R-3 Repository :: Browsing by Author "Stevenson, Randolph T."

Browsing by Author "Stevenson, Randolph T."

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Cartelization in U.S. State Legislatures
(2012-07) Spiegelman, Andrew; Stevenson, Randolph T.; Hamm, Keith E.; Martin, Lanny; Soligo, Ronald
Cartel Theory research exclusively focuses on national legislatures, which has led to empirical uniformity among the studies. By only examining national legislatures, researchers have only observed chambers where there is a strong connection between party reputation and legislator reelection. This project examines legislatures where the connections between party reputation and legislator reelection vary widely. National legislatures generally have legislative rules enabling agenda control and therefore tend to have low majority roll rates. The variation in majority roll rates this project finds among U.S. state legislatures is due to the variance in legislative rules among these chambers. While most other Cartel Theory research implicitly assumes a connection between legislative rules and majority roll rates, this project verifies it empirically. This project further seeks to determine what causes legislative cartelization. In order to determine causal factors, the project examines cases where there is variation in legislative cartelization and the connection between party reputation and legislator reelection. U.S. state legislatures display substantial variation in both of these variables and are, therefore, ideal candidates for observation. With these motivations in mind, this project’s primary two research questions test unverified assumptions made in the Cartel Theory literature: 1. How strong is the relationship between legislative cartelization and the connection between party reputation and legislator reelection probability? 2. Are low majority roll rates indicative of chambers having institutionalized rules enabling agenda control? The answer to the first is that, among U.S. state legislatures, there is not a consistently strong relationship between majority roll rates and the connection between party reputation and legislator reelection, though there is a strong relationship between agenda control-enabling legislative rules and this connection. These two findings suggest that we need alternative measures of cartelization. More broadly, the findings suggest that Cartel Theory may not be as universally applicable as it once seemed. The answer to the second question is that there is a strong connection between low majority roll rates and legislative rules enabling agenda control but that this relationship is variable and alternative measures of cartelization are necessary for future Cartel Theory research.
Charting the course: A test of the dynamic implications of the on-line and memory-based models
(2006) Miller, Elizabeth J.; Stevenson, Randolph T.
The goal of this project is to determine how well our current models of public opinion---the on-line and memory-based---predict the course of public opinion during political campaigns. Unfortunately, the dynamic implications of these public opinion models have not been explored to the point where they can provide an answer to this question and the dynamic implications of these models have not been leveraged in the empirical evaluation or theoretical refinement of the models themselves. My approach to this task is two-pronged. I first formalize the theoretical arguments into mathematical equations to produce dynamic maps of the movement of public opinion. Consequently, I test the theoretical models by collecting data on campaign communications in eight congressional and gubernatorial campaigns and use these data as the inputs in the equations. The result is a predicted course for public opinion over the campaign, given the campaign communications that actually occurred. I then examine public opinion data to evaluate which of the two models accurately predicts the course of public opinion over the campaign. The results suggest that neither model can adequately account for the dynamics of a political campaign; therefore, I suggest a path for future research aimed at understanding the relationship between memory for campaign information and candidate evaluation.
Context and Political Knowledge: Explaining Cross-National Variation in Partisan Left-Right Knowledge
(The University of Chicago Press, 2016) Fortunato, David; Stevenson, Randolph T.; Vonnahme, Greg
We present a theory that links variation in aggregate levels of political knowledge across countries and over time to corresponding differences in the political context in which voters become (or do not become) informed. Specifically, we argue that the level of partisan left-right knowledge in a given context ultimately depends on how useful the left-right metaphor is for organizing, simplifying, or otherwise facilitating voters’ understanding of political processes. Using survey data on the distribution of left-right knowledge in 59 different contexts (in 18 countries), our analysis reveals that voters understand the relative left-right positioning of parties to a much greater degree when these positions are important predictors of the composition of policy-making coalitions, but that variation in this knowledge does not correspond to the accuracy with which the relative left-right positions of parties predicts more narrow policy positions.
