1,720,984 research outputs found
The sweep of the electoral power
No full text1 online resource (PDF, pages 1-85)Stephanopoulos, Nicholas O.. (2021). The sweep of the electoral power. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/221947
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Drawing Democracies: Redistricting in America
No full textThis dissertation investigates the institutions which underly the drawing of districts in the United States. State, legislative, and local districts in the United States are redrawn following each decennial census. These districts define constituencies for the decade, which in turn define the partisan, racial, and ideological makeup of elected officials in legislatures and on councils across the country. Here, I present a series of studies which explore when and how institutions constrain and improve the redistricting process.
The first study replicates and extends the standard analyses analyzing the effectiveness of redistricting commissions. Redistricting commissions are the default reform to redistricting processes to limit the ability of partisans to influence districting plans. Here, I explain how most of these studies incorrectly analyze data on redistricting plans by treating districts within or across years as independent. As such, previous research has overstated the impact of enacting redistricting commissions.
The second study, which is coauthored with Cory McCartan, Tyler Simko, Shiro Kuriwaki, and Kosuke Imai, measures the degree of partisan gerrymandering in the 2020 cycle. We use a new dataset of redistricting simulations for all 50 states to establish district-level manipulations of redistricting outcomes. Primarily, we show that partisan gerrymandering is widespread, where plans have partisan biases in most states. Yet, Democrats and Republicans gerrymander at similar rates, which results in only a small national bias. Even so, gerrymandering reduces competition across the board, which in turn reduces the responsiveness of the House to changes in voter preferences.
The third study explores the relationship between map drawers, the courts which oversee them, and written redistricting rules. Many states have adopted explicit redistricting rules in the form of laws and constitutional amendments which guide and constrain the redistricting process. Due to recent changes in federal following Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019, state courts hold final control over most of these rules. I exploit differences in rules across states to demonstrate that map drawers typically follow written rules within each state. State courts are more likely to intervene when there are written rules, even for a fixed amount of bias in a plan. Finally, when state courts chose to intervene, they decreased the bias of adopted plans.
The fourth study, which is coauthored with Cory McCartan, Tyler Simko, Emma Ebowe, Michael Zhao, and Kosuke Imai, evaluates the causal effect of reducing the leeway that partisan actors have over the redistricting process. Here, we develop a formal model which maps onto the possible steps in any given redistricting process. We apply this model to 2010 and 2020 redistricting processes. The differences in equilibria across time become the treatment variable in a continuous differences-in-differences-in-differences model. We demonstrate that the bundles of reforms which decrease partisan leeway cause a decrease in partisan bias and an increase in political competitiveness. Further, through counterfactual policy analyses, we show that fully independent processes result in larger changes than more typical, constrained reforms.
The final study, coauthored with Cory McCartan, introduces a relative measure of electoral fairness which incorporates both counterfactuals and individual characteristics to solve the issues absolute measures face. Most work to evaluate redistricting plans has focused on absolute measures of partisan gerrymandering, such as the efficiency gap or partisan symmetry. Absolute measures are unable to account for legal criteria in map drawing and pre-existing political geography. Further, existing methods cannot separate partisan effects from racial effects, especially in places where race and party are highly correlated. We demonstrate that this relative approach to fairness captures standard partisan gerrymanders and can be applied to both racial and ideological gerrymandering.Governmen
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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Felon Disenfranchisement and Legal Financial Obligations
No full textThis Dissertation offers an empirical account of felon disenfranchisement and legal financial obligations in the era of mass incarceration. It focuses on the passage of a 2018 ballot initiative, known as Amendment 4, which sought to end lifetime disenfranchisement in Florida. At the time, the Republican-controlled state accounted for more than one-quarter of the United States’ disenfranchised citizens. Marshaling hundreds of public information requests, this Dissertation introduces multiple novel datasets that cover the hundreds of thousands of petitions collected to put the initiative on the ballot, the millions of ballots cast for its watershed victory, the voter registration records of people whose voting rights were restored, and the outstanding fines and fees that cause many to remain disenfranchised. Part I