Diversity, deliberations, and judicial opinion writing.

Underlying scholarly interest in diversity is the premise that a representative body contributes to robust decision-making processes. Using an innovative measure of opinion content, we examine this premise by analyzing deliberative outputs in the US courts of appeals (1997-2002). While the presence of a single female or minority did not affect the attention to issues in the majority opinion, panels composed of a majority of women or minorities produced opinions with significantly more points of law compared to panels with three Caucasian males

Reciprocal Interactions of Pit1 and GATA2 Mediate Signaling Gradient–Induced Determination of Pituitary Cell Types

AbstractThe mechanisms by which transient gradients of signaling molecules lead to emergence of specific cell types remain a central question in mammalian organogenesis. Here, we demonstrate that the appearance of four ventral pituitary cell types is mediated via the reciprocal interactions of two transcription factors, Pit1 and GATA2, which are epistatic to the remainder of the cell type–specific transcription programs and serve as the molecular memory of the transient signaling events. Unexpectedly, this program includes a DNA binding–independent function of Pit1, suppressing the ventral GATA2-dependent gonadotrope program by inhibiting GATA2 binding to gonadotrope- but not thyrotrope-specific genes, indicating that both DNA binding–dependent and –independent actions of abundant determining factors contribute to generate distinct cell phenotypes

Comparing Ideal Points Across Institutions and Time

Many spatial theories of policymaking in the context of a system of checks and balances require the estimation of ideal points which are comparable across institutions. This analysis evaluates comparisons between the president, Senate, and House. For applications which presume that legislators change their positions over time, the most commonly used estimates impose too many restrictions on the ideal points. I consider an alternative approach to creating a common scale by using interest groups (American Conservative Union [ACU] and Americans for Democratic Action [ADA]) as reference actors and incorporating "bridge votes," roll calls on which the House and Senate vote on identical text. The analysis demonstrates this approach can produce comparable estimates across time and chamber

Bayesian Ideal Point Estimation

The advantages of Bayesian methods of estimation have found application throughout political science and particularly useful in recovering the ideal point positions of legislators.  These advantages include computational efficiency of MCMC methods to jointly estimate all parameters, direct characterization of uncertainty, and simplicity of summarizing auxiliary quantities of interest.  This chapter summarizes the Bayesian ideal point model and the myriad of advances facilitated by the application of these methods.  These include addressing questions over comparability over time and chamber, the connection to executive and judicial political actors and the mass public, modelling extensions including agenda and hierarchical information, and applications involving non-roll call data.  In this discussion, future challenges are highlighted

Where Does the President Stand? Measuring Presidential Ideology

Although estimating the revealed preferences of members of Congress is straightforward, estimating the position of the president relative to Congress is not. Current estimates place the president as considerably more ideologically extreme than one would expect. These estimates, however, are very sensitive to the set of presidential positions used in the roll call analyses for the 103rd through 109th Congresses. The president often obtains more moderate ideal point estimates relative to Congress when including positions based on signing bills into law

Replication data for: Reconsidering the Great Compromise at the Federal Convention of 1787: Deliberation and Agenda Effects on the Senate and Slavery

Conventional accounts of the Federal Convention of 1787 point to the many different compromises made at the convention, specifically the Great Compromise on representation and the Three-fifths Compromise on slavery. Often these compromises are treated as separate events, the result of deliberation leading to moderation of delegate positions (presumably among the key states of Massachusetts and North Carolina). However, by applying the techniques of roll call analysis we find this traditional account is at best incomplete and probably misleading. While the Massachusetts delegation’s behavior seems consistent with a moderation hypothesis, we find evidence that the other crucial vote for the Great Compromise — from North Carolina—is inconsistent with moderation, but can be linked through the agenda to the Three-fifths Compromise over slavery, taxation and representation. We conclude by arguing that this reconsideration of some of the convention’s key votes should cause political scientists and historians to reevaluate how they see the compromises at the convention

The Wealth of Hawks and Doves : explaining variation in confederate congressional support for the army during the civil war

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Democracy as a Latent Variable

We apply formal, statistical measurement models to the Polity indicators, used widely in studies of international relations to measure democracy. In so doing, we make explicit the hitherto implicit assumptions underlying scales built using the Polity indicators. Modeling democracy as a latent variable allows us to assess the "noise" (measurement error) in the resulting measure. We show that this measurement error is considerable and has substantive consequences when using a measure of democracy as an independent variable in cross-national statistical analyses. Our analysis suggests that skepticism as to the precision of the Polity democracy scale is well founded and that many researchers have been overly sanguine about the properties of the Polity democracy scale in applied statistical work