计量经济分析 = Econometric analysis

Scholars of culture, humanities and social sciences have increasingly come to an appreciation of the importance of the legal domain in social life, while critically engaged socio-legal scholars around the world have taken up the task of understanding "Law's Empire" in all of its cultural, political, and economic dimensions. The questions arising from these intersections, and addressing imperialisms past and present forms the subject matter of a special symposium issue of Social Identities under the editorship of Griffith University's Rob McQueen, and UBC's Wes Pue and with contributions from McQueen, Ian Duncanson, Renisa Mawani, David Williams, Emma Cunliffe, Chidi Oguamanam, W. Wesley Pue, Fatou Camara, and Dianne Kirkby. This paper introduces the volume, forthcoming in late 2007. The central problematique of this issue has previously been explored through the 2005 Law's Empire conference, an informal but vibrant postcolonial legal studies network.

Law's Empire

We estimated ideological preferences of 3.8 million Twitter users and, using a data set of nearly 150 million tweets concerning 12 political and nonpolitical issues, explored whether online communication resembles an “echo chamber” (as a result of selective exposure and ideological segregation) or a “national conversation.” We observed that information was exchanged primarily among individuals with similar ideological preferences in the case of political issues (e.g., 2012 presidential election, 2013 government shutdown) but not many other current events (e.g., 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, 2014 Super Bowl). Discussion of the Newtown shootings in 2012 reflected a dynamic process, beginning as a national conversation before transforming into a polarized exchange. With respect to both political and nonpolitical issues, liberals were more likely than conservatives to engage in cross-ideological dissemination; this is an important asymmetry with respect to the structure of communication that is consistent with psychological theory and research bearing on ideological differences in epistemic, existential, and relational motivation. Overall, we conclude that previous work may have overestimated the degree of ideological segregation in social-media usage.

Tweeting From Left to Right Is Online Political Communication More Than an Echo Chamber

Researchers in comparative research increasingly use multilevel models to test effects of country-level factors on individual behavior and preferences. However, the asymptotic justification of widely employed estimation strategies presumes large samples and applications in comparative politics routinely involve only a small number of countries. Thus, researchers and reviewers often wonder if these models are applicable at all. In other words, how many countries do we need for multilevel modeling? I present results from a large-scale Monte Carlo experiment comparing the performance of multilevel models when few countries are available. I find that maximum likelihood estimates and confidence intervals can be severely biased, especially in models including cross-level interactions. In contrast, the Bayesian approach proves to be far more robust and yields considerably more conservative tests.

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How Many Countries for Multilevel Modeling? A Comparison of Frequentist and Bayesian Approaches

Parties, candidates, and voters are becoming increasingly engaged in political conversations through the micro-blogging platform Twitter. In this paper I show that the structure of the social networks in which they are embedded has the potential to become a source of information about policy positions. Under the assumption that social networks are homophilic (McPherson et al., 2001), this is, the propensity of users to cluster along partisan lines, I develop a Bayesian Spatial Following model that scales Twitter users along a common ideological dimension based on who they follow. I apply this network-based method to estimate ideal points for Twitter users in the US, the UK, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands. The resulting positions of the party accounts on Twitter are highly correlated with oine measures based on their voting records and their manifestos. Similarly, this method is able to successfully classify individuals who state their political orientation publicly, and a sample of users from the state of Ohio whose Twitter accounts are matched with their voter registration history. To illustrate the potential contribution of these estimates, I examine the extent to which online behavior is polarized along ideological lines. Using the 2012 US presidential election campaign as a case study, I nd that public exchanges on Twitter take place predominantly among users with similar viewpoints.

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Birds of the Same Feather Tweet Together: Bayesian Ideal Point Estimation Using Twitter Data

The rights of gays and lesbians, as part of the socalled “culture wars,” lie at the heart of recent political conflict in the United States, perhaps even affecting the outcome of the 2004 presidential election. Battles over gay rights have been fought most intensely at the subnational level—in legislatures, courtrooms, and direct democracy campaigns—yielding a complex policy mosaic. Some states have adopted numerous progay policies; others have few or none. What explains this variation? In particular, significant controversy has arisen over the role of public opinion and how well opinion majorities are respected. This evokes a basic tension in democratic theory. Functioning democracy requires some minimal matching of government choice to citizen preference. However, normative concerns quickly arise. Too little responsiveness calls democracy into question, whereas complete popular sovereignty raises the spectre of “tyranny of the majority.” This is particularly true for civil rights because minorities might be unable to rectify grievances through electoral processes. A strong relationship between public opinion and policy may suggest successful representative democracy, but still be troubling if it leads to fewer protections or rights for minorities. Struggles over minority rights have played a large role in U.S. history and are among the core conflicts in any diverse democracy. Such struggles have perhaps moved from race to sexual orientation, but basic

