While a considerable body of scholarship has investigated court-curbing attempts by Congress that are focused on the Supreme Court, less attention has been paid to court-curbing bills directed at the lower federal courts. However out of all the federal appellate courts, only one circuit has been consistently targeted in court curbing bills over a lengthy period of time: the Ninth Circuit. Over the course of seven decades, members of Congress have repeatedly sponsored legislation that would alter the jurisdiction of the Ninth Circuit by creating a new circuit and dividing up the existing jurisdictional area. This paper investigates whether the splitting bills that target the Ninth Circuit can be understood as part of broader trends in court curbing in the federal judiciary. Are these bills linked with attempts to rein in the Supreme Court, or are other factors driving these proposals? Using an original dataset of all bills to split the Ninth Circuit, we test competing explanations for this lengthy fixation on a single court.
With the discipline’s push toward DA-RT, journal replication archives are becoming more and more common. As researchers work to ensure replication materials are provided, they should also pay attention to the content—rather than just the provision—of journal archives. Based on our experience in analyzing and handling journal replication materials, we present a series of recommendations that can help make replication materials easier to understand and use. The provision of clear, functional, and well documented replication materials is key for achieving the goals of transparent and replicable research. Furthermore, good replication materials better boost the development of extensions and related research by making state-of-the-art methodologies and analyses more accessible.
It has long been recognized that voters bring their political behaviors in line with economic assessments. Recent work, however, suggests that citizens also engage in economic behaviors that align with their confidence – or lack thereof – in the political system. This alignment can happen consciously or, as we suggest, unconsciously, in the same way that positivity carries over to other political behaviors on a micro-level. Using monthly time series data from 1978 to 2008, we produce further evidence of this relationship by demonstrating that political confidence affects consumer behavior at the aggregate level over time. Our analyses employ measures that capture nuanced shifts in the public while simultaneously accounting for the complex relationships between subjective and objective economic indicators, economic behavior, political attitudes, and the media. Our results suggest that approval of the president not only increases the electorate’s willingness to spend money, but also affects the volatility of this spending. These findings suggest that the economy is influenced by politics beyond elections, and gives the “Chief Economist” another avenue by which they can affect the behavior of the electorate.
This research explores the role of political ideology in local policy formation by assessing the impact of the city manager’s ideology on local expenditures. While previous studies have identified nuanced and overlapping roles between administration and politics, here we extend those investigations by positing that ideology may influence a manager’s role in the policy formation of the budget. Although some conceptualizations of city managers assume them to be largely apolitical in a partisan sense, we find a significant effect of ideology on local expenditures among city managers. This adds to the literature that suggests that city managers may not merely passively implement policies created by elected officials; rather city managers may influence policy in multifaceted ways, thereby driving a need to further investigate individual influences upon policy formation.
Data access and research transparency (DA-RT) is a growing concern for the discipline. Technological advances have greatly reduced the cost of sharing data, enabling full replication archives consisting of data and code to be shared on individual websites as well as journal archives and institutional data repositories. But how do we ensure scholars take advantage of these resources to share their replication archives? Moreover, are the costs of research transparency borne by individuals or journals? I assess the impact of journal replication policies on data availability and find articles published in journals with mandatory provision policies are twenty-four times more likely to have replication materials available than articles in journals with no requirements.
Local government is often characterized as the least important level of government; however governments at the local level provide many of the vital services that people rely on for daily life. In delivering these services to citizens, it is the municipal level of government that most people come into contact with in a direct way. This direct contact can have a bearing on the image of government that citizens develop and can consequently affect the behavior of those citizens toward government.
In this chapter we explore one of the primary elements of cognitive social capital, trust. First we compare the trust levels that citizens have in their local government in Mexico, South Africa, and the United States. Next, using a survey of chief officials in U.S. municipalities, we examine variables that contribute to the level of trust citizen’s place in their local municipalities. We find several factors including the quality of services delivered, the level of income inequality, and the degree of social heterogeneity have a significant effect on trust levels in these U.S. communities. We offer these findings as suggestions for possible ways that municipal leaders in the U.S. and elsewhere may look to increase trust levels within their communities and thereby increase their levels of social capital. We conclude with a few suggestions for future research.
Time can either be treated as a nuisance or as a substantively interesting variable across a variety of political science subfields and a wide array of research questions. The popularity of studying political phenomena over time has increased over the past 40 years. Encompassing any study where data are collected at multiple points in time, time series analysis includes studies of duration, event counts, (pseudo-)panels, repeated cross-sections, pooled cross-sections, and studies of volatility. Beginning with a discussion of the development and integration of ‘long’ time series methodology in the political science literature, we also briefly discuss other types of time series. We conclude with some suggestions for future research.
Stata’s latest release, version 12, is a big leap forward in the programs time series capabilities. Always a popular program, Stata has had several areas where it lagged sig- nificantly behind the competition with “long-T” time series analysis being a prime example. This has been the case despite the fact that Stata’s duration modeling and pooled- cross-sectional time series (PCSTS) capabilities have been excellent for several versions now. Practitioners and teach- ers of time series in political science have often resorted to more specialized software packages such as RATS (Regres- sion Analysis for Time Series) and EViews if they wanted to get into advanced areas. The new Stata 12 finally has the ability to get deeper into recent (say, post-1995) advances in applied time series, making the program a viable substitute for dedicated time series programs. For teaching and many advanced models, Stata 12 can certainly do the job.