In 1974 an article appeared in Science magazine with the dry-sounding title “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” by a pair of psychologists who were not well known outside their discipline of decision theory. In it Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the world to Prospect Theory, which mapped out how humans actually behave when faced with decisions about gains and losses, in contrast to how economists assumed that people behave. Prospect Theory turned Economics on its head by demonstrating through a series of ingenious experiments that people are much more concerned with losses than they are with gains, and that framing a choice from one perspective or the other will result in decisions that are exactly the opposite of each other, even if the outcomes are monetarily the same. Prospect Theory led cognitive psychology in a new direction that began to uncover other human biases in thinking that are probably not learned but are part of our brain’s wiring.

Thinking fast and slow.

Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1994, Vol 39(2), 225. Reviews the book, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992). The author's commendable effort to specify a model of mass opinion formation offers readers an introduction to the prevailing vi

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.

To explain the astounding over-representation of blacks behind bars that has driven mass imprisonment in the United States, one must break out of the `crime-and-punishment' paradigm to reckon the e...

Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh

The American political science review

In pursuit of the dream that patients' exercise of autonomy could extend beyond their span of competence, living wills have passed from controversy to conventional wisdom, to widely promoted policy. But the policy has not produced results, and should be abandoned.

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Enough: The Failure of the Living Will

Recent findings from the literature on imprisonment policy suggest that in addition to traditional social and economic variables, imprisonment rates are also strongly related to changes in the state political environment. In this study, we extend this literature by testing a theory of state punitiveness which posits that (1) the political environment of states influences the degree to which they incarcerate their citizens, and (2) the political determinants of state punitiveness may be conditional upon the racial subpopulation being incarcerated. Our results suggest that increases in state political conservatism in recent decades have contributed to increases in both the growth in black imprisonment rates and black imprisonment disparity (relative to whites), but that these effects are, to a degree, tempered by countervailing political conditions.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1111/j.1468-2508.2005.00352.x

Politics and State Punitiveness in Black and White

Since the United States Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore, the public's support for the judicial system looms as an especially important concern. Although studies have confirmed that the Supreme Court's reservoir of public goodwill has remained largely intact following the politically divisive decision, the status of public support for other American courts has received little attention. This reflects a broader trend in judicial politics scholarship toward placing inordinate attention on explaining public support for the U.S. Supreme Court while largely ignoring the courts where most of the policymaking in the nation occurs—state courts. We use a national survey to assess the factors influencing diffuse support for state courts. We find that although many considerations affecting diffuse support for state courts parallel the determinants of such support for the nation's high Court, important differences exist between explanations of citizen support for state courts and the Supreme Court. Most notab...

Homegrown Institutional Legitimacy Assessing Citizens' Diffuse Support for State Courts

One consequence of the president's use of rhetoric to shape the public agenda, the media, and congressional attention is less recognized: Presidential rhetoric shapes the priorities of the administrative agents over whom he seeks managerial control. We present statistical tests of the managerial power of presidential policy signals in the case of the United States Attorneys' implementation of the federal “War on Drugs.” We find that presidential policy signals shifted the composition of the Attorneys' caseload, although not to the exclusion of other pertinent local, national, and internal factors. Yet, the consequences of presidential rhetoric for executive governance remain real and substantial.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1111/1468-2508.t01-1-00122

Policy Signals and Executive Governance: Presidential Rhetoric in the War on Drugs

Recent findings from the literature on imprisonment policy suggest that in addition to traditional social and economic variables, imprisonment rates are also strongly related to changes in the state political environment. In this study, we extend this literature by testing a theory of state punitiveness which posits that (1) the political environment of states influences the degree to which they incarcerate their citizens, and (2) the political determinants of state punitiveness may be conditional upon the racial sub-population being incarcerated. Our results suggest that increases in state political conservatism in recent decades have contributed to increases in both the growth in black imprisonment rates and black imprisonment disparity (relative to whites), but that these effects are, to a degree, tempered by countervailing political conditions.

In this study, we build upon the work of Ducat and Dudley's 1989 examination of presidential power and the federal judiciary. Whereas they focused upon presidential fortunes before the federal district courts in cases involving the formal constitutional and statutory powers of the president, we apply a similar model to the voting records of United States Supreme Court Justices in such presidential power cases. Additionally, we offer an extended model of justice voting on presidential power cases that we believe affords a better explanation of the decision-making process. We find that justices' decisions to support the president are conditioned upon presidents' public approval ratings and the justices' ideological inclinations. We also find that presidents receive more voting support in cases involving foreign policy and military affairs than in domestic/nonmilitary cases, thus, lending support to the two presidencies thesis.

Jeff Yates

Papers

Politics and State Punitiveness in Black and White

Homegrown Institutional Legitimacy Assessing Citizens' Diffuse Support for State Courts

Policy Signals and Executive Governance: Presidential Rhetoric in the War on Drugs

Politics and State Punitiveness in Black and White

Presidential Power and the United States Supreme Court