Working Papers
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This paper provides a primer for estimating public opinion at the state level using the technique of Multilevel Regression and Postratification (MRP). We provide sample R code for creating estimates and give step-by-step instructions on setting up the data, running models, and collecting estimates.
Forthcoming
2022
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2020
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2019
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Despite the importance of every nomination to the Supreme Court, a unified theory that illuminates presidential selection of nominees across the modern political era remains elusive. We propose a new theory—the “characteristics approach”—that envisions nominees as bundles of characteristics, such as ideology, policy reliability, and attributes of diversity. We formalize the theory, which emphasizes the political returns to presidents from a nominee’s characteristics and the “costs” of finding and confirming such individuals, and derive explicit presidential demand functions for these charac- teristics. Using newly collected data on both nominees and short list candidates, we estimate these demand functions. They reveal some striking and under-appreciated regularities in appointment politics. In particular, the substantial increase in presidential interest in the Supreme Court’s policy output and the increased availability of potential justices with desired characteristics has led to significant changes in appointment politics and the composition of the Court.
2018
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2017
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2016
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2015
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Do senators respond to the preferences of their state's median voter or only to the preferences of their co-partisans? We develop a method for estimating state-level public opinion broken down by partisanship so that we can distinguish between general and partisan responsiveness. We use these estimates to study responsiveness in the context of Senate confirmation votes on Supreme Court nominees. We find that senators more heavily weight their partisan base when casting such roll call votes. Indeed, when their state median voter and party median voter disagree, senators strongly favor the latter. This has significant implications for the study of legislative responsiveness and the role of public opinion in shaping the members of the nation's highest court. The methodological approach we develop allows more nuanced analyses of public opinion and its effects, as well as more finely grained studies of legislative behavior and policy-making.
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2014
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2013
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2011
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2010
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We study the relationship between state-level public opinion and the roll call votes of
senators on Supreme Court nominees. Applying recent advances in multilevel modeling, we use national polls on nine recent Supreme Court nominees to produce state-of-the-art estimates of public support for the confirmation of each nominee in all 50 states. We show that greater public support strongly increases the probability that a senator will vote to approve a nominee, even after controlling for standard predictors of roll call voting. We also find that the impact of opinion varies with context: it has a greater effect on opposition party senators, on ideologically opposed senators, and for generally weak nominees. These results establish a systematic and powerful link between constituency opinion and voting on Supreme Court nominees.
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2008
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The Democrats' victory in the 2006 election has been compared to the Republicans' in 2004. But the Democrats actually did a lot better in terms of the vote. The Democrats received 54.8% of the average district vote for the two parties in 2006, whereas the Republicans only averaged 51.6% in 1994. The 2006 outcome for the Democrats is comparable to their typical vote shares as the majority party in the decades preceding the 1994 realignment. Nevertheless, the size of the Democrats' victory in the 2006 House elections has obscured the sizable structural disadvantages they faced heading into the elections. In this paper we document the advantages the Republicans had, examine how and to what extent the Democrats overcame it, and offer predictions as to whether the results of the 2006 election leveled the electoral playing field for 2008. Our calculations showed that the Democrats needed at least 52% of the vote to have an even chance of taking control of the House of Representatives.
Prior to the election we estimated the seats-votes curve for 2006 by constructing a model to predict the 2006 election from 2004, and then validating the method by applying it to previous elections (predicting 2004 from 2002, and so forth). We found that the Democrats in 2006 were always destined to receive fewer seats than their corresponding average vote share. They were able to gain control of the House by winning the largest average district vote by either party since 1990. Has the 2006 election removed the Republicans' structural advantages? While Republicans continue to win more close races, a preliminary analysis of the 2008 election suggests that the switch in incumbency advantage from the Republicans to the Democrats may nevertheless level the electoral playing field.