Do Americans Perceive Diverse Judges as Inherently Biased

Although women and minorities hold an increasing share of judgships in the United States, they remain underrepresented. We explore Americans’ perceptions of the bias of women and minority judges – one of the possible challenges to creating a diverse bench. We argue that prejudice against these groups manifests in a subtle way, in the belief that diverse judges cannot fairly adjudicate controversies that involve their ingroup. To test our theory, we use a list experiment specifically developed to minimize social desirability effects. We find that many respondents rate female and Hispanic judges to be biased decision makers. Our results highlight the nature of prejudice against female and Hispanic judges and suggest multiple important implications. They shed light on the reasons why female and Hispanic candidates for judgships may win at a lower rate and also suggest negative implications for the legitimacy of their decisions

Ascriptive Characteristics and Perceptions of Impropriety in the Rule of Law: Race, Gender, and Public Assessments of Whether Judges Can Be Impartial

Perceptions of procedural fairness influence the legitimacy of the law and because procedures are mutable, reforming them can buttress support for the rule of law. Yet legal authorities have recently faced a distinct challenge: accusations of impropriety based on their ascriptive characteristics (e.g., gender, ethnicity). We study the effect of these traits in the context of the U.S. legal system, focusing on the conditions under which citizens perceive female and minority judges as exhibiting impropriety and how this compares with perceptions of their white and male counterparts. We find that Americans use a judge\u27s race and gender to make inferences about which groups the judge favors, whether she is inherently biased, and whether she should recuse. Notably, we find drastically different evaluations of female and Hispanic judges among the political right and left

Portfolio Allocation as Leadership Strategy: Bargaining among and within Parties.

In parliamentary democracies, cabinet ministers hold very important positions because they make policies and oversee the implementation of policy on behalf of the government. This dissertation introduces a theoretical framework that accounts for the allocation of cabinet portfolios as a product of a prime minister’s “political strategy.” The prime minister is concerned about productive policy-making as well as the long-term survival of the government. These concerns affect the bargains that the prime minister will choose to strike with potential and existing coalition partners. From this theoretical framework, I develop a game-theoretic model that articulates the circumstances under which the prime minister of a coalition government is likely to surrender various numbers of portfolios. I then evaluate the model’s predictions by drawing on data from coalition governments in thirteen Western European countries. The empirical work demonstrates that the prime minister uses portfolio allocation as an instrument to defuse tensions among coalition partners as well as to reward them for joining the ruling coalition. I find that the prime minister’s party surrenders more portfolios not only as its bargaining power in assembling a coalition declines, but also as the policy preferences of coalition partners become more divergent. Since bargaining over cabinet portfolios also takes place within parties, I further extend my theoretical framework to explain portfolio allocation among party factions. Party leaders decide how to allocate portfolios among their party’s members, but many do so while cognizant of internal divisions among their party’s factions. To explore how the dynamics of portfolio allocation work within parties, I examine an important case in Japan where the long tenure in power of the Liberal Democratic Party allows us to investigate systematic variation in allocation outcomes. The empirical findings suggest that substantial variance exists in allocation outcomes over time because, similar to prime ministers in coalition governments, party leaders also allocate cabinet portfolios among factions as a means of preventing defections and challenges from internal rivals. The resulting portfolio allocation reflects the bargaining dynamics within the party and affects the extent to which party members are willing to behave in a disciplined manner in the parliament.Ph.D.Political ScienceUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/75937/1/onoy_1.pd

CRAGE-Duet Facilitates Modular Assembly of Biological Systems for Studying Plant-Microbe Interactions

Developing sustainable agricultural practices will require increasing our understanding of plant-microbe interactions. To study these interactions, new genetic tools for manipulating nonmodel microbes will be needed. To help meet this need, we recently reported development of chassis-independent recombinase-assisted genome engineering (CRAGE). CRAGE relies on cassette exchange between two pairs of mutually exclusive lox sites and allows direct, single-step chromosomal integration of large, complex gene constructs into diverse bacterial species. We then extended CRAGE by introducing a third mutually exclusive lox site, creating CRAGE-Duet, which allows modular integration of two constructs. CRAGE-Duet offers advantages over CRAGE, especially when a cumbersome recloning step is required to build single-integration constructs. To demonstrate the utility of CRAGE-Duet, we created a set of strains from the plant-growth-promoting rhizobacterium Pseudomonas simiae WCS417r that expressed various fluorescence marker genes. We visualized these strains simultaneously under a confocal microscope, demonstrating the usefulness of CRAGE-Duet for creating biological systems to study plant-microbe interactions

Genetic Predisposition to Ischemic Stroke

Background and Purpose—The prediction of genetic predispositions to ischemic stroke (IS) may allow the identification of individuals at elevated risk and thereby prevent IS in clinical practice. Previously developed weighted multilocus genetic risk scores showed limited predictive ability for IS. Here, we investigated the predictive ability of a newer method, polygenic risk score (polyGRS), based on the idea that a few strong signals, as well as several weaker signals, can be collectively informative to determine IS risk.Methods—We genotyped 13 214 Japanese individuals with IS and 26 470 controls (derivation samples) and generated both multilocus genetic risk scores and polyGRS, using the same derivation data set. The predictive abilities of each scoring system were then assessed using 2 independent sets of Japanese samples (KyushuU and JPJM data sets).Results—In both validation data sets, polyGRS was shown to be significantly associated with IS, but weighted multilocus genetic risk scores was not. Comparing the highest with the lowest polyGRS quintile, the odds ratios for IS were 1.75 (95% confidence interval, 1.33–2.31) and 1.99 (95% confidence interval, 1.19–3.33) in the KyushuU and JPJM samples, respectively. Using the KyushuU samples, the addition of polyGRS to a nongenetic risk model resulted in a significant improvement of the predictive ability (net reclassification improvement=0.151; P<0.001).Conclusions—The polyGRS was shown to be superior to weighted multilocus genetic risk scores as an IS prediction model. Thus, together with the nongenetic risk factors, polyGRS will provide valuable information for individual risk assessment and management of modifiable risk factors

The Underrepresentation of Women in Politics: A Literature Review on Gender Bias in Political Recruitment Processes

departmental bulletin pape

Replication Data for: The Contingent Effects of Candidate Sex on Voter Choice

Replication Data for: "The Contingent Effects of Candidate Sex on Voter Choice

Replication Data for: Do Voters Prefer Gender Stereotypic Candidates? Evidence from a Conjoint Survey Experiment in Japan

The striking under-representation of women in Japan has been partly attributed to gender stereotypes and prejudice toward female leadership among voters. We examine whether and to what extent candidates get rewarded or punished when they deviate from the behavioral expectations associated with their gender roles and images. Our conjoint experiment results in Japan demonstrate that not only are female candidates disadvantaged compared to their male counterparts, but also that they could lose support when they diverge from gender-based behavioral expectations. Our findings suggest that female candidates face a difficult dilemma in that they must weigh the cost of losing support for failing to conform to gender-based expectations, against the general loss of support they would incur for conforming to these expectations