to democracy is declining and that citizens are willing to embrace candidates who would trample democratic principles. We examine whether violations of those principles generate resistance from voters and/or top campaign donors and whether such resistance extends across partisan lines. In a conjoint survey experiment, we investigate how regular Americans and donor elites trade off pa…
The Effect of Electoral Inversions on Democratic Legitimacy: Evidence from the United States
When a party or candidate loses the popular vote but still wins the election, do voters view the winner as legitimate? This scenario, known as an electoral inversion , describes the winners of two of the last six presidential elections in the United States. We report results from two experiments testing the effect of inversions on democratic legitimacy in the US context. Our results indicate that inversions significantly decrease the perceived le…
Searching for Bright Lines in the Trump Presidency
Is American democracy under threat? The question is more prominent in political debate now than at any time in recent memory. However, it is also too blunt; there is widespread recognition that democracy is multifaceted and that backsliding, when it occurs, tends to be piecemeal. To address these concerns, we provide original data from surveys of political science experts and the public measuring the perceived importance and performance of U.S. d…
Understanding Multivariate Research: A Primer for Beginning Social Scientists
Still Shirking
While Lawrence's analysis highlights the importance of considering outliers, it neither disconfirms the original Rothenberg and Sanders analysis of shirking on the impeachment vote nor findings of shirking generally. Indeed, when a systematic analysis of outliers is conducted for Republican voting on the Clinton impeachment, shirking results again emerge. While outlier analysis is important, it must be done systematically and not in an ad hoc man…
Modeling Motivations: A Method for Inferring Judicial Goals from Behavior
The consensus among most scholars of American politics is that judges are policy seekers. Yet we know very little about what motivates judges in other parts of the world. To begin to address this gap, we develop a systematic method for inferring goals from behavior. Using a simple game-theoretic framework, we generate a series of testable propositions linking behavioral outcomes to goals for four ideal types of judges: loyalists, policy seekers, …
The Complexity of Tolerance and Intolerance Judgments: A Response to Gibson
Civic Knowledge of Elementary and Secondary School Students, 1933–1998
We make five over-time comparisons of student knowledge of civics and government: a) knowledge among 4th, 8th, and 11/12th graders between 1975/6 and 1998 using two separate NAEP trend assessments; b) knowledge over the same period by comparing responses to individual items asked in the 1975/6 and 1981/2 assessments to responses on identical questions asked in the 1988–98 assessments; c) knowledge among 12th graders in the 1930s–1960s compared to…
Assessing Student Performance in Civics: The Naep 1998 Civics Assessment
Students' ignorance of civics is often viewed with alarm, as in interpretations of the 1998 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP); yet adults' incomplete knowledge of government is considered by many to be reasonable and acceptable. We show that aggregate distributions of political knowledge are actually quite similar for students and adults. However, the types of questions differ greatly: Where adults are typically asked about conte…
Reply to “Shirking in the Contemporary Congress: A Reappraisal
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
Much Ado About Very Little: Reply to Herron
While Herron (2004, Political Analysis 12:182–190) is correct that sensitivity to changes in underlying scale and how they affect estimates and inferences is generally important, our assumption in Rothenberg and Sanders (2000, American Journal of Political Science 44:310–319) that W-NOMINATE scales can be directly compared from one Congress to another to study legislative shirking is quite defensible because scale variability is not a substantial…
Tolerance and Intolerance, 1976–1998
Early students of political tolerance projected a rapid rise in levels of tolerance, but subsequent research has failed to offer conclusive evidence regarding whether tolerance has, in fact, increased. The General Social Survey (GSS) included the same 15 dichotomous tolerance items in the period 1976–1998, seemingly permitting assessment of trends in tolerance through examination of a standard 0–15 scale. Unfortunately, the validity of these data…
Tolerance and Intolerance, 1976-1998
Modeling Legislator Decision Making: A Historical Perspective
Although scholars have put enormous effort into developing models of legislative choice behavior, they may not have sufficiently considered the underlying choice process and its relationship to the institutional environment. Our analysis does so by jointly integrating more realistic models of legislator decision making with a historical perspective on institutional evolution. We apply a unified model, incorporating participation and vote choice i…
Uncertainty and Turnout
This article develops a model that simultaneously considers individual turnout and vote choice while also accounting for uncertainty about candidates. The theoretical development of this model implies that the effects of uncertainty on turnout vary with the strength of individual preferences. Application of the model to individual choice in the 1996 American presidential election confirms that decreasing uncertainty about the character traits of …