Delegation, Agency and Competitive Representation
(2015-08-12) Atanasov, Iliya; Stevenson, Randolph T.; Hamm, Keith E.; Dobelman, John; Martin, Lanny; Tang, Xun
Traditional agency models focus on the conceptual line of delegation running from principal to agent. The more information about agents’ preferences and actions, the better able the principals to use selection and sanctioning to achieve desirable outcomes. Following this conventional wisdom, institutional transparency is viewed as an unequivocal good and representative democracy as built on delegation and control. However, this is an incomplete picture at best. Game-theoretic and case analysis shows that the elevation of the elected European Parliament as a legislative chamber coequal to the intergovernmental Council of the European Union may be a ruse to undermine lobbyist influence by diluting formal responsibility. Less transparency in decision-making may help align EU policy closer to broader societal objectives. The Commission, perhaps most heavily influenced by special interests, and not Council has lost clout in the legislative process as a result of the changes. In several generalized noncooperative formal settings with information asymmetries, delegation can work for principals only if the set of potential agents is diverse. Not only does selection dominate sanctioning as a control mechanism, but the very existence of compliance equilibria is contingent upon the a priori arrangement of candidate agents’ policy preferences relative to one another and to the principals’. The principal–agent relationship is dependent on and may be only secondary to between-agent competition. This insight has far-reaching implications for a number of research programs within political science. Schumpeter viewed modern democracy as a system where elites compete for the support of the masses. This conceptualization suggests a new path towards sustainable democratization. Building elite capacity in undemocratic conditions through institutionalized, if unfair, competition may be a more effective approach than parachuting fully democratic institutions in an unreceptive environment. Empirical analysis of over two hundred years of data shows that states with competitive political institutions, regardless of whether those are democratic, are most likely to develop and sustain full-fledged democracy.
The Electoral Cost of Coalition Governance and Elites' Behavior in Parliamentary Democracies
(2015-12-02) Lin, Cheng-Nan; Martin, Lanny W.; Stevenson, Randolph T.; Carroll, Royce; Lewis, Steven W.
This dissertation examines the interaction between voters and party elites in parliamentary democracies, particularly those with multiparty governments. In the first half of the dissertation I focus on individual party supporters and explore their reactions to coalition policymaking. I develop a heuristic model that explains voters' preferences for coalition governance and the consequent impact of their preferences on voting behavior. I contend that party voters' preferences for coalition governance are associated with two simple heuristics: cabinet membership and their own ideological locations relative to parties in a coalition on the left-right policy spectrum. I find that party supporters who perceive themselves to be located between coalition partners are less likely to cast a punishing vote. This is because voters expect that policy compromise essentially brings cabinet parties closer to their own ideal points. In the second half of my dissertation, I derive a behavioral implication from the theory regarding the collaborative behavior of party elites. I argue that rational politicians should be able to predict the potential cost of coalition participation by gauging the size of ideological interior voters (i.e., party supporters located in between a pair of parties) they share with other parties, and that they can respond to this information by acting strategically. Specifically, political parties are more likely to cooperate with one another when they share more interior supporters than when they do not. This is because parties in such a situation face a lower cost of collaboration if they chose to partner with each other. I then examine this implication empirically by using data on parliamentary speeches and coalition partnerships. The empirical investigations show results that are consistent with my argument. I find party elites to be less likely to engage in lengthy floor debates on government policies and to be more likely to govern together when they share more interior voters. Taking all these findings together, this dissertation enhances our understanding of citizens' preferences for collective policymaking and of the connection between voters and political elites in parliamentary democracies.
The Electoral Strategy of Legislative Politics: Balancing Party and Member Reputation in Japan and Taiwan
(2012-09-05) Matsuo, Akitaka; Jones, Mark P.; Stevenson, Randolph T.; Martin, Lanny; Carroll, Royce A.; Lewis, Steven W.
This thesis explores how political parties coordinate competing objectives, such as winning elections and influencing public policy with demands from their legislators whose interests lie principally in re-election and policy distribution. Electoral and legislative institutions affect the prioritizing of these goals and the appropriate strategy by which to achieve them. Utilizing two East Asian democracies, Japan and Taiwan, my dissertation evaluates this argument via the econometric analysis of various aspects of legislative behavior and policy outcomes, such as committee assignments and deliberations, and intergovernmental fiscal transfers. In regard to committee activities, there exists a significant difference between governing and opposition parties in terms of the expected role of their members on legislative committees. In regard to fiscal transfers, governing parties distribute fiscal resources strategically to party strongholds.