/pdf/gay-rights-in-the-states-public-opinion-and-policy-2ewms4veoz.pdf

Gay Rights in the States: Public Opinion and Policy Responsiveness

We compare two approaches for estimating state-level public opinion: disaggregation by state of national surveys and a simulation approach using multilevel modeling of individual opinion and poststratification by population share. We present the first systematic assessment of the predictive accuracy of each and give practical advice about when and how each method should be used. To do so, we use an original data set of over 100 surveys on gay rights issues as well as 1988 presidential election data. Under optimal conditions, both methods work well, but multilevel modeling performs better generally. Compared to baseline opinion measures, it yields smaller errors, higher correlations, and more reliable estimates. Multilevel modeling is clearly superior when samples are smaller—indeed, one can accurately estimate state opinion using only a single large national survey. This greatly expands the scope of issues for which researchers can study subnational opinion directly or as an influence on policymaking.

/pdf/how-should-we-estimate-public-opinion-in-the-states-17dyemdxk1.pdf

How Should We Estimate Public Opinion in the States

We study how well states translate public opinion into policy. Using national surveys and advances in subnational opinion estimation,weestimatestate-levelsupportfor39policiesacrosseightissueareas,includingabortion,lawenforcement,health care, and education. We show that policy is highly responsive to policy-specific opinion, even controlling for other influences. But we also uncover a striking “democratic deficit”: policy is congruent with majority will only half the time. The analysis considers the influence of institutions, salience, partisan control of government, and interest groups on the magnitude and ideological direction of this democratic deficit. We find the largest influences to be legislative professionalization, term limits, and issue salience. Partisanship and interest groups affect the ideological balance of incongruence more than the aggregate degree thereof. Finally, policy is overresponsive to ideology and party—leading policy to be polarized relative to state electorates.

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The Democratic Deficit in the States

We formulate a new game-theoretic model of bargaining on the U.S. Supreme Court. In the model, a degree of monopoly power over policy endogenously accrues to the assigned writer despite an "open rule" for the other justices. We assume justices are motivated ultimately by a concern for judicial policy, but that the policy impact of an opinion depends partly on its persuasiveness, clarity, and craftsmanship - its legal quality. The effort-cost of producing a high quality opinion creates a wedge that the assignee can exploit to move an opinion from the median without provoking a winning counter-offer. We use this bargaining model as the foundation for a formal analysis of opinion assignment. Both the bargaining and opinion assignment models display rich and tractable comparative statics, allowing them to explain well-known empirical regularities as well as generate new propositions, within a unified and internally consistent framework.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID939622_code419245.pdf?abstractid=939622&mirid=4

Bargaining and Opinion Assignment on the U.S. Supreme Court

Does public opinion influence Supreme Court confirmation politics? We present the first direct evidence that state-level public opinion on whether a particular Supreme Court nominee should be confirmed affects the roll-call votes of senators. Using national polls and applying recent advances in opinion estimation, we produce state-of-the-art estimates of public support for the confirmation of 10 recent Supreme Court nominees in all 50 states. We find that greater home-state public support does significantly and strikingly increase the probability that a senator will vote to approve a nominee, even controlling for other predictors of roll-call voting. These results establish a systematic and powerful link between constituency opinion and voting on Supreme Court nominees. We connect this finding to larger debates on the role of majoritarianism and representation.

/pdf/public-opinion-and-senate-confirmation-of-supreme-court-oecuxmylp6.pdf

Jeffrey R. Lax

Papers

Gay Rights in the States: Public Opinion and Policy Responsiveness

How Should We Estimate Public Opinion in the States

The Democratic Deficit in the States

Bargaining and Opinion Assignment on the U.S. Supreme Court

Public Opinion and Senate Confirmation of Supreme Court Nominees