Lame-Duck Politics: Impending Departure and the Votes on Impeachment
Legislator Turnout and the Calculus of Voting: The Determinants of Abstention in the U.S. Congress
Lame-Duck Politics: Impending Departure and the Votes on Impeachment
One of the peculiarities of the December 1998 votes in the House of Representatives to impeach Bill Clinton was that they took place during a lame-duck session. Roughly 10 percent of the voting population were in their final term and therefore no longer faced any risk of electoral retribution by the citizenry. While most of the relevant empirical literature suggests that the absence of electoral discipline does not matter, in theory, these depart…
Severing the Electoral Connection: Shirking in the Contemporary Congress
Studies of representation focusing on legislative shirking tend to offer an interesting tension: when the opportunity presents itself, it seems that exiting members do not change their votinq behavior (ideological shirking) but do reduce their effort level by voting less (participatory shirking). Our analysis avoids the pitfalls of prior studies by defining a simple, quasi-experimental, research design contrasting those certain that they are seek…
Unified Models of Turnout and Vote Choice for Two-Candidate and Three-Candidate Elections
In this article I use a theory of individual utility maximization to derive a unified model of electoral behavior that includes both candidate choices and turnout decisions. Compared to this new unified model, existing specifications for jointly considering turnout and vote choice are found to be theoretically or empirically lacking. I provide methods for testing my model in elections with two or three candidates, and I show that the parameters o…
Severing the Electoral Connection: Shirking in the Contemporary Congress
Studies of representation focusing on legislative shirking tend to offer an interesting tension: when the opportunity presents itself, it seems that exiting members do not change their votinq behavior (ideological shirking) but do reduce their effort level by voting less (participatory shirking). Our analysis avoids the pitfalls of prior studies by defining a simple, quasi-experimental, research design contrasting those certain that they are seek…
Searching for Bright Lines in the Trump Presidency
Is American democracy under threat? The question is more prominent in political debate now than at any time in recent memory. However, it is also too blunt; there is widespread recognition that democracy is multifaceted and that backsliding, when it occurs, tends to be piecemeal. To address these concerns, we provide original data from surveys of political science experts and the public measuring the perceived importance and performance of U.S. d…
Tolerance and Intolerance, 1976–1998
Early students of political tolerance projected a rapid rise in levels of tolerance, but subsequent research has failed to offer conclusive evidence regarding whether tolerance has, in fact, increased. The General Social Survey (GSS) included the same 15 dichotomous tolerance items in the period 1976–1998, seemingly permitting assessment of trends in tolerance through examination of a standard 0–15 scale. Unfortunately, the validity of these data…
Unified Models of Turnout and Vote Choice for Two-Candidate and Three-Candidate Elections
In this article I use a theory of individual utility maximization to derive a unified model of electoral behavior that includes both candidate choices and turnout decisions. Compared to this new unified model, existing specifications for jointly considering turnout and vote choice are found to be theoretically or empirically lacking. I provide methods for testing my model in elections with two or three candidates, and I show that the parameters o…
Legislator Turnout and the Calculus of Voting: The Determinants of Abstention in the U.S. Congress
Uncertainty and Turnout
This article develops a model that simultaneously considers individual turnout and vote choice while also accounting for uncertainty about candidates. The theoretical development of this model implies that the effects of uncertainty on turnout vary with the strength of individual preferences. Application of the model to individual choice in the 1996 American presidential election confirms that decreasing uncertainty about the character traits of …
Lame-Duck Politics: Impending Departure and the Votes on Impeachment
One of the peculiarities of the December 1998 votes in the House of Representatives to impeach Bill Clinton was that they took place during a lame-duck session. Roughly 10 percent of the voting population were in their final term and therefore no longer faced any risk of electoral retribution by the citizenry. While most of the relevant empirical literature suggests that the absence of electoral discipline does not matter, in theory, these depart…
The Complexity of Tolerance and Intolerance Judgments: A Response to Gibson
Modeling Legislator Decision Making: A Historical Perspective
Although scholars have put enormous effort into developing models of legislative choice behavior, they may not have sufficiently considered the underlying choice process and its relationship to the institutional environment. Our analysis does so by jointly integrating more realistic models of legislator decision making with a historical perspective on institutional evolution. We apply a unified model, incorporating participation and vote choice i…