offers a history of the campaign and the tradeoffs it made to depoliticize disenfranchisement and win Republican support. Part II demonstrates the limited partisan consequences of expanding the right to vote to people with felony convictions. Finally, Part III shows how the assessment of fines and fees complicates attempts to dismantle disenfranchisement. Amendment 4 restored the vote “upon completion of all terms of sentence,” but a sentence can drag on indefinitely, tangled up in collection efforts that extend well beyond any period of supervision. Because most people with felony convictions owe outstanding fines and fees, Florida continues to disenfranchise more citizens than any other state. Ultimately, the campaign for Amendment 4, and the ensuing partisan implementation and litigation over its scope, suggests that felon disenfranchisement reform should be recast: as a question of citizenship, rather than partisanship; and as an issue intertwined with, rather than separate from, the criminal justice system
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Quasi Campaign Finance
Full text linkSay you’re wealthy and want to influence American politics. How would you do it? Conventional campaign finance—giving or spending money to sway elections—is one option. Lobbying is another. This Article identifies and explores a third possibility: quasi campaign finance, or spending money on nonelectoral communications with voters that nevertheless rely on an electoral mechanism to be effective. Little is currently known about quasi campaign finance because no law requires its disclosure. But its use by America’s richest and politically savviest individuals—the Koch brothers, Michael Bloomberg, and the like—appears to be rising. It also seems to skew policy outcomes in the spenders’ preferred direction.
After introducing quasi campaign finance, the Article considers its legal status. Is it like ordinary campaign finance, in which case it could be regulated fairly extensively? Or is it like garden-variety political speech, rendering it presumptively unregulable? One argument for pairing quasi and regular campaign finance is that they share several features—who bankrolls them, the tactics they pay for, the reasons they work—and so may serve as substitutes. Another rationale for conflation is that they may both cause the same democratic injuries: corruption, the distortion of public opinion, and the misalignment of public policy. Pitted against these points is the slippery-slope objection: If quasi campaign finance may constitutionally be curbed, what political speech may not be?
Lastly, the Article suggests how quasi campaign finance should (assuming it actually may) be regulated. Limits on contributions and expenditures are unwise and probably unadministrable. Disclosure, though, is a necessity. The public should know who is trying to persuade it (and how). Even more promising is the public subsidization of quasi campaign finance. If every voter received a voucher for this purpose, then public funds might crowd out private capital, thus alleviating its harmful effects
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KEYNOTE SPEECH: Walking the Line: Modern Gerrymandering and Partisanship
No full textINTRODUCTION I am going to be discussing an ongoing project of mine that I call hyperpartisan election law. I make three main arguments in this project. The first is that almost all of election law was created during an unusually nonpartisan period in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Consistent with this period\u27s very low level of partisanship, election law originally did not intend to, and did not actually have the effect, of addressing partisan cleavages. The second claim is that as the country\u27s voters and politicians have become ever more partisan over the last generation, election law has adapted in two distinctive ways. One, by sometimes going into dormancy, and so not being available for litigants. Two, by being redirected to enable it to tackle partisan grievances, only indirectly rather than directly. The third claim is that neither of these two responses by election law are really apt for our hyperpartisan modern moment. It would be a lot better, in my view, for election law to tackle partisan intent and partisan effect directly rather than indirectly. I will try to convince you that American political history has gone through three main phases. First, a long period, up through the 1950s, when voters and politicians were nearly as partisan as they are today. Two, a very unusual era-in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s-when both voters and politicians were much more nonpartisan. Third, another stretch occurs from the 1990s to today, when the partisanship of both voters and politicians has risen to unprecedented heights. Next, I will go through four separate redistricting doctrines: one-person, one-vote; racial vote dilution; racial gerrymandering; and partisan gerrymandering, and try to show how each one corresponds to my thesis. My thesis, again, is that election law used to make sense during the more nonpartisan period in which it was formed, but its old doctrines are an increasingly bad fit for our hyperpartisan present. In the broader project I try to address all of election law, but because the symposium is on redistricting I will only talk about redistricting today
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