The power of the local in sports broadcasting: a cross-cultural analysis of rugby commentary

This article explores how local pressures intersect to produce differing broadcasts in 2 cultural contexts. This is achieved via a cross-cultural analysis of a decade of tele¬vised rugby union matches between France and New Zealand and interviews with leading commentators in both countries. The authors argue that although the over-arching commercial imperative to capture audiences might be the same in both coun¬tries, and despite global tendencies toward homogenized presentation of sports events, there are local differences in expectations about which kinds of audiences should be captured, and these lead to different practices and emphases in the live broadcasts. The authors suggest that in each country, broadcasts are the result of a complex set of pressures that interact to produce broadcasts with “local” flavor and characteristics

Standing the Test of Time: The Breadth of Majority Coalitions and the Fate of U.S. Supreme Court Precedents

Should a strategic Justice assemble a broader coalition for the majority opinion than is necessary, even if that means accommodating changes that move the opinion away from the author’s ideal holding? If the author’s objective is to durably move the law to his or her ideal holding, the conventional answer is no, because there is a cost and no corresponding benefit. We consider whether attracting a broad majority coalition can placate future courts. Controlling for the size of the coalition, we find that cases with ideologically narrow coalitions are more likely to be treated negatively by later courts. Specifically, adding either ideological breadth or a new member to the majority coalition results in an opinion that is less likely to be overruled, criticized, or questioned by a later court. Our findings contradict the conventional wisdom regarding the coalition-building strategy of a rational and strategic opinion author, establishing that the author has an incentive to go beyond the four most ideologically proximate Justices in building a majority coalition. And because of later interpreters’ negative reactions to narrow coalitions, the law ends up being less ideological than the Justices themselves

Stochastic Weighted Graphs: Flexible Model Specification and Simulation

In most domains of network analysis researchers consider networks that arise in nature with weighted edges. Such networks are routinely dichotomized in the interest of using available methods for statistical inference with networks. The generalized exponential random graph model (GERGM) is a recently proposed method used to simulate and model the edges of a weighted graph. The GERGM specifies a joint distribution for an exponential family of graphs with continuous-valued edge weights. However, current estimation algorithms for the GERGM only allow inference on a restricted family of model specifications. To address this issue, we develop a Metropolis--Hastings method that can be used to estimate any GERGM specification, thereby significantly extending the family of weighted graphs that can be modeled with the GERGM. We show that new flexible model specifications are capable of avoiding likelihood degeneracy and efficiently capturing network structure in applications where such models were not previously available. We demonstrate the utility of this new class of GERGMs through application to two real network data sets, and we further assess the effectiveness of our proposed methodology by simulating non-degenerate model specifications from the well-studied two-stars model. A working R version of the GERGM code is available in the supplement and will be incorporated in the gergm CRAN package.Comment: 33 pages, 6 figures. To appear in Social Network

Being backed by extended party networks can mean a greater chance of electoral success for a Congressional challenger

Political parties play a central role in democracies, helping to mediate between citizens and governing elites by running candidates for office who promise to pursue policy programs. But what if “the party” is really more of a collection of interest groups than a traditional party organization? Using data from US congressional elections and campaign finance, Bruce Desmarais, Ray La Raja and Mike Kowal show that parties are networks of partisan groups that converge on select groups of challengers. They explain that parties in the U.S. have become so distinctive and polarized, because they represent unique coalitions of policy demanders that influence the ideological composition of Congress

Discrete Measurement, Continuous Time and Event History Modeling

Most even history models used in political science assume the time being analyzed is continuous. Discrete measurement causes this assumption to be violated. The violation of this assumption is shown to introduce non-trivial bias to parameter estimates. Analysis of discrete-measured data as interval-censored is shown to greatly reduce this bias. The empirical properties of the bias introduced by discrete measurement and the interval-censoring correction are explored through Monte-Carlo simulations and a replication of the analysis of civil war duration from (Fearon 2004). I also demonstrate that analyzing discrete-measured continuous-time data as interval-censored is a better approach than the discrete-time models proposed in (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 2004). The conclusion of the analysis is that event-history analysis of continuous-time variables should always be implemented as interval-censored estimation