Modeling Motivations: A Method for Inferring Judicial Goals from Behavior
The consensus among most scholars of American politics is that judges are policy seekers. Yet we know very little about what motivates judges in other parts of the world. To begin to address this gap, we develop a systematic method for inferring goals from behavior. Using a simple game-theoretic framework, we generate a series of testable propositions linking behavioral outcomes to goals for four ideal types of judges: loyalists, policy seekers, …
Still Shirking
While Lawrence's analysis highlights the importance of considering outliers, it neither disconfirms the original Rothenberg and Sanders analysis of shirking on the impeachment vote nor findings of shirking generally. Indeed, when a systematic analysis of outliers is conducted for Republican voting on the Clinton impeachment, shirking results again emerge. While outlier analysis is important, it must be done systematically and not in an ad hoc man…
The Effect of Electoral Inversions on Democratic Legitimacy: Evidence from the United States
When a party or candidate loses the popular vote but still wins the election, do voters view the winner as legitimate? This scenario, known as an electoral inversion , describes the winners of two of the last six presidential elections in the United States. We report results from two experiments testing the effect of inversions on democratic legitimacy in the US context. Our results indicate that inversions significantly decrease the perceived le…
Reply to “Shirking in the Contemporary Congress: A Reappraisal
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
Assessing Student Performance in Civics: The Naep 1998 Civics Assessment
Students' ignorance of civics is often viewed with alarm, as in interpretations of the 1998 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP); yet adults' incomplete knowledge of government is considered by many to be reasonable and acceptable. We show that aggregate distributions of political knowledge are actually quite similar for students and adults. However, the types of questions differ greatly: Where adults are typically asked about conte…
Much Ado About Very Little: Reply to Herron
While Herron (2004, Political Analysis 12:182–190) is correct that sensitivity to changes in underlying scale and how they affect estimates and inferences is generally important, our assumption in Rothenberg and Sanders (2000, American Journal of Political Science 44:310–319) that W-NOMINATE scales can be directly compared from one Congress to another to study legislative shirking is quite defensible because scale variability is not a substantial…
Tolerance and Intolerance, 1976-1998
Civic Knowledge of Elementary and Secondary School Students, 1933–1998
We make five over-time comparisons of student knowledge of civics and government: a) knowledge among 4th, 8th, and 11/12th graders between 1975/6 and 1998 using two separate NAEP trend assessments; b) knowledge over the same period by comparing responses to individual items asked in the 1975/6 and 1981/2 assessments to responses on identical questions asked in the 1988–98 assessments; c) knowledge among 12th graders in the 1930s–1960s compared to…
Unified Models of Turnout and Vote Choice for Two-Candidate and Three-Candidate Elections
In this article I use a theory of individual utility maximization to derive a unified model of electoral behavior that includes both candidate choices and turnout decisions. Compared to this new unified model, existing specifications for jointly considering turnout and vote choice are found to be theoretically or empirically lacking. I provide methods for testing my model in elections with two or three candidates, and I show that the parameters o…
Lame-Duck Politics: Impending Departure and the Votes on Impeachment
Legislator Turnout and the Calculus of Voting: The Determinants of Abstention in the U.S. Congress
Lame-Duck Politics: Impending Departure and the Votes on Impeachment
One of the peculiarities of the December 1998 votes in the House of Representatives to impeach Bill Clinton was that they took place during a lame-duck session. Roughly 10 percent of the voting population were in their final term and therefore no longer faced any risk of electoral retribution by the citizenry. While most of the relevant empirical literature suggests that the absence of electoral discipline does not matter, in theory, these depart…
Severing the Electoral Connection: Shirking in the Contemporary Congress
Studies of representation focusing on legislative shirking tend to offer an interesting tension: when the opportunity presents itself, it seems that exiting members do not change their votinq behavior (ideological shirking) but do reduce their effort level by voting less (participatory shirking). Our analysis avoids the pitfalls of prior studies by defining a simple, quasi-experimental, research design contrasting those certain that they are seek…
Uncertainty and Turnout
This article develops a model that simultaneously considers individual turnout and vote choice while also accounting for uncertainty about candidates. The theoretical development of this model implies that the effects of uncertainty on turnout vary with the strength of individual preferences. Application of the model to individual choice in the 1996 American presidential election confirms that decreasing uncertainty about the character traits of …
Modeling Legislator Decision Making: A Historical Perspective