Essays on Voter and Legislative Behavior in Coalitional Democracies
(2012-09-05) Fortunato, David; Martin, Lanny W.; Stevenson, Randolph T.; Carroll, Royce A.; Sickles, Robin
In this dissertation I examine the reciprocal relationship between voters and political parties in coalitional democracies in three essays. First, I investigate how voters alter their perceptions of political parties in response to their participation in coalition cabinets. I argue that voters view coalition participation as broad and wide-ranging policy compromise and update their perceptions of the policy positions of cabinet participants accordingly. I ﬁnd that voters perceive coalition partners as more similar than parties that are not currently coalesced, all else equal. In the following essay, I examine the electoral repercussions of this shift in perceptions by proposing a model of voting that considers coalition policy-making. I argue that voters will equate the policy compromise they perceive in the cabinet with a failure to rigorously pursue the policies they were promised and that voters who perceive compromise will punish the incumbent. The data reveals that this perception may cost incumbent cabinets about 2.5% of their vote share. Finally, I move from the electorate to the legislature to investigate if and how these perceptions condition legislative behavior. The previous essays suggest that coalition parties have substantial motivation to differentiate themselves from their partners in cabinet when voters perceive them as becoming more similar. I test this argument by examining partisan behavior in legislative review. The data show that coalition partners who are perceived as more similar are more likely to amend one another’s legislation.
Gender Quotas and The Representation of Women: Empowerment, Decision-making, and Public Policy
(2012-09-05) Barnes, Tiffany; Jones, Mark P.; Carroll, Royce A.; Stevenson, Randolph T.; Heffes, Gisela
Over the past two decades governments worldwide have begun to take action to correct gender disparity in representative bodies, resulting in drastic increases in women’s numeric representation. It is unclear, however, how these increases influence legislative behavior. This research contributes to our understanding of how increases in women’s numeric representation influences substantive representation of women. I collected an original dataset to examine this relationship across twenty-three subnational Argentine legislatures over eighteen years. This project represents one of the first empirical efforts to examine women’s substantive representation over a large number of legislatures over a long duration of time. A key piece of the puzzle is to understand if female exhibit distinct preferences from their male colleagues. The second chapter of the dissertation uses a new data set of ideal point estimates recovered from cosponsorship data to examine gender differences in legislative preferences. I find strong evidence to suggest women display different legislative preferences than their male colleagues. Chapter three investigates how increases in women’s numeric representation influence women’s legislative behavior. Previous research suggests that increasing women’s numeric representation should enhance the probability that women work together to pursue common legislative agendas. Yet, I demonstrate that as the percentage of women in the chamber increases, women are increasingly less likely to work together. I argue that this unexpected finding can be explained by considering how institutions shape women’s legislative incentives. In chapter four, I develop theoretical expectations about the conditions under which increases in the proportion of female legislators, in combination with institutional arrangements, will foster or stifle women’s opportunities and incentives to represent women’s interests. The chapter provides strong empirical support for the hypothesis that women behave differently conditional on institutional incentives. These findings imply that understanding institutions is key to understanding how and when female representatives will stand for women. Taken together, this dissertation makes an important contribution to our understanding of how changes in the proportion of female legislators and differences in institutional contexts shape women’s legislative behavior.
