1,720,961 research outputs found
Replication Data for: Software Citations in Political Science
No full textPolitical scientists rely on complex software to conduct research, and much of the software they use is written and distributed for free by other researchers. We argue that creating and maintaining these public goods is very costly for individual software developers, but that it is not adequately incentivized by the academic community. We demonstrate that statistical software is widely used but rarely cited in political science, and we highlight a partial solution to this problem: software bibliographies. To facilitate their creation, we introduce an \texttt{R} package which scans analysis scripts, detects the software used in those scripts, and creates bibliographies automatically. We hope that recognizing the contribution of software developers to science will encourage more academics to create public goods, which could yield important downstream benefits
Replication Data for: Public Support for Professional Legislatures
No full textEvidence suggests that well-funded, professional legislatures more effectively provide constituents with their preferred policies and may improve social welfare, yet legislative resources across state legislatures have stagnated or dwindled at least in part due to public antagonism toward increasing representatives' salaries. We argue that one reason voters oppose legislative resources, like salary and staff, is that they are unaware of the potential benefits. Employing a pre-registered survey experiment with a pre-post design, we find that subjects respond positively to potential social welfare benefits of professionalization, increasing support for greater resources. We also find that individuals identifying with the legislative majority party respond positively to potential responsiveness benefits and that out-partisans do not respond negatively to potential responsiveness costs. In a separate survey of political elites, we find similar patterns. These results suggest that a key barrier to increasing legislative professionalism---anticipated public backlash---may not be insurmountable. The findings also highlight a challenge of institutional choice: beliefs that representatives are unresponsive or ineffective lead to governing institutions that may ensure these outcomes
Replication Data for: A Foot Out The Door: What Drives Bureaucratic Exit Into Lobbying Careers?
No full textThe revolving door is a potential mechanism of private influence over policy. Recent work primarily examines the revolving of legislators and their staffs, with little focus on the federal bureaucracy. To analyze decisions to turnover into lobbying, we develop an argument emphasizing the (1) policy expertise acquired from federal employment; (2) the proximity of employees to political decision-making; and (3) the agency policymaking environment. Leveraging federal personnel and lobbying data, we find the first two factors predict revolving whereas the policymaking environment has an inconsistent impact. We highlight the importance of studying selection into lobbying for estimating casual effects of lobbyist characteristics on revenue and contribute to the literature on bureaucratic careers and the nature of private influence in policymaking
Replication Data for: Lobbyists into Government
No full textThis dataset includes the code and data necessary to replicate all tables and figures in the manuscript "Lobbyists into Government," Quarterly Journal of Political Scienc
Replication Data for: Local Elections Do Not Increase Local News Demand
No full textAnemic demand for local news has contributed to an industry crisis. We consider whether local elections, which highlight the ability of local television stations and newspapers to provide information that is unavailable from national news outlets, increase local media use. While we show these elections are a time of increased attention to local politics in the news and among the public, we also find local media outlets do not benefit from this when considering behavioral news use measures. Relative to news outlets in cities without an election, local television remains substantively unchanged during local elections. Newspaper website traffic is largely stable, although it falls slightly the month after an election. In both cases these differences are small, even when considering close races and those happening off the federal election cycle. This shows limits on the ability of salient local political events to motivate local news use
Replication Data for: Experience, institutions, and candidate emergence: The political career returns to state legislative service
No full textMore than half of the current members of the U.S. Congress served in their state legislature prior to holding federal office. We quantify the relationship between state legislative service and career progression to Congress. Using close elections for exogenous assignment of political experience across otherwise similar candidates, we show that serving in the state legislature more than doubles an individual's probability of eventually contesting a Congressional seat relative to a similar candidate who lost in a comparable election; it also doubles the individual politician's probability of eventually winning a Congressional seat. State legislatures thus create national politicians out of otherwise marginal political entrants. We then show that the effect of state legislative service on career progression is larger in more professionalized legislatures, highlighting the role of institutions in facilitating political career progression. Our results hold important implications for representation and accountability, and confirm that prevailing institutions can affect political selection via career progression
When do Revolutions lead to Democracy? The Conflict between Democracy and Governance in Georgia and Tunisia
Full text linkThe revolutions that began in Tunisia in late 2010 spread across the region and toppled many seemingly durable authoritarian regimes in the Arab world. These revolutions in the name of democracy drew many comparisons to the popular color revolutions of the early 2000s that ousted leaders of post-communist regimes in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. Through the benefit of time, observers have noted that the democratic quality of these Eurasian regimes is lacking, and many now exhibit the same characteristics of the regime they deposed through revolution - a worrying sign for democrats in the Arab world. This thesis compares the cases of Georgia and Tunisia by focusing on the conflict between the progressions of democracy versus governance in democratizing, post-revolutionary regimes. In post-revolutionary regimes, either democracy or governance will prevail at the cost of the other, lending key insights into the future democratic development of the case in question.Master of Art
Difference-in-Differences with Staggered Treatments: An Application with Firms and Revolving Door Lobbying
Full text linkJosh McCrain is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Utah. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from Emory University and an M.A. and B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and was previously a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University. His research focuses on public policy, political economy, media and politics, and computational social science within American politics. His current projects involve revolving door lobbying, health policy, local media in the United States, and R for data science. His work has been published in the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, and State Politics and Policy Quarterly. It has been covered by The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, NPR, Vox, CNBC, New York Magazine, and Nature Human Behavior. Prior to entering academia, Josh worked in lobbying and advocacy for non-profit organizations in Washington D.C.“Revolving door” lobbying describes the back-and-forth transition of individuals between public service and employment in lobbying, raising normative concerns around the role of special interests in public policy. Little, however, is known about individuals who make the transition from lobbying into government. Using unique panel data from 2001-2020 of U.S. federal bureaucrats and congressional staff matched to lobbying records, we 1) provide important stylized facts on this phenomenon and 2) quantify the value to lobbying firms when their employees enter government service. Employing a matched difference-in-differences design appropriate for staggered treatment timing, we find lobbying firms that gain government connections through departure of one of their lobbyists experience a 36% revenue increase, or roughly $320,000 per year. These results shed light onto the political economy of the lobbying industry and the value of access in lobbying, and provide needed context surrounding ongoing policy debates on revolving door regulation
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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