Although scholars have put enormous effort into developing models of legislative choice behavior, they may not have sufficiently considered the underlying choice process and its relationship to the institutional environment. Our analysis does so by jointly integrating more realistic models of legislator decision making with a historical perspective on institutional evolution. We apply a unified model, incorporating participation and vote choice i…
Tolerance and Intolerance, 1976–1998
Early students of political tolerance projected a rapid rise in levels of tolerance, but subsequent research has failed to offer conclusive evidence regarding whether tolerance has, in fact, increased. The General Social Survey (GSS) included the same 15 dichotomous tolerance items in the period 1976–1998, seemingly permitting assessment of trends in tolerance through examination of a standard 0–15 scale. Unfortunately, the validity of these data…
Tolerance and Intolerance, 1976-1998
Assessing Student Performance in Civics: The Naep 1998 Civics Assessment
Students' ignorance of civics is often viewed with alarm, as in interpretations of the 1998 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP); yet adults' incomplete knowledge of government is considered by many to be reasonable and acceptable. We show that aggregate distributions of political knowledge are actually quite similar for students and adults. However, the types of questions differ greatly: Where adults are typically asked about conte…
Reply to “Shirking in the Contemporary Congress: A Reappraisal
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
Much Ado About Very Little: Reply to Herron
While Herron (2004, Political Analysis 12:182–190) is correct that sensitivity to changes in underlying scale and how they affect estimates and inferences is generally important, our assumption in Rothenberg and Sanders (2000, American Journal of Political Science 44:310–319) that W-NOMINATE scales can be directly compared from one Congress to another to study legislative shirking is quite defensible because scale variability is not a substantial…
The Complexity of Tolerance and Intolerance Judgments: A Response to Gibson
Civic Knowledge of Elementary and Secondary School Students, 1933–1998
We make five over-time comparisons of student knowledge of civics and government: a) knowledge among 4th, 8th, and 11/12th graders between 1975/6 and 1998 using two separate NAEP trend assessments; b) knowledge over the same period by comparing responses to individual items asked in the 1975/6 and 1981/2 assessments to responses on identical questions asked in the 1988–98 assessments; c) knowledge among 12th graders in the 1930s–1960s compared to…
Modeling Motivations: A Method for Inferring Judicial Goals from Behavior
The consensus among most scholars of American politics is that judges are policy seekers. Yet we know very little about what motivates judges in other parts of the world. To begin to address this gap, we develop a systematic method for inferring goals from behavior. Using a simple game-theoretic framework, we generate a series of testable propositions linking behavioral outcomes to goals for four ideal types of judges: loyalists, policy seekers, …
Still Shirking
While Lawrence's analysis highlights the importance of considering outliers, it neither disconfirms the original Rothenberg and Sanders analysis of shirking on the impeachment vote nor findings of shirking generally. Indeed, when a systematic analysis of outliers is conducted for Republican voting on the Clinton impeachment, shirking results again emerge. While outlier analysis is important, it must be done systematically and not in an ad hoc man…
Understanding Multivariate Research: A Primer for Beginning Social Scientists
Searching for Bright Lines in the Trump Presidency
Is American democracy under threat? The question is more prominent in political debate now than at any time in recent memory. However, it is also too blunt; there is widespread recognition that democracy is multifaceted and that backsliding, when it occurs, tends to be piecemeal. To address these concerns, we provide original data from surveys of political science experts and the public measuring the perceived importance and performance of U.S. d…
Who will defend democracy? Evaluating tradeoffs in candidate support among partisan donors and voters
Scholars and pundits fear that the American public’s commitment to democracy is declining and that citizens are willing to embrace candidates who would trample democratic principles. We examine whether violations of those principles generate resistance from voters and/or top campaign donors and whether such resistance extends across partisan lines. In a conjoint survey experiment, we investigate how regular Americans and donor elites trade off pa…
The Effect of Electoral Inversions on Democratic Legitimacy: Evidence from the United States
When a party or candidate loses the popular vote but still wins the election, do voters view the winner as legitimate? This scenario, known as an electoral inversion , describes the winners of two of the last six presidential elections in the United States. We report results from two experiments testing the effect of inversions on democratic legitimacy in the US context. Our results indicate that inversions significantly decrease the perceived le…
Political science (15 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (13 works) · Politics (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Economics (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Voting (7 works) · Law and economics (6 works)