Implementation of Economic Sanctions
(2013-09-16) Kobayashi, Yoshiharu; Morgan, T. Clifton; Leeds, Brett Ashley; Stevenson, Randolph T.; Sickles, Robin
This dissertation investigates implementation problems in economic sanctions and how a state's concerns about policy implementation affect its decisions and the outcomes of sanctions. This study builds on the premise that sanctions are carried out by firms within a sanctioning state, not the state itself. First, using a game-theoretical model, I show that firms' non-compliance with sanction policies not only undermines the effectiveness of unilateral sanctions, but also has a counter-intuitive effect on a sanctioning state's decision to impose sanctions. The model suggests that a state is more likely to impose sanctions when it anticipates firms' non-compliance. A number of empirical implications are derived from the model and corroborated with data. Second, this study also investigates a sanctioning state's decision to sanction multilaterally or unilaterally, and how its expectations about the enforcement of sanctions influence this decision. When the enforcement of unilateral sanctions is expected to be difficult, the state is more likely to sanction multilaterally, but only when it has enough resources and the bureaucratic capability to help other states enforce their sanctions. The empirical evidence also buttresses these theoretical results. This study highlights the importance of incorporating expectations about enforcement into a full understanding of the sanctions processes. The conclusion is that states' ability to influence firms' decisions at home as well as abroad is a crucial determinant of whether they impose, how they design, and the effectiveness of sanctions.
Legislating for Europe: The dynamics of MEP voting behavior
(2005) Reichert, M. Shawn; Stevenson, Randolph T.
The European Parliament is a unique legislative body. It is a supranational legislature with directly elected members. The policy authority of the EP has increased dramatically as the European level legislation has grown both in depth and scope. This thesis addresses the question of what political pressures most influence members of the EP when they are voting on legislation. The members are directly elected from national constituencies as members of national political parties. Once elected to the EP, members sit according to ideology in transnational party groups. Potentially then, the national constituency, the national political party, and transnational party groups all pressure MEN to vote a particular way on given pieces of legislation. I propose a principal-agent theory that assesses the relative strength of these competing pressures. While there is reason to expect each 'principal' to pressure MEPs, I argue that it is necessary to take the policy content into account. Specifically, I hypothesize that distributive policies are more likely to bring national pressures to bear, while voting on regulatory policies is more likely to be governed by ideological considerations. I test these hypotheses using a large sample of roll-call votes chosen specifically for their policy content during the period 1984--1994.
Strategic Choices in Foreign Aid
(2013-09-16) Heinrich, Tobias; Morgan, T. Clifton; Stevenson, Randolph T.; Fang, Songying; Vannucci, Marina
This dissertation addresses three important questions surrounding the politics of foreign aid, namely what leads to its provisions by donor countries, and what are some of its consequences on those receiving it. Using arguments rooted in political economy models and large-N statistics, this dissertation provides three core findings: (i) Foreign aid can be driven by heterogenous motives in the donor country. (ii) This heterogeneity determines whether a donor lives up to the promises over foreign aid that it makes. (iii) Inflows of foreign aid tend to restrain the government’s propensity to engage in killings.
Strategic Obfuscation through Bureaucratic Delegation
(2014-04-25) Loftis, Matthew; Martin, Lanny W.; Stevenson, Randolph T.; Carroll, Royce A.; Lewis, Steven W.
In this dissertation, I develop and test a theory of when politicians delegate more policy making responsibility to bureaucrats. Since minimizing blame for bad policy outcomes and claiming credit for good ones is a constant concern for politicians, the aim of reelection means it is preferable for politicians to distance themselves from policies that will be unpopular. For this reason, delegating power to bureaucrats has long been suspected of letting politicians shift responsibility for policies voters do not prefer. I move forward our understanding of this feature of democratic politics with a detailed formal theoretical model, from which I derive new empirical expectations. I test these in the contexts of both Western and Eastern Europe, drawing on unique features of the European Union policy harmonization process to build large cross-national datasets of policy making. I use the theoretical framework to explain how political corruption in Central and Eastern Europe, combined with political control over bureaucrats, gives politicians an incentive to make policy more discretionary to obscure political responsibility. Then, I apply the theory to explain how coalition governments in Western European parliamentary democracies use bureaucratic delegation to achieve cooperation between ruling parties discreetly, to avoid attracting voters' attention to compromise policies. The findings reveal support for the theoretical model and new insights on how the dynamics of coalition government and the cabinet's policy prerogatives in parliamentary democracies affect the transparency of the policy-making process, opportunities for corruption, and political control of policy outcomes.
Voter Demands and Representative Behavior
(2017-08-02) Tromborg, Mathias W; Stevenson, Randolph T.; Martin, Lanny W.
This dissertation analyzes whether and when voters get the type of representation that they prefer from their political representatives in contemporary democracies. Theoretically, I argue that individual representatives are motivated to respond to the demands of the voters in their districts because of personal vote-seeking incentives and party leader strategies. Likewise, governments have an office-seeking incentive to respond to demands from the national electorate when they produce policy. Empirically, I first show that vote-maximizing party behavior is not confined to mainstream parties, but applies to niche parties as well. Next, I show that individual representatives from parliamentary parties are responsive to policy demands from their district voters on issues that are not highly salient to the party’s brand, and that individual representatives in presidential democracies are more likely to prioritize the provision of national resources to their district when their district voters demand them more. Finally, I show that government social spending in OECD countries responds to the preferences of the median voter in the national electorate. These findings have important implications for the way that representation works in contemporary democracies.
What drives perceptions of partisan cooperation?
(Cambridge University Press, 2024) Santoso, Lie Philip; Stevenson, Randolph T.; Weschle, Simon
What drives voters' perceptions of partisan cooperation? In this note, we investigate whether voters have accurate beliefs about which parties regularly cooperate with one another, and whether these beliefs follow the real-time portrait of cooperation and conflict between parties that is reported in the news. We combine original survey data of voters' perceptions of party cooperation in four countries over two time periods with a measure of parties' public relationships as reported by the media. We find that voters' perceptions of cooperation and conflict among parties do reflect actual patterns of interactions. This pattern holds even after controlling for policy differences between parties as well as joint cabinet membership. Furthermore, we show that the impact of contemporary events on cooperation perceptions is most pronounced for voters who monitor the political news more carefully. Our findings have important implications for partisan cooperation and mass–elite linkages. Specifically, we find that contrary to the usual finding that voters are generally uninformed about politics, voters hold broadly accurate beliefs about the patterns of partisan cooperation, and importantly, these views track changes in relevant news. This reflects positively on the masses' capacities to infer parties' behaviors.
What Makes Politics Interesting?: How Political Contexts Shape Political Interest Across the World
(2015-04-16) Lee, Seonghui; Stevenson, Randolph T.; Alford, John R.; Martin, Lanny W.; Oswald, Fredrick L.
Decades of behavior research have shown that political interest is the most important predictor of political knowledge and citizen participation. Political interest and knowledge, in turn, are at the core of democratic citizenship and the quality of representative democracy. An under-appreciated fact about political interest, however, is that typical levels of political interest (and thus political knowledge) vary dramatically across countries. Current theories of political interest and knowledge, however, explain little about why such differences occur and persist. This dissertation attempts to fill that void by proposing a novel theoretical framework for why individuals do or do not become interested in politics. This new theory leads directly to hypotheses about how typical levels of political interest can vary across different political contexts. The individual level theory draws on appraisal models of interest in psychology. These models show that appraising an event or a message as "comprehensible" (or, more generally, as being able to cope with it) is one of several necessary conditions for individuals to be interested in the event or message (e.g., Silvia 2006). Drawing on a large body of work in political psychology which highlights the critical role heuristics play in helping individuals comprehend politics, I extend the appraisal model of interest to include a role for heuristics in enhancing comprehensibility and therefore interest. Adding heuristics to the appraisal model of interest is the key to understanding cross-national variation in typical levels of political interest. Specifically, I argue that a specific set of simplifying heuristics that work to make politics more "comprehensible" is the main driver of the temporal and cross-national differences in political interest. The micro-foundations of the argument are examined by implementing a unique experimental design that manipulates the availability of heuristics for different groups. The experimental results support the proposed mechanism, demonstrating that individuals in contexts where heuristics are available and useful are more interested in experimental tasks. To validate the main argument for the cross-national differences in political interest, I introduce a set of measurements tapping into the political contexts associated with the availability and usefulness of common political heuristics, and test the argument using a comprehensive dataset combining a large pool of cross-national surveys and various contextual measures.

Browsing by Author "Stevenson, Randolph